 And now, SiliconANGLE TV and Wikibon.org present a focus spotlight. Live from Las Vegas and VMworld 2011, host John Furrier and Dave Vellante, a human being. New models for cloud service providers will support from SolidFire. Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante from Wikibon.org and this is SiliconANGLE and SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of VMworld 2011. I just want to let the audience know out there, if you want to get full coverage of VMworld, go to SiliconANGLE.com, go to SiliconANGLE.tv, go to Wikibon, check it out. You got questions, hopefully we have answers. This is the cloud service provider spotlight segment where profiling, new storage architectures and new enablement, a focus of this spotlight has been quality of service, enabling new applications. And we've got a panel now that we're going to have a discussion around these topics. We just heard SoftLayer and Virtustream, two very interesting disruptive cloud service providers. Duke Skarda is back and Matt Thur from Virtustream, Duke from SoftLayer. We're also joined by David Wright, CEO of SolidFire and also founder of SolidFire as well. So welcome gentlemen. Thank you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. So David, we heard from Virtustream and SoftLayer. I'd like to start with you. SolidFire, new company, just came out of stealth. We met actually in May at EMC World, ironically. Tell us about SolidFire. Yeah, so SolidFire was really born out of my experience at another cloud service provider at Rackspace. It was there for about a year and a half after they acquired my last company. And I really saw a lot of the challenges that Duke and Matt talked about earlier with providing storage in a cloud environment, providing both the scalable storage that's needed as well as the performance, the quality of service, the availability, everything that's expected of storage in the cloud. And that was really the genesis of SolidFire, the desire to solve some of these challenges with traditional storage. Use really interesting technology like SolidState, compression, deduplication, efficiency technologies to solve both the performance as well as the scalability, cost challenges of primary storage for cloud. So let's get right into it. Maybe share with our audience who might, oftentimes we get the CNBC Wall Street Journal crowd listening in and they might not be as familiar with some of the issues in the areas of storage. So the problem is, if I could set it up and then you guys can correct me or drill in a little further, for years applications have assumed that there's going to be spinning disk out there and spinning disk is slow compared to semiconductor speeds. And now this concept of flash comes in and for the first time we have persistent flash that is much, much faster and it sort of changes the way we think about applications. But there's a drawback. It's expensive. So what we've seen now is tons of innovation in flash, all this money pouring in and we're starting to see prices and configurations come in line with traditional arrays. That changes the way you guys think about architecting storage. So why don't we start right to left with Matt. How does that change the way in which you think about storage? So the advent of the speed and the performance of flash is really, in a lot of ways it's inverted what's been the traditional problem. The traditional problem is we've run out of performance before we've run out of space. And flash technology, in a lot of ways, inverts it. We actually can run out of space before we run out of performance and to my mind that's a far better situation to be in because it's relatively easy to add space. It's never been as easy to add performance. So, Duke, when we think about cloud storage we oftentimes think about object storage or we think about files. Where's block-based storage and applications that run on block-based storage fit in the cloud? Well, it fits in a number of different ways. First of all, black storage is behind a lot of the cloud infrastructures that are out there in a couple of different ways. Either behind a NAS or a SAN. So it's very important from a platform perspective but also as secondary storage. Our customers use it quite a bit as a way to have detached storage that they can move from cloud server to cloud server as well. So, David, when you started SolidFire drawing on your experiences with Rackspace I presume you weren't trying to solve the problem of archiving and backup. What I really saw is that there were a number of smart companies that were focused on the backup and archival piece of cloud storage. Guys like Nervonix and Scality and other guys that were building these large-scale capacity-oriented storage systems. But really there wasn't anybody that was focused on high-performance primary storage. That area, there just was a lot of legacy enterprise hardware and there wasn't much innovation. There wasn't much new stuff coming into that space and even the places where Flash was being introduced it wasn't being done in a way that was really appropriate for the cloud and I really thought that there was a new approach that was needed. There was a different focus on how to use Flash to not just make the system faster because anybody can put Flash in a box and get a lot of performance, but to really focus on the ability to guarantee quality of service, to guarantee SLAs around performance, storage, availability, things like that. Flash could be a component of that solution but there was really a lot more technology that needed to be built around that and that was really what we did with SolidFire. So the good news is a lot of investment going on in this area. There's a lot of competition and that's a good thing in a way because it says you might have a good idea but at the same time there's a lot of competition. So you specifically have taken your company and targeted the cloud service provider marketplace exclusively, right, at least initially. Talk about why. You know I think there are a couple of reasons that we decided to do that. Certainly my background, my experience there, understanding of the market was a big reason to do that but we also felt that it was, as I mentioned, an area that wasn't getting as much attention from either the startups or the big companies. There was a big