and then take the remaining chunks and apply compression. We'll do that on the same because there's like a remainder. It's like a division. It's like long division with the remainder. There's always unique data. Okay. Okay. So that's one of the things we'll do. I mean we will support both inline and post-process and hybrid. So we have a product right now. I won't tell you which one it is. It'll do Ddupe inline, but then it'll do compression as a post-process. So Ddupe can be engineered to run fast. Right. Compression we would take more time. Okay.  Okay. And then when you get the data on the other side you got to rehydrate the data. Yep. Sure. And that's always. There's an asymmetry. That's one of the things we figured out is there's an asymmetry there. So that we would rather take more time to shrink the data than to get in the way of a read operation. So we do everything we can for the rehydration of the data, the decompression to be much faster than the compression itself. And it's partly because this context-weighted algorithm will be trying different things and kind of playing around with the algorithms to get absolutely the best shrink rates. Whereas once it shrunk, you know, it's encoded with precisely which algorithm and then the algorithms themselves tend to be a little asymmetric. So one of Cali's earlier points is that there's trade-offs, right? So in some of the stuff. So like if I was going to use deduplication and compression and it was for purposes of sending stuff off site, right? For disaster recovery, right? Application recovery. Anything that elongates that period of the post-process expands the amount of data that could be lost in the event of a disaster, right? So you've expanded your loss opportunity. Your backup window has increased. So those are some interesting challenges there. Yeah, there's lots of interesting trade-offs. One of the things to consider, for example, is in a compliance-oriented archive like our DX product, you wouldn't want to dedupe files because dedupe takes a file, breaks it into chunks, recombines them in all random ways. Whereas in a compliance-oriented archive, they have a file, it gets treated with worm and retention and expiration policies and they want to keep those as discrete files. So you have to. So our DX product, which is actually, I'll say here, is the first product we're going to ship with Ocarina technology included with it. Okay. And that's coming later this year. And that will be. Months, not years. Yeah. It depends how many months, I suppose. But you could calculate it in months. You can't, right? It still be years. It depends how many hands do I have to count, right? But that'll be a compression-only workflow. The data sets you tend to see in that kind of. Because of compliance issues. Well, partly because of compliance, but also the data sets you tend to see in that use case are unique data sets. So even in an eDiscovery world, there are, obviously there's redundancy and emails and attachments and all the things that are going through an eDiscovery process. But generally, the application layer that exists above the storage is already stripping out a lot of that redundancy. So we find that there may not be a lot of incremental benefits to doing deduplication. And that compression is. So there's also, for example, the idea in certain workflows that you'll want to recover things on a file by file basis. And so again, I don't want to scramble the chunks and put them in special containers. I want to find a file in a file system and see it and move it back. I want to restore a specific. I may need to decompress it. Accidentally. But at least it's exactly, but at least it's a discrete file that a scrap door piece of software can go access and pull back. So there's different scenarios for different products and platforms and use cases. And fortunately, when we started down the path of developing our embedded code, we built it in a modular way that will allow us to kind of, you know, not just do inline and post process and so forth, but also, you know, some interesting ideas around how we throttle our resources, resource consumption and make sure that we're not getting in the way of normal IO to the storage platform. I know this is changing. Okay, I know this is changing because of the investments in the acquisitions that Dell has made. And the investment that made in channel partners. But there was at least a time when you when people even within Dell would say, if you got past the first bullet, you have too many bullets for our sales team to explain the solution. This is just this was reality. It's like, we're looking for velocity. We're not looking for long conversations. What you just described in your technology is, Wow, there are a lot of there are a lot of tradeoffs and decisions that you have to make along the way. So it's to make the right decision. And you can't just leave it up to, I mean, clearly not, clearly, you can't leave it just up to my job to simplify that based on the platform that the technology is going in. I have to write the requirements document that says this is extremely dumb, simple to use and beats our competition every time under the target, you know, for the intended use case. But but is there a do you need a heavy consultative layer and your channel partners and your direct sales force to be able to sort of yes and no, the basic value proposition of I can shrink your data. So the cost to be stored goes down. But the phone call is I just shrunk my stuff and I did and and and I just am undergoing a compliance audit and and I can't prove where I've got a legal discovery thing going on and I can't prove that this data hasn't been changed. Yeah, I won't say there's I've just think there's not unique scenarios, but but generally speaking, delivering on that basic value proposition is simple to understand. It's easy to sell. It's easy to establish the ROI by revaluation tools. And and that's the kind of the mainstream model here. And we can simplify these products pretty easily. Now, fortunately, we now have, I mean, we've evolved from a sales perspective. And you know, maybe this is a, you know, good way to tie up the conversation here. But but the we have an enterprise class sales force now on the storage side, we have we are now hiring a dedicated storage sales team that's going to work with the generalist sales teams to go not just into existing Dell accounts, we bought lots of servers, but into into new accounts that we haven't been able to get into before. And so we're seeing a level of sophistication in our go to market and our in our sales motion and our strategies that didn't exist before. And so as we get into these richer higher intellectual property type of products, and that includes compelling that includes the files DSFS file system that includes Ocarina capabilities. We now have a team that we think it will be successful taking this to market. Well, very good. It was great to hear all of that.  So we appreciate your time. And you have anything else or no, this is I appreciate it very much. I hope you enjoy the rest of the show. Oh, it's a great show so far that you know, the customer attendance is tremendous. And there's a lot of interest in my products in particular. And so it's just a great chance for me to engage and ask lots of questions. Awesome. Thanks for your time. I appreciate talking to you guys. And you know where to find me. Oh, absolutely. Okay. All right. So we next up, we have Dan Marbs. He's the AVP of infrastructure design at Associated Bank. Come on in. You guys are watching the Cube. Thank you so much for joining us. The Cube is Silicon Angles flagship broadcast. Silicon Angle is the worldwide leader in tech event coverage. And I also have Dave Vellante here. I'm here from wikibon.org. And and it's good to be here in Orlando. And we're here with Dan Marbs who Callie is a big fan. So yes, I've been a fan of the show for a long time. Dan said I got to meet you. I got to be on with Callie. So you guys switched gears on me over there. We did. We did kind of explain what you do. What is what Associated Bank is. And you know, just what you guys do over there. Sure. Associated Bank. We are a commercial and personal bank in the Midwest. We have a three state footprint. We're in Wisconsin and Illinois and Minnesota. Okay. We provide full service banking for all of our clients. So loans, mortgages and the whole financial services package. I am a systems engineer. I work on our design team. I function really as our lead server and storage designer. So we are we are here sort of giving the good word about compelling. We've been a company customer for a little over five years from taking our journey with them