>> Live from Las Vegas,
it's theCUBE
covering VMworld 2018.
Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE.
We are continuing our coverage of VMworld 2018 day 3.
I'm Lisa Martin,
with two very stylish men next to me.
I'm quite impressed.
Dave Vellante, my esteemed co-host.
>> Oh shucks.
>> Rocking the salmon, King Salmon Vellante.
And The Zog is back, Eric Herzog.
Great to have you back.
I was looking at you on Twitter
and you have been on theCUBE 17 times.
Is this 18 or 19?
>> You know,
I think Dave said
I was on one of the very first CUBEs way back in 2010.
So I've been on a few.
>> That's a whole other criteria of VIP level.
Well thank you for coming back.
You have been, not only is he,
you can't do a CUBE without Eric Herzog.
You've been everywhere all over VMworld.
I saw you're speaking at IBM booth on VMware and IBM,
you're at Cisco, you're giving sessions.
How do you fit it all in and still have time for us?
>> Well, I always make time for theCUBE.
>> Always? Thank you, thanks for that.
>> Always make time for you guys.
Love talking to CUBE. You guys have been very helpful.
We appreciate everything that you do.
Love doing shows, love 'em.
I may be 60 years old,
but I'm really 18 down underneath,
so if I only sleep three hours a night,
not a problem.
>> What do you love about them?
I mean, is it?
>> Number one is meeting customers.
Customers and channel partners, right?
Well, all of the employees
of all the various companies here
get a paycheck from whoever that may be,
me, IBM, someone from other companies, people from VMware.
That's not who pays your salary.
It's the end-users and the channel partners,
if they buy through the channel.
They're the ones that really pay your salary.
So being close to the customers
and the partners is number one.
Second thing, of course, is seeing all the cool technology.
You know, seeing what's going on, what's hot,
what can we leverage from our perspective,
what can we tie ourselves to.
So for example, the hot things,
that IBM's really been doing from a storage perspective.
Cloud and modern data protection.
Those are the two big things we've been focused on
for the last couple of years.
And how do we integrate our storage solutions
and our modern data protection with cloud infrastructure,
and then also how do we, if you're not in the cloud,
how do we help customers protect their data better
in a modern way and reuse their secondary data,
instead of making 27,000 copies of the same data.
>> So when theCUBE first started at VMworld,
modern data protection at the time
was dealing with the lack of physical resources,
'cause you went from 10 servers down to one,
and you didn't have all that excess capacity
to do a run up back up job anymore.
Today, modern data protection is all around cloud
and multi-cloud and software defined,
so I wonder if you can help us sort of
paint a picture of what modern data protection is for IBM?
>> Sure, I think there's a couple, couple aspects too.
So, first of all, you have to support the cloud,
and that's two ways.
So for us, several of our backup products are used
by cloud service providers.
In some cases they use our name,
and say, "Featuring IBM Spectrum Protect
or Spectrum Protect Plus."
Other cases, they have their own brand
but it's our software underneath the hood
so that if the end user is backing up to their cloud,
they're actually using our software.
So that's item number one.
The second thing is you need to make sure
that your traditional storage software
can TEAR to the cloud,
can migrate data to the cloud,
can transparently move data to the cloud
in an automated fashion using AI.
So using artificial intelligent when the data's hot
if you connote a target,
and that target could be a cloud,
and when the data's hot it TEARs the data to the cloud.
Sorry, when it's cold.
When it's hot it pulls it back in
and that needs to be all automated through AI base.
So we've done both,
we have our backup software which is available
from several cloud providers
as a backup as a service,
we also offer it through the cloud so IBM Cloud
actually sells spectrum protect backup as a service solution
All of our primary storage software and even our
spectrum scale software can automatically TEAR data
to a cloud target device.
>> Eric I got to ask you so
TEARing used to be predominantly,
correct me if you disagree but,
it used be a one way trip to the bit-bucket.
You just described going there and coming back.
Has cloud changed that because of big data, analytics?
Where people want to pull back data increasingly?
