>> Live from Las Vegas, It's theCube. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is day three of three days live wall to wall coverage of VMworld 2018. This is theCube, I'm Stu Miniman, and my co-host this morning is Justin Warren. How about I welcome back to our program two Cube Alum's from the VMVare storage and availity business unit. Yanbing Li, second time in The Cube this week, is the senior vice president >> Yes. >> and general manager of the group. And Christos Karamanolis, is the fellow and CTO, thank you both for joining us. >> Great to be here. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so first of all, congratulations. A lot of news this week, a lot of excitement around it. And we're talking off cameras, there's so much there that people don't understand some of the work that went into this. And some highlights as to things that I know VMWare thinks will be very game changing over the next couple of years. So, we're excited to dig into this. Yanbing, why don't you start us off with a little bit of an overview from your group as to the news this week. >> Yeah, happy to do that. I think, so, we are seeing a lot of customer energy around what we're doing in storage and availability. You know, there's huge momentum behind product like vSan and our customers are truly embracing HCI in very mainstream use cases, and we've seen customer after customer have gone all in, meaning they're taking HCI and made a determination to run that for all of their virtualized workload. So, very exciting time. But what's more interesting is their expanded view on what HCI is about. Certainly, we started with virtualizing computer and storage together on servers. But we're seeing rapid expansion of that definition. You know, we've been a believer that HCI is foundationally a software lab architecture. I think know, there's more recognition in that. And it's also going from just computers and storage to the full stack of the entire software defined data center. It's expanding into the cloud, as you've seen from VMCI WS. It's expanding to the edge, expanding from just traditional apps to cloud native apps. You know, we've announced beta for vSan to become the storage platform for Kubernetes' Navisphere environment. So, a lot of exciting expansion around how customers want to see HCI. And if you look at HCI, hybrid cloud, SDDC, the boundary around these three is not very very clear. I think they're all converging to work, something that's very common. >> Yeah, Christos? I want you to help unpack this a little bit for us. I remember speaking to you a couple of years ago, and your team. We know how many years of effort went into, set the ground work for vSan. with the underlying things that arrived with the API's, and development with your partner ecosystem. Taking vSan as a foundation... Oh, it's going to work with Kubernetes and cloud and everything. It's not a simple port, like, you know, no offense to the hardware people, but putting it on a new platform? Alright, you need to test it, integrate it, make it a couple tweaks, but. The software level, there's a lot of things that go on here. Talk about what the team's been working on, some of the big architectural things that've been happening. >> Oh, yes, absolutely. There are some fundamental changes. We never stop, we never declare that we have finished what we are doing. Obviously, the world is changing around us. Not only the hardware, as you know. There are many important changes there, with NVMe becoming now very prevalent, and renewed aero-technologies appearing, like persistent memory. But, for us, a focal point the last year or so has been, how do we move our entire software stack data on being outlined earlier, into any type of environment, including public clouds? So, you see now, with a few more clouds in AWS, the customers can run applications there without having to re-platform them. It's the exact same environment. So, a keystone of that environment is the storage. How do you virtualize storage? How do you deal with any type of infrastructure? So, vSan was developed for physical devices, SS disc and magnetic disc, more recently NVMe. Now, what we want to give is the option to our customers to use the cost efficiencies of cloud storage. Without the those sacrificing the semantics, the properties the vSphere stack. So, we did a lot of engineering to make vSan work on top of EBS. So, it may sound simple when you announce it at the keynote of VMWorld, but it took lot of hard engineering to adapt a platform. vSphere and vSan was designed for physical hardware, do not work on virtual storage volume. So, that is just one example, there are more examples. For cloud-native use cases, as you said. >> Yeah, I don't think people quite understand the implications of that. The fact that you can use things in the same way in multiple different locations, the whole idea behind multi-cloud-- If you can operate it in the same way as you can on site as you can in whichever cloud you choose. For enterprises who are used to doing things one way, and have made big investments in VMWare, this just opens up an entire universe of opportunity for them. >> Absolutely, and you get the best of both worlds, right? You have the same operational model, the same characteristics I can run now on Amazon applications that use vSphere, ETSI, or the motion pictures that require cell storage. On the cloud, you do not have cell storage. EBS volumes can be accessed by one host at a time, and like stores that need the networks, and vSan brings those stores their networks and semantics, all in software of course, on the cloud. So, I can run my traditional applications, as well as some new generation applications. And for us, strategically, what we've done with EBS? If you think about that is one step into a much bolder vision where vSan becomes this common storage platform that virtualize any type of storage. Physical, or cloud, or virtual, so we expose the same operational model, and the same store semantics to all those who run these three platforms. And this is, you know, just one step. >> And it's not how you-- there is the common operation model that's very appealing to all the enterprise customers. But we are truly marrying the strength and the capabilities of vSan and vSphere and the VMR platform was what EBS uniquely provide. That's elasticity, scalability, but you know, we have a much richer set of data services that we've