since they were fairly small. And we feel like we've grown up with them in the storage space. So we're we're just here telling our story. So was it an awkward transition as compelling got bought? No, we were we were excited to see all of the new opportunities with the Dell family that would be would be opened to the compelling product line. A little bit scared because we've seen other acquisitions. Not necessarily by Dell but usually the whole acquisition process is a very scary thing for everyone on the other side. You're always you're always worried that the the organization doing the purchase of the smart company is going to take them and tear them apart and ruin the fabric of what it was that made the company so successful. With compelling there's really a whole culture surrounding the company. I mean that they're really a small shop able to be very agile and very mobile because of their their small size. That's awesome. And just a great culture of people that they develop. So take us back to you said five years you've been working with compelling. Take us back five years ago. What was the world like? And what was the drivers to move? We were we were using primarily DAZ five years ago. And we knew that after one of our recent acquisitions that we needed to provide some more centralized storage primarily for document archiving all of our old green screen reports and signature cards and all those sorts of documents. So we know we needed some sort of sand solution because we're just scaling out faster than than DAZ was really going to allow us to keep going. So we had looked at a couple of vendors the company that we purchased had some existing sand storage and that vendor was really more aimed at really massive million dollar plus enterprise deployments. And we just weren't really ready for that at that point. So we actually at the end got down to considering the ecological solution and the compelling solution. And we ended up going with the compelling solution. So we started out small original deployment was about 17 terabytes. And over that five years we've grown from one array with that small amount of storage to eight production arrays with about nine hundred terabytes in total. Do you have to have people? Did you add people to manage that? We are at this point we have four engineers who take part in both the sand design and administration activities. But in our time estimates for the last month we figured it's one tenth of one FTE total across all systems for all design and administration tasks. And that was. Yeah. We were like 26 hours of time logged in the last month first and administration. So it really does run itself. I mean I hear these horror stories about people saying they've got spreadsheets of data to manage where this block is. And that's that's insane. So we just let the system basically run itself. We learned long ago. Don't try to outsmart the hardware. Just let it do its thing. And somebody needs more space. We click click click and it's done. Your background is not one management. No my is not what one man. Call your management is actually education. I have an undergraduate degree in music education was a high school band director for five years before becoming a touring performer which is the last time I was in Orlando and now I work in IT. Wow. Junior high school band director yesterday at downtown Disney maybe an elementary school band director. Oh yeah. I was doing the chicken dance. I don't know if I was directing rather than I was trying to follow a law. Junior high school is often the best strategy. Yes. Try not to get trampled. So just a beer off course here a little bit. You said the last time you were here in Orlando how are you still that was the summer of I perform a lot now just not with that show in the summer of 2002 I was selected to be part of the initial touring cast for an offshoot of the show Blast called Shockwave and we performed for three months on the American Adventure Stage at Epcot and then did a seven month US tour. Wow that's a long time to be on there after that the show went to London and I ended up going back into into education and then eventually transitioned in IT. Wow.  So to go back to you know the the move to a compelling when you guys decided was you said it was really easy obviously but were there any you know sticking points was was there any tough part to that transition not to that transition. We've had a few bumps in the road along the way. We figured out at one point we had tried to take those original rays that we had and just make them scale up to be very very very large. I mean at one point I think the initial arrays we had we built them up to about a hundred and sixty or hundred and seventy terabytes each. Yeah. And the problem is it's great to have all your eggs in one basket because it's just there but when the bottom breaks out of the basket it's it's problematic and and we fell into a trap what I think a lot of people do only considering you know I have X amount of gigabytes available and I have X amount of gigabytes of data this one is less than this one so I'm good without considering the impact of the performance on those of those different workloads.  Sure. So we've we've adapted you know I think in the computing world in general we realize we can't even processors we can't continue to scale up and scale up and scale up so now we scale out so that's why at this point we have four production arrays and each of our data. How do you do your backups? What's your snapshot? We actually are using a disk to disk backup third party product at this point for some of our very largest systems like our document archiving system which is currently around 17 terabytes of live production data we actually use snapshots and then replicate that offsite to our other to the backup software. We're using a product called eval right now by I-365. You know even like it. Eval I know I-365 a bit. I mean it's it's sort of an emerging you know category of software right and it's not the classic yeah some anti-actively legato base right so I like it. Okay. It's for disk to disk right I mean that's the that's the future you know no tape. We only use tapes for our core IBM hardware right now which was out of scope at the time that we initially implemented that solution but for all we're primarily a window shop for all of our windows boxes the backups are all disc all table. And you do in virtualization server virtualization. Yeah we are here VMware. We are using both in the data centers we're primarily using VMware's ESX 40 and 41. We are probably 70 percent virtualized in the data center at this point. We still have a significant physical hardware footprint because we have approximately 300 remote locations of branch offices and brick and mortar back office locations and it's without fully revamping your infrastructure and going with VDIs and thinking about converging all your data inside the data centers. There's really just a need for physical server locations. Talk about the bank. What's happening at the bank at the business and what is that been talking about different industries. Well we just we're really trying to provide service to the customer and give them all the channels that they want. This past weekend we just launched a major revision to our online banking platform and we now have a mobile banking platform. So as as people begin to use their tablets and their smartphones as really their primary interface device to the Internet we want them to be able to have their banking activities be able to work on those devices. So you can get your balances you can transfer funds and do it all from your phone. Yeah that's been a huge thing on the consumer to use the phone for banking and it's been interesting to watch as as those changes happen. So do you see that going anywhere different than it is now. I think is as we as that platform as a smartphone and tablet platform becomes more capable and has more ability. I know there are banks right now experimenting with take a picture of a check and submit that through your mobile banking platform actually deposit that to your account. We won't mention them sorry. We will continue to see what what our partners you know our third party providers are able to. Leverage. Okay you know as as those platforms about this idea of an app store for the enterprise is that something that your industry. We'll get to your organization at the point where we're I think fully ready to embrace tablets and smartphones and we really understand the different work types that occur because you think about a loan origination officer versus a teller versus a traveling sales person versus a traveling person and every one of those people