 And Fabio, my friend from Twitterland. Hey Fabio, good to see you again. Good to see you Dave. How's it going? Going well. Roger. Good to officially shake your hand. Pleasure to see you and meet you. How are you guys doing? Great. Doing great. What's happened at the show for you? Seen a lot of good stuff, geeking out? Yeah, just hanging around with the cool guys in the industry. A lot of networking. A lot of networking. It's been a fantastic event from the ability to talk with the customers, like myself, on the bloggers like myself, and then get to talk to the engineers both from Compellent and Dell. Ten sessions, it's been a fantastic event. Yeah, I've been here a lot, but I had a chance yesterday. We ended early and I spent some time in the VDI session. It was great. A lot of good questions, a lot of hands-on. You know what I love about it is, you know, you had some Dell guys up there talking and they're the experts and users were asking questions. The great thing was you had other customers saying, hey, there's another way to do that. I heard about a tool. Lakeside Software has another tool. What about this tool? How do they compare and just peer-sharing information? It's all about sharing. Of course, we love that because that's what Wikibon is all about. What's hot these days? What's on your radar? We're already watching closely the integration efforts by Dell to integrate everything that they both during the last two years, I mean, Exynet, Ocarina, now Compellent, and they're putting a lot of effort to integrate everything into a kind of single platform that can scale down from the SMB stuff made by Equalogic, even the Power Vault stuff, up to even the enterprise space with big installation, big federally the stuff with Compellent, live volume, stuff like that, which is pretty impressive. So integrated, all working seamlessly. Hey, wait, wait, wake up, tension, tension. Do we think that's actually that Nirvana that you described? Is it, but it sounds hard from an integration standpoint. We've seen NetApp trying to integrate Spinnaker for over seven years. We've seen EMC essentially give up on integration other than some lightweight integration and some hardware integration. I mean, that's not fair to the engineers that are working hard on it, but I mean, in terms of true integration, it's hard to come by, isn't it? It's really hard. So from a practitioner's perspective, why do you want it? And from a practical standpoint, do you feel like that it's worth it for a vendor to do that? So where's the balance? It is worth it. Maybe you just don't need a titanic effort to have a really good baseline from the operating system, scale that for them from the SMB stuff up to the enterprise stuff on the same level, just like NetApp does. With a single platform tap that's scaled down from the Fast 2020 up to the 6000. Maybe they can retain what they're doing now. The equalizing stuff just ice-cazi up to a compelling which is multi-protocol. But they need to have a single pane of glass all across, just more like the EMC approach to the Unisphere, which is in my opinion quite good. It's not perfect, but it's quite good. Okay, so that level of integration from your standpoint adds a lot of value to the organization, is that right? I think we're seeing it today. Let us play with the code name Spartan product, the FS7500. We got some hands-on with it. And I'm a hands-on guy. I like to get in there and get dirty with it. How's this work? Exactly. But we saw it with the same interface as the ecological interface. It's second nature. There's just a new NASDAQ, you go on, you create a new SIFT for NFS share, and you're pretty much done. Ecologics always have a good job of being very streamlined, very simple interface for the admin that just doesn't have the time to be in there all day. And I think that is something that they'll really get at doing across the board. Yeah, so you guys, I mean, we live in this world where we have so many outlets, you know, social media, theCUBE, and guys like you can share your knowledge with a big audience, you know, part blogger, part practitioner. Yeah. And so let's talk a little bit about that. Maybe your roles. Fabio, let's start with you. Your organization, your blog agenda, the things that you're covering. Talk a little bit about yourself. Yeah. I started blogging like three years ago now, and we started mostly to, you know, get the world out, mostly in Italy because we still have, you know, we're still lagging behind the other countries as far as technology is involved. So we're trying to spread out the world for what's new, what's hot in the industry, mostly for storage, because, you know, it's, it was not so developed in Italy. We tried to do that, and we mostly succeeded in that, and we tried to, you know, expand our vision to English language. So across the border from Italy, Italy started blogging in English to attend conferences outside Italy, and it's been quite good. I mean, we have this blog which is called Juku, J-U-K-U.IT, which is both in English and Italian, and we're two, I'm one of the guys, the other one is Enrico, which is, you know, now involved in another conference right now. Is he on the West Coast? Yeah, he is on the West Coast. Yeah, close to the West Coast. I think I saw him this week, I was in Vegas, but half your tweets are in Italian, I love it. Yeah, I don't tweet so much in Italian because there's no big audience for Enrico. Enrico does a lot of