 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at HP Discover 2014. Brought to you by HP. Okay, welcome back. We're here live in Las Vegas for HP Discover. This is theCUBE, out on the ground extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Forrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're here with Craig Nunes, Vice President of Marketing Alliance, HP Storage. Storage is the hot story. Obviously in the marketplace, storage for the past, literally four years has been on fire, catapulting all the companies involved and converging infrastructure, social media, big data, cloud, really powering next generation data centers and the person who's been with us, commentating is Craig Nunes. Welcome back to theCUBE again. Thanks buddy, good to be here. So Dave and I were just talking to David Scott. Obviously the keynote was a huge success here at HP Discover, packed house, where he had to put him on the bill again, which is historic, share the story there. So we had a packed hall, probably 400 people in the room. We had to turn away about 200 attendees, unfortunately, so we are going to run again tomorrow at noon. We've got David coming up in the general session keynote with Bill Vecti to kind of hit the high points, what's going on in storage. So hot topic. A lot of people here want to know what's happening with HP Storage. So the enterprise group at HP now run by Bill Vecti obviously under new leadership there. The market's changing and anything from your perspective changes in terms of the product, makes obviously your announcements with the flash that was been compelling. Is there a shift internally at HP with respect to kind of market reaction to the trends? Are the things that you're seeing out there that were different last year that we should know about? So I think for sure the approach to flash is a big deal. Let me give you some numbers. We introduced the three-part store serve all-flash array, the 7450, one year ago. When we introduced that platform, the cost per usable gig was about $13. That was EMLC drives, our latest compaction technology, in 12 months, $13 has become less than two. So that focus has been tremendous. That is hot. Software-defined storage is also one of the hottest things going in the market. I think we're seeing a huge uptake, small-meaning business, remote office environments. We're seeing a big uptake with our cloud customers. So outside of the big enterprises that have large-scale, hyperscale, we were going to call it, you mentioned SME, small-meaning-sized enterprises or businesses, they want turnkey. Cloud has certainly showed that I don't need to have a big exchange server for email sitting in the telephone closet or a server closet. I can use cloud technologies or have a smaller data center from a mid-sized company. How has the game changed for those guys procuring to buying storage and what are their needs? So broadly speaking, and I'll kind of come at it from the software-defined storage perspective because that's really what folks are thinking a lot about these days. If they have virtualization environment going, they know they've got to get into shared resilient storage to get their environment up off the ground and software-defined storage is shared resilient storage without buying shared resilient storage. And for those guys, like you said, turnkey, it has converged infrastructure in a box, low-cost, easy-to-manage. It is a great solution for this small environment. What does that mean to the customer? That's that customer. No hassles, just turnkey. I mean, you're dropping. From a budget perspective, awesome. And literally, procuring, deploying, configuring storage is like firing up a VM. I mean, it's that easy. Also, you see some larger capabilities also moving down into the market where you see, normally seen on large enterprises, like Big Data, Dave and I were talking earlier. Big Data stuff is you park it away. You might not need low latency, but you want to have good cost per gigabyte situation. You might roll stuff into a MySQL database for transactional or structured databases for transactions. The mix and match of those use cases are now coming down into the medium-sized enterprises. What does that mean for customers, as they start to think about that? Where I can be a transactional business, but I also want to store all the social data or the big data. Yeah, so generally speaking, I think a small or medium-sized enterprise, fundamentally what they desire is what is being run in the larger enterprises. They've just got to find a way to fit it into a tighter budget. So whether it is a software-defined storage approach, very cost-effective, or if you're a high-growth business and you're looking to accelerate out of there onto maybe a software-defined storage on an appliance, or even handle a second site, replication requirements, that is all part of the offer that HP Storage brings into that space. We're talking about resilience. What does resilience mean to you? And also you mentioned in a collage, I was reading a CRN article where you were closing that Flash is going mainstream. Obviously that means more companies will be using it. But what does resilience mean in your mind? Well, you talk about resilience. So to me, resilience is having the capability within a platform to handle anything that might go wrong and still serve the application with performance customers need. So I'll give you a great example from a resilience standpoint. Dual controller arrays, two controllers. If the worst happens and you lose a controller, the impact to the application, you can still get to data. The impact of the application is like 70 or 80% performance drop. That kills any business application. That is not resilience, right? Resilience is lose a controller application still runs with the bulk of its performance. You can only get to that if you've got a controller architecture that goes beyond the dual controller limitations, which is exactly what Inverge Storage is built on, what 3PAR is built on from top to bottom. So I'm excited about the $2 per gigabyte, sub $2 per gigabyte. I just posted a graphic on CrowdChat. I'll show you too, Craig, so John can see it. But it was a chart that David Floyer produced in 2009 that basically said he had three scenarios for price declines of Flash relative to spinning disk. His premise was flash costs are gonna come down faster than spinning disk, which they have. And he said if it comes down 50%, 60% or 70%, here's the three scenarios. It basically showed that by 2014 would be the crossover point. 