interfaces within that working with the data differently. So what we really need to do is continue to be cognizant of what those roles are and adjust their interface to fit. So if that's a tablet or a smartphone with an app store. Great if that's a laptop with a Citrix application portal. Great if it's a fat desktop. Great and we want to. We want to let the business drive the technology decision so we can provide the right solutions to those folks rather than simply trying to shoehorn technology into that we think is cool into a place where it might not be needed. And we were talking off camera you're doing some desktop virtualization but it hasn't really hit the whole space. It's a pilot project at this point what we we're looking at was if you have a large back office location that becomes unusable tornado fire flood Godzilla you know what have you. We want we need some way to allow those users to be functional in a short of time as possible. So we've taken some unused space in some of our current locations and put a number of thin clans out there we're leveraging VDIs right now for workspace recovery. And business resumption for for those folks. So so it really hasn't hit the mobile side of your business yet. Not yet. You expect that that VDI desktop virtualization what even call it desktop virtualization. Right I mean we've got all these devices think that as virtualizations of buzzword and people like buzzwords so so yeah so speaking of buzzwords so you do server virtualization. And use some VMware. Yes. And and the VDI is VMware as well. Yes it's it's on VMware right now fronted by Citrix. Okay. How do you do disaster recovery. Very carefully. We actually for a lot of our critical applications we leverage some of the asynchronous replication features in the compelling product. Our document archiving system for example we have I believe nine or 10 virtual servers and a two node cluster that backends the database and all the file share data and that entire infrastructure lifts up replicates over to the other data center and can be presented on other hardware in the opposite data center and we take advantage of some network tricks with stretch V lands and that sort of thing. So you can bring the same servers up in another building and the same IP address so to the client nothing has changed. Okay. They access the application their their client that they have on their workstation interfaces with the back end components in exactly the same way. And many times they're not even where it's moved and we can move that entire application which is close to 20 terabytes of data in under two hours. So you said that's an active active. Yes. But you said it's a synchronous before not. We don't we don't have fiber between the two sites so we don't have low enough latency to do synchronous replication. Okay. So how do you deal with RPO? We take snapshots of that application every 15 minutes and replicate those across and they sync relatively quickly. It's just with the mechanics of synchronous replication. It would put an undue burden on the on the time to complete a transaction. So you don't have a zero RPO? It's as close to zero as we can get with our core transaction processing system on the IBM hardware we use their their MIMX replication product which is transaction based replication and with some of our larger sequel databases we do database mirroring between sites because that gets us a lot closer to zero zero RPO. Okay. And do you see do you see that business requirement shrinking or is 15 minutes okay for the business or are they safe? It really depends on the classification of the application. I mean we have some which are really like our core transaction processing systems you can't lose anything ever. So what do you do there? That's on the IBM hardware that's using the MIMX replication which is transaction based replication. Yeah. So that's that's essentially as close to zero RPO as you can get as you can get. So you said you're here to share at the forum to share your story to interact with people and other customers I guess right? How's that going? Have you met anybody really interesting? We've done a lot of chatting with analysts and media folks over the last couple of days. I think that this conference is really interesting. I think you have people who are from the equal logic camp that are apprehensive and excited all at the same time about compiling it and you have people from the compiling camp who are excited and apprehensive all at the same time about what is the what is the merger into Dell bring and how do these partnerships affect the product. So our experience has been that you know all of these players in the space that we've worked with generally have the customers best interest in mind and we believe that now with compelling being part of this larger family that it's going to open even more doors. It might be we have to digress we have dear friends who live in England all we have is probably seen in close to 10 years that coming over this year we're going to rent a house down the beach with our kids. Our kids have all grown up. I'm jealous. Right. So it's like the two families get together the parents all know each other but the kids you know it's like yeah logic. What's going on here? That's a good analogy there. I have no doubt it'll all be good. But yeah. So what about compelling? Let's talk a little bit more about them because I've talked to a lot of compelling customers and actually you guys are kind of boring. The stuff doesn't break. It's just set it and forget it. I mean what doesn't compelling do well that you wished it did well? Yeah. I really can't think of anything. Wait. What is up with that? I don't know it's part of the advantage that we have having been a customer for so long is that I have really good relationship with a lot of the senior engineers and senior support people. So even when it's a feature request matter of fact I just spent some time talking with one of the directors of technical engineering today and I was like it would be great if if you replay manager product which is their their VSS snapshot engine if it did if it just did this you know your power all your power shell integration if you could just add commandlets for these two little things and it's like OK. That was it. I'll probably have them in less than a month. Wow. Yeah. We're like oh I'm like yeah this didn't work exactly. I said OK sure I'll fix it. Do you see that changing? I really don't because I really think I mean I continue to be struck in both meeting and listening to Michael Dell and just how he really seems to understand the human aspect of this business. Yeah. We talked about Dell the Dell Salesforce becoming trusted advisors and really building long term relationships. And I think that is just talked about really looking at and embracing the co-pilot support model and just understanding what that culture is all about and we're really good friends with with the president and he's really confident that you know that culture is going to be able to stay in place and it's just going to build I mean they're adding all sorts of staff but I know they're hiring the right people that are going to keep that that same culture alive. It feels great it's been on the cube a couple of times. Yeah. Yesterday and today. This week we had a lot of VMware a couple of times and you hear the same theme compelling customers. Yeah. He had Heineken on at BM World and absolutely love it it's hard to believe almost.  