 VMworld 2015, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, Dave Vellante. Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. This is theCUBE. theCUBE is SiliconANGLE Wikibon's continuous coverage of VMworld 2015. This is our sixth year at VMworld. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Our friend Vish Mulshan is here with HP Storage. Vish, it's always good to see you. You know, in your hometown, in the backyard, it's great to be in Moscone. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. Great to be here, as always, again. So we have seen, you know, I go back to 2010. And at the time, you know, 3PAR was a separate company and then we watched the acquisition occur. HP really badly needed that acquisition. We were at VMworld when the bidding war was occurring between Dell and HP and we predicted HP was going to win that war. And of course, it changed the course of storage at HP, you know, permanently. So it's been an amazing run. 3PAR has become the crown jewel of the portfolio. But the most amazing thing is how you've evolved that platform into play, into the all-flash world. A very, very competitive product. So we've been sort of documenting that traction. But give us the update, let's talk about sort of where you've come from and you know, where we are today. Sure, sure, Dave. So I mean, if we look back in June 2013 is when we first announced the airfare, right? And since June 2013, we've had a fire series of announcements. In December, we announced something called adaptive sparing, which you know, was actually very unique flash innovation, treating the flash separately, giving customers 20% more capacity. In June 2014, we brought $2 per gig deduplication. In December 2014, we brought the concept of what we call the Converge Flash Array, right? Flash Array, Flash Focus Design. But hey, you can add spinning this to it if you want. Right? And several of our customers are actually doing that because they have a need for that. And then in June of 2015, we doubled down, right? And we announced the 20,000 series. We brought the affordability even better to $1.50 a gigabyte. And that was in June. So the other amazing thing is the pace of the cadence of announcements. I mean, I have to say, I mean, remember for years, you know, HP, the announcements were very slow to come out. You have one a year, maybe a name change. But now it's like, bang, bang, bang. I presume it's the architecture that allows you to do that. But there were a lot of skeptics when you came out with the all-flash arrays. And yeah, it's going to be a bolt-on. You said no, you know, you said, all right, we'll see. But now you're proving it. Help the people who sort of don't understand the nuances. How was it that you were able to do that? And what are the proof points that it's not just a bolt-on? So I think it all comes down to the architecture, right? You have to have an architecture that's modular, that's extensible. And as we looked at the three-par architecture, all the attributes that we put in place early on were very applicable to Flash. Now, Flash did have some differences. And we did account for some of the differences in the architecture. But the architecture proved to be able to be extensible. And a lot of the tenets around scalable controllers were performance, the ASIC to offload, the fine-grain virtualized operating system with a very small page allocation size. All of those fundamentals were perfectly suited for Flash. And you could almost probably say there were too much for spinning disk, right? Well, I was just saying, was that luck? Because a lot of what the original designers at three-par did were trying to, well, most of it was trying to offset the deficiencies of spinning disk. Or did they just have amazing vision, or was it just? I give the founders a lot of credit for their foresight. In fact, if you look at the founders when I spoke to them, they had a server background when they started, right? And they said to me, they said to me, when we did a server benchmark, it would take us six months. Four and a half of those six months was getting the storage right. And they said, they really didn't understand why it had to be so hard, right? And I think they brought a very different approach to storage, to how sort of the industry was handling storage, right? It was very different. It actually turned it on its head, and they actually architected some very interesting capabilities, which I'm very confident as we go to Flash 2.0, as we talk about other newer non-volatile memory technologies. If NAN, something other than NAN comes about, I'm very confident that the architecture will be able to again, to isolate the media from the customer. Well, Martin Fink hopes that's a memory stir, but we'll see. Whatever the elements are. We'll go with what the industry does. Memory stirs a big element there, but we'll go with what the industry wants to look at. Yeah, of course. So, let's talk about VMworld 2015, and what you guys are doing here. I'm going to emphasize the announcements that you're making, talk about that a little bit. Sure. So, at VMworld, we had several announcements we made. What I'll focus in is on the Flash