 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. Oh, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE live from VTUG Winter Warmer 2015. I'm Stu Miniman and joining me for this segment is Jesse St. Laurent who's the VP of Product Strategy with SimpliVity. Jesse, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me, Stu. All right, so it's your first time on theCUBE. We've had SimpliVity on a few times. Duran, your CEO, has been on a few times and this is home court for you guys. For those that don't know SimpliVity, they are a startup in the hyper-converged infrastructure solution set and headquarters in Westboro, Massachusetts, which is right up 495 from where we are here in Foxboro. Jesse, give us just a quick little background as to what you do and where you came from. Sure, some VP of Product Strategy for SimpliVity. So for us, that means touching customers and partners. It means strategic partnerships on the business side. It also means engagement with our engineering teams as well as our product management teams, making sure that the product is headed in the right direction from the market and also making sure that we're getting all the feedback from our customers and that all flows into the right place. Yeah, so you were one of my panelists on the hyper-converged panel. We'll be sharing that with theCUBE community when we put up all the VTUG stuff. One of the main things we talked about is I used to think of the pieces of infrastructure, my storage, my server, my network as discrete pieces, and there were whole lines of business around that and whole IT managers out of those. And now it's more about infrastructure. So you come from the networking world, right? Talk a little bit about just what you've seen along that trend from going from discrete components to more of infrastructure. Sure, so my background is really servers and storage operating systems infrastructure. And I think if we look at the historical stack, it was marched down from the top. You have top-of-rack switches, you had servers, you had storage, you have a whole stack of appliances in your data center and a whole bunch of software packages that enable all the features and functions that we think of in the traditional data center. And the problem is, or one of the problems, is that you go from this big stack and then it's time to add another device, you add another whole device, right? And this kind of endless cycle of, well, add another storage device. Well, now we're out of balance over here, we've had one of those upgrade this. What SimpliVity looks at is really to simplify that. So scale this out horizontally and not thinking about these discrete building blocks of single functions, but thinking about a hyper-converged appliance that can deliver all the functions we're talking about. Yeah, and one of the things interesting about you guys is it's not just the base pieces. You have a very robust stack built in. It might not be the best analogy, but when I think in the storage world, one of the things that NetApp got kudos for years was when you bought NetApp, it was a single device and you didn't have to layer on all of these features because it was just one operating system with all the features built in for the data center infrastructure. Do you guys have every piece that I need today and in the future, will they just be a part of it or will I start having to add on and have separate licenses in the future? Yeah, so it's a great question. Today, when you buy an OmniCube, it's this 2U building block for your data center. You get CPU, you get memory, you get storage, you get all these other data center appliances, backup functionality, replication functionality, all at one single license. As we add features and functions in the product, the goal is to continue to add them into that core system. The idea that we look towards is simplicity and if you want to drive simplicity, simplicity for the end user is not 27 different line items to buy one of these systems, it's a single line item. So you buy a cube, you get everything, right? The simplicity, we try to make that systemic to our overall business. So it's the product, it's how you engage with us, it's how our support works, it's how the product itself works. We think that should be pervasive. Yeah, it's interesting thing because you have so many different pieces that you can replace that the entry point into when a customer might adopt you, it's not one, it's not like they say, oh, okay, I need a new server. Wait, I'm going to go buy SimpliVity or this year I'm doing new storage. How do you guys deal with the fact that there's so many different entry points and get customers to pay attention to you and might be somebody saying, oh, I'm looking at way in optimization and they run across you guys and then say, oh, wait, it leads to a broader discussion. Walk us through some of that. Yeah, I think there's a handful of major points. In our view, the more opportunities the better, right? So if it's a DR project, certainly great opportunity. If it is someone who's looking at bringing back up to disk into their environment, the cost of that oftentimes will pay for an entire SimpliVity overhaul of your environment. If you're doing a tech refresh on the server side, there's an opportunity there. That's just looking at kind of the capital side of it. If you look at the operating side of it, which is really, we talked about earlier on the panel, the number that always gets thrown around is 70% of costs in IT is to keep the lights on. And if you think about the amount of simplification that can happen there and the cost savings there, that's just huge and that actually creates a bunch of additional entry points around ways