Right. This is IT. Right. Did you add something? Yeah. All right. Let me tell you the inside baseball and that. But yeah. And I think some of the frustration that generally we as technologists have with with our technology providers is that we understand that not everything is going to work a hundred percent right a hundred percent of the time. But when you get there's another vendor that I work with that it took me six months to resolve a what I consider to be a fairly basic support slash design issue. OK. With compelling I've never had to wait more than a couple of days for RCAs. They'll escalate it up to the highest levels of engineering and they will get you the answers you need. And if you're actually in if you're in a jam where something hasn't worked right and it happens to be service affecting it's they will get all hands on deck and fix it as fast as humanly possible. It was interesting when we started Wikibon my colleague David Flore and I we did a lot of he did he's a CTO did a lot of technical analysis and we looked at all the various supplies and we asked each of them. Can you give us you know examples of what we call the hero report you know what I'm talking about. No I don't. So the hero report is and I'm curious as to whether or not you use it. It shows you what utilization is you know allocated versus written you know all this essentially all the money you're saving is you know do you do you see those statistics do you use those statistics. Do you report on that or we don't really consider those. I mean we we I think we have a rough idea of what those numbers are but we don't we don't track them to that penny the way some other organizations do we just rather spend the time you know implement you know continuing to improve our design implementing better solutions and I mean we can draw them up if we need to well the reason I brought it up is because I'm compelling was really one of the few companies that said oh yeah we have that pushed about and got it and essentially they took metadata in from from you know all their customers it wasn't customer data it was about you know how the system was behaving and they just shared it with us here it is we were able to run a statistical sample on on the efficiency of the products relative to you know traditional arrays but you couldn't get that type of reporting out of the other systems and it struck us that well the reason is because it's so simple fundamentally simple and there were some others too but it was sort of the modern architectures the compelling three par was another one that was really good at that some of the other stuff wasn't so it sort of underscores that whole trying to meet Callie and I were talking before this event our the IT at our our home is better than the IT at our work yeah these days and I think that's you know you were asking earlier of but better do you mean easier yes you mean better experience right what I mean and you know as an IT person you might ruffle some feathers saying that but the reality is is you know it's pretty easy to run IT at home you get your Gmail you get your phones and it's there's some complexity but you were asking Callie you know is that is that relatively new and compelling is one of those companies that I think catalyzed that whole that whole shift consumerization of IT do you see that you know driving into other parts of your business I think that if you really look at what it means to embrace the concept of private cloud yeah I think compelling will be a facilitator for us as we as we really put the rest of the pieces in place with their storage and virtualization and then all the process shift that has to happen to really embrace private so private cloud is that something you guys think about that's a term you use internally we haven't we don't use the term internally as such but we there are a lot of things we do that align with what people traditionally believe private cloud to be what what makes your private cloud as we call it that what makes it cloud we are trying to as much as possible automate away the minutia of system provisioning and system and capacity addition you know that's we really want the brain resources that we hire we hire people because they're smart and they're good at what they do and we want them to be able to use those traits those assets in in the most effective way which is not click provision click provision you know just make make the make the busy work go away and then let yeah and let people think about really what can we do to help drive business initiatives like what what systems can we put in play like what high level integration can we do that's going to make all of this make more sense to our customers as IT our customers are both all of the tellers and the other frontline employees and then obviously the customers debate integration with your financial systems and the business systems right matter exactly how about so there's a lot of customers out there that you know they might be using legacy systems they might be using to ask what advice would you give to those individuals that are thinking about maybe moving toward a more virtualized storage environment virtualized storage environment I think you know going back in time and and if I could if I could give myself that same advice I would say understand what you want the system to do and how you perceive that it may grow I mean everyone talks about this massive growth of data and how it's been hundreds of percent every year and you just have to really understand what that's going to be and how you're going to use the system we we now understand that we have to monitor both raw capacity and then the overall performance characteristics of the data and the systems that we're we're integrating in and that's where we failed early in in 2007 and 2008 and got ourselves into a bit of a jam so have a vision have a have a strategic direction and it's a lot easier to put technology into a plan than to make a plan after you've already decided on a random bit of technology like let the business drivers determine the technology you're going to use rather than forcing technology to drive business strategy because that leaves nowhere good yeah that's a good thought to end on we really appreciate your time thank you so much alright you have anything else before it leaves I just wanted to make sure I didn't cut you off fantastic background yeah very interesting stuff so we'll have this up live and this is live now we'll have it up on demand on siliconangle.tv fantastic so go in do you have a Twitter ID? I do it's at Dan Marbs okay M-A-R-B-E-S correct alright well tweet me and we'll try and talk a little bit later alright thank you so much for watching thank you very much alright great to meet you alright this is siliconangle.tv's continuous coverage of the Dell Storage Forum we are here live at the cube our flagship product the silicon angle the worldwide leader in tech coverage tech event coverage I'm Dave Vellante with wikibon.org and I am here with my co-host Callie Lewis and actually so we are going to break right now and we want to play an interview that we had with Phil Soren before yesterday actually you saw that one I did I saw the Phil Soren interview yesterday and part of today awesome so I'm looking forward to tomorrow so let's go alright well let's cut to that take a look at Phil we'll see what he's got to say so he was just up he's over there looking at us now I think he knows he's coming so for those of you just joining us we are at the Dell Storage Forum this is John MacArthur and we are about to bring we'll see what he's got to say soひль was just up he's over there looking at us now so maybe we can I think he knows he's coming so for those of you just joining us we are at the Dell Storage Forum this is John MacArthur and we are about to bring on Phil Soren he's He's the president of Dell Compellants. So come on over, Phil. Yeah, Phil, great to have you here. I'm really glad you can make it. We've been talking you up. Yeah, we have. Uh-oh. Well, what did you say? I've got to find this out here. You just got out for the keynotes. Do you get paid to do this? No, this is free. We get paid in cookies. Yeah. Well, that'll be good here. So how's it going? Going great. Did you enjoy the keynotes and everything? Yeah, well, we were doing this. You guys were right here. We were here, so we want to know what you want. We want to know what you said. Yeah, we talked, actually, it was kind of a fun event here. First of all, I got to thank some of our customers that have been with us for 10 years and some of the business partners who have met their business on us. And not quite 10 years, but that was really impressive. And actually, one of our business partners got out and thanked us again. That was real neat. Actually kind of emotional for me. But I'll tell you what I tried to talk about is how we innovated a Compellant and how we're going to keep innovating under Dell and not lose that innovation, which is hard. When you're smaller, it's easier to innovate. So how do you keep that going? And how do you? Yeah, well, one of the biggest things we did at Compellant was we formed a thing called the C3, the Compellant Customer Council.  Yeah, I actually came to one of your first ones. You spoke to one. I spoke to one of your first ones. That's the second meeting we had. I came to the second one. You didn't invite me to the first, but I got to see it. Oh, Al was good. We did it. I hear a little bitterness there. It was good. And so it was really neat, because when we started the company, we've got a lot of press and coverage. And so a lot of people called and said, we want to know what you're doing, and we'd like to participate with you and help you. And so what we said is, first we said, we're in stealth mode. We can't tell you it's a secret.  