announcements. And if you look at the approach we've taken with Flash, we've had three vectors, right? Affordability, performance, and data services. And some companies have done one or two, but I think it's rare to see all three vectors being attacked at the same time. And that's been our approach from the start, and all the announcements that we talked about, and in this announcement that we made this week, same approach. So, let's maybe go down those three vectors, Dave, if you'd allow me to do that. Yeah, please. Okay, so let's start with affordability. And we announced a new 8,000 series, which is a refresh to the 7,000 line, a very successful 7,000 line, which is 74, 50, Flash array is one of them. Now, the starting point for the 8,200, the old Flash 8,200 now is down to $19,497. Two controllers, six drives, six terabyte usable capacity. Not 19,999, we're under 20 grand. We're under 20 grand by a lot. We made sure we got that 497, right? So, that's great. We also announced then a lower entry price point to the 20,000 series that we announced in earlier in June. Those were, as you call, eight controller systems. We announced a lower price point, 2450, a four controller capable system as well. Again, on the theme of bringing affordability, right? Driving the price down. Okay, so you have $1.50 per gig, if you want to buy it that way. You have low entry price point with 19K, if you want to buy it that way. Or if you want a scalable system that you can grow to the extreme, you can buy affordable price point that way as well, right? So, in my mind, the adoption and the success we've had in the marketplace has been a function of a couple of things. Affordability is a key one, right? It's economics, that's what drives adoption. Okay, now, performance, everybody thinks, okay, it's Flash, everybody's got the same performance. It's high performance. Now, it's somewhat true because relative to spinning disk, it's going to be better performance, but it's nuanced. So, talk about your performance. Yeah, so, performance is very important. We announced a couple of interesting performance. First, we talked about some improvements in bandwidth. Now, let's take a look at sort of why that matters, right, Dave? So, if you were doing a million IOs and there were small 4K blocks, you do the math, it's four gigabytes per second. Now, if you're doing large block IOs, like if you're doing a SQL database query, analytical query, those are typically large block IOs, right? If you do a million of those and they're, say, a meg in size, then that bandwidth becomes a choke point to the array. So, we've announced with the 8,000 series, you know, 24 gigs a second of bandwidth, which is two and a half times more than. So, but this is, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but this is why a lot of the existing arrays that bolted on Flash failed. Well, yeah, so one of the reasons why they failed is their controllers are not able to handle the IO load. And once, even if they do, can they handle the bandwidth requirements? And then, you know, here's the other thing that matters is the latency, right? So, the other thing we announced at this week was a 44% improvement in latency. So, milliniops 387 microseconds latency at a milliniops. That's low latency. So, you're setting up this sort of latency storage versus capacity storage, right? And you play in both, but we're obviously talking about the latency piece here. Okay, so that's the performance piece. And then, there's actually two more. You mentioned it, but there's the availability, which sort of, FreePAR is known for high availability. I mean, it's the new tier one, right? So, but there's data services associated with that. Yeah, so the resiliency is a big factor there. And you know, there's single system resiliency, pull out a drive, pull out a controller, fail a cache board, how do you react, right? In fact, the reason why we succeed in the marketplace that our customers tell us is that reliability factor. And they go and they have these tests where they pull things in and out, right? And they watch how the other arrays operate, right? And you know, consistently we've come back really operating well in the area of single system resiliency. Now, there's also a multi-system resiliency, which is, what do I do with replication? What I do with snapshots? Can I move my snapshots to a deduplicating backup device? All right, how quickly can I move? How much do I move? So, I think there are all of these elements that you look at resiliency that I think are important. There's another piece on resiliency that's coming up while emerging, Dave, and that's around protecting the access to your data security. Do you encrypt the data? So now, if you encrypt the data and you have a snapshot and you move that snapshot to a deduplicating device, what happens to that snapshot and the key? Do you have to have multiple keys so your keys get compromised? So that resiliency topic is a big one, lots of different areas to go after. And whether it's replication, snapshots, backup devices, encryption, key managers, we have all of those available as well. How about, so again, one of the, we always talk about this, one of the big