>> So I think of a couple of things.
So first of all,
there's no doubt that the world is data driven.
The most valuable asset isn't gold, it's not silver,
it is absolutely not oil, it's not diamonds.
It is data.
And it doesn't matter whether
you're one of the largest banks in the world,
you're in manufacturing,
you're in the government,
or whether you're Herzog's barn grill.
The data is your most valuable asset.
What you do with your customer data,
how you manage your business,
what you do with your supply chain
if your a services company,
how are you servicing,
what are you charging,
what are you billing,
all of that is the most critical thing that you have.
So in a data driven world,
its critical that you use the data.
And that also means that because of valued data,
when you backup the data
or you snapshot or replicate the data,
you now created a secondary copy.
Well what if you could use it to do tests?
What if you could use it to do big data analytics?
What if you could use it for DevOps?
So instead of making one copy for tests,
one copy for disaster recovery,
one copy for this,
and have basically a plethora of copies all over the place,
with what we've provided in modern data protection,
you can use a backup,
you can use a snap or a replica,
and you can use that to do tests or development or to do
big data analytics.
And using that one copy not making multiple copies.
So that's-
>> I just want to pick up on something you said
there's going to be some folks in our audience like,
"yeah yeah we hear that data is more valuable than oil
or more valuable than gold, et cetera,
more valuable than platinum."
There's evidence,
if you look at the market value of the top five companies,
Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon,
they've surpassed the banks,
they've surpassed the energy companies,
and I would argue its cuz of data.
People are recognizing that they're data companies,
you agree?
>> But if you look at that name
the only one that actually builds anything of substance,
as a fair amount of their volume of revenue,
is Apple.
>> Is Apple, right.
>> Amazon doesn't, they ship stuff.
Facebook clearly doesn't,
Google has a few things but not really builds stuff
its really about the data.
Absolutely and if your a more traditional company
like a bank or someone building the table.
Whoever builds this table if they have their act together
and they're using that data right,
they're building the table cheaper than anyone else,
they're shipping it to theCUBE cheaper than anyone else
could ship it to you.
They got more colors because they know what their doing.
And they ship you the right color table and they don't
screw it up and send you a black table when you want
it this color table because black won't show up
on theCUBE very well.
The more you do that the more money you make.
Even something as simple as a table manufacturer.
And that's all about the data and how you use that data.
>> So Eric you love talking with customers
which is great as the CMO for IBM storage.
Got to talk to those customers.
Let's talk about how you're seeing customers take
the efficiencies of what IBM is doing with data protection,
storage, et cetera. to be able to
harness the power of AI,
the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday,
and transform their businesses.
Give us some of your favorite customer examples
where its really revolutionary.
>> So we had a great example today,
we did a panel with a bunch of end users
as part of the show agenda.
And one of the customers is a provider of
softwares of service to universities and schools.
45,000 customers between the universities,
junior colleges, schools districts, et cetera.
In North America so Canada and the U.S.
And they are doing softwares of service
so for them performance is critical,
they can't go down.
All of the college bookstores,
if you go into a college bookstore,
all of the infrastructure behind that is them.
So they're called Follet.
So a couple of things,
one because they're doing softwares of service
and managing all that.
Its critical, can't go down.
Got to be available, it's got to be performant,
it's got to be resilient, it's got to be reliable.
So that's how the storage melds in.
From modern data protection the way it melds in
is how many books did Dave buy?
What did Eric buy?
Oh is Dave buying a used book?
Or is Eric buying a new book?
Okay say we know that the propensity is certain of members
of the community.
I went to UC Davis, University of California Davis,
are going to buy used books, Dave,
whereas Herzog's going to buy new.
They can figure that out,
how many used books they need,
how many new books they need,
that's all about efficiency and how they make more money.
What are the store hours?
Certain universities it's this,
other universities it's that.
What do they do in the winter time?
At UC Davis you can go in the winter time,
I know you went to school in Boston its probably snowing,
no one's going in the bookstore in the wintertime.