already viewed into the whole VMR stack. >> Yeah, Yanbing, you bring up some really interesting points. When we put our critical analysis hat on, when the partnership was announced. It was like, "Well, Amazon's got access to 500,000 "VMWare customers, we're going to start "getting customers comfortable with Amazon. Great, they can start moving over." The thing that really caught a lot our attention is, it's some of the Amazon services that are now coming to the VMWare customers. So, EBS is a really good one. When you talk about, you know, the database capabilities that Amazon has, that now I can do on premises, this is a partnership, a two-way street. Its not, you know, just a one way. Maybe speak a little bit about that maturation, and, you know, definitely want to get from Christos, also. There's questions about some of the technical ways of how that works. >> Yeah, what I'm excited is exactly what you described. This is not a one way street, it's really bi-directional. And the levels of collaboration is not just superficial. It's deep levels of integration and leveraging each other to strength, in terms of both technology as well as customer reach. I think that what make the partnership is, you know, people can see that is taking to whole new level. And Christos has been very deeply involved with the various solution architects, and when we examine how we take RDS back on Prime to a VMR environment, I think he can tell a lot more stories behind that. >> For us, actually, it was a great learning experience, I must admit. Because, obviously, we see strongly the desire for our classroom is to start moving from managing the low level, nitty gritty details of the physical IT infrastructure, which we were, you know, traditionally helping them to do, to moving up the starter. Many of them now, they want to have their own users, their own customers, internal customers, to run all those applications. And what are the most critical components of business critical applications? They are the databases, right? So, how can we make the life of our customers easier, how can we provide them the tools to offer data, databases, as a service to their own users? So, this has been our high level objective, and of course, our partnership with AWS helps us deliver some of those properties. >> Christos, I want you to go one level deeper for us. Because some people it's like, >> I'd be happy to. "Wait, RDS, that's, you know, the cool new databases "in Amazon. Wait, I can do something on--" Is that an extension, am I putting things back and forth? Those of us that lived through the virtualization were getting databases just virtualized took years and a lot of hard work. And, I can't just have a database spanning between these, and moving back and forth. This isn't, you know, -- We haven't broken the laws of physics. >> We have not, because here-- >> Help us explain >> What is and isn't possible today. >> Absolutely. First of all, let me highlight what are the main pain points of customers. It's one thing to set up your application and install it and run it. But then there are all the day two operations, right? How do you patch the software, the operating system, the database? How do you scale it, up or down? How do you, even more to the performance, how do you do data protection, backup, disaster recovery? Those are really painful, difficult tasks, that involve a lot of work from expert database administrators that they'd rather be doing some of the important things that address the business earnings, right? So, our objective is to address this. Now, to your point, how do we, you know? What about those laws of physics? How can we have services on the cloud and service on a premise? What we announce here, this RDS, Relational Database Services, on VMWare, it is a fully stand alone service that runs on VMWare environment on premises. There are no dependencies on the public cloud, you have your data sets on your own data centers, and this is actually a major requirement of customers. Whether it's for compliance reasons, or security, or company policy, we insure that your data stays in your data center, while you still get all the benefits of a managed database that you don't need to do all those, you know, little tedious operational tasks I mentioned earlier. Moreover, we support data protection using, actually, underlying vSphere features. Like ETSI and clustering, or even data protection by creating copies of your database in another available domain within your data center. And this is a lot of work that VMWare did to make this happen, as you can imagine. So, that's a lot of infrastructural work, but we support the full range of features that you get on AWS, without having to go over the wire and, you know, break those laws of physics. >> I don't think people have quite understood how profound that is. We're here at a VMWare show, I've spent a lot of time with developers, and the developers are going to love this. Because, now they can use exactly the same way that they operate in public cloud, which they've loved for many years. Being able to do that on site? The way application development is going to happen inside enterprises, where they want to keep it on site, they want to keep it under they're own control, they want their data secured inside their own data centers. The ability for them to do that, and still develop applications in the same way that they could as cloud-native? Cloud-native now means that it runs on site. This is going to be amazing. >> Absolutely. Our customers explicitly tell us that they want to consume, not storage, but data. Those abstractions that matter to the application. So much so, that they have been asking us already, "Hmmm, what is next?", right? "Can you offer us some of this new generation databases?", you know, "the Mongoose or the Cassandra's of the world? "Can we have some similar experience with those "because they're very painful to deploy "and manage in the data centers." So, I cannot make any commitment, of course, but this is an indication of how much interest there is in this type of services. >> Yeah, it really does show you, I think, some of the strategic intent from VMWare. And this is a very clear move for what is going to be possible for customers to actually be able to do on site, it's really quite exciting. >> And for us, you know. Our role providing all the storage related capability, and we've been strongly expanding our