 Okay, let's go, ready? Here we go. We're live in Silicon Valley for theCUBE here at SNW, the premier storage industry conference. 2000 pre-registrations, there's a lot of walk-ins. It's the authoritative show in storage. Obviously now it's infrastructure, it's cloud, it's everything. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante with a multiple appearance CUBE alumni. Greg Nunes, thank you for coming on. You're now with HP, VP of marketing. What's your official title at HP? Yeah, that works, VP of storage marketing, but you're in storage marketing at HP, the big acquisition. Welcome to theCUBE again. Thanks, yeah, it's great to be here, guys. So HP, lots happening these days. You guys aren't wasting any time, you're not resting investing over there, are you? No, no, there is no time for that. That's when I talked to you, you were like, ah, we're doing sales kickoffs, and we're going crazy, we're flying around the world, so how's that going? Yeah, good, yeah, so strictly speaking from the three-par integration, that was a big focus, just getting everybody up to speed on what we could do for HP's cloud strategy. And that is now fully in motion. We've got our sales guys out there capable of taking that one into our hands. I thought the corporate headquarters last week for a big industry conference there, new CEO showed up, and the M&A guy was there, and he was absolutely totally pumped about the integration of three-par. He said it went smooth, great, you guys hit the ground running, things are in motion, so you guys are about to unleash some things. Can you tell us anything? So in early March, you did some unleashing. So it was really three-par integration, you did some stuff with server and storage, like blade and storage integration, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, sure, so first of all, for everyone tuning in, three-par is HP's lead storage play for the cloud, for the private cloud, the public cloud, hybrid cloud. It is the storage platform. Now, as it relates to that, HP's strategy there, HP's offer is called cloud system, and cloud system really brings all the components to bear, the infrastructure, the orchestration, the portal, the service catalog, if you will. So of course it was important if three-par is that platform, that storage platform for cloud, getting that into that orchestration framework, we call cloud system matrix. And so we have been at it for 98 days, and I'm happy to report that a month ago, we announced the integration of three-par with cloud system matrix, and that is in effect what we're saying is, through matrix, you can not just manage, but provision three-par into your service catalog, your portal for your users to then draw from. The other thing that we got done was the integration of three-par with our iBrix scale-out NAS technology. And what that brings, the iBrix platform is a real multi-tenant approach. In fact, I would tell you, it is the only multi-tenant block-and-file platform in the marketplace, three-par with iBrix. And so that really allows us to kind of take for folks thinking about their own clouds, how to bring block-and-file together and serve that better. Can you clarify that, because wouldn't NetApp claim multi-tenant for their unified storage? So what's different? Yeah, so help us understand that. So multi-tenancy is three things at a high level. Multi-tenancy is scale on a shared platform. Scale, and so that's, I think, love the NetApp guys a lot, but I think we put a fair bit of distance between a dual-controller architecture, kind of where we're at with three-par, multiple-nodes scaling to- Cloud scale. Cloud scale, utility scale. Number two, security. We walk around this show with our phones and our laptops, everything equipped with a virtual private network. We wouldn't think of leaving home without it, but when it comes to your data, we've been slow to respond to our industry. And so what we've built into the platform is a virtual private array capability, which really allows you to administratively lock down your data in this shared infrastructure. The final element to multi-tenancy is not just storage HA, but a resilience so you can maintain the service levels you've committed to without even with a catastrophic failure that might occur. So you're able to keep people up and running, not just accessible to your data, but the business is up and running. And those attributes are all about multi-tenancy and that bringing that to our customers is all about utility. So that's nuanced, but it's important, right? And well, I mean, it's, I don't know why you- I mean, if people can say, well, I'm multi-tenant or I'm multi-tenant, they can maybe have one or two of these attributes. So marketing is way out in front of technologists here. I mean, people are talking multi-tenants. Well, we are at SNW. But be specific on that. What do you mean by the marketing as a head of the technology? You mean the rhetoric around the functionality? Yeah, so, well, is everybody here in, you know, doing cloud? Sure. Okay, is everybody here- 100%. Most people here sell in the same stuff they were selling 15 years