This is a transcription of an interview with Craig Nunes, VP of Storage Marketing at Hewlett-Packard Corp. and former VP of Marketing for 3Par, which was recently acquired by HP, in the Cube on SiliconAngle.tv from the 2011 SNW Conference. He is interviewed by SiliconAngle Founder and CEO John Furrier and wikibon.org Co-Founder and CEO David Vellante.
JF: We're here live in Silicon Valley for the Cube at SNW, the premier storage industry conference. 2,000 pre-registrations, lots of walk ins. It's the authoritative show in storage, obviously now its infrastructure, its cloud, its everything. I'm John Furrier, my co-host is Dave Vellante, with a multiple appearance cube alumnus, Craig Nunes. Craig, thank you for coming on. You're now with HP, VP of marketing, what's your official title at HP?
CN: Yeah, that works, VP of storage marketing.
JF: You were VP of marketing at 3PAR, but you're VP of storage marketing at HP. A huge acquisition. Welcome to the Cube again.
CN: Thanks. It's great to be here, guys.
DV: So HP, lots happening. You're not resting and vesting over there, are you.
CN: No. No there is no time for that.
DV: I talk to you, “Aw, we're doing sales kickoffs, we're flying all around the world.” So how's that going?
CN: Good. So strictly speaking from the 3PAR integration, that was a big focus. Just getting everybody up to speed on what we could do for HP's pub strategy. And that is now fully in motion. We've got our sales guys out there capable of taking that one ….
JF: We were over at the corporate headquarters last week for a big industry conference there. The CEO showed up, and the M&A guy was there. He was absolutely, totally pumped about the integration of 3PAR. 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?
DV: Early in March you did some releasing. It was really 3PAR integration. You did some stuff with server and storage, with blade. Talk about that.
CN: Sure, so we … So first of all, for everyone tuning in, 3PAR 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, service catalog if you will. So of course it was important if 3PAR is that storage platform for cloud, getting that into that orchestration framework that we call “Cloud System Matrix”. So we have been at it for 98 days.
DV: (chuckles) The 100-day plan.
CN: And I'm happy to report that a month ago we announced the integration of 3PAR with Cloud System Matrix. In effect what we're saying is through Matrix you can not just manage but provision 3PAR into your service catalog, your portal, for your users to then draw from.
The other thing that we got done was the integration of 3PAR with our Ibrix scale-out NAS technology. And that brings: The Ibrix platform is a real multi-tenent approach. In fact I would tell you it is the only multi-tenent block-and-file platform in the marketplace – 3PAR with Ibrix. So that really allows us to take for folks thinking of their own clouds how to bring block and file together and serve that better.
DV: Can you clarify that because wouldn't NetApp claim multi-tenant for their Unified Storage? So what's different?
CN: Yeah. So multi-tenency is three things at a high level. Multi-tenency is scale on a shared platform. Scale. So I 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 3PAR, multiple nodes, scaling....
DV: Cloud scale. Okay.
CN: Cloud scale. Utility scale.
Number 2, security. We walk around this show with our phones and our laptops, everything equipped with 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, our industry. So what we've built into our platform is a virtual private array capability that really allows you to administratively lock down your data in this shared infrastructure.
The final element to multi-tenency is not just Storage HA but a resilience so you can maintain the service levels you've committed to 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 businesses up and running.
And those attributes are all about multi-tenency and bringing that to our customers.
DV: So that's nuanced, but it's important, right? People can say “Well, I'm multi-tenent.” They might have one or two of these.
CN: Marketing is way out in front of technologists here.
JF: Be specific about that. What do you mean that the marketing is way out in front of the technologists? Is that rhetoric around the functionality?
CN: So is everybody here doing cloud?
JF: Sure.
CN: Are most people here selling the same stuff they were selling 15 years ago? A lot of them are in storage.
DV: That's true. New brochures, new names.
CN: New brochures, new names. Marketing always gets to the party first, right? Technology lags. Sometimes it never gets there. That's my point. When it comes to multi-tenency you can slap a label on it, but do you have the scale to play? Do you have the security? Do you have that resilience you need in the architecture? That's pretty simple stuff, that's not nuance.
DV: Okay. So the proof-points to me would be 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?
CN: Sure. So first of all seven of the global top-10 cloud service providers are running the 3PAR platform for their utility offering. So these are the guys who've done the due diligence, they understand multi-tenency, and they are dead without it. Remember Storage Networks, remember Loud Cloud, remember Jamcracker. They got multi-tenency by physically dedicated siloes and infrastructure. Broke the bank. They're gone because of that. The right infrastructure wasn't available in a production way back then. It is now. So that's what we're bringing from a storage perspective.