to take costs out of the environment just from getting your IT organization to stop thinking about loans and shares and controllers and start thinking about applications and services and things that are valued in the business. Yeah, Jesse, you brought up as one of the biggest differentiators and top thing that people should think about you guys is multi-site environments. And replication's been, storage is challenging for most people, but replication is one of those that we've all struggled with for many years. What makes what you guys do with replication different from everything else that's out there on the marketplace? Yeah, I mean, one of the things we struggle with is a little bit of vocabulary, right? So replication suggests, well, you know, we're backing up data from site one to site two and some traditional synchronous or asynchronous method. We think about data management in a very different way. We have a technology that we refer to as the data virtualization platform. And what we did is we rewound back to the beginning and thought about, if you're writing data into your environment, how do you want it to be treated? You've got an application or virtual machine. Ideally, you want that data to be as efficient as possible. So part of what we do is deduplicate, compress, and optimize that data at inception. We call it pre-dupe. By doing that, we now keep the data in that efficient format for its entire life. So that means whether it's locally, whether it's protected across two cubes, whether it's going to the cloud, whether it's going to another site, it's all in that efficient format. So that's the first part of the equation. In our view, that has to be built in from the first line of code you're writing. The idea of bolting these things on, we've seen it in other file systems over the years. It's a hard problem and in general, you end up having to do a rewrite. That's the foundation. And then on top of that, to come back to the DR aspect, is really how you manage the data movement. So there's, can you make the data efficient? And then there's, how do you get it from Boston to San Francisco? Traditionally, that was lun to lun, share to share, IP to IP, and a tremendous amount of configuration. And if a change happened on one side or the other, there was a huge amount of business risk, a huge amount of planning, a huge amount of work that went into that. A lot of times, a huge amount of money to a consultant that went into that to do the work for it. In our environment, you simply define, send this virtual machine to San Francisco once an hour, keep it for a week. Once you do that, you've abstracted away from the underlying infrastructure. So wherever that VM goes, however you treat that VM, that policy remains. And the individual sites can change completely. You can tech refresh completely, a SimpliVity site without ever having to adjust or do a manual data migration around any of those policies. Yeah, it's a great point and you're right. Big difference that you talk about DR or backup. There were so many point solutions out there and customers will always struggle with how can I justify this point solution and what's my utilization going to be? And if I've got, you know, most customers have multiple locations. So if I need IT at multiple locations and my utilization is low, I mean, if we look at most IT, even if I'm virtualized and heavily virtualized, you know, it's not like it maxed out my computer or it maxed out my IOs. I have bandwidth, but how do I utilize that? So if I change from the point solutions to just my IT that can take care of all of these different things, it's a different mindset. How tough is it for customers to wrap their head around this new mindset? It's a great question. We typically get asked that from customers. It comes in one form or another. Sometimes they say, you know, how did you build seven, eight, 12, whatever number of people use different devices? And the real answer to that is we have a vocabulary problem in IT which, and especially SimpliVity has a challenge, which is there's preconceived notions about what all these things mean. And for us, instead of thinking about all the point solutions and trying to build them individually, what we look at that just from an allergy perspective is being like the flu. There's two ways to treat it. One is you can go to the drugstore and you can buy a dozen different medications because your head hurts because you're coughing, you're sneezing, you can't sleep, whatever the other issues are. When you take that handful of medication, you probably don't feel much better than before you took the handful of medication, right? Our theory is if somebody could figure out a solution to the flu and actually cure the flu, you take that one medication and suddenly you're not worrying about six or eight or 10 different problems. You now, in our view, have the data virtualization platform. And once you address it at that systemic level, it actually changes the vocabulary and it changes the discussion. Yeah, it's interesting. We've used the terminology sometime. Is your solution, is it aspirin or is it a vaccine? Yeah, exactly. And we're looking to vaccinate IT and there's some things that you might never run across from your solution. But there's other things that, you know, boy, it's going around and it's gonna hit you one of these days and you're gonna be glad that you've got protection from that. That a good analogy? