 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine, VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. We're back to EMC World coverage. This is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. SiliconANGLE TVs, live can continue as covered from EMC World 2014. Digging into a segment now is near and dear to my heart. Talking about converged infrastructure and I've got Cara Garcia from the EMC V-SPEC group. Gary, first time on the Cube, I believe? It is the first time. Hey, happy you could join us, thanks. You're the director of global solutions marketing with EMC V-SPEC. The Cube loves talking to V-SPEC. We were there at the product launch in San Francisco in April of 2012. Have watched closely everything going on there and you guys had a nice mention in the keynote this morning. That's right, thanks Stu. Yeah, it's been a great ride. V-SPEC has captured a lot of people's attention because it solves a lot of real world problems. It's got a lot of utility. Yeah, it's interesting. I think back to when the product launched, there was a lot of questions. It's like, oh, this is a reaction to EMC and Cisco are going to fight. Well, VCE is doing well and Cisco is a major partner of V-SPEC. And so there was a lot of questions of what V-SPEC's is and what V-SPEC's isn't. So give us an update, where's the business stand? So at the heart of the matter, V-SPEC's is a solution. It is an infrastructure reference architecture, it is converged infrastructure that's delivered and integrated by our channel partners. So value-added resellers who have a relationship with people who are actually trying to get work done, trying to solve real world problems, they have insight into what needs to be built to actually solve real world problems. And so they can use V-SPEC's and the reference architecture to integrate EMC storage with a number of different technologies, from a number of different providers to partners to actually go from idea to offering very quickly and while reducing the risk of integration for the IT practitioners. So the adoption of convergence is going pretty well. Some of the biggest challenges is changing the mindsets, both for not only the end user, they have to change how they purchase it, they have to change how they manage it, all their expectations, the channel themselves. There's a rejiggering of who does what in the value chain. So maybe let's start with the customers first and then maybe we can tackle the channel. What's your take on how are we doing with that change of mindset? Has it been significant or how far have we moved along from a customer standpoint? You know, when Convert, I remember way back in the mid 90s, people were trying to do Converged Infrastructures and it was difficult because a lot of the technologies really hadn't matured enough to where they played well together. We're at an interesting point now with the advent of virtualization that it is much easier for the technologies to play well together and so IT practitioners have a demand to deliver to the business much faster. Converged Infrastructure offers them a mechanism to do that and so there's both the appetite and the opportunity on the IT practitioner side. From the channel provider's perspective, this is a great opportunity to both meet customers' needs but reduce the risk in the sales cycle because if they're building their own infrastructures, if they're building and consulting with IT practitioners to solve these problems, they're taking on a lot of responsibility and nothing against them, they're quite capable of doing that but it's just so much faster if you can aggregate all of the knowledge of the industry, all of the people who've done VDI, learn from all of those experiences, boil it down into one solution that can be delivered very quickly, now they're adding value to the IT practitioners and to their customers much, much faster and then for someone like EMC, data storage by itself, I'm fascinated by the technology, I love it but let's face it, it's got to work to serve some purpose, it's got to serve applications and so by having this converged infrastructure strategy it allows us to partner with a number of technology partners that make the breadth of the solution so much broader than what we could do on our own and so being able to have VSpecs as a program allows us to attract technology partners, I think you'll talk to some of them up in the next coming sections, that allows the solution to solve niche problems and some very big specialty problems in different markets that maybe we wouldn't get to if we were trying to do it all on our own. So that's the importance there. So when VSpecs first launched, it was a small number of actually technology partners, you guys launched, I think it's called VSpecs Lab Validated, you've got various levels of integration that you do, from a technology standpoint, how many different offerings are there in the VSpecs? I think there's 24 different reference architectures out there, I think we're announcing another five here at the show, we're even including things like scale I.O. in the solution. It's been VNX, we announced VNX-E as part of the VSpecs family here at the show and now soon there'll be a scale I.O. solution that's coming out, so a lot of technology is just within our own portfolio and then as far as our technology partners, VSpecs has been used in the real world by real channel partners solving real world problems with customers, so it has played well with just about everything you can think of out there in the market and that's the power of the flexibility. There's a place for a more packaged solution and some people need that, but if you need something that's tailor made for a customer's application while reducing the risk and using all the experience of the market while playing well with what's in a customer's real world data center, you can't beat VSpecs, I mean it's just what the doctor ordered, right? It's hope for that. So one of the biggest challenges out there is you want flexibility, but you need standardization and the biggest challenge of the past is I would build a bespoke architecture for an application and the poor administrative team would spend all their time tweaking the dials and getting everything ready for to go up and down the stack to make sure it works. Virtualization changed a lot of that and convergence is driving that more. So how do you balance between I want to be able to handle multiple workloads but I want to be able to have reliable performance for my mission critical pieces, like, you know, my question makes sense. You know, that balance. Yeah, and so you'll notice like those of you who are like familiar with VSpecs, you know that there are a number of reference architectures that speak to single applications. Just I think six weeks ago, we brought up for the both sizing tool and a reference architecture that integrates multiple applications and shows best practices for running multiple applications in the same infrastructure. This one happened to be a suite of Microsoft applications on the VSpecs. But, you know, the power of the solution, you know, all the stuff that EMC delivers is good. Where it gets really good though is when we have our technology partners, people like Egenera, their cloud management partner, right? Validated on and proven in VSpecs labs and they can manage this infrastructure as if it were a private cloud or Vistara. You're going to talk to them later. Their software as a service management platform manage applications, right? And they can, so not only is VSpecs capable of hosting multiple applications, not only do we have the sizing and the availability and the best practices to deploy