 Hello everybody, it's Dave Vellante back live VMworld 2011, and we are in day two in Vegas. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu, welcome. Dave? Now, as we've told you, we have these in-depth spotlights that we're doing this year at VMworld. Many of them are sponsored segments, not all of them. We have a spotlight, it's an in-depth segment on beyond storage virtualization. It's sponsored by HP, and we're going to go in-depth and look at storage virtualization, the impact that's had on the market, and what's next. And then we're going to bring in some customers. We've got an architect, CTO, we've got an independent panel, and we're going to look at this topic. I'm going to talk a little bit about federated storage, Stu, but what I'd like to do is just take you through some of the data that we've captured in the Wikibon community. First of all, around storage virtualization, and then set up a vision beyond that. You've been following this market a lot of networking activity, but you've seen what's happened in storage virtualization. Right, Dave. I mean, I think back on the trend, server virtualization really helped get greater utilization out of our resources, and it also broke a lot of the traditional infrastructure, like networking and storage. So we've seen a lot of the big vendors and a lot of startups trying to fix that solution, get greater utilization out of what they're doing, and fix, in this case, the storage problem. And what surprised me over the years was the degree to which servers were getting virtualized, but storage wasn't. So what I'd like to share with the audience, and we'll bring this up on a slide here, you know, let's talk about storage 101. And that's the utilization problem, and what we mean by that is traditionally spinning disks, some people call it spinning rust, have only been utilized at 20 to 40 percent. Now, Stu, we know why. There's a lot of reasons why, but the three big ones are that storage has to be allocated on contiguous space. You know, 30, 40-year-old sort of rule in storage. That's just the way, you know, it works architecturally. And so once you allocate that space, very hard to move. And because of that, what do people do? They over-provision, but you've seen that. So I mean, what kind of rates have you seen in terms of utilization over the years? It's awful, because depending on how the configuration, a lot of time for performance, we're short-stroking disks, so we've got a lot more capacity than we need, or, you know, I have to add frames because I don't have enough cache. So architecturally, things have been broken, and virtualizations only improved, only made that worse. So the analogy I use of this whole notion of needing to lay down contiguous data is, like, imagine if you're laying a wood floor. You ever do that in your home? No, I had a contractor for that with the whole separation. I've done it before, and I'm not that great at it, but one of the things that is key is you have a saw, and you can just fit whatever size board you need. If you have that much space left, you just cut that space and lay it in. Well, if you're laying a wood floor and you don't know, you don't have a saw, and you don't know what size is coming in, your floor is going to be filled up fast with a lot of empty space, and you're going to be in big trouble. That's what happens with disks. Imagine having to rip out the floor, reconfigure it. It's not worth it. So you just buy more disks, and so that's created this problem. So now what I also want to share with the audience, and we'll bring this up on the next slide, is that, as you pointed out, Stu, VMware and cloud adoption are really driving new storage requirements. It's taxed storage, and customers are screaming for simpler storage. So you saw in the early 2000s, you had a number of disruptors. You had three-part, compelling, equal logic, left-hand, and they really started attacking this problem. It was amazing innovation. You, at the time, were inside of EMC, right? EMC was asleep at the wheel with all this stuff. You had Joe Chuchigolo feature companies. Well, these feature companies have now been absorbed by these big wheels. We've seen that the big companies either try to be a fast follower or acquire that technology and bake it into their product, or in some cases still, they have external appliances and multiple product lines. And of course, EMC is sometimes attacked as to having too many point solutions and have to cobble it all together. Well, so what's happened is that we've seen these virtualized architectures were created. A ton of money went in, as I say, the most compelling and three-part, most recently, had huge exits. And you see that business growing very, very fast. HP announced at its last earnings, and we had Dave Scott on here before he said that the combination of store once and three-part was triple-digit growth. Now, store once is tiny. I say tiny, it's probably, I don't know, 10% of the market. Three-part is relatively tiny, but they're now both growing very fast. So three-part, let's say, was a $200 million company. Let's say they're growing at triple digits, talking about a four or 500 million run rate, getting to a billion a lot faster than they would have. I would expect the same thing is going to happen with Compalent at Dell, in fact, I have no doubt with that channel. So what it's doing is it's eating share away of that $20 billion external disk array marketplace. Now, this next slide, it's a little bit difficult for people to read, but the reason I put it up there is we did a study, David Floyer ran this, and now still what he did is he took metadata from the three-part phone home system. No customer data, okay, it was just the metadata on the amount of data that was allocated versus written. So you could see what happened previously with existing architectures and how much more utilization they achieved with thin provisioning and virtualization. And this slide shows that 97% of the customers saw some improvement in virtualization, and 51% of the customers saw more than 150% utilization. So those figures are astounding. Yeah, absolutely. So people took notice and that really began to change the business and others have sort of hopped on that bandwagon. And the last thing I want to share with the audience on this slide is the business angle. So Stu, we've seen since 2008, the installed capacity has been up about 3x within customer sites. And VMware's driving a lot of that. Virtualization, we know, is just the driver, it's the rising water that's lifting all boats. What's happened to headcount in that time? Yeah, of course, operational budgets are flat to negative, and we know we need to be able to manage a lot more storage with fewer headcounts. So is that imperative? We've got to do more with less. Everybody talks about it. Everybody hears it. And then you've seen strategic acquisitions by HP with left-hand and three-par, by IBM with XIV, by Dell with Equalogic, and now Compalent. And these companies are going hard after that opportunity. And so now, what about the title of this segment is beyond storage virtualization? Because we've kind of been there and done that, you know? Yeah. And that's been absorbed into a lot of different, you know, large environments. So what's new? What we're seeing now, and Dave Scott talked about this, is new forms of innovation hitting the market. Federated storage, right? We saw EMC V-Plex come out, which is a virtualization layer, allows for heterogeneous storage and movement. Yeah, so I mean, the interesting thing about federation is actually, I think the first time I ever heard the term was before I joined Wikibon, you had written a definition of federated storage. Well, and I have a subset of that here. Yeah, and what I found really interesting is I'd spent many years working on replication products. And federation kind of eats into some of that because the challenge that we had in the industry, we talk about low utilization rate, is when I'm replicating data, I've got one site that's active and the other site's that are not active, unactive, and there I have a lot of disk that just sits there unused. So for a lot of environments, what I want to have is especially in relatively close areas, I have two data centers, I want to use all of that capacity. So what we're talking about here is autonomous physical resources that are operated as a collection, managed as a collection, it simplifies migration, in which it's a big thing. This notion of perpetual migration without having to take the system down. I mean, so... And so we have to wrap, but so the use cases, you kind of see them up here. Go ahead, make your last comment. Yeah, so just what I was going to say, if you look back, virtualizing storage isn't new. Rate itself was virtualizing a single array and multiple disk out there. Storage virtualization really takes that beyond the box and now stepping that over geography and eventually we're just stretching that over disk. So we're going to talk about that, we're going to talk to customers, we're going to talk to architects, have a good discussion around storage virtualization and federation, how people are doing that differently, what the use cases are, and we're going in depth. And I'd love to see the proof points out there. This is no longer a science project, this is the reality of what we're doing out here. Okay, so this is the storage spotlight on beyond virtualization. We're here, VMworld Live 2011. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman and we'll be right back.