ago. A lot of them are. A lot of them are in storage. Yeah, it's true. New brochures. Yeah, new brochures, new names. Marketing always gets to the party first, right? Technology's lags. Sometimes it never gets there, right? And so that's my point. When it comes to multi-tenancy, you can slap a label on it. Do you have the scale to play? Do you have the security? Do you bring that resilience you need to the architecture? Those are, that's a pretty simple question. That's not a new one, either. Okay, fair enough. So the proof points then would be, to me, in the cloud service provider space. Because those are the guys who are going to want this the most. So can you talk about some proof points there? Sure. I mean, first of all, seven of the global top 10 are running the three-part platform. Global top 10 cloud service providers. Cloud service providers are running the three-part platform for their utility offering, okay? So these are guys who've done the due diligence. They understand multi-tenancy. And they live and read it. They are dead without it, right? Remember storage networks, remember loud cloud, remember jam cracker. They got multi-tenancy by physically dedicated silos and infrastructure, broke the bank, right? They're gone, right? Because of that, the right infrastructure wasn't available in a production way back then, and it is now, right? So that's what we're bringing from a storage perspective. Okay, so you got seven out of 10, that's pretty good. That and average, damn good. It's baseball, you're definitely in the hall of fame. Right on, right on. Where's the Red Sox? Ted Williams was the last one in bat 400, and that was, you know, 700. Okay, so that's good. Now, so John was hinting at some other big bang coming. What are you guys doing at the show? Is sort of, are you watching anything here? Is it more, is the big messaging here? Yeah, we are fundamentally talking about, you know, IT as a service and how that's changing strategically the roles of IT, how IT is becoming not just builders, but brokers of services into their organization and how they cope with that. You know, it's this whole hybrid cloud. You know, what does that mean, how do I get there? So let's talk a little bit about HP, right? Sure, guys have been busy in the past year or so. You know, Dave Donatelli came on and all of a sudden you guys, I mean, I guess you had already acquired left hand, right? Prior to Dave coming on, he was sort of had the handcuffs on, right, for a while, he was running networking and servers. But since that time, it was an Ibrics acquisition, obviously the three-part acquisition, the whole, you know, that was a very high visibility. Vertica's now in the roster. Vertica's now in the mix, obviously you got a big data play. And some homegrown IP too in our application strategy, store once, so it's like a great architecture there. Total facelift for HP storage, you still got a pretty vast portfolio, which got a big install base, so you guess you have to have a big portfolio. But talk about that transformation and what it's like going from, you know, a little old three-par, public company, but small, relatively speaking, to big, huge wealth. How do you get the word out, you know, internally, externally, how do you maintain that speed? It's three-par able to bring that kind of ethos to HP. How are you doing that? What are you getting from HP? How's it all working? Yeah, so, God, where do I start? So the, first of all, HP storage is rich with great IP, like you mentioned. I mean, there's no shortage of conversation that one can have, and in fact, the way I describe the experience of going from three-par to HP is all the stuff that we never had, but so desperately coveted is here at HP with open arms. And so, great scale-out file system, right? Great deduplication technology architecture. A wonderful virtualization platform in the left-hand technology. So all of that there, the, I think, part of what we gotta get done is marketing guys, we have a portfolio aimed at optimizing folks' existing environment, getting them to virtualization in the cloud, and then helping folks through this hybrid kind of transformation is kind of getting that word out about all of what has changed with HP storage. It's, if you'd not looked at it for two years, totally different, right? Completely, yeah. Now, David Scott, I always love listening to him speak because he always starts with some tectonic shift or mega-trend, and he's very articulate. And it's the accent. So, I guess, Floor is the same way, right? I mean, just automatically get points, but talk a little bit about some of the big trends that you guys are seeing. David's now the general manager of the storage division, so you're sort of marching to the cadence of his vision, and, of course, Donatelli's convergence vision. Absolutely. But start with some of the things that you guys talked about at three-par, but now it's expanded with the scope with HP. What are some of those mega-trends? So, I think back to how these tectonic shifts, as David calls them, the move from a distributed or kind of traditional data center architecture to a virtualized