>> Trend towards book rentals,
how do we capitalize on that?
>> That's all they do.
One of the things they talked about was
how they always have to protect that data and back it up.
The other thing they talked about was they have to
assume a lot of capacity.
So what they do is they bought
assuming they would have to refresh in 18 months.
And because our storage arrays have a ton of different
data reduction technology whether that be
block, D2, compression, et cetera.
And they have petabytes of data.
Petabytes. 12 Petabytes.
They've actually calculated it out
they won't need to buy new storage for 36 months
instead of 18 so they just saved on CapX.
Through the intelligence of the storage.
So in that case you've got both modern data protection
and you've got a storage message.
One of our other customers who's a public reference,
not here at the show,
which is a hospital,
they were backing up all their data,
both cloud and on premise with our backup software,
and they went down and their entire system went down
and they didn't lose one stitch of data and its a hospital.
It's a teaching hospital,
think they're in Pennsylvania,
and in the public reference in the video he said,
"and we went down and off that backup we were able to get
all of the data back.
We didn't lose any patient data,
we didn't lose any research data,
we didn't lose any billing data,
if you break your arm they do bill you,
they didn't lose anything."
>> That's not just money,
that's lives so that's huge. >> Absolutely.
>> I want to ask you about
you know that table example you were giving,
and we were talking about the big five companies
in terms of market cap being data orientated.
There seems to be a gap between those sort of traditional
companies and those data companies
and that gap tends to be the data is often is often in silos
its human expertise or expertise around a bottling plant
or the manufacturing plant or whatever it is
versus a data model with humans who understand how to
leverage that data.
Do you see,
whether its through new data protection techniques
or other storage techniques that IBM is working on,
ways to help customers break down those data silos
so they can become more digital and be able to
take advantage of data?
>> So I think there's a couple of things.
So first of all at the very tactical level
we provide this automated IA based data TEARing.
We can tear from anything to anything
so we can take data from an IBM array
and TEAR it to an EMC array.
We can take data from an EMC array
and TEAR it to a net app array.
A net app array to a Tachi array,
an HP array back to our array,
so we can do this transparent data move
based on hot and cold.
Not only does that allow you to control CapX and OpX
you can move the data from array to array,
and once you move that data set it might be working
that other array could be hooked up to
a different set of servers through the SAN
that's running a different workload and then takes
that dataset and use it with that other piece of software
out on the server side.
So that's item number one.
Item number two is IBM not just in the storage
but overall has a global program where IBM is promoting,
through universities all over the world,
data scientists.
Part of that is training data scientists
not only how to do the science of data
and analyzing data and mining data and doing it,
but to break down those walls.
The value is more there.
And we also have from a storage perspective
some products are spectrum scale products,
one of our customers who's one of the
largest banks in the world
they run 300,000 servers attached to a giant
spectrum scale repository,
petabytes and petabytes,
and they do real time data analytics to see if
Dave Vellante or Lisa's credit card was stolen.
>> Thank you! >> Oh yes, thank you!
>> So that's real world analytics they run
but they need petabytes of data.
And then with our IBM cloud object storage technology
where we have several customers at the exabyte level
in production with an exabyte of data,
you put the data out when its cold but guess what,
if you want to mine it you might want to pull it back
and guess what,
you can TEAR data from spectrum scale
to IBM cloud object storage
and then spectrum scale can pull it back in to do
the big data analytic workloads.
>> And that AI you're using is it heavy open source?
Is there a little bit of Watson sprinkled in there?
>> It's stuff the storage division developed years ago
and then has peppered in the AI based technology
into that software to determine when the dataset
is hot or cold and then move it back or forth.
We also do the old style,
so if you go back 10 years ago,
the automation of storage was policy based.
So we had it way back when which was
if the data is 30 days old move it to this array.
>> The old HSM kind of...
>> Yeah and it was automated so once it hit 30 days,
but now what we've done is,
we started with that,
what I would call automation,
and now we've moved that to AI.
And by the way, if you still want to do it the old way
and say move this data when its 60 days old,
you can still do that.