tweeting, actually. And that's for the blogging. We also have, me and Enrico are a small company, it's a very, it's a center part of it for the Italian compelling and for NetApp too, actually. And we specialize on, you know, storage and utilization only, provide consultancy to, you know, organizations that ask us to maybe validate infrastructure or even design from scratch. And it's, you know, we're pretty specializing on that and we're pretty successful. Good space to be in. You know, you're talking about conferences outside Italy, I think you should have more conferences inside of Italy so we can come visit you. Sounds like a good thing. What do you think, Roger? So, Roger, take us through, you know, so your activities and what you do. Sure, so, I'm an admin by day. You know, I work at a race services group, I was saying Cloud of Minnesota, I started out in Minnesota, and so I do the VMware day-to-day storage, compelling customer on that side. I've really taken my time to put the research that I do as an admin out of my main blog, vroger.com, right? I kind of do an admin view on that space. And, you know, what I've done also is, is we're kind of centrally located in Minnesota. You know, I've started doing, for the last three years, computer user groups, the VMware user group, vmug format, to pull in the rural areas, customers from the healthcare, from the small, medium business. So, these are vmug-like? These are vmug-like. This would be an unofficial vmug, right? Your fork in vmug? Yeah, yeah. And just as of this weekend, I'm now a co-leader in the Minneapolis user group, vmug. So, why do you do that? It's people, there's demand, people, and vmugs are only, what, every six months in the area? Every quarterly. Is it quarterly? Okay, yeah. But they're not always in the same, they're not in the Twin Cities necessarily, right? You might have to, or maybe they are. In our case, yeah. In New England, it's like... In New England, it's like... Yeah. And I think that some of that is, you know, it's a little bit flexible, right? Actually... We do the same nearly. Actually, I'm one of the founders of the vmug. It just started, like, six months ago. Yeah. And we started doing that. And we're facing a lot of issues in choosing a place to do the event, the vmug event, because... That's so hard. Florence, Rome, Milan, where do we go? Yeah, we had a couple of guys flowing through Milan and to Milan from Sicily, which is, you know, on our flag. Yeah. And out of their own pocket. Yeah. So pretty dedicated. Yeah, yeah, sure. They're pretty keen. It's just a little challenging on the aspect that we're trying to find places to house anywhere from, you know, seeing as low as, you know, 25 to 50 people all the way up to 300, 400 people depending on the location. You know, someone's got to pay for the room, the refreshments and that type of thing. Plus, you've got to find vendors that are willing to help you talk and, you know, show them a product offer if you've decided to do a discussion, you've got to have topics. So you can just both take it on your days, you know, if you're busy already and stuff like that. But, I mean, the networking is great, you know, you learn more from those events from each other than anything, you know. And you'd have RogerLund.net too, right? Yeah, so it's an IT blog that RogerLund.net is my main blog site. I created VRoger as a redirect, right? Yeah. It's because you try to explain that and it's just a multiple subject. Yeah. Also, here about six months ago, I created vbrainstorm.com, a little more design-oriented. I just got done doing a whiteboard of Commvault, that type of content. It's more someplace that doesn't get refreshed by this fast, you know, because you get a blog, it can get a lot of content you're trying to search through it and stuff like that. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about, Fabio was talking about the value of integration before, and you said there's clear value to you guys as practitioners. So one of the things we've been looking at with VKibon is the integration points around VMware. And of course, you know, I'm not a practitioner, I'm not really a technologist, but, you know, I'm in the business. You hear about VAI, you hear about VADP, you hear about change block tracking. Those clearly have impacts on storage and backup. And then, so we dug into it a little bit. We found there's so many points of integration. Like, I think we counted 30 or 38 points of integration, pathing. I mean, just the list goes on and on and on. Help us squint through that. You know the list I'm talking about, right? It's endless. And it's a big thing for vendors to have to go right to that, and VMware has to support it. How important are those capabilities to you guys as practitioners? Fabio, you can start. Roger, you can chime in. In my case, they're quite fundamental to that, because if you try now in 2011 to, you know, build a solution around VMware, you know, a large one, maybe not a large, but starting from 100 VMs upwards. And you don't have integration points between the VMware and your storage. This is not going to be easy to manage. It's going to be complicated, way too complicated to manage. And if you spend, say, 10 hours a week to manage storage, related to VMware, if you have at least a couple of integration points, VAI, maybe an integration with vCenter, you're going to spend maybe half of the time. Imagine scaling that up to 1,000 VMs, 2,000 VMs, 10,000 