data center. That tectonic shift kind of stands shoulder to shoulder with this move to call it IT as a service, delivery of IT as a utility service. And in fact, that's driving the move to a virtualized data center. That desire, right? Those two together fundamentally change the underlying requirements for the infrastructure, server storage network. It drives, think about an IT as a service model. You are dead if you cannot deliver swiftly, if you can't deliver speed. Great economics, the cloud is all about more for less. And so we talk about, hey, this agile infrastructure, what's that mean? Provision quickly handle the unpredictable workloads that are streaming in and do all that while you maintain service levels, agile infrastructure. And then to kind of drive those transformational economics, what do you have to do? Well, it's all about driving up utilization. It's not magic, get utilization from 10 or 15% to 80%, and then make it stupidly simple to manage from it. It's all about automation, or what we call autonomic management technology. Joe Tucci calls it autonomic too. Yeah, Joe may have lifted it. It happens to us all the time. People stealing our ideas and we feel compliment. Well, we put it out there. I take it as a compliment and you watch over the next 12 or 18 months autonomic, I bet you NetApp's going to use it next. Yeah, so we now have a gear inside the cube, so it is ours, because we are not creative governments. We have a copyright to this. How about the whole convergence thing, right? I mean, it's not just about storage or just about computer, just about networking. We were at the HPE analyst meeting last month and we heard a heavy dose of convergence. A lot of substance there, we've been, we heard Intel guys say it's the network bottleneck, not compute, it's about networking bottlenecks. Right, the Intel IT guy we had on the cube earlier today, they're big on convergence, right? IT's a service, consumerization of IT, we're going to call it. And so, for years, I mean, I remember when I was at IDC a decade ago and HPE would come in and say, oh, we're a server vendor and servers and storage and there's an affinity and it was sort of, just didn't have a lot of meat behind it, but it feels like it does now. I mean, convergence seems like buying logical blocks of infrastructure to support applications. Seems like it's, because of virtualization, seems like it's finally here. Yeah, well, so think about, back to our IT as a service conversation, think about the, you know, it's the death for IT as a service. Death comes from complexity and, you know, inefficiency, right? IT as a service does not get off the ground with that. What drives that? Sprawl drives that. And look at the kind of growth people are seeing in their server virtualization environments in, with not just compute, but the storage side, the network side. Sprawl in general? Anything that would make network sprawl, server sprawl? All of it. All of it. I mean, start with a VM and try to do it without more storage capacity and pretty soon more network resource. And so the antidote to that complexity is data center convergence. Converge infrastructure for your server storage and networking gear, right? So, you know, if you can get the job done in one thing versus 30, doesn't that help you get there? And in fact, we had an announcement, March 1st, we introduced an exchange appliance with our partners over at Microsoft. And that did exactly that. That brought 30 SKUs, 30 components, and drove that into a single appliance that was faster to get up and running, cheaper to power and cool, and in one appliance, storage, server, network, and application, all in one, right? It's kind of interesting. We live in this, the IT business has really changed a lot the whole, you know, we're talking about convergence, but there's been a lot of consolidation as well. You get a very strong partnership with Microsoft who's invested, I think, a quarter of a billion dollars in this whole appliance initiative. HP and SAP are, you know, renowned. HP and Oracle used to be that way, and that sort of chilled out a little bit. And now, you guys just bought Vertica. So you see this really interesting co-opetition thing. You see it with VMware, you hear it, EMC talks about it all the time. You know, what do you see there? How do you see that all going? More of the same, or does it just get more intense? Yeah, no, I think so. The customer data center is a mix of technologies. It's an ecosystem, right? And for us to get the job done for our customers is to, you know, partner where we need to. And in fact, I'll give you a great example. One of the ways we talk to people about how they get to kind of their private cloud is, you know, they should be asking us, give me the template for me to get my Microsoft implementation for SQL. Done is a cloud service, right? And so what they ought to get, what they get from us is, you know, white papers and implementation guides and deployment scripts. We've done this before. Yeah, exactly, and it's a methodology. It's repeatable, we call them cloud maps. You know, you ought to have a cloud