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that it's all based on the right foundation, right? And the vaccine to a certain extent, you know, you can get into the minutia, right? Flu vaccines where we always get last year's flu strains in this year. So if you didn't design the right one last year, you've got a problem. For us, we think there are really some core decisions you have to make up front. And if you make those right decisions, if you focus on efficiency, if you focus on mobility, if you focus on the ability to take your virtual machines and move them around and back them up efficiently throughout your infrastructure, you've solved a lot of underlying problems and you can stop thinking about the points around the environment. Yeah, it's interesting. You look so many solutions in the marketplace, you usually start in kind of a niche environment. Let's start with test dev, let's start with, you know, not to besmirch it, but VDI has a very specific, you know, if I have flash and I have high performance, I can really nail that and, you know, there's some hyper-converged solutions that started there and like VMware's vSAN starts there, but that has some unique characteristics. Mission critical, I mean, this is, businesses run, it's called mission critical, because if it goes down, I'm out of business. Why should companies trust a startup to run their business? And I mean, how do you guys ever come that? Yes, it's a fantastic question. When coming out early on, we didn't expect customers were going to go put their core mission critical apps day one. What we found was that the value proposition and the TCO of our technology was so compelling to these folks that we went in and ended up taking on more and more applications very quickly. So one of the things I've experienced in my whole career in IT is, when you put a box in, if it becomes the easiest thing to manage in your environment, then suddenly it becomes like this magnet of infrastructure, right? Whatever is the easiest lowest barrier to entry, lowest friction, suddenly the administrators start putting more and more stuff on there, it just becomes bigger. And for us, that's what happened. I think as a company, one of our really core corporate cultures is around corporate responsibility, right? When you are in charge of somebody's data, there is nothing more important, right? And we take that very seriously. So we go out of our way to make sure we take every level of protection possible within cubes, across cubes, across data sets. I think that's really what's given customers the conference to not only go out and put test and dev or video on these boxes, but we look at across our customers, almost 80% of them are running SQL, about half of them are running Exchange, about half of them are running SharePoint. Almost all of them are running multiple sites in DR. That gives you an insight into what our customers are telling us through their actions. Yeah, Jesse, I want to bring up another point. You talk about really, it's the data reduction or really storage services components. It's a complicated mess out there. I mean, I think back to my days of, you know, encryption, compression, and, you know, deduplication. You know, there's a fit for all of those, but it's a different fit in how we put those together, and of course all the solutions aren't the same. You know, boy, how do we make it easy for customers to understand some of these, you know, some of the minutiae and the differentiation? I know you guys will say you've got the best, you know, data, you know, compression and deduplication out there, but you know, customers are going to say like, hey, you know, it gets boiled down to a checkbox. How do we help educate them better? Yeah, it's a fantastic question, because if you look at the way we look at dedupe and compression and efficiency in general, there's a dozen or more aspects to it. To turn it into the, you know, the green checkbox and yes, this is the answer, it does dedupe. I think it really oversimplifies and it's really a disservice to the user. I think that the core question you can ask when you look at any technology is, was it designed to do this, right? So our stuff from the ground up was designed to do it, and in our platform, everything above the device driver and below NFS is SimpliVity technology. We knew from the first line of code we wrote, it was going to dedupe, it was going to compress. We didn't want the user to have to think about it. So one of the challenges is, as soon as you start having on and off switches for all these things, now the user has to say, well, for exchange, should I compress but not dedupe and is that different for Oracle and what should I be doing for this other app? So if you simplify it for the user and you say, it's just on, it dedupes and compresses everything all the time, it's simpler. The problem with that is the performance when you turn those things on all the time is terrible. I mean, in general, there is no free lunch, right? Dedupe requires a tremendous amount of overhead. Compression requires a tremendous amount of overhead. The worst part about compression, right? There's some data that just doesn't compress. Unfortunately, you don't know that until you try to compress it and you realize that all those cycles were wasted. Our way to address that, our solution to that problem, is we have an accelerator card that goes inside of every OmniCube and takes all of those cycles that you would normally invest to do that and pushes them off to our accelerator. That enables the platform to run all your business applications, all the things you bought it to do. All the heavy lifting required to deliver the data efficiency is offloaded and the user doesn't have to think about it. I think in the end of the day, if the user doesn't have to make a decision if it just works, that's mission accomplished. Yeah, it's interesting. You and I have had conversations on, this board is, please correct me if I'm wrong, the