 Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman, our next guest is Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President, Global Channel Sales for IBM Storage, CUBE alum, great to see you. Thanks for coming by. We always love coming and talking to theCUBE. Love having you on, get the insight, and you get down and dirty in the storage, but before we get into the storage impact, the cloud and all the great performance requirements and software you guys are building, news is that the CEO of Cisco swung by your booth. Yes, Chuck did come by today and asked how Chuck Robbins came by today. Asked who we're doing it. IBM has a very broad relationship with Cisco beyond just the storage division, the storage division, the IoT division, the collaboration group, security is doing a lot of stuff with them. IBM has won Cisco's largest resellers through the GTS and GBS teams, so he came by to see how we're doing and gave him a little plug about the versus stack and now it's better than the other converged solutions but talked about all of IBM and the strong IBM-Sysco relationship. I mean, it's not a new relationship. Spanned on what you guys are doing, how does it intersect with the vision that he put on stage yesterday with the keynote? He laid out and said publicly and put the stake in the ground pretty firmly. This is the old way, put an architecture of firewall, you know, a classic enterprise network diagram. And so that's the old way and put in a big circle with all these different kind of capabilities with the cloud. It's a software-defined world, clearly Cisco, moving up the stack while maintaining the networking chops, networking and storage, always the linchpin of cloud and enterprise computing. What's the connection? Share the touch points. Sure, well I think the key thing is everyone's got to realize that whether you're in a private cloud, or a public cloud configuration, storage is at rock solid foundation. If you don't have a good foundation, the building will fall right over. And it's great that you've got cloud with its flexibility, its ability to transform, the ability to modernize, move data around. But if what's underneath doesn't work, the whole thing topples over and storage is a critical element to that. Now what we've done at IBM is we have made all of our solutions on the storage side, versus stack or all flash arrays, all of our software-defined storage, our modern data protection, everything is what we'll say is cloudified. Okay, I designed for multiple cloud scenarios, whether it be private, hybrid, or public, or as you're probably seeing in some of the enterprise accounts, they actually use multiple public cloud providers, whether it be from a price issue or legal issues because they're all over the world, and we're supporting that with all our solutions and our versus stack specifically just had a CVD done with Cisco, Cisco Validated Design, with IBM Cloud Private on a versus stack. Talk about the scale piece because this becomes the key differentiator. We've talked about in theCUBE many times with you around, some of the performance you guys have and the numbers are pretty good, you might want to do a quick review on that. I'm not looking for speeds and feeds. Really, Eric, I'd like to get your reaction to and view and vision on how the scale piece is kicking, because clients want scale optionality. They're going to have a lot of stuff on-premise. They have cloud going on multi-cloud on the horizon, but they've got to scale. The numbers are off the charts, you're seeing all these security threats. I mean, it's massive. How are you guys addressing the scale question with storage? So we've got a couple things. So first of all, the storage itself is easily scalable. For example, on our A9000 all flash array, you just put a new one, automatically grows. Don't have to do anything, okay? With our transparent cloud tiering, you can set it up, whether it be our spectrum scale software or whether it be our spectrum virtualized software or whether it be on our all flash arrays that you can automatically just move data to whatever your cloud target may be, whether that be something with an object store, whether it be a block store. And it's all automated. So the key thing here on scalability is transparency, ease of use and automation. They want to automatically join new capacity, want to automatically move data from cloud to cloud, automatically move data from on-premise to cloud, automatically move data from on-premise to on-premise. And IBM's storage solutions, from a software perspective, are all designed with that data mobility in mind and that transportability, both on-premise and out-to-any cloud infrastructure they have. What should Cisco customers know about IBM storage? If you get to talk to them directly, we're here at Cisco Live. We've talked many times about what you guys got going on the software love, the software systems approach. You know, we dig that. But a Cisco deployment, they've been blocking and tackling in the enterprise for years, clouds there. What's the pitch? What's the value proposition to Cisco clients? So I think the key thing for us talking to a Cisco client is the deep level of integration we have. And in this case, not just the storage division but other things. So for example, a lot of their collaboration stuff uses underpinning software from IBM and IBM