 Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2018, brought to you by Commvault. Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee, the home this week of Commvault Go with Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE. Happy to welcome to the program a regular on our program, Patrick Osborne, who's the Vice President and General Manager of Big Data and Secondary Storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Patrick, great to see you. Great, thanks for having me. Love to be on theCUBE, appreciate it. Yeah, so we've had you on theCUBE in lots of places, but a first in Nashville, because it's the first time we've been here. Keith's second time at the show, my first. What's your impression so far? Yeah, so this is our first major presence here at Commvault Go. I think it's going pretty well so far. Certainly a great venue. We actually, we do a couple of things here for our own presales folks. So, first impressions, love the fact that we have a whole conference dedicated to secondary storage. Certainly, again, a lot of importance lately within customer conversations as well as overall investment in the industry. So, I'm pretty impressed, pretty lively crowd here. Yeah, I really liked, we started off the morning talking to Chris Powell, the CMO of Commvault, talking about how Commvault is a 20-year-old company. And therefore, there were certain things that a 20-year-old company has. As you think about their pricing work, you think about how people's perceptions of them are. You work at a company with plenty of history. HPE can partner with whomever they'd like to. Why is it important for HPE to partner with Commvault? Yeah, 20 years for Commvault, 78 for HPE. So, we got a lot of chops there. For us, secondary storage is certainly becoming very important for customers. And it's being driven by new user stories, new capabilities centered around data. So, what we look for is, as a technology company, we want to provide an entire solution, like vertically oriented, that not only includes our compute, networking, storage, secondary storage, cloud, but as well as a very vibrant ecosystem. So, we've been working certainly with ad customers and in the partner ecosystem with Commvault for a number of years. And now, we've formalized that and codified it with a couple of technology announcements, certainly on the go-to-market side, and then some offerings we've done as a service, so back up as a service. So, let's talk about some of these technology announcements. Talk to us about the significance of the store wants, Commvault integration. Got a great de-duplication appliance in store wants, now you're bringing Commvault to the scene, to the solution. What advantage does that bring to customer, first off? Yeah, so we have a couple specific integrations we've done. We have our primary all-flash arrays, Nimble and 3PAR, certainly within the IntelliSnap umbrella, we've worked with them in the past. We've worked with Commvault recently to deliver some support for our de-duplication algorithms. We have what we call Catalyst, it's the ability to de-dupe anywhere, within the data center or not, even outside the data center. So, they support that, it really helps out with certainly high-speed performance for backup so you can meet those aggressive SLAs. We feel like we have pretty differentiated technology on the de-dupe side, so it helps our customers save in terms of the storage that they have on disk. And then the other big thing is that they've also integrated with CloudBank, so it's our ability to store archived backup data for very, very long periods of time in either Azure or out in Amazon, and essentially using Commvault as the workflow and the catalog and being able to plug into the ability for us to federate primary, secondary, and the Cloud is a pretty powerful integration for customers who might already have HPE, might already have Commvault, so it definitely brings a lot of value into that. Yeah, Patrick, we've seen a real maturation of that, really the multi-Cloud model in the last couple of years. It seems like that's a foundational piece of the partnership between Commvault and HPE. What are you hearing from customers and what differentiates this solution from others in the market? Yeah, so I mean, I think the secondary storage is one that's always rife for having a multi-Cloud storage, whether it's people just wanting to do something like I don't want a secondary data center, I want to use the Cloud, I want to replace tape, there's a number of different reasons why. I think the differentiation part comes in the technology that I talked about before making that very seamless for customers and be able to move workloads out to the public Cloud for the purposes of long-term data retention. The other key thing is that we're providing this to customers in completely as a service style. So not only from a technology perspective, but the way you consume it now, so we're able to provide primary, secondary, your Commvault solution, the Azure capacity, for example, advisory services, and we're all able to package that up on a per terabyte or a per metric basis that customers consume in an elastic manner, like you would the Cloud. Yeah, HP was one of the first, forgive me if I say legacy, 78-year-old company. People automatically assume companies like AWS and