DV: Okay, so you've got 7 out of 10. that's pretty good.
CN: Batting average is damn good.
DV: Okay. So John was hinting at some other big bangs coming. What have you got at the show?
JF: Do you have anything new here, or is it more....?
CN: We are fundamentally talking about 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. Hybrid cloud, what does that mean and how do I get there?
DV: So let's talk a little about HP, because you guys have been busy in the past year or so. (EVP) Dave Donatelli came on and all of a sudden you guys … I guess you had already acquired Left Hand prior to Dave coming on. He sort of had the handcuffs on for awhile. He was running networking and servers. But since that time there was the Ibrix acquisition, obviously the 3PAR acquisition. That was a very high visibility … Vertica's now in the mix. You have a big data play.
CN: There's some home-grown IT too in our storage architecture. StoreOnce great architecture there.
DV: So a total face-lift for HP storage. You've still got a pretty vast portfolio, which, you've got a big installed base so you have to have a vast portfolio. But talk about that transformation and what it's like going from little old 3PAR – a public company ,but small, relatively speaking – to a huge organization. How do you get the word out internally, externally? How do you maintain that speed. Is 3PAR able to bring that kind of ethos to HP. How are you doing that? How does it all work?
CN: So where do I start? So first of all, HP storage is rich with great IT like you mentioned. There's not shortage of conversation one can have. In fact the way I describe the experience of going from 3PAR to HP is all the stuff that we never had but so desperately coveted is here at HP with open arms. So great scale-out. Great deduplication technology, architecture. A wonderful virtualization platform in the Left Hand technology. So all of that is there. Part of what we've got to get done, I think, is marketing. We've got a portfolio aimed at optimizing existing environments, getting them to virtualization and the cloud, and then helping folks through this hybrid transformation. Its getting that word out about all that has changed with the Hp storage. If you had not looked at it for two years – totally different, right?
DV: Completely, yeah. Now David Scott, I always love listening to him speak because he always starts with some tectonic shift or megatrend, he's very articulate.
CN: It's the accent.
DV: Talk about some of the trends you are seeing. David's now the general manager of the storage division, so you're marching to the tune of his vision; of course Donatelli's convergence vision. Start with some of the things you guys talked about at 3PAR but now the scope is expanded with HP. What are some of the megatrends?
CN: So I think going back to 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 stands shoulder-to-shoulder with this move to, call it IT-as-a-service, this delivery of IT as a utility service. And in fact that is driving the move to a virtualized data center, that desire. Those two together fundamentally change the underlying requirements for the infrastructure – server, storage, network. Think about an IT-as-a-service model. You are dead if you cannot deliver swiftly, if you cannot deliver speed, great economics, it's all about more for less. So we talk about this agile infrastructure. What does that mean? Provision quickly, handle the unpredictable workloads that are streaming in. And do all that while you maintain service levels.
And then to 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% to 15% to 80% and then make it stupidly simple to manage. It's all about automation or what we call autonomic management technology.
DV: Joe Tucci calls it autonomic, too. Didn't he steal that term from you?
CN: Joe may have lifted it.
DV: It happens to us all the time. Someone steals one of our ideas and we feel comfortable with that.
CN: 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.
JF: We now have ?? inside the cube, so it's ours!
DV: How about the whole convergence thing. It's not just about storage or just about compute or just about networking. We were at the HP analyst meeting last month, and we heard a heavy dose of convergence, a lot of substance there.
JF: We heard the Intel guy say it's the network bottleneck, not compute.
DV: Right, the Intel IT guy we had on the Cube earlier today. They're big on convergence. So for years – I remember when I was at IDC a decade ago, and HP would come in and say, “We're server vendors, and server and storage...” It just didn't feel like it had a lot of meat behind it. But it feels like it does now. Buying logical blocks of infrastructure to support applications seems like because of virtualization seems like it's finally here.
CN: So think about, back to our IT-as-a-service conversation, think about the death of IT-as-a-service. Death comes from complexity, and inefficiency. IT-as-a-service does not get off the ground with that. What drives that? Sprawl drives that. Look at the kind of growth people are seeing in their server virtualization environments and not just compute but storage, network.
JF: Sprawl in general or network sprawl, server sprawl?
CN: All of it. Start with a VM and try to do it without more storage capacity and pretty soon more network resource. So the antidote to that complexity is data center convergence – a converged infrastructure for your storage and networking gear. If you can get the job done in one thing vs. 30, doesn't that help you get there?