also uses some software from Cisco inside our collaboration package. In our storage package, the fact that we put together the VersaStack with all these Cisco validated designs means that the customer, whether it be a cloud provider, for example, on the VersaStack, about 20 of our public references are all small and medium cloud providers that wheel in the VersaStack connect them and it automatically grows simply and easily. So in that case, you're looking at a cloud provider customer of Cisco. We're looking at an enterprise customer of Cisco. Then the key thing is the level of integration that we have and how we work together across the board. And the fact that we have all these Cisco validated designs for object storage, for file storage, for block storage, for IBM cloud private. All these things mean they know that it's going to work right out of the box. And whether they deploy it themselves, whether they use one of our resellers, one of our channel partners or whether they use IBM services or Cisco service. Bottom line, it worked right out of the box, easy to go and they're up and running quickly. So Eric, you talked a bunch about VersaStack and you've been involved with Cisco in their UCS since the early days when they came out and helped drive really this wave of converged infrastructure. One of the biggest changes I've seen last couple of years is when you talk to customers, this is really their private cloud platform that they're building. When it first got rolled out, it was a virtualization. We kind of added a little bit of management there. What to give us your viewpoint is to kind of high level, why is this still such an important space? What are the reasons that customers are rolling this out and how that fits into their overall cloud story? Well, I think you hit it, Stu, right on the head. First of all, it's easy to put in and deploy, okay? That is the big checkbox. You're done, ready to go. Second thing that's important is be able to move data around easily, okay? In an automated fashion, like I said earlier, would that be to a public cloud if they're going to tear out? If I'm a private cloud, I got multiple data centers. I'm moving data around all the time. So the physical infrastructure in data center A is a replica or a DR center for data center B and vice versa. So you've got to be able to move all this stuff around quickly, easy. Part of the reason you're seeing converge infrastructure is it's the wave of what's hit in the server world. Instead of racking and stacking individual servers and individual pieces of storage, you've got a pre-packed versus stack. You've got Cisco networking, Cisco server, VMware, all of our storage, our storage software, including the ability to go out to a cloud or with our ICP, IBM private cloud to create a private cloud. And so that's why you're seeing this move towards converge. Yes, there's some hyper-converged out there in the market too, but I think the big issue in certain workloads, hyper-converged is the right way to go. And other workloads, especially if you're creating a giant private cloud or if you're a cloud provider, that's not the way to go because the real difference is with hyper-converged, you cannot scale, compute, and storage independently. You scale them together. So if you need more storage, you scale compute even if you don't need it. With regular converge, you scale them independently. And if you need more storage, you get more storage. If you need more compute, and if you need both, you get both. And that's a big advantage. You want to keep the CAPEX and OPEX down as you create this infrastructure for cloud. Remember, part of the whole idea of cloud are a couple things. A, it's supposed to be agile. B, it's supposed to be super flexible. C, of course, is the modern nomenclature. But D is reduce CAPEX and OPEX. And you want to make sure that you can do that simply and easily. And versus stack and our relationship with Cisco, even if you're not using a versus stack config allows us to do that for the end user. Yeah, and something we're seeing is it's really the first step for customers. I need to quote, as you said, modernize the platform and then I can really start looking at modernizing my applications on top of that. Right. Well, I think today it's all about how do you create the new app? What are you doing with containers? So for example, all of our arrays and all of our arrays that go into a versus stack have free persistent storage support for any containerized environment for dockers and Kubernetes. And we don't charge for that. You just get it for free. So when you buy those solutions, you know that as you move to the container world and I would argue virtualization is still here to stay. But that doesn't mean that containers aren't going to overtake it. And if I was the CEO of a couple different virtualization companies I'd be thinking about buying a container company because that'll be the next wave of the future. And yes, I- Don't forget Kubernetes. Yeah, all of that. Yeah, Eric Herzog's flying over to DockerCon make a big announcement, I think. So. It's got to drop a little bit. I got to ask you a question. I'm obviously, we watch the trends that David Floyd and our team MVME always big topic. Right, right. So what's the MVME leadership plan for your on the product side for you? Can you take a minute to share your vision for what