We're going to want to talk to these same customers a year from now. Let's bring them in and build the product together. So we actually brought them in. And I talked about Marty Sanders ran that first one. And he opened up a rack, and it was empty. He said, this is our product. What do you think? And we got a lot of sighs and yawns in the audience. But they hope they helped us fill up the rack. And so we want to continue that. And I also talked about the innovation that's kind of occurred in the last decade in storage. You've been a storage veteran, too. But I think I've been in 25 years or a little more. I started when I was 12. But storage, really, innovation has been very, very quick this last decade. And we kind of talked about the innovation. It hasn't come from the big legacy vendors. It's come from the innovators, like Component and Equalogic. And I kind of did a little joke. I've learned in Texas that the legacy vendors kind of have big hats, but no cattle. You know, that's a. I'm from Texas, you know. I meant something new now. All right. So that's terrible. What we talked about. OK, OK. So how are you going to continue that innovation then? Well, the biggest thing, like right here, we're starting. We've got breakout sessions with customers, getting the feedback, what we're doing. We're opening up kind of what we're going to do development-wise to see if that's the right stuff they want to see. We'll continue like on Sunday. We had our partner advisory council, which is our key resellers. And they are right there with us, giving us a lot of feedback on the integration of the two channel programs. What are they telling you? You were both pretty of an Equalogic and Component, very channel friendly, right? Well, they gave us a lot of feedback on deal registration and conflicts, how to work with the Dell Salesforce. Don't take it directly. Work with us a little bit there. But I'm really glad Equalogic was first, because they broke the ground with Dell on the channel front. And we've been able to piggyback on that. And they've been, things like how we do deal registration, they've taken some of our program elements in the corporate and the Dell ones. They're open on more than just technology, what they're taking from Component. So co-pilots, another big one they're adopting that kind. Yeah, tell me about co-pilot, because co-pilot was, you mentioned co-pilot at the time of the, either at the IPO or the acquisition. I think it was at the IPO you talked about, co-pilot. So tell me about co-pilot. Well, so everyone has to have support. And with co-pilot, what we do is we try to take it to a whole new level and we named it different because it is different. So we call it co-pilot because we want that customer to know that when they call into our support line that that person is in the cockpit with them as opposed to a control tower, where they're kind of ordering them around, they're in the cockpit and if they don't land, they both don't land. That's the concept. It incorporates a lot of software. We do a lot of real sophisticated call home. And then we use that data once we get that call home data to predict and prevent problems for customers. And then we have a, there's just a whole concept. We don't believe in callbacks. The person on the phone, the first person they talk to has got to be very technical, has got to be on answer questions. We encourage how to, how do I do questions as opposed to I'm broke and the only way to do it. And then also we follow up. We help, we call them when they don't have a problem just to see how things are going. So it's just a lot of things, but ultimately it's people. And we just got the best people in the world actually working it. We've also been trying to incorporate that into other products. That's a good thing to focus on as the people. Let's talk about fluid data for a moment. I'd kind of like to hear your thoughts on that and where you think it is and where it's going. You hit it right in the nose there, which is it's got so much possibilities. So it's, we're not done with it, but there's another one compelling, did kind of coin the term fluid data. And it just kind of, it described our whole product. It described how we manage data, get the right data at the right, just drive at the right time at the right price. And we do it automatically and very fluidly. I mean, it just described what we do. It described our support, described our hardware architecture where they can fluidly move with new technology without having to start over or throw things away. So we have this persistent architecture. And then when Dell acquired us, they started looking at their product portfolio and they go, you know what? A lot of this fits in there. Equalogic doesn't have forklift upgrades either. It fit right in there. They've managed data real fluidly and dynamically. They have the peer scaling, so it fit there also. It managed some of the things we're going to do with the fluid file system that they have. It just, I don't know, it describes what we do. You're running right now, you're running Equalogic. So you're running compelling as a separate sort of group within the server storage division. Is that right? Yeah, we're working, we're pretty key to Dell's future. So it's a very integrated effort. Now, a compelling right now is, you know, in Minnesota, they're investing in Minnesota, we'll add hundreds of jobs up there, already have added hundreds that we're doing there. The development team, the compelling development team is working on the compelling product, but there's also a portion of it that's working on integrating these other technologies too, like the scalable file system. Okay, that's from X and F. Yep, and then the compression and de-duplication technology kind of on top of what we're doing. So there's, it's separate, but it's pretty integrated, frankly, though, too, in the day-to-day efforts. Okay. So you don't really see, you know, Dell teaching compelling or compelling teaching Dell one way or the other. You really see yourselves as teams. It really is that way.  Good. They've met, they kind of quickly got respect. One thing that was really good too, that Dell has a lot more technical talent than they might have had years ago. And so when these engineers see technically competent people to work with, they get respect, and then they work together, and that's happened. So, yeah. It's not a our way or their way. Right. Engineers usually get along pretty well. It's the next level up, that's where fights start to happen. So I'm the fighter then, right? Well, yeah, apparently not. Apparently not. Apparently you're getting along or you're playing well with others. That's good. Mom touched you well. That's a Catholic school education, I guess. That's a Catholic school, and you were a teacher too, right? I was a school teacher, yeah. Junior high math teacher, yeah. Way back when, yeah, so. So why the move, and did that teach you anything coming from those routes? It taught me a lot here, yeah. How to handle injuries like handling junior high math? No. Oh. Don't put that one on those, too late, man. It's live, it's live. No, it, yeah, teaching does teach a lot. How to be dynamic and fluid.  Definitely. And you know, it's a lot of it's presenting and being on your feet and being able to adjust. Good background. And this is paid off well for you. This is your second storage company, right? This is paid a little better than school teaching did, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The second one we does, the three of us founded another company, 95. It's the same three. The same three, it was, that company, we had the first sand in the industry in 1995, first virtual sand, so. Right. I think we have a lot of innovation. A lot of tight VMware integration, I think at the time. Well, VMware really wasn't kind of going there. But it, How we virtualized all the physical drives was really a lot of the innovation. And yeah, VMware. Actually it was no. VMware has kind of done what we did the storage early on and now we're expanding on that. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's good. Well, we know we have to let you go because you have a very busy schedule. I really appreciate you stopping by. And it was great to chat with you. Well, this is fun here. So who do you got next? Darren. We're gonna talk to you. Okay. We're gonna talk to your classmate, Darren. Okay. See, we get along well together now, right? All right. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Phil. This is fun to have you guys here and thanks for supporting us. Thanks for coming. All right, good to see you. Bye-bye. Take care. So next up is Darren. So thank you. Welcome back. This is live continuing coverage from theCUBE at Dell Storage Forum 2011. I am John MacArthur. And I'm here today with guests from Caringo. We have with us Gene Cheshire. Hi there. Nice to meet you. And Mike Melson. Correct. Pleasure to meet you. Pleasure to meet you. So how's the show going for you guys? Excellent. It's been fantastic. Yeah, really good. You got here when? I flew in Monday. Okay. Oh, I got here Monday evening also. Yeah, okay. Just in time for the party. Oh, just in time for the party. Absolutely, yeah. So Caringo's in the object store business. That's correct. And what's the heritage of the company? You skipped a little background. Sure, sure. Well, Caringo is founded by three gentlemen who have a tremendous legacy in the startup business. Mark Goros, Jonathan Ring, and Paul Carpendier. Their names make up the name Caringo. Paul Carpendier in particular is the father of CAS. He invented what became the Centera product. Right, right. I knew that there was an EM, a Centera relationship. There very much is, right? So he ended up taking the things that he wished he had perhaps done differently and went with 2.0, if you will, and parlayed that into the object storage server that is Caringo. Right, so one of the things I'm interested in is what were the things that they learned in generation one to sort of impact generation two CAS products? Sure. One of the things, of course, with Centera, the original addressing scheme was based on the MD5 hash of the content. When MD5 became a cracked algorithm, then that became unsecure. And it was no longer something that held up in court of law for a compliance key. You could no longer prove that the content was immutable. They've had to deal with that. So he separated out the address from the ability to prove forever that the content was truly never changed. So that was one thing. The other was dealing with small files. Centera has a history of perhaps not being real speedy with the smaller files. So he fixed that with, and I think the way Centera works, correct me if I'm wrong, in order to deal with billions of small files, what they would do then is sort of aggregate groups of files and then deal with them as a single object. Is that right? Yeah, and they keep the index for the metadata actually in their access nodes in the server so there's not really stored with the object. So with the DX and Dell's implementation at Caringo, we actually store the metadata with the object physically down on the disk. Okay, and Jean, you're with Dell. And your title is? I'm a storage strategist. I work in our PG product development group and in our advanced engineering. So we were working with the DX product in Caringo before it was released in the early stages of bringing on integration partners and kind of bringing the solution to market. Okay. And like, were you with Caringo from the beginning? No, I was probably about employee 20. I've been there three and a half years now. And the relationship with Dell started when? Well, our advanced engineering group effectively went out and tried to analyze what are the options for this type of object storage. We wanted an object storage platform to have an archive. So it's part of our longer term intelligent data management strategy. So it ties in with the other acquisitions that we've had recently with Compella because of their tiering and storage, the arena because of their compression and D-dupe and Xinet because of the file system. So one of those components of a complete family of intelligent data management product was to have this intelligent active archive and primarily the HTTP RESTful interface and the ability to scale to millions of objects. So it was a platform. And we just simply looked at the way Caringo had done it compared to everybody else and said, this is what we want. This is effectively the way we wanted to implement the technology. So we've become extremely close technology partners. We really worked a lot deeply together. Okay. And you've got a specific device that you ship, right? But you're also looking, are you looking longer term to embed the functionality into all of the platform, across all the platforms that is going to stay as a separate appliance? All of the above is the proper answer. Most everything will come to market initially as individual appliances. The archive store, the compression engine, the Xinet file head. Each of those things will come there. But eventually it's very logical to see the compression things of Ocarina in an ecologic controller to see the file systems and things get more integrated as you go forward. But it's about collecting the proper intellectual property and applying the right thing at the right place. So there is a true architecture that Dell is investing in that they call our new term for it as fluid data architecture now that we've got the compelete in the family. But it was an intelligent data management fabric so that we have the proper relationship of a data mover of a deduplication engine of workload managers and so forth so that we break the way that data should be handled down into the smaller components and then apply the technologies to move it more efficiently to where it needs to be. So it's a long road. And obviously object store is really important in sort of medical records. It's important across all industries in the context of legal and regulatory compliance. Legal and regulatory compliance anywhere where there's really fixed content. Kringa was built, Caster, which is the software inside the DX from the ground up to manage fixed content. So yes, medical images, video, audio, any of those types of things. We're seeing that in media and entertainment, of course. Feature length movies now, 12 terabytes of data, 350,000 files. Feature length movies, only 12 terabytes post rendering. No, that's the HD RAW that you see in the theater. It's 350,000 frames, right? After it's rendered, it's ready for broadcast, right? Correct. Pre-rendering, it's a lot bigger than that. Much, much more than that. So the explosion of fixed content, if you will, because those frames once they're shot, they're in the can, they stay, they will edit them and create new versions, new renderings. Right. But yes, medical imaging, satellite photos, electronic discovery, e-evidence, all of that is just creating tremendous growth of fixed content. And I've talked to banks who said if you could solve the problem of, I don't remember if it was Bank of America or one of them, but the problem of storing tens to hundreds of billions of check images. Right, correct, correct. And so I could retrieve a single check image without having to retrieve a bundle of them. Right. Then I'd buy the product today. So how deeply are you guys in that space? A lot. You know, the old tradition problems that checks different types of bankings would have these millions of little 2K check images and they'd be laying them down in the world. Is that how small they are? 2K? Yeah, the smallest 2K. And then the smallest sector in a file system is like 4K, so you're wasting 50% of the space by putting it there. So the way Koringa lays the software down on the DX, they lay the objects down end to end to end. And so there is no wasted space out there. You can literally, we did a session earlier today where we really got down and did the comparison of traditional filesystems versus an archive storage and to look at the different efficiencies. And you get a, when you put an object in an object store, you get back a tag or you need an identifier. That's the way that you find it. So it's literally one step to go retrieve that and pull that object back. And if you look at a file system with a RAID five, there's, what was there, 12,000 different pointers get hit to pull back one file compared to one. So it's those types of efficiencies. If you're going to add 10 storage nodes a month for 70 years, you've got to be sure that you're not wearing out those disks and that you've got a pattern of accessing that data that will last you through the years. And file formats and types and operating systems change, but we're native HTTP. So HTTP is probably going to be there a long time. So that's the access method. That's the access method, yeah. Okay. And is there a theoretical limit in terms of the number of objects? Well, or current constraints. We can use a class B at network addressing scheme today. So we can logically get about 65,000 nodes and we could store a 30 million items per node depending on their size. So yeah, it's a pretty big number. It's a big number. The storage capacity as well as the namespacing to address that capacity, all of that is fully distributed. It's a symmetrical architecture. So it is hard to predict where that theoretical limit would be with the DX. And as you add nodes to the system, it just