hole that we needed to fill and there's a lot of other great Flash storage companies, Flash storage startups out there that are targeting other spaces and filling other needs. But this is really the area that we thought was a huge opportunity both now and based on the growth of the cloud it's going to be a huge market in years to come. And virtue stream and software, storage is not your business. You mentioned Dave, you mentioned Nervonix. They're a cloud service provider but they do storage. Storage is not the only thing you guys do and you're selling all types of different services but where's storage fit in the priority pie or the problem pie? Storage has always been from virtualized infrastructures of a few years ago up to the modern cloud service provider storage has always been probably the most difficult problematic area of any infrastructure. And our business is about providing the compute, the horsepower for our customers to run their applications that are enterprise applications and that's not only CPU and memory and network IO, that's disk IO and disk performance and the ability to store the data. So storage is a huge part of it of our design considerations but our business is providing the horsepower. And you would agree with that too? Absolutely. Anything you'd add? Yeah, well I mean there's compute is nothing without either storage and a network to get to it. So our ability to sell compute power and servers is only as good as our ability to sell the rest of the infrastructure their customers need. And as he said storage has always been one of the unsolvable problems. You can only do as much as physics will allow on a spinning disk. SSDs and what a lot of these new guys are doing is they're not just throwing flash at it but they've really stepped back they're taking advantage of the compute power that's available today as well and they're re-architecting the whole way to build an ass which is what's really exciting to us is it's not just putting SSD into a sand they've really reworked the whole way the thing operates. What does that mean for your ability to develop offerings? Do you feel like it cuts your cost of delivering quality of service or is it more than that? Does it allow you to go after a bigger market? I think it's much more than our ability to cut costs. Obviously we always like to be able to to lower our expenses and lower our costs for our customers but this is really much more about being able to enable our customers in a way that we haven't been able to before. So it's really about offering new solutions not just lowering the cost of existing solutions. It's us to complement our quality of service which runs through our infrastructure. It really complements our ability to provide those guarantees and our SLAs of our infrastructure. It just ties very nicely into our ability to do that and it allows us to do it in a very cost-effective manner but it allows us to expand the scope of our services and start looking at new ways to drive innovation and services and really drive value for our customers. So David Wright, I want to ask you, start-up, we know start-ups are faster, more nimble. They focus like a laser on a problem. Hopefully they fly under the radar for a period of time but you're going after some big whales in a way. I mean what you're doing is very disruptive so talk a little bit about the lead that you feel you have. How confident you are in that lead and just add some color there if you could. Yeah, obviously we're very proud of the technology. We're very proud of the architecture that we've built. We think we've got some really unique IP behind that, some really unique architecture that, like I say, is more than just about putting SSD in a box. The challenge that I think a lot of the legacy storage providers have is SSD is so fast it strains every aspect of the storage system. The controller architectures, the processor architectures, the network bottlenecks are very different and you need a different approach to be able to harness all of that power not just to deliver the performance that Flash has but then do interesting things with it. Do things like the data efficiency, the compression, the duplication, the quality of service and we really feel the only way to do that is with a true scale at architecture, an architecture that allows you as you add more capacity to get more CPU, more memory, more network, more processing power to bring to bear to deliver all of that performance and so we really think that's one of the big advantages we have. We're really the first scale at architecture that has been built for them ground up around Flash while certainly Flash can be retrofitted onto existing solutions. You're just not going to be able to get the full benefit that you can derive from it and you're certainly not going to be able to derive the cost efficiencies from technologies like deduplication and compression while still getting that Flash performance unless you've designed your system around that. You're going to have to prove it of course because the big guys are going to say they're going to go to you and say we'll have that in 18 months or whatever, 9 months and 9 months we're going to have everything that these guys have and it might be 18 or 24 months to do all those things. So you've got to have the proof points. That's why it's interesting to see SoftLayer and Virtus.Tream. I don't know if the big wheel comes in and says that to you, what's your reaction? Okay, we'll wait. There's risk. There absolutely is risk and we obviously weigh risk versus benefit but 18 months, 9 months in the world of IT and this market that's like dinosaurs to modern man. It moves so fast that you have to take advantage of the technology and if it's the right technology and it pans out and the risk cost benefit is there, you've got to move on it. If I were to put you in a camp, you were in a camp who would take the risk with a startup to get that new value and get the market faster and manage those risks. You've got risk management systems and ways to do that. That's what young companies that are aggressive smart do. Good company. Good, excellent. Thanks very much guys for coming on the Cube and give us a deeper detailed overview of your storage challenges. Dave Wright, good luck with SolidFire and I appreciate you guys coming on. Thank you.