14 to 15, and we're pretty much there. So my question is, are high performance, so-called high performance spinning disks in oxymoron, are they essentially dead? I think 15K SaaS drives are dead. They're cooked. So it's either Bitbucket, slow, SATA, cheap. Yeah, 7K, 7K drives still have a good cost profile today. But if you're on 15K drives, or if you're tiering for better response times, yesterday was the end of life of that portfolio. And in fact, how about this? Dave, I want you to go out and I want you to go buy a gig of Flash. Awesome. Go for it. I got my two bucks. Our gift to the king. Courtesy of Craig Nunez. Thank you. Yeah, right on. Awesome. You can even buy an ice cream for two bucks. Not in Palo Alto. Not in San Francisco either. All right, let's talk about backup. Let's shift gears a little bit. You guys have been very aggressive in that space. Absolutely. With the store once. You got this beautiful end to end architecture. It's a technology that came out of HP Labs. Give us the update. Sure, so for folks who might have missed it a few months back, we rolled the entire lineup low to high from software through our hardware appliance lineup. So the store once VSA rolled out new 2000 and 4000 kind of entry and mid range all the way up to our 6000 high end. Now the interesting thing about backup is whenever you ask folks, how's it going? Generally speaking backup continues to be an area where folks are not happy with what they've got on the floor. The issues are, if you look at corporate data, I think 90% of corporate data is all two years new. People have been slow to invest in their infrastructure and their backup infrastructure. And so part of what we're tackling with the store once lineup is taking a lot of that complexity that they've got on their floor today with some big new announcements that we made here at the show. Like what? The, well, I think the flagship announcement was taking the complexity of managing your backup stores. So what people do today, they have single node appliances limited from a compute and capacity perspective. So at some point you hop to a second, a third, a fifth, a tenth on and on. With each appliance, you've got a number of stores, backup store for files, backup for database. You group them together for better deduplication. As soon as you go to a second appliance, you have to repeat all of that. You lose all the deduplication that goes on across that. So we had an idea. We thought, what if we could bring a, in effect a virtualization layer across controllers, across capacity and just hand folks a petabyte size virtualized pool. So you set up your backup stores once under the covers. The hardware is effectively backing up portions of that. Backups are faster, deduplication efficiency is better. Management is absolutely simplified. Visually. You're managing one thing instead of four or 10 or whatever. So that we think is a big announcement and it's been tried in our industry before to actually drive a pool across controllers and bring management and deduplication value. And in fact, I recall that, in fact, DMC, Data Domain strapped two single node appliances together, it lasted about a year and a half on the market, pulled it, simply wasn't delivering the promise. What we are doing across multiple controllers, multiple drives, never been done before in our class and delivers outstanding value. Customers are very excited about it. All right, let's talk about software defined storage. So a lot of hype around software defined storage. I saw it was walking around earlier. I said, you guys are number one market share in software defined storage. I think that's a Wikibon number. We got no love on the stat, but I think that's, I think we're the only guys who ever quantified the software defined storage. So why software defined storage? Why all the hype now? You guys have had your version of SDS for a while. You just kind of naming it. Say, hey guys, by the way, we've had this for years. Why all the hype now? So a couple of things. One is, I think virtualization, it's pretty well ubiquitous, that's key enabler. The horsepower and your server processors, tremendous drives are larger and larger. And so fundamentally folks are in virtualized environments with resources that are not fully consuming. And fundamentally what we're talking about is taking a software defined storage, we call it a virtual storage appliance. Drop it in the server infrastructure, harness those resources that you already own and turn that into resilient shared storage for virtualization, right? It's the most cost-effective way to expand your virtualization environment. Compatible with any server infrastructure. We happen to love Proliant around here, but it'll run with your IBM server infrastructure, Dell server infrastructure, whatever. So your point of view on software defined storage is different than some of the other visions that are being put forth there. From what I see, I mean, you're shipping product. You've been shipping product for years, right? Yeah, seven years. Seven years, yeah. We are up to, in fact, with a program that we're running with our server platform, every single server that ships goes out with a license for store virtual VSA. We are up to nearly 900,000 licenses that have been shipped. That equates to about two and a half exabytes of store virtual VSA capacity. So essentially you can pool that capacity, that server-based capacity. Why would a customer, talk about why a customer would purchase your solution versus, say, a vSAN solution? So first of all, VSAN, I should say, is from VMware's latest software defined storage push. Yeah, so number one, when we talk to our customers, generally speaking, they're looking for a platform, and a platform that is interoperable with their environment today and in the future, and we support VMware environments, Microsoft environments, and we're announcing support for KBM environments. VSAN supports one environment, and no intention to support anything else. Well, it can't, right? I mean, essentially, go ahead. It's a feature of the hypervisor. And in many ways, VSAN is an ease of use feature for vCenter. It's not truly a storage platform. We provide a synchronous replication capability so you can protect what is in your VSA. We allow you to move hot data from software VSA to a storage platform. We can provision external storage that you want to repurpose. All of those things are lacking in VSAN. And like I said, VSAN is effectively a ease of use feature for vCenter. It's a v1 product associated with vSphere only, and I give you a great customer quote. Financial services customer, looking at software defined storage, very excited about it, and their take is, look, I could never propose a storage platform decision based on a feature of a single hypervisor. No way would it fly in the bank, right? And what we are talking about is a storage platform that'll run on any server platform, run across hypervisors, and deliver that cost value, but with the resilience, the availability that folks are looking for for their critical data. Excellent. All right, Craig, we have to leave it there. All right. Okay, I was going to ask, I've got a chat here, a question from our crowd chat. Craig, could you please define software defined storage quickly? I will do. Software defined storage, first of all, it's software. It is full storage capability in software. It runs on any server platform. There is no underlying hardware dependency for that software, and it is scale out or federated, so you can really grow it and manage it across your server infrastructure. Craig Neunez, VP of Marketing and Lines here at HP Storage. Been here from the beginning with a three-par acquisition. To get the start of it, I just saw someone posted your innovative marketer. Congratulations. Of course, big fan of the queue. We appreciate that. We are here live at HP where all the actions happen around convergent construction, consumerization of IT, whereas HP says new style of IT. This is the queue. We'll be right back after this short break.