VMs. It's going to be, you know, exponential. Right. So it's fundamental in 2011 to have a really strong integration between VMware and your storage. And, Roger, different, different, so you guys know best, compelling, equal logic, or mostly compelling. Mostly compelling. Mostly compelling. And you resell NetApp. We resell NetApp, but, you know, we do consultancy for every brand of storage. Any, so, yeah, we're storage-agnostic on that. Okay, so you're the trusted advisor. Yeah, I am. Okay. And, Roger, your specialty is similar across anybody's area. Well, I've got to have a pretty wide understanding of the storage technology, just from the user group side of things, right? So, and I wouldn't be a rigid blogger if I didn't, you know, kind of understand what's going on out there. But my probably strongest roots are NetApp and compelling. It was prior to NetApp customer. So, different vendors have different approaches to integration, right? So EMC is like, we got to do it all. We're going to put a gazillion people on it. And we're going to market that. And it's very effective, right? When you talk to a practitioner, it's different. You know, we don't have to go into them because I couldn't and we don't have time. But different capabilities have different value. Some of them mean a lot. Some of them don't mean so much. Other suppliers, maybe you don't have the resources. Maybe they get the SDK later or whatever it is and they focus on sweet spots, right? What's the landscape look like to you? I mean, is having that huge list like EMC does, is that, you know, the right approach? Is it maybe a more targeted approach makes sense? I mean, what's your take on that? I'll give you the answer that, you know, it always doesn't mean it depends, right? I mean, it depends on a lot of customer needs. If you're a customer that relies, as a budgetary standpoint, on professional services and you like to have a proven vendor relationship that you rely on them heavily, maybe EMC, it makes the most sense. If you are a lean IT shop and you've only got a few minutes a day to manage storage, it makes sense. If you're somewhere in between, you know, in that app or, you know, it makes sense. And I think really what Dell's tried to do, excuse me, in their portfolios is to offer multiple areas at the end of the spectrum. You know, Compellent has got some enterprise class features for sure, you know, it's a little more hands-on, it's a little capable from, you know, one end of the spectrum to the other. Ecologic has got lots of products that stack in different verticals, both with a real ease of management focus, right? And then they've got a lot of SMB products, also, the one thing. My sense is, and I wonder if you could, you know, tell me if I'm wrong. My sense is Dell is catching up, in part because Compellent was a smaller vendor that didn't get the VMware love that it's going to get now with Dell. So it's now got to, we've got to give it some time to catch up in that integration. If you look at them now, you see that Ecologic is much more about the position on the VMware integration because they got, you know, VAEI, they already got the vCenter integration. Yeah, Compellent has that too now. The vCenter. Well, that's a good starting point, right? Yeah. You know, VAEI, for example, VMware was very judicious about how it even made SDKs available, you know? Yeah. We know that speaking with your budding guys, before the acquisition was, you know... And, of course, EMC gets it first because they own it, and they're big. So there's a business justification, of course they didn't have. So now that's going to change for Compellent because now that they're part of a whale, you know, VMware's going to say, well, they just cut the line, didn't they? The biggest OEM for VMware. I mean, it's... Well, I think that you see, you know, whoever's the most innovative, right? Whoever can change the fastest to the adaptive environment is always the top player for the most part. I mean, there's always going to be a nick out there, but, you know, and I think that, you know, with recent people like Jay Sabaki coming on board for Compellent, you know, VCDX type of level guys like yourself, obviously, are key players into showing what Compellent are doing to accelerate some of the product line. Yeah, so, and we're kind of in the early days of this whole integration play, right? I mean, I remember I was at VMworld last year, and we probably had 70 guests on the queue, and probably half of them were practitioners, and I would ask them, and there were more VMware practitioners, not so much storage guys, and I would ask them, you know, what do you think about VA AI? What does it matter to you? And they go, I don't even know what that is, you know? And of course, now they know, right? They're seeing it, but so, and of course, the whole vendor community at the time was going crazy, so we need some time to sort of absorb all this stuff. The question I have around it is, where are we at with VMware and storage, and where are we going? Is it very early in the game? And everybody knows VMware virtualization breaks storage, right? So we wake up to that and say, I'm going to solve this problem. Where are we in solving that problem? Where do we need to go as an industry? Well, actually in the early days for that, and this is going to change pretty soon with the new vSphere. vSphere 5 would be, you know, a pretty good leap in advance with the storage integration