advantages of an architecture that's been around for a decade is you've got the stack, it's hardened, the set of storage services. So that's a big differentiator from what you see in a lot of the startups and or the bolt-ons, which everybody thought you were going to be bolt-on, re-architected the whole thing. So that's cool. What about quality of service? What about the ability to address quality of service, to pin application performance and to actually change that programmatically? Yeah, so quality of service is a very, very big attribute of ours. In fact, the product for HP, three parts called priority optimization. And in this week's announcement, we announced further enhancements. First of all, we have latency goals on our QoS product, which I think is unique. Nobody else offers latency goals. And this week we announced the latency goals going down to half a millisecond. I mean, if that array is operating at, you know, three to 400 microseconds, you want to be able to control your priorities with that granularity, right? And so QoS granularity is exactly what we brought. And you know, Dave, if you remember when we did the last Q, we talked to the cloud. And they had taken a gold silver bronze tier, hardware-based, and then put it on a flash array and put priority optimization to implement in software, the gold silver bronze. Right, yeah, the cloud is a company, by the way. Yeah, the cloud is a company in New Zealand. Not that cloud, they're the company. Yeah, so that's right. And that was interesting to see that they did that with flash, right? Yeah, exactly. What do you think is going to happen there, right? We're hearing increasingly at shows like this and others that you're starting to see more tearing in flash. You're hearing it now in the Hadoop world and big data world. An example that you just gave. A lot of people initially, and maybe still think, you're going to have a flash tier, you know, the latency tier, and you're going to have the capacity tier, the bit bucket. What's your thinking now on how that shakes out and how practitioners should be thinking about their storage architectures going forward? Yeah, and I think we're going to see the variety of that. I think that's one very possible use case which says, hey, I have applications that are critical, service optimized, service level optimized, right? That's going to be on flash. And then I may have either a backing store for time, or I might have another set of applications that are not service level optimized, more cost optimized maybe, right? So, and maybe that changes over time. Maybe it changes by quarter. What is cost optimized today? It needs a spike and come back. So this notion of data mobility, I think is very key, right? And sort of the fourth data service pillar I want to talk about because we announced four way federation, which is the ability to take four arrays and operate as a single logical whole, and you can federate the data among those arrays now, but if you extend the ideas, can you federate it to a backup device? Can you federate it to the generic cloud, right? Can you federate it to an archive tier? I think these are the kinds of things that our customers are asking us, right? They want to first of all federate to another array to workload balance, for example, or asset refresh, right? But all of the other use cases, federate to the cloud, federate to archive tier, those are all coming up. So I suspect we're going to see more of those coming up. Can I? And that's the answer. Stay tuned. Stay tuned, you know? I mean, as we look to raise the bar once again, these are some of the things we're thinking about. All right, so I know you can't give details, but give us a high level roadmap. What should we be thinking about watching, you know, HP, generally 3-par and all flash specifically? Yeah, so I think we'll continue to drive affordability, right? 3D NANDs available as well. Now there's other flash technologies. And you know, we want to isolate our customers from whether it's CMLC, MLC, 3D NAND. And we're going to say to them, look, what's your price point? What's your capacity point? What's your availability point? Okay, and we'll meet that. Let us worry about that technology problem. Yeah, how we get there. How we get there. So that continues to work us on, you know, the media faster controllers, again, to drive up the performance. Host in the connects. You know, there's a lot of talk around the role of 25 gig ethernet, 32 gig fiber channel, the RDMA technologies, right? ICER, IWARP, Rocky. So there's all of these things here. NVMe to the back plane, NVMe to the host. So, you know, flash JBOD. So look at it a lot. Yeah, we're shifting the bottleneck, aren't we? Yeah, you got to look at the bottleneck across all areas end to end and make sure that you're looking at this holistically, right? As you drive forward. Doesn't get less complicated, but at least for the guys who are building this stuff, hopefully for we who are using it, it does. But Vish Moshan, thanks very much for coming back to theCUBE. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure, sir. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2015 in Moscone. We'll be right back.