even Azure move that way, but where have you seen customers in their readiness, both from a people standpoint, as well as a procurement model for that model as I said, HPE is one of the first one to the big traditional players that help push that model. Yeah, so the desires there, we pitch this every day, every week, and it's got a lot of legs from a customer interest perspective. We are transacting, and we'll start to build our business and it helps us financially as well too, because for us to offer those as a service, that's a reoccurring revenue, it's bookings, it's not just your traditional CAPEX hardware acquisition, so it helps us, and a little-known fact is that HPE Financial Services, when you talk about an established company, we have a very, very high net promoter score for HPE FS, and that's one of the capabilities that allows us to provide these really, really granular, flexible services for our customers. So we've got a lot of things going at HPE being a more established, mature company with a very large install base, so not only technology piece, but the financial aspects of it is something we can offer as well. Patrick, talk to me about some of the advantages of the as a service. From an agility perspective, when I think of consuming HPE physical hardware on-prem through HPE Financial Services, and I'm consuming this as a service, how does that enable agility for your customers? Well, it enables agility in the financial model, number one, so a lot of customers are asking us for as a service, subscription models, moving from CAPEX to OPEX, and not just in OPEX lease, because that doesn't count anymore, the rules are changing. So what we're able to do is we provide an actual service. So we have the customer hands-over, the architecture reigns to us, so we have an established methodology of how we implement this, so no snowflakes, we can build on a wealth of experience we have with a number of other customers to be able to essentially deliver a number of outcomes. So it becomes very agile in the fact that at the end of the day, secondary storage, some of the user stories are pretty mundane. They're very repeatable, right? And so if you hand that over to us, we're able to help you with that, not only financially but architecturally and from an operations perspective, and you can focus your talent that you have in your organization on differentiating for your business, right? Because backups, maybe at the end of the day, that's not going to be where you're going to hang your hat on your digital transformation as a customer, but it's certainly something you need, so we can both partner together on making that a better experience. All right, go ahead. I was going to ask, what's the interface? How do customers consume these as-a-service solutions, whether it's the secondary storage, or if it's a service living in the cloud? So we have a number of examples of these, so when you take a look at a service that we have for example, HPE Cloud Volumes, right? It has a portal, you log in, you can put your credit card in and you can add, let's say your cloud credentials into that as well, and then you are essentially off and running on dollars per terabyte, and you can scale that up, you can scale that down, so at the end of the day, we're really trying to provide an experience for customers that's very similar to the public cloud, and I think the other area that we've done, we've made some acquisitions in this space, cloud technology partners, Red Pixie, Cloud Cruiser, so not only on being able to use the consumption methodology and the metering that we provide, but also the advisory services is something that you get from HPE, you actually get to talk to people that know how to do this and have done it before and can help you arbitrate and make you very successful. All right, so Patrick, last 18 to 24 months, the secondary storage space has just been buzzing, almost frothy, if you will. Commvault's been around for 20 years. Five years ago, there wasn't the excitement in the space. There's the startups, there's companies like Commvault and Veritas and Veeam who have established customer base in there. Why do you see so much excitement there? Is it the new AI availability? Is it, if somebody, I've got plenty of background in the storage industry, just data is so critically important that it's right there, what do you say? I see it as a massive shift in thinking from TCO to ROI, right? Five years ago, you're having conversation is how can I do this as cheaply as possible, right? It's a non-differentiated life insurance policy, at the end of the day. Now it's all about what can I do to maximize the return on that data. And it could be things that are not super sexy but test verification, sandbox labs, being able to provide copies of data for your developers to get a better experience and a better quality experience for their customers at the end of the day. So there's a number of things that we've been able to unlock in the secondary storage area and some people call it copy data management, hyper-converge for secondary storage. I mean, there's lots of different names and nomenclatures applied to it but it's essentially, from what I see is people unlocking the value of that data where it used to be captured, siloed, untouchable but now you've unlocked a number of possibilities