with VA AI, the new VA AI. So we'll probably see more focus on that. From VMware, because they sorted out most of the other stuff. They know how to virtualize RAM effectively. They know how to virtualize CPUs effectively. And storage is left as the last big thing to sort it out correctly. And this is going to probably change with the new release. And it would be the new starting point as it was the third version of VMware. The VMware BI 3 was back in 2006, I think. That was the starting point for VMware inside the enterprise, the more enterprise level stuff. Before that, VMware ESX2 was used mostly for test and development deployments. And the tree got, you know, the breaking point to sell inside the big enterprise to virtualize tier 1 apps. People started to virtualize tier 1 apps inside VMware at the time. And probably the new vSphere 5 will be where the storage becomes a first-class citizen inside VMware. Do you think, Roger, that storage will eventually become invisible when it becomes that first-class citizen? I think that, you know, you've got a lot of interesting technology out there, right? And everybody's trying to figure out what to do with it. You know, you've got products like Fusion I.L. that are coming in for a pretty little dollar amount, you know, showing these huge numbers, right? And I think that, you know, some part of the VMware side sometimes and the storage side, we're really trying to figure out how the household stack fits into all this, you know. Once they kind of figure out some of those techs and how to push them together, I think that what we could see is the HA and the storage side. It's going to be more unified storage hardware for the vendors. The one that's VMware where you can go, it'll migrate over with your VMware infrastructure and some of the cool resources. It'll be cool to memory. It'll be cool to CPU. It'll be cool to storage and tiered. And, you know, it's more fluid in that direction of words coming out, right? But what I'm trying to say is that the storage vendors are doing some self-discovery, trying to figure out how to connect these technologies together and the software vendors are trying to figure out what the storage vendors are doing, right? And so as soon as that mesh, that connectivity comes together correctly, we're really going to see some product movement from totally new directions. It's going to be exciting time, you know. Won't that simplify storage, accelerate the adoption? So my question around that is, you know, the big advantage that compelling and equal logic have is simplicity, right? And clearly, they're marketing, their architecture, everything. They looked at the market, they said, okay, EMC has all this to share. They popularized the whole business. They created the storage business. We're going to go after that base with a simpler product. If we can make that stuff invisible, because EMC's got the, you know, some of the most complex products out there, they play to their advantage in a way. And does it diminish the advantage of a guy who's like, compelling and equal logic? And how do they keep pace? How do they innovate? I think, you know, it fits into the cloud, right? I mean, if you can't, you know, simplify some of this storage technology on the admin, and on our end, as a customer or a practitioner, I mean, how do you know it fits into the cloud? You know, if it requires vendor integration every time that you move storage back and forth, it's not smooth enough. So my translation of that is with VMware, of course the EMC owns VMware, they can brute force it, spend a lot of money on it, but there's so many places where it's just not practical to do that. So a simpler architecture is going to adapt in different places faster. So there'll always be places where the little guys can tuck in. They're not little guys anymore, but you know what I mean. Yeah, eventually they'll be calm. There will be another wave of storage startups, I think. Yeah, there's some funding going on. There's a cloud on-ramp object store, you're seeing some startups there. Where do you see the new innovation? Go ahead. Well, I think we saw some of the way we could be cloud directors in some of the new directions that the industry is going in. Now it's just, you know, virtual desktops is a large part of this, right? I mean, if we can't do VDI throughout the businesses, we can't speak to the cloud. If we're tied physically to a desktop, it's not something that's a easy transition. If you don't have all your documents, you don't have all your favorites, if you don't have your background, all that stuff follows you where you go. I mean, that's really what the ultimate goal is. You know, it's to provide seamless integration from your desktop, from your server, into the cloud, out of the cloud, into your private cloud. How about mobile? I'm almost feeling desktop, it's an outdated term, you know? Yeah. And VDI, you guys know, I mean, you heard Maritz last year at VMworld talk about how, you know, we really don't quite have it right with VDI. We got to really rethink that model. At the same time, you see Citrix going full bore on mobile. And I think Citrix really understands that desktop virtualization space better than VMware, frankly. And so, is mobile going to change the sort of whole VDI discussion from one of maybe it's virtual device to virtual, or virtual desktop to virtual device. But today it's, well, the use cases are narrow, the TCO is not there, but if you