these applications, we also have partners that allow us to go even higher in the stack and begin managing these applications as if they were services, which in the end is what business wants, right? The CEO probably doesn't really care about how the cabling's run. They want it to be neat. They want it to be reliable. But they want to consume the service. So you make me laugh because, you know, when I think about Egenera actually, these headquarters used to be right next door to where Wikibon is. It's in Marlboro, Massachusetts. And their original business value was to build a hardware platform that got rid of your cabling. And they were one of the early, early kind of converged solutions when early blade servers were coming out. Another software company. So the question I have for you, of course, is that there's all, you know, we know software is eating the world. And so, you know, how does VSpecs, you know, continue to add the value and stay relevant with users as, you know, software and new applications and, you know, all these pieces, you know, tend to say, I don't need to worry about what the underlying infrastructure is. I'll take care of that for you. Well, it's a good question. And the answer is that there's always going to be CPU. There's always going to be memory. There's always going to be IO. That part's not going away. The solution that VSpecs brings is how do you make that part that's not going to go away easier to deploy, more reliable and less, and take all the risk out of it, you know, in a way that allows the business to consume what they need and not more than they need, right? And so you can think of VSpecs, if you want to, as a platform that delivers software. And so EMC is delivering software, our backup products, our data protection products. VSpecs is a perfect environment for us to deliver that value to customers. But it's also made more valuable by the ecosystem of technology partners that then go into these VSpecs labs. And it's not just marketing. We don't just say it works. We actually go and test and prove that it works. Because right at the end, you need three things, right? You need a real capability to add value. You need to prove, you need to make the solution bigger than any one company can build. You need some method of proving and validating that things work on your platform. And then you also need some mechanism to promote the solution and a channel to deliver it to the customer so that real IT businesses, real businesses can consume the technology. And that's the value of VSpecs. In the end, VSpecs is that delivery mechanism, is that ecosystem, that environment, as well as the technology. Of course, we're interested in providing the technology. But the strategy is, and the value to customers is more than just the technology. So Gary, you mentioned that Scale.io is going to be part of the portfolio in VSpecs. When I think Scale.io, I think scalability. And I think about, I don't necessarily need a storage array because Scale.io is, what we've defined is what's called a server scan. So I can bring internal storage and the storage layer will take care of things, but it's not a separate array built only for that. So I'm curious how is Scale.io just a block service that you're going to be offering? And what is the, and I guess the follow up on the second question is, the scalability story for VSpecs, because for the most part, when I think about VSpecs, it's a single block at a time or something like that. Look, the EMC's constant, you can see our vision, right? We understand that the world is going to the third platform. And our opportunity here is to make solutions that help customers get to the third platform. I won't say anymore about the solutions that are coming. You'll see how they're positioned as we announced them. But I mentioned that you can think of VSpecs as a mechanism to deliver more than just the technology, but to deliver an ecosystem of value that allows customers to reduce risk and go from idea to offering faster. And so this is all part of a larger strategy that helps us to solve real world problems. Okay, would it be fair to say that today, most VSpecs are, you know, is it a single block or customers buying repeat? You know, where is that in the portfolio? So if you look at, you know, most VSpecs, most customers, you know, the, when customers choose converged infrastructure, usually there's a couple of different projects that they start off with. It's either consolidation, maybe a VDI or a special project where they're implementing a new application, they want to really use a cloud-like infrastructure. That means that they typically start with one infrastructure. But what you'll find is that there's a number of customers who after they get their feet wet and they learn how to manage a cloud infrastructure, it becomes their practice. It becomes the way they do business. And so if you look at like managed service providers, there's one called Prometia out of the East Coast and they manage IT infrastructure for school districts. They deploy these VSpecs school after school and manage them using a technology partner that's also validated on VSpecs called Vistara. Right? And if you think about it, it's pretty cool, right? It means that we're elevating infrastructure from being infrastructure to being a service that's not only manageable by the IT practitioners, but it's also managed as if it were a private cloud, even though it's on my data center, right? And so that's a kind of innovation that happens when you have an ecosystem of partners who can innovate, work together, and dream up these solutions that didn't exist, right? And no one, it'd be very difficult for anyone company to dream up that story, right? Managing school districts data centers as if they were an external private cloud, but on premise. Solves tons of problems and it's frankly, I think it's something that, I just found that one to be very innovative, really interesting and timely, right? Because with all the privacy concerns and trust concerns, having your own private cloud but still manage that, that's neat, right? And all done with P-specs, multiple data centers, it's really neat. It's a great story, Gary. And what I like is EMC's committed to convergence, but you've gone way beyond the convergence discussion. It's about the applications, about solving solutions. As we said, we're focused on solutions here. So, I wonder, can you put a bumper sticker? What is, what should be people to be thinking of when they think of V-specs? Well, you know, I'm not very good at bumper stickers, but I mean, flexible, efficient and trustworthy. I mean, we're committed to the solution. You've seen that, you know, we launched the platform, we continue to refresh the platform. We're committed to our partners. And this is, you know, bumper stickers aside, what we really need is we want people to believe that this is something that they can invest in and trust that it will continue solving problems, right? So that's very good. Hey, don't worry about the bumper sticker. Glad you guys are bringing us some of your channel partners, some of your technology partners. Happy to dig in to this solution. So, Gary Garcia, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE, you're a veteran now of the event and always good to catch up with the V-specs team. We will be back with our continuous coverage from EMC World 2014. And one last chip plug, just check wikibon.org slash S-L-I, which is the software led infrastructure. We've got an entire segment, covers all the convergent infrastructure solutions out there and you can always ping me, I'm at Stu on Twitter. Thanks so much, we'll be right back with our next guest.