one custom piece of hardware in the SuppliVity solution. When you guys first came out, primarily it was sold with Dell servers. You are now also offering it with Cisco UCS servers, but either way, you're using this accelerator card. Can you just give us a short as to, there's usually the balance, is Moore's law, am I going to have more cores? We talked about utilization of servers and VMware even doesn't choke up all these. Obviously, compression and Ddupe can hurt performance, so what's that balance between having that hardware board, how often do you refresh that? If a customer buys a SimpliVity, did they get a refresh on that board every couple of years? What's the hardware software mix? Sure, so the card is designed by our team. We have a hardware development team and there's two interesting things about it. One, it's designed specifically to work with our software stack and really we talk about it as a hardware device, but it's running a whole software stack. So the majority of the IP in the card is actually software, ironically. So it's designed specifically to work with our technology. So it's not an off-the-shelf card and our technology wouldn't be able to deliver the functionality it does on the software side if we tried to leverage some other type of off-the-shelf card. So I think it's very unique in that aspect. Intel continues to get faster and that's certainly something to pay attention to. You never want to bet against Intel, you never want to bet against Ether in the data center. At the same time, you have to have predictable performance, right? And one of the things that we've seen is users, especially in the enterprise, especially when you're running mission critical applications, value performance tests that generate nice boring flat lines. And it turns out when you look at things at the micro level within environments, one of the most predictable ways to get flat line performance is to have very predictable results on the data efficiency side. Having the hardware allows us to know exactly how long it takes to do compress and optimize this piece of data, that's something that when you live in a shared resource world, you don't have that same level of predictability. And again, as you look at the mission critical apps, predictability is incredibly valuable to them. All right, Jesse, wondering, it can talk a little bit about just go to market. Are you guys primarily channel focused? How do customers get engaged with SimpliVity? Sure, 100% channel. So we do not have any direct business. It goes 100% through our channel community. And that is a mix of two types of partners today. It's partners that are Cisco partners. We have a great offering with the Cisco UCS platform. We go to market together with the Cisco channel folks and the Cisco teams on that side. And then we have some partners that are also partners with our direct product or our cube as opposed to the OmniStack. So in the Cisco world, it's OmniStack. It's basically all of our IP running on a UCS system. If you run that on our own system, it's called a cube instead of the stack. And we take that to market again through partners. In a lot of cases, those partners are actually the same exact partners. Yeah, interesting thing on that. If you look at the configuration of a UCS with your OmniStack software, of course, I don't need an external storage array. It's disk inside. What's high level economics of what you guys typically, what do you talk to customers is the savings of going to a traditional kind of 3-tier architecture, server-SAN, server plus storage array with storage network versus what you can do with your solution. Yeah, so typically it's plus or minus 3X. So we could exaggerate and come up with some giant marketing numbers if we threw in every piece of software that we could potentially disrupt. If you just look at the things that are commonly disrupted within the environment, that pretty easily gets you to 3X within those environments. And that's consistent across the UCS as well as the SimpliVity Cube based offering. Okay, great, Jesse. Last thing I want to talk about, it's beginning of 2015. Where should we be looking for SimpliVity? Show us a little, what do we expect to see from you guys this year? Headcounts up over 400, I believe. You grow in gangbusters. So what's in store for 2015 in SimpliVity? So more of the same. And if we look back, we went from 100 folks to 360 in about 12 months. We're a bit over 400 now. And if you look over the course of 2015, we expect that to roughly double. We expect the company in terms of revenue to do more than double. So aggressive growth curves, you'll see us pretty much everywhere. Yeah, you're doing some hiring locally and globally? Yeah, so we have teams coming on globally. Our field today is already global. We have folks in North America. We have folks in Amia. We have teams in the Pacific as well. We're expanding in all three of those regions in terms of field organization. We're expanding our engineering teams and the teams in our corporate office in Westboro. The plan is to bring a couple hundred more people into Westboro. We have, for I think the third time in the last 18 months, run out of space in our Westboro facility. So we're yet again expanding. All right, well, Jesse, I really appreciate you coming to spend time with us. You're now on the CUBE alumni list and expect to hear more from you in SimpliVity much more this year. So you're going to wrap it at this point. We will be right back with many more guests here from the VTUG, talking about hyperconvergence, cloud networking, and lots of virtualization here from Gillette Stadium with Teddy Bruceky over our shoulders. Thanks for joining us. We'll be right back.