map for each one of these things. And the best way to get that is to drive us to work with those ISV partners, with VMware, with Microsoft, with SAP, with all those guys. And so, I mean, that's the name of the game. And if you think you can do it all yourself, you know, take a look at the data center. Yeah, it's tough. How is the IT service economy as you're talking about affecting the partnership and the channel strategies? Because, you know, there are other approaches out there that are in the industry that are kind of old school, controlling the pricing and the lock and all that stuff going on. You guys have always had a great channel. You have the convergence portfolio with network servers and storage. And so, obviously things aren't getting simpler, at least from a solution standpoint. You guys are doing some simplification. Right, so what's the channel, what's the market in the field experiencing? Can you talk about the trend there? Yeah, so I mean, I don't know if I'd call it the trend, but so long as you can, you know, ID the customer problem and give an easy answer for your partner, give them a way to, you know, provide the customer a few simple options. And whether it's, you know, whether it's, you know, a DAZ-based approach for their Microsoft Exchange deployment versus a SAN. A few in our industry can do that. But, you know, very simple answers to their problems, solutions for their backup issues, whatever. You get that done. Their sales cycles are quicker, their customers are happier, and that breeds a wonderful relationship with our partners. The other thing that is important is how we bring our partners into our cloud system strategy, right? And how we, you know, can link with them arm in arm to deliver cloud computing into our customers. And again, they are, there are brothers and sisters there. So, you know, bringing them along for the ride, big part of it. How about data protection? I've been pretty vocal about how the state of backup is just completely broken. I mean, backup's insurance, right? You're buying insurance policy and nobody wants to overpay for insurance and that's what people do. But you were just saying earlier, what does backup mean, right? Is it primary data? Well, so. You're having a conversation with the electronics. Yeah, so, but backup is complicated, right? It's overpriced. And if I want to extend it to remote offices or even my desktops and laptops, it gets even more expensive. And essentially, you know, you got the software vendors extracting, you know, the rents, we know that story. It's horrible, yeah. That's the word that we've been hearing. Symantec is, but that's the way it is. I mean, people are, you know, they have that infrastructure installed, but virtualization is kind of changing that. It's forcing people to re-look at their backup. You've got this new technology store once, now it's not software technology. Of course, you've got data protector. It is software. And that fits in there. I know, but it is, but it's, well actually, it's, but store once is, it's not a backup application, right? Or would you consider it a backup application? I think it has a relationship to the backup application you're writing. Right, so I'm going to work with Symantec or Network or HP Data Protector or something like that. Okay, so, but the state of backup is a mess, right? And there's a big opportunity here to break down some of those silos. So what is HP doing in that whole space? How are you guys going to make that happen and really put your mark in backup? Yeah, as you appear to be doing, certainly in networking, right? And you've always been very strong in servers and it looks like you're really well positioned in storage now and generally, but how about backup specific? So let's talk about store once. So in June, 2010, we introduced data deduplication architecture. We label store once. And the unique thing about what we're doing here in data deduplication is this is an architecture not just for inline deduplication for backup, but is an architecture that can live on the backup client that is capable of living in primary storage. And the benefit of one architecture across your environment is ultimately you're able to move your data around without having to rehydrate it every time you make a move. That vision is, we're probably not the only ones who have ever recited it, but I think we are the only ones who can make it a reality. By virtue of the technology, that is an architecture that can do those things. Now that came out of HP Labs, right? So it was homegrown. Yeah, yeah. And where we're at today, we have a terrific lineup of inline data deduplication appliances that can get the job done faster, lower total cost of ownership, take a lot of the headache out of deployment and management of those backups. That's a big deal. The next step for us is to take that architecture to the backup client and begin to deliver on that vision that we've talked about. So that is- Okay, so right now you're taking data domain head on essentially, right? And that's a game of bigger, better, faster, better mouse trap. But you're saying, if I understand it