But the modern way is let the storage figure out for you
and move it back and forth whether it be to the cloud
or whether it be on premises.
>> So it's intelligent hierarchical storage management?
So if the characteristics change the system knows what to do
as opposed to-
>> So when it's hot it'll pull the data back into flash,
for example, when its cold it'll put it out to cloud,
it'll put it out to tape
or it'll put it out to slow hard drives, either way.
>> Alright Eric, so we're almost out of time here.
You've been at IBM a long time,
IBM's been around a long time,
you said you even have customers at exabyte scale.
I'm hearing heterogeneity, customer choice,
but if I'm a small hospital in the middle of America
and I have choice
with data protection vendors, storage vendors,
some smaller than IBM that might be able to move faster,
what are the top three differentiators of why I would
want to go with IBM's storage solutions?
>> Sure so the first thing is our broad portfolio.
Whether it be file block or object,
whether it be modern data protection,
whether it be archiving if you still want to use tape,
we're the number one provider of tape in the world
and we sell gobs of it to the web scale guys.
>> Of course you do.
>> They're the guys that buy it.
>> Cuz its cost effective.
>> So we've got one throat to choke,
all of it talks to each other,
and happens to work with all the cloud vendors
not just IBM cloud.
We work with Amazon, we work with Microsoft,
we work with Google, and we work with IBM's own cloud.
So we can work with anything.
That's out of mind.
Second thing, for smaller shops we have a network
of business partners all over the world,
some of them even deal with the big global Fortune 500
and others deal with small accounts.
And then really the third thing is that IBM makes sure
that our stuff works with everyone else's stuff.
Whether that be cloud, our spectrum tech software
which has been around for years and is the leading
enterprise backup package,
the bulk of what it backs up is not IBM storage.
The vast bulk of it is from two of the competitors
on the floor of this show,
they also back up our stuff too.
And we backup everyone's.
There's probably 20 storage vendors
we backup every one of their data.
So if someone buys storage from XYZ,
call me, we can back it up.
If someone buys it from one of the big competitors
we back it up, from us we back it up.
So the fact that our software works with everyone's gear
is of an advantage for both the small shop and the big shop.
We make sure that our software,
whether its embedded in our arrays
or whether we sell it as just a pieces storage software
and we are the number one storage software provider
on the planet as well,
we can meet the needs of any company big or small
because we have this flexibility of working with our stuff
and working with everybody else stuff
and most of the other guys don't do that.
If its a small shop their stuff usually only works with
their stuff.
>> And from a support perspective,
you play with everybody?
>> Global network.
I mean we're known for our support whether it be
IBM direct or what we do with our partners
all the partners are certified,
its a big certification process,
and if they can't certify the product they can't sell
IBM's stuff. That's just how we operate.
Other people, if they can move a lot of boxes
but they don't have anyone pick up the phone
or can come out to Dave's house to install,
they let them sell, we don't do that at IBM.
We don't use those box mover types
we go for guys that add value
and know how to work with the cloud,
know how to do hybrid cloud.
One of our resellers designed a Watson based
AI system that's used in bottle factories.
Packaging. Beer, soda, milk,
and it can figure out if its full or not full,
if the bottle or can or carton is damaged.
And they used Watson to do it.
Now they're regular resell.
They resell all the storage,
they resell our power,
they resell mainframe,
but they've gone into the software development side
using this Watson thing and they're selling a full solution
with the software included to bottling plants
all over the world.
>> Wow, Eric.
This has been a super charged conversation.
Thanks for stopping by and talking with Dave and me
about not just your excitement about talking with customers
but really how IBM is really empowering customers
of any size worldwide to succeed.
We know we'll see you again soon but thanks for stopping by
a couple of times this week. >> Great well thank you.
Thank you, really appreciate the time.
>> And the outfit choices are just on point guys,
you blend well too.
For Eric, Dave Vellante, I am Lisa Martin,
you're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 day 3.
Stick around,
we'll be back with our next guest after a short break.
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