for this data, and you can multi-use, right? It's the new currency. Yeah, we always argue at the show Commvault saying that data is the new water. But Dave Vellante would say, well, water often is a scarce resource and something we all have to fight for. Data, the ability to unlock the data is we can use it multiple times in lots of different ways and the more I use the data, the more valuable it is, not like traditional resources. Yeah, and also too, some of the big bets you've seen from HPE is certainly a big investment on edge-centric computing as well too. So our edge line, the build-out of 5G, certainly the ubiquitous wireless networks that we provide with Aruba. So there's a huge amount of capability of either moving the processing outside the data center but that data is still data, it needs to be protected, you need to be able to use it. So I think we're just getting started in some of these areas, certainly around secondary storage. So let's talk about the value that .next brings to the mix. We're talking about some pretty advanced use cases, the edge, the data center, the cloud. Stitching this together isn't quite simple. Tell us about the .next story and how they helped extend the capability beyond just going zeroes and ones. So I think there's a lot of our folks that cover customers, the count team, sales folks that are really insuring our customer success. They view this area as very rife for certainly advisory services. I think one of the things is that having the capability of doing this, you guys have seen in the past couple of years, people have scaled back dedicated storage admins, right? Dedicated backup admins, unless you're in a very large shop really don't exist, you've moved towards essentially hypervisor admins, generalists, right? So I think that our capability is we have those services, we have that expertise in-house and for us to be able to provide very good reference architectures that touch all parts of the stack because secondary storage is, it's not just selling an all flash array, for example, or some capacity optimized disk, it touches everything. It's a questions around what's your SLA, what are the apps, what are you trying to do? So for us, we have a wealth of resources and knowledge in this space and bringing in companies like Cloud Technology Partners and Redpixie into our services organization. It gives us the ability to help customers make that move to hybrid cloud as well too, which is very important. The other message we're hearing loud and clear from Commvault is the roadmap is a lot of automation. There's the intelligence, you know, you talk about all those admins, it was funny, they put up all these roles up on the board in the keynote this morning and all of them really were bots underneath, they've got to have automation and do that. Have us look forward, how does the HPE roadmap and the Commvault roadmap, how much synergy is those with those visions? Yeah, so right now we're definitely running along some parallel lines, I mean, they probably fire me if I didn't get off stage here without talking about InfoSight, right, because it's a huge investment for us and we think it's a huge opportunity. You guys have seen the proof and the pudding from that in terms of automated support, we've got predictive analytics now. So for us, the more that you can build in from an AI and ML perspective, we think the value is in a couple areas, certainly cross stack, so going all the way from the app down through the infrastructure and we're providing that through InfoSight and then we're also expanding some of the use cases to include things like secondary storage, right, so if you see, let's say we have a signature that we can see, right, a certain IO pattern, right, we'll make some predictive calls to the infrastructure to say, hmm, that looks like ransomware, maybe you should take a full clone of that and then encrypt it and shove it up in the cloud, right, or the change rate on your database just elevated to orders of magnitude, maybe I should think about moving some workloads that are adjacent to that off, that system, so as we expand those and then allow that type of workflow to enable our partners as well too, you can see where that value would head as well too, right, so you start to integrate some of the telemetry from HPE, telemetry from a vendor and an ISP partner like Commvault, you can do some really powerful things across the stack. All right, last thing for you, Patrick, you're going to be on the keynote tomorrow, show us a little bit for our audience here, what to expect from HPE? So I think we talked a little bit about today, we're going to focus our talk tomorrow on some of the new consumption models, right, so as a service and we're certainly going to highlight some of the things that we've done so far in AI and ML, right, and certainly making the lives of our storage and data customers a lot easier and you know, a little bit of a vision as to where we're going with both of those two. All right, well Patrick, always a pleasure to catch up with you, thanks for joining us and look forward to catching up at the next event. Thanks for having me. All right, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman and we'll be back with more coverage here from Commvault Go here in Nashville, Tennessee. Thanks for watching theCUBE.