correctly, the leverage that you have is that architecturally you can place that on primary as well? Architecturally we can place that on primary. Is that the plan, or can you talk about that a little bit? That is the plan. For this architecture, we need to get it in the entire environment. And to be honest, our, so we have engineers working away at this stuff. Our challenge at the moment is not one of technology. It's one of sales and marketing. It's getting at bats. It's getting into those opportunities to compete and show what we can do because if you are looking at a refresh of your backup environment, guess what? If you refresh that with HP today and tomorrow HP rolls out the duplication on the backup client, guess what? You know, what you got today is going to serve you even better in the future. Not just in line. Well, and of course Data Domain did a really good job about the whole tape sucks theme. And then we were talking to Varun today from Nimble Storage about really, not only does tapes suck, backup sucks. You know, so well, I mean it really does. You know, so that's something backup is broken. And I think that, and I think the fix is data protection as a service. And when you're talking about, service-oriented architectures or IT as a service and the whole, you talk about the three-par utility storage, I mean that is ultimately where this business is going. I think you got a great opportunity there. And I hope you can pull it off because I'd love to see that vision come through. You're right, you're not the first place I've ever heard that vision, but you hear it from places that have a lot of different still places. No, it's an execution. You got to execute on it. I mean the thing is you got to get it out there and go and do the frontal and do the head-to-heads and do the marketing and brute force here and some good marketing, change the game on the competition. And Donatelli brings that execution ethos. What's it like working for Dave? Not that you work directly for him. Dave Donatelli is the reason I'm at HP. I got to tell you. Because in the good old days at three-par, you know, I lost more than one deal because Dave Donatelli made that last sales call. The man, you know. He makes sales calls. He likes calling. Yes, he does indeed. So that's a leader. It leads from the front, absolutely. That's the way to do it. So you respect that. I mean he's a task master, right? I mean that's his reputation. He doesn't, you know. Call it in business. Call it what you want. Execution, baby. He really focuses on getting the job done. He doesn't make excuses. Yes. But you're saying that he walks the walk. He does. And that's got to have a ripple effect on the people. Well, and the idea of this converge infrastructure, right? The idea that server storage and networking guys are going to innovate side by side and leverage each other's work to make a better product. Easy to say in a sentence. Hard to do. Try to do it with thousands of engineers. Well, I talk to, you know, CIO like customers all the time through our theCUBE and blogging. And converge networking is here finally, you know. And the convergence in the nirvana we were talking about years ago. And you guys are well positioned. You guys have good marks from customers in terms of, you know, this is not just a Cisco thing anymore. This is HP is a player and has a track record in networking, in storage, and now a three-part kind of modernizing some of the cloud stuff. And they've had servers for years. I mean, even when I work there. So HP actually has the right stuff at the right time. But storage was always a second-class citizen in HP as it was, it still is my opinion, by the way, at IBM. It certainly was that case at SON, right? It was, these were server companies. And they say, yeah, yeah, storage. Well, it's more strategic now in terms of like, we're hearing here about performance, we're seeing flash. But storage, storage software, a lot of innovations around flash, things like that. And I would say that HP's made that transformation just from an ideological standpoint. You're not just a server company. ESSN, and you're not just a storage company, by the way. Even though you're run by a guy with a big storage background. I mean, you, that converged infrastructure message really hit in the face, you know, when you talk to HP. And it's not just about talking it, right? I mean, March 1st was all about, you know, converged infrastructure with the exchange appliance, the 5000, converged infrastructure with the P4800 left-hand, right? C-class blade system chassis, C-class blades, ProLiant blades along with P-4000 left-hand controllers in one chassis, right? Yeah. And so the cool thing to me is that Antibiotica on top of it with the new app versions, I think that's going to be just a game changer. You guys can get that integrated across. I know, you know, we asked Dave specifically about big data at Barcelona, there's all this, you know, softwares at this, but I think if you guys can harness the analytics side of it, that amplifies the value proposition. Can you clarify, where does Vertica sit in the organization? I- Software