keeps adding capacity. Is there an operation? Sometimes there's theoretical limits and then there's the operational logistical limit. Yeah, we, like you say, we've looked at scaling in a mid-release in December, we went to support a class B versus just class C network. First you didn't think anybody needed more than like 250 storage nodes, but if you can get to 65,000 storage nodes at two terabyte drives, 12 drives per system, you get to about a one and a half exabytes worth of data today. But we haven't sold one that big yet, but we'd like to. We'd be pretty happy to find out what that limit is in reality. So, medical image is big. What about in the area of social media? Because some of these social media platforms, they're sort of, they're building their own, I think they're building a lot of their own technology, right? Are you seeing opportunities for maybe the tier two-ish kinds of applications? Maybe ones that exist in the cloud. Absolutely. Well, the first place is CDNs, content distribution networks. So, they have their network where they have a tremendous number of edge servers, where they cache content as they deliver it, but all of that needs to come back to a set of origin servers. For the original content, make sure everything's safe. And so for that golden master, which they may want in two or three strategic geographies, the DX is an absolutely outstanding platform for that origin server. And those would be what kinds of files? They range in the CDN world everything, from the 2K thumbnails for a social networking site to full feature length videos that are streamed across the web. Netflix, the costumer? No, we don't know, okay. I don't know. It seems like they're soaking up a lot of traffic these days, they are. Well, anything that is native HTTP, so so many things starting out with cameras and PDAs and everything, there's just an HTML format picture. So, you know, like one of the big wins for Caringo I know a long time ago, they talk about was like Vodafone in Europe. And they said, well, they're starting out with HTTP and they're putting it on a file system and they're going across a block system and they're replicating to another file system and then they're delivering HTTP on the back end. So if they could go HTTP end to end from the time you create data until you retrieve data and you've simplified it, every time you go through another format you have an opportunity to corrupt data or to lose data. So it's just a matter of having a platform. And for all practical purposes, a DX just looks like a web server. It's HTTP 80, it's just there. It scales and it's very easy to manage. You just plug in additional nodes and they boot up and join the cluster. And so there's no backup in restore. When you run out of data, you don't have to do a forklift upgrade whenever you've filled up a frame or something like that. And it fits Dell's model. All of our storage products, we worked for them to be pure scalable. So that's the same way, Ecologic. When you add more Ecologic, you get more controllers, more horsepower, more nick ports, more drive. DX does the same thing. The way that X in it scales is the same way. The way Ocarina will scale will be the same way. So as you add more compliances, so to speak, you will then grow that power as it goes forward. Your biggest competitor probably is EMC in this space. Is that right or is it somebody else? Well, we like to think we don't have any competition. Of course you'd like that. But EMC Centera has gone into life and that was the probably platform. They have an Atmos out there today. In both cases, it's heavy lifting to basically do business with them. They have a very heavy API. You have to go like totally rewrite your software to take advantage of it. Or we're really HTTP 1.1. And instead of a write, you do a put. And instead of a read, you do a get. It's just extremely simple to do that. And so the porting gives us another set of scale. There's a few others out there, but they're making it look like an object where they'll have a file system below or they'll be keeping the index in a server instead of really down with the data. So this is the purest application that we've seen in what we truly call a true object store. So you would say the wave of the future is accessed by HTTP. It absolutely is. It'll be there for a long time. That was probably the last of the major differences that Paul Carpenter looked at was a protocol as the API. Something that was industry standard out there that didn't need a big SDK, that you could actually point a web browser at the DX and pull your content out if you happen to know the key. And so it's being validated out there, of course, by some folks like Amazon with S3. That HTTP is the way to access cloud and object storage. You can think of it as a private cloud, but then there's just people are learning different use models. I mean, it was originally thought of very much as being a second or a third tier of storage. But again, in medical, if you're reading 100 meg files, it's primary storage to them. It's all the need because of that type of application. You need some performance characteristics that are fairly significant, right? Well, and that's why there are features such as what we call dark eye, where you have perhaps petabytes of data, but most of it's long tail. It won't be accessed. Medical images will sit there and you need those available. You don't know when the doctor's going to need that X-ray, but when he does, it's gotta be there. And so we'll fill up DX nodes and then power them down. And until the content is needed, those disks will stay spun down. You get 30% power savings until you need the content and then it's available almost instantly. And again, this relationship has been going on for about how long? About probably three years, I guess. Yeah, two or three years. Since the time it started development. First release was just over a year ago in May was the first Dell release of the product. And then we had a second feed bump that we kinda came out with in the December timeframe. And then we added some significant features there where we added the ability to name an object instead of having to use just that unique unit identifier. So that you can actually... So it's got a worldwide name now? Yeah, well... You can do that. You can do that? Yeah, yeah. So it made it more applicable to other areas. We've also come out with a file protocol gateway so that you can have a SIFS and an NFS access to it through a gateway. Because some people aren't completely ready to rewrite their software, but they want the advantages of that long-term archive. So we developed a gateway that will again allow people to do a normal mount. They lose some features when they do that and if you write native to the application you can write all your metadata on a per-write basis. So I can make five copies of your email and two copies of mine or I can do anything that I want to for life points or when it's gonna be deleted. If you do it through a gateway you have to set your policies on each mount.  You can make it do 19 years or whatever you want. You just set your static policies compared to the being dynamic. That's about the biggest difference. If I'm an application developer today that's got some sort of long-term art, where I need immutability, let's just leave it at that. But I'm writing a new application pretty straightforward. It is. You can write standard HTTP calls but to make it even easier than that on support.del.com there's a complete open-source SDK that has bindings in multiple languages, Java, C-sharp, C++, Python. You can download that literally you can be writing content into the DX in a matter of minutes. But if I was a guy who already developed the application and maybe I was integrated with a Centera Atmos kind of or Atmos approach what's the process for making a migration or making this an alternative? Right. It's fairly simple and that was where named objects as we call them came in. Originally when the first version of the DX only had the ability to be assigned a key by the DX you then had to store that in your application. Some applications didn't want that. They said we create our own name we even build semantics into the name. It might have an account number that type of thing. So now with both naming schemes available it really is simply a matter of changing your rights to the file system to posts to HTTP and either storing the key you get back or using the name you've already been using all along. That it really is that straightforward. So there's and there's a lot of hybrid use cases. So they'll write specific application servers to write all this data but they may have a simple web browser application