And in fact we had an announcement March 1st. We announced an exchange appliance with our partners over at Microsoft. That did exactly that. That brought 30 SKUs – 30 components and drove that into a single appliance that is faster to get up and running, cheaper to run and cool, and in one appliance storage, server, network, and application, all in one.
DV: it's kind of interesting, we live in this....the IT business has really changed a lot. The whole – we talk about convergence but there's been a lot of consolidation as well. You've got a very strong partnership with Microsoft which has invested, I think, a quarter of a billion dollars in this whole appliance initiative. HP and SAP are renowned. HP and Oracle used to be that way, and that's sort of chilled out a little bit, and now you guys just bought Vertica. So you see this really interesting coopatition thing – you see it with VMware, EMC talks about it all the time. What do you see there? How do you see it all going? More of the same, or does it just get more intense?
CN: The customer data center is a mix of technologies. It's an ecosystem, right? And for us to get the job done for 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 their private cloud is they should be asking us, “Give me the template for me to get my...my Microsoft implementation for SQL done as a cloud service.” What they ought'a get, what they get from us, is white papers and implementation guides and deployment scripts.
DV: Yeah. We've done this before.
CN: Exactly. It's a methodology, its repeatable, we call them cloud maps. You ought'a 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.
JF: How is IT service economy you are talking about effecting the partnership and the channel strategies? Because there are other strategies out there, there are other approaches out there in the industry that are kind of old school, controlling the pricing and lock-in, all that stuff going on. You always had a great channel, you have the convergence portfolio with networks, servers, and storage. So obviously things aren't getting simpler at least from a solutions standpoint. You guys are doing some simplification. What's the channel, what's the market in the field you are experiencing? Can you talk about the trend there?
CN: So I don't know if I would call it the trend, but so long as you can ID the customer problem and give an easy answer for your partner, give them a way to provide the customer a few simple options, and whether it's a DAS-based approach for their Microsoft Exchanage deployment vs a SAN – few in our industry can do that. But 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's important is how we bring our partners into our cloud system strategy and how we can link with them arm and arm to bring cloud computing into their customers. And again they are brothers and sisters there. So bringing them along for the ride is a big part of it.
DV: How about data protection? I've been pretty vocal about how the state of backup is completely broken. Backup's insurance. You're buying an insurance policy, and nobody wants to overpay for insurance.
JF: I was saying earlier, what does backup mean?
DV: But backup is complicated, it's over-priced. And if I want to extend it to remote offices or even my desktops and laptops it gets even more expensive. And essentially you've got the software vendors extracting rents – we know that story, Oracle and Semantec. But that's the way it is, they have that infrastructure installed. But virtualization is changing that. It's forcing people to relook at their backup. You've got this new technology StoreOnce, software technology, of course you've got Data Protector that's in there. It isn't a backup application, right? Or would you consider it a backup application?
CN: I think it has a relationship to a backup application.
DV: So I'm going to work with Semantec or Networker or HP Data Protector or something like that. But the state of backup is a mess. 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 put your mark in backup as you appear to be doing in networking? And you've always been strong in servers, and it looks like you are really well positioned in storage now generally. But how about backup specifically?
CN: So let's talk about StoreOnce. In June 2010 we introduced a data deduplication architecture we labeled StoreOnce. And the unique thing we are doing here in data deduplication is this is an architecture not just for in-line deduplication for backup but is an architecture that can live on the 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 – you know we probably aren't the only ones to 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.
DV: And that's from HP Labs. That's home grown.
CN: Right. 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....
DV: So right now you're taking Data Domain head on essentially, and that's a game of bigger, better, faster, better mousetrap. But you're saying if I understand you correctly that the leverage you have is that architecturally you can place that on primary as well?
CN: Architecturally we can place that on primary.
DV: Is that the plan, or can you talk about that a little bit?
CN: That is the plan for this architecture. We need to get it in the entire environment. 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 out (inaudible) 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 deduplication on the backup client, what you've got today is going to serve you even better in the future, not just inline.
DV: Data Domain does a really good job of the whole tape sucks theme. We were talking to (???) from Nimble Storage about backup sucks. And it does. And I think the fix is data-protection-as-a-service. When you're talking about service-oriented architectures or IT-as-a-service, or you talk about the 3PAR utility service, that is ultimately where this business is going. I think you have a great opportunity there, and I hope you can pull it off because I'd like to see that vision come true. And you're right, you aren't the first place I've heard that vision. But you hear it from places that have a lot of different (inaudible).
CN: Execute.