that is going to be? Sure, well we've already publicly announced. We've been shipping an MVME over a fabric solution leveraging Infiniband since February of this year and we demoed it actually in December at the AI conference in New York City. So we've had a fabric solution for MVME already since December and then shipping in February. The other thing we're doing is we publicly announced we would be supporting the other MVME over fabric protocols both fiber channel and ethernet by the end of the year. We publicly already announced that. We also announced that we would have an end to end strategy. In this case you would be talking about MVME on the fabric side going out to the switching and the host infrastructure but also MVME and a storage subsystem. And we already publicly announced that we'd be doing that this year. And how's the progress on that, on that announcement, on that plan? You feel good about it? We're getting there, I can't comment yet but just stay tuned on July 1st and see what happens. So how about the spectrum NAS and other announcements that you have? What's going on, what are the big news? What's happening? Well I think that the big thing for us has been all about software. As you know for the analysts that track the numbers we are and ended up in 2017 as tied as the number one storage software company in the world independent of our systems business. So one of the key powers there is that our software works with everyone's gear. Whether it be a white box through a distributor or a reseller, whether it be our direct competitors. Spectrum Protect, which is one of the best enterprise backup packages, we back up everybody's gear. Our gear, NetApp's gear, HP's gear, Pure's gear, Hitachi's gear, the old Dell stuff. It doesn't matter to us, we back up everything. So one of the powers that IBM has from a software perspective is always being able to support not only our own gear but supporting all of our competitors as well and the whole white box market, with things that our partners may put together through the distributors. I know it might be obvious to you but just take me through the benefits to the customer. What's the impact to the customer? Obviously supporting everything. It sounds like you guys have done that with software so you're agnostic on hardware. So is it a single pane of glass? What's the benefit to the customer with that software capability? There's a couple things. So first of all, the same software that we sell as standalone software, we also sell our own arrays. So if you're in a hybrid configuration and you're using our Flash System V9000 or our store-wise family, that software also works with an EMC or NetApp box. So one license, one way to do everything, one set of training, which in the small shop is not that important but in a big shop, you don't have to manage three licenses, right? You don't have to get trained up on three different ways to do things and you don't have to, by the way, document which all the big companies would do. So it dramatically simplifies their life from an OPEX perspective, makes it easier for them to run their business. Eric, I'd love to get your opinion on just, how's Cisco doing out there? It's a big sprawling company. You know, I looked at the opening keynote, large infrastructure business, doing very well in the data center, but they've got collaboration, they do video, they're moving out in the cloud. Want to see your thoughts as to how are they doing and still making sure they take care of core networking while still expanding and going through their own transformation that they're talking very public about, how do we measure Cisco as a software company? Well, we see some very good signs there. I mean, we partner with them all the time, as I mentioned, for example, in both the security group and our collaboration group, they're not talking storage now, just IBM in general. We leverage software from them and they leverage software from us. We deliver joint solutions through our partners or through each of the two service organizations, but we also have products where we incorporate their software into ours and they incorporate software into us. So from our perspective, we've already been doing it beyond their level now of expanding into a much greater software play. For us, it's been a strong play for us already because of the joint work we've been doing now for several years on software that they've been selling in the more traditional world and now pushing out into the broader areas like cloud, for example. Awesome work. Eric, thanks for coming on. I got to ask you one final personal question. Sure. Get the white shirt on. You usually have a Hawaiian shirt on. Well, because Chuck Robbins came by the booth as we talked about earlier today, felt that I shouldn't have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on. However, now they've met Chuck next time at Next Cisco Live. I'll have my IBM Hawaiian shirt on versus my IBM's traditional shirt. Chuck's a cool guy. Thanks for coming on. As always, great commentary. You know your stuff. Great, thank you. Great to have the slicing and dicing, the IBM storage situation as well as the overall industry landscape at Cisco Live. We're breaking it down here on theCUBE in Orlando. Second day of three days of coverage. I'm Chuck for Stu Miniman. Stay with us for more live coverage after this break.