adopt and embrace mobile, does that change that whole equation? What do you guys think? Well, I think it does in certain aspects, and I think a lot of it is us. You know, how are we used to use it at PC? Us users, yeah. Us users, we have a mouse and a keyboard, and that's here, right? I mean, in order to use some of these products, you have to get used to things like gestures. Swipes, thumbs. Need to overcome, you know. It's like a mental block. Right, there's some mental things that we have to do to go through a transition effect with. And I think as that transitions interface-wise, it'll become much easier to do your day-to-day things, not even on a phone. You know, but, you know, we're so used to having a peripheral device that we're using to navigate around, that there's a little bit of getting used to that. I mean, there's no reason that we can't swipe in certain directions to do mouse gestures, right? But we just don't think in those terms. You know, it's ironic about that, Roger, is when you think about how we got into that mindset today of the mouse, it really came from Apple and the Mac, and then Microsoft copied that, and there was a lawsuit later on, and it got thrown out, and of course the rest is history. And now, we're seeing it again. Apple is really popularizing the new gestures, and you can see that, you know, and they're gonna use that for gesturing. And I think that the millennials are all gonna come out of the, you know, they come out of the womb doing this, right? So it's gonna be interesting to see. It's probably the easiest for the youngest generation to, you know, always do something, you know, the way instead of relearning, it's just like language I can learn early. It's part of who you are, and how you operate, but when you have to go back and rethink day-to-day functions, and something, I mean, you don't think about it because it's a mouse, do you? No. It's second nature, you know. No, but I didn't think about slash file retrieve. No problem with it. Right. But we're just not used to doing gesture-based stuff. So a lot of it is just, you know, I think we're on the box a little bit. And how do you get that through to, even if you decided that there's gestures that mean certain things as a standard, what's the right way to approach the people with that? You know, as an advertiser, as a marketer, as a train, there's lots of different things to think about that. SST, you brought up before. SST Flash is something that we've looked at a lot. We've looked at the consumer market. I really remember the first iPods had disk drives in them, and that's gone. And it seems like Flash is, you know, moving further and further into our space, the enterprise space. Fusion IO's got an IPO. Violin just raised a bunch of dough. We had STEC on yesterday, and they've obviously done very well in their markets. They're a rollercoaster with their stock, but it's still interesting to watch. We're seeing persistent storage change the game, aren't we? What are you guys seeing in Flash? We touched on it briefly, but is it really changing the game that much and how so? Yeah, I think so. I think so because, you know, it's changing, you know, if you look at the Moore low for, you know, CPUs, you see that, you know, they double performance every, I think it was 12 months. It used to be every 24, then 18, now it's 12. Xeon's every 12 months, you're right. And you see the, and you plot on the same chart, the, you know, the evolution of disk drives in the last 20 years, and it's mostly flat. Oh, in terms of performance? Performance, yeah. Yeah, you could even, yeah, yeah, that's right. Capacity exploded. Capacity exploded. Yeah, performance per IO went, Yeah. Oh, sorry, sorry. IO's per dense per capacity went down. And we need to find out. Performance went up a little bit in terms of disk drives. Yeah, but just a little bit. It's just, just marginal. And Flash is the next big thing, in my opinion, for that. And I think that what you're seeing is the Flash technology getting to the market, but there's a lot of different characteristics there, right? Some Flash has got faster reads, some has got faster writes. Some has got different meantime to failures, depending on your Flash. And there's cash in the equation, you know. How do you architect it? How much cash do you put versus solid state? Different vendors, you know, kind of planning those ideas, you know, but, but either way, I mean, you were talking about some impressive time differences in the versatile world. You know, one of the partners was in the VDI session, probably the same one he attended. He said that, you know, customer, the regular component, SAS disk, 45 seconds, which I mean, honestly, it's pretty fast. 45 seconds, you remember how long it used to be, five years ago, desktop to boot up, but by putting two Flash disks, Flash-based SSDs in there, 15 seconds. You know, and that's, that isn't, we're not talking about a massive scale out of Flash drives to get, you know, shave off some time. And that was a pretty good number of PCs, not just one versus desktop, so. Well guys, I'm sorry, we're getting the hook. This was great. I, you know, I'd love to get cards from you because you guys are some smart nodes and we could, I'd love to keep in touch and share, you know, some of the things we're doing and maybe have you guys on again. You know, really, really great discussion. So thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Thanks for having us.