DV: Execute, yeah.
JF: The thing is you've got to get it out there and do the frontal and do the head-to-heads and marketing, and brute force here and change the game on the competition.
DV: Donatelli brings that execution ethos. What's it like working for Dave?
CN: Dave Donatelli is the reason I'm at HP, I've gotta tell you.
DV: Otherwise you'd be at Dell? <laughter>
CN: No. In the good old days at 3Par I lost more than one deal because Dave Donatelli made that last sales call.
JF: He makes sales calls, Dave Donatelli.
CN: Yes, indeed. He leads from the front, that's the way to do it.
DV: So you respect him. He's a task master, right? That's his reputation.
CN: Call it what you want. Execution, baby.
DV: He really focuses on getting the job done. He doesn't make excuses. But you're saying that he walks the walk.
CN: He does.
DV: And that's got to have a ripple effect on the people.
CN: And the idea of this converged 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. Try to do it with thousands of engineers.
JF: I talked to CIO customers all the time on the Cube and blogging, and converged networking is here, finally, in the convergence nirvana we were talking about years ago. And you guys are well positioned. You guys have good marks from customers. This is not just a Cisco thing any more. This is HP is a player and has a track record in networking, in storage, and now with 3PAR kind of modernizing some of the cloud stuff. And they've had servers for years, even when I worked there. So HP actually has the right stuff at the right time.
DV: But storage was always a second class citizen in HP, as it still is in my opinion, btw, at IBM. It certainly was that case at Sun. These were server companies and yeah they did storage.
JF: But it's more strategic, and the things we're hearing now around flash.
DV: But storage, storage software, a lot of innovations around flash. And I'd say HP's made that transformation just from an ideological standpoint. You're not just a server company like ESSN, and you're not jut a storage company either, btw, even though you're run by a guy with a big storage background. That converged infrastructure message, really you get hit in the face when you talk to HP.
CN: And it's not just about talking it. March 1st was all about converged infrastructure with the Exchange Appliance. Converged infrastructure with the P4800 Left Hand. C-class blade system chassis, C-class blades. Along with P4000 Left hand controllers all in one chassis.
JF: And Vertica on top of it...I think that's just going to be a game changer when you guys can get that integrated across. I know we asked Dave specifically about big data in Barcelona. If you guys can harness the analytics side of it, that amplifies the value proposition.
DV: Would you clarify – where does Vertica sit in the organization?
CN: I would probably be the wrong person to comment on that.
JF: It came from the software side. But in talking to some of the insiders at HP that talk publicly, that Vertica's going to be their VMware to EMC.
DV: So there's this interesting battle. You've got VCE on the one side taking their partnership approach, and you've got HP's approach through vertical integration. And HP doesn't own a hypervisor, so HP is playing an open, heterogeneous hand. Choice.
CN: Versus lock-in.
DV: Well, it's interesting.
CN: Interesting implicit lock-in.
DV: VCE tells you, “Look, this is the block. And if you don't want that management software then go somewhere else. But this is the block.”
Whereas HP's saying, “We have more choice.” And I think that's an interesting battle. To me its VCE and HP and to me there really isn't anyone else. Oracle's kind of got it. 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 it's gig to be a huge market, multi billions of dollars in blocks of infrastructure going in, and right now it's a two-horse race. And you guys are very well positioned. I think both companies – different philosophies, but I think both companies can make a lot of money there.
CN: So here's the approach. Make it totally simple. Sometimes choice can be read as complexity. I have to figure it out myself. So make it totally simple. Get a cloud system. One SKU, done, there you go.
But for a lot of folks, sort of one size doesn't fit all. There's a lot of folks out there who are going to virtualize in different ways. There's a lot of folks out there that are going to run different kinds of databases. For those guys we still have the best infrastructure at every level. And that's kind of where we're aiming. So why wouldn't you take an open approach?
JF: If you can simplify it, and increase utilization, and provide speed, economics of scale....
DV: I think the answer to that question is if you're three separate companies it's hard enough as it is to do that level of integration. So you really have to limit....
CN: And by the way, talk to some of the large cloud service providers. They have premium clouds running VMware, but then they have kind of the lower-end offers built on totally different technologies. What are you going to do?
DV: 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.”
JF: They've got Citrix, too, so they don't really care about a hypervisor. That's what I'm hearing.
DV: No, I think that's right, John. What are you seeing here?
CN: A lot of conversations about cloud. Dedup is a hot topic, as you'd imagine.
DV: So thanks for coming in here. We're going to be at HP Discover in June. So looking forward to that.