initially, right? I mean, probably would be the wrong one to talk about. Yeah, okay, so that's it. It came from the software side, but in talking to some of the insides at HP that talked publicly is that Vertica's going to be their VMware to EMC. Well, so, but that makes sense. So, you know, there's this interesting battle. You had VCE on the one side taking a, you know, their partnership approach and you got HP's, you know, approach through vertical integration. And of course, HP doesn't own the hypervisor, so HP's, you know, playing an open heterogeneous hand. Choice, right? Yeah. Versus locking. Well, it's interesting, right? I mean, so- Interesting implicit locking. Well, but no, it is. I mean, basically- Total solution locking. And you know what? And VCE will tell you, look, this is the block. And if you don't want, you know, that management software, then go somewhere else. But this is the block, right? Whereas HP's saying, well, we have more choice. And I think that's an interesting battle. See, to me, it's VCE and HP. And then there really isn't anybody else. I mean, Oracle's kind of got it. You know, the Oracle's just trying to sell their whole stack. And IBM really is not playing here. And who else is there? So it's a really interesting battle. And I think that's going to be a huge market. Multi-billions of dollars in blocks of infrastructure going in. And it's right now, it's a two-horse race. And you guys, I think, are very well-positioned. I mean, I think both companies, different philosophies, but I think- Totally different. Both companies can make a lot of money there. Yeah. So here's the approach. Make it totally simple, right? Sometimes choice can be, you know, red as complexity after, you know, after model stuff, I have to figure it out myself. Sort of for me. So make it totally simple. Get a cloud system, right? Once you've done, there you go. But for a lot of folks, you know, kind of one-size-done-fit-all, give me, you know, there's a lot of folks out there who are going to virtualize in different ways. There's a lot of folks out there who are going to run different kinds of databases. You know, for those guys, we still have the best infrastructure at every level. And that's kind of where we're aiming, right? So why wouldn't you take an open approach? I mean- You can simplify it. You can simplify it and increase utilization and provide speed, economics, and scale. Yeah. Well, I think, by the way, I think the answer to that question is that if you're three separate companies, it's hard enough as it is to do that level of integration. So you really have to sort of limit the flexibility. By the way, talk to some of the large cloud service providers. They have premium clouds running VMware, but then they have, you know, kind of the lower-end offers built on totally different hypervisor technology. What do you do? The cloud service providers tell us a lot. Don't tell us how to do what we want to do. Enable us. Give us the infrastructure. A lot of them want to build their own files. And they've got Citrix, too. It's not just Citrix and VMware. It's Citrix and VMware and other issues. So they don't really care about hypervisor. I'm hearing, but- No, I think that's right, John. And I think that- Like I say, to me, it's Republicans and Democrats. I don't know which one you guys want to see. I mean, Citrix was owned in California, so I guess you can be- I prefer to think of it as Yankees and Red Sox. That's it. It's renaissance. Great, we would go there. Big and bigger. Where's Oracle been in that equation? And they're not even playing baseball. That's an American football. What did somebody say the other day that Oracle has become in the North Korea of the IT? Industry, yeah. We love Oracle. I could be jailed soon. I'll tell. So, OK, so that's good. I mean, we're talking about the transformation of HP. We're at Craig Nunez of HP, formerly three-part VP marketing now at HP. Inside the Cube here at SNW with Dave Vellante. I've had a great conversation. Thanks so much. Yeah, anything else? We have time, yeah. What are you seeing here? I mean, a lot of- You guys have time? Is everybody talking cloud? A whole lot of conversations about cloud. DDoop's a pretty hot topic, as you'd imagine. And I haven't had a chance to run through the Expo and see what everybody's, you know, strutting. No, I haven't. I can't write to the Cube. I think the people are in there now. Oh, it's a good time to be in there, actually. Yeah, right on. Now's the time to go. All right. Well, thanks, Craig, for coming on board. Appreciate it. Always a pleasure for the 10th time. Good luck with everything. We'll be watching. We're going to be at HP Discover. We should tell people, right? We're going to be at HP Discover in June. So looking forward to that. Yep. The Cube at 10 Vegas. 10,000 strong in Vegas. 10,000 strong? Well, we'll be broadcasting. HP Discover, we'll be there with the Cube. A lot of gasses, and we'll hear more and more from HP. Looking forward to it. Right on. And we'll see you in Vegas. See you next time. All right. Stay tuned. All right. Bye, guys. All right. That's great.