for people to pull data. If you want to pull back a map or a picture you just type in the HTTP and you can hide that behind a little plug-in to any type of an app. So the access method. I mean you can use the SDK you can write all the things that you need to with the software but then you can retrieve it. Very often when I'm doing a demo I'll write a script or something and show a bunch of things and then we'll just type in an IP address and URL and when it comes back to the picture of the Parthenon or whatever you want to see so that you can show. Actually starts bringing some interesting use cases that I don't think you would ever thought of in the storage world. You can actually post HTML and JavaScript into a DX cluster and use it as a web server and bring those pages back. So there are some things like that. You can plug a search appliance into it like you would a full text index and metadata index the entire storage system and then have full text search capability of your entire system. With some of the unstructured data particularly around images and stuff like that obviously with images hopefully there's been some tagging and I can do some searching on that. Are there other capabilities in terms of search that are sort of interesting to you to enable people to search through things that don't have a lot of metadata or maybe you use it to create metadata? All of the above. Can you talk about it? Can you talk about it? Well let me jump on that first and then Gene get free to chime in. So in addition to full text search that type of thing we also have a product called the content router and you can, when you write data you can do custom tagging as you said. So in addition to standard metadata such as timestamps and those types of things content link you can add any custom metadata you want. If there's in this product called the content router you can write rules against that metadata to generate lists of content that are in the system that meet criteria such as tagged as send to the Southwest region, whatever it is. That then is available to get that stream of data and do whatever you want with it. By default we have a system that will replicate it to other DX clusters anywhere in the world. So that's why it's content replication the content router it will route anywhere in the world subsets of the data. But it's an open API. So you can do whatever you can dream up with that API as well. In our December release in our second release Dell actually created a set of standardized metadata tags and we're encouraging not a completely requiring but strongly encouraging our ISV partners to write a set of standardized metadata tags down with the object whenever they're creating the objects. And this medical for instance was a big ask for this because they may have five or six applications in a hospital that all need to be archived. Well the only search was each individual application. So the payroll app versus the pharmacy versus the cardiology each one of them had their individual and they couldn't search across all things. But if they get each of those apps to fill the metadata field then they can search and find all of the instances of Mike Melson and we can mark him as dead or whatever we need to do there in the metadata. We can modify, we can modify, you know. But we can say Mike found a cure for cancer and we can update that across all of the records. Thank you for going positive. Yeah, I got it. Appreciate it. Yeah, yeah. Well and actually Michael Dell talked a little bit about that in a keynote today is around how the medical community has been in some ways very non-science based and so and some of that's driven by privacy, right? Cause I'd like to know how it worked out for you when you took that medication but for privacy reasons I don't get to. Right. So are you seeing interesting applications? Some of the most cutting edge things that I've seen have just come out of conversations with people in the medical cause they're usually pretty willing to they write their own software anyway. So they're not scared about making a border thing and we were in a conversation with a big medical company out on the West Coast and they were saying, well we can just do HTTP range reads and make it work and I went, well I'd explain that. Well you can read in HTTP a chunk of a file without having to read the whole file from the end. So they want to write like 10 copies of the file and retrieve 10 chunks of that file and put them back together so they're retrieving it 10 times faster than they would from a file system for picking it up from the beginning to the end and we're just going, well it's just a standard part of HTTP it just exists out there but for someone to create that creative application to do that and they want to see their medical images faster than their competitors so they're out figuring out ways to do that. The other thing they can do since we have the ability to write multiple copies the default is like a minimum of two and a maximum of 16 but you can change those things. So they want to write like 15 copies of the application or the object when it's first created so that a lot of doctors for the first couple of weeks can get to it and then two weeks later it has a tag that drops it down to two copies for the longer term retention so that type of metadata manipulation and tagging can be created at the time that the object is written instead of having to be post-processed they'd also possibly have a tag that said delete this file at the end of seven years and so your application didn't have to go crawl file systems to create deletes they're just life points that exist so it's a different kind of tool. Now Perot's systems has got a lot of expertise in the area of medical, right? Correct. And so how are you three I mean you're not part of Perot Perot's part of Dell but how does Koringa Dell proper and Perot's system work together? Very well together we have a large, still I think in prototype states but it's a large application for Stanford Medical that Perot was involved in supporting out in California and we actually set up DX clusters with TerraMedica, one of our use partners and so TerraMedica performs the whole Paxus layer to connect to all the modalities and then they as they pool the product in an equal logic for their almost spooling type of storage well it has to stay there until it reaches a level of maturity that it's reached the doctors updated at the pharmacy of the different thing and then it automatically moves through and stored into the DX with the long time archive function and then they replicate between their two hospitals so that they've got complete copies of everything with one and the other and that was all a Perot integration and Perot did all of that. There's some significant networking can get involved in this and so that's where Perot and those people do an awesome job because they'll go in and consult and analyze and figure out a person's network so that they overcome the fears of going through it so they've been great partners and it's fun because they're smart people and they learn fast and so as the more you work with them they instantly start coming up with new ideas well I can use this over here I can use it over there because they see that use case evolving. We were talking to some of the Ocarina team and when you start thinking about replicating data over distance and some of this data particularly medical and entertainment so some of those files get mighty big and suck up a lot of bandwidth so what's the opportunity but if you've got to preserve content in its immutable state, how do you guys work together what's the opportunity for you guys to work together long term? What can you do? What can't you do? I think it's a tremendous opportunity when you look at the intelligence of the Ocarina solution it really goes about how they do compression and de-dupe very very differently and very very smartly so it really is just a beautiful marriage of two very compatible technologies I think you heard earlier that Ocarina and DX are going to be integrated very soon here the first to integrate the Ocarina technology I think it makes a lot of sense to bring that out first because they add so much value to the immutable story because of the way they do it. I appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE with us just wanted to see what we've got coming up next we're going to take a quick break now, okay? I'm John MacArthur I'm here with our guests from Caringo and Dell talking about immutable data on Silicon Angle, theCUBE the premier broadcast of tech events worldwide or at least here in the United States that's good you're going to let Kelly do the intros and exits because