application footprint to cover the Hadoop, the Cassandra, the Mango DV type of application as well as containerize the applications. And, you know, we have introduced a lot of new capability or solution that address exactly like that. >> Containerize the applications, for example, against the announcement, I think, didn't receive the attention, that in my opinion, it deserved is supporting natively in vSphere, and with vSan, specifically, cloud-native use cases. Actually, we're introducing a controlled playing, and expanding our store's controlled playing, to manage natively, container volumes. So, now, the same way today, our customers can visit builders through the UI or API's, and have management workflows for virtual machines and virtual disc, VMDK's. Now, they can also manage volumes of containers. And, as you've heard also, we are working with Kubernetes being our main focal point and with PKS to support natively Kubernetes on vSphere, down the road. >> Yeah, great point. I wonder, since we're talking about storage here, you've talked about Kubernetes, we talked about what's in the cloud and on premises. Give us the updated view how VMWare views and how you're helping customers with-- Data can't-- I can't just move, you know, data anywhere, so. While it's good to have similar frameworks, and different-- similar tools there, but still, where data lives, what I move, how I move it, do I move it, how that whole, kind of, data locality is seen today? >> The answer, we have been very keen in defining what we doing in the broader category of data management. From data mobility to protection to analytics, and to life cycle management, the whole slew of that. And we've been starting by building a lot of-- First of all, our job is to make vSan a storage platform that can enable these different demands of data. So, we've expanded vSan's roll from purely from delivering block storage now to offer file, and down the road, object. Cuz a lot of the new data will be consumed in an object like format. And we've also been painting our roadmap for the broader data management, so. >> Yes, exactly. On one hand, we'll provide the platform for primary storage that serves all the needs of the applications, block, file, object, we may even consider a native file interface, actually, for zero data copies, since you were asking about the technical details. I'm very excited about that, you know. We'll see, some of these things will come in the future. But, then, given that you have the platform, what you are building on top of that is data mobility and data protection workflows that are driven by policies. The very first step in that direction is our disaster recovery as a service we offer for hybrid clouds. There, the new model is that, even how you manage your data is as a service. Not a traditional model of installing software and a hundred different bits and pieces that have to integrate with each other and operate. Very simple, you go to a portal, and you manage your data, in this case, starting with disaster recovery use cases. You specify policies, like recovery point objectives. Down the road you may also give the options for recover time objectives. And, also, specify, by policies, what of your data want to be archived and stay on your data center, what of the data can go to the public cloud through your, you know, the hybrid models of cloud model we offer. So, our goal down the road is quite ambitious in offering comprehensive, uniform data management across clouds, that goes all the way from the edge, your Motofy's, your oil rig, all the way to the enterprise, the Cassandra's, to the hybrid clouds. And data mobility there is, you know, using our data transport, our archival capabilities that are coming with vSan Native Snapshot that we also announced at this VMWorld. These will give you the ability to manage your data across all those environments. >> Alright, so, last thing I just want to say. It's interesting to watch this space because we say there's a lot happening under the scenes that people don't understand. I was seeing some research lately saying where AWS lives in the storage ecosystem. I've written an article, couple a years ago. They were the quiet, billion dollar, you know, storage company. And one analyst firm said,"Oh, they're number 3, "and they'll be number 1 in storage." Wikibon actually published a report this month talking about what we call true private cloud. And in our support where we look at the software ecosystem, Yanbing, do you remember who we had number 1 on the list there when you picked >> Ah, yeah... software plus the ecosystem around there for -- >> I remember it clearly, you said it's VMWare. >> Yeah, so, you know, it surprises some people when you look it there, but I'm sure it's no surprise to you and your team, I'm sure. >> So, you know what we've started with vSan is quickly becoming a big way of how all of vSphere customers consume storage. And certainly, that has been our initial focus. But what we are doing for the cloud, what we are doing for the next generation applications. I think we are re-imagining a lot of the things. And it's great to have people like Christos, who started this journey many many years ago, and continue to expand our horizon. Yeah, this is an exciting time for our business unit, and certainly for VMWare, and our customers. >> Christos, in the end, really appreciate us being able to geek out, dig into some of the really important innovations happening in this space. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, still a full third day live coverage here from VMWorld 2018, thanks for watching theCube.

>> live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's the King covering via World 2016 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host stew minimum. Welcome back to the Cube here at VM World 2016. Happy to welcome back to the PO program. Christos Caramel analysts. Who's the fellow in CTO of the V A more storage and availability business unit. Thank you for joining us again. >> About to be buck >> Storage is a big focus here. Big announcements around. Not only the sand, but everything happened in the storage room. Tell us what you've been working on the last year. >> Yeah, quite a few things. As you know, Miss Olsen has become practically mainstream product now, especially since we saved the very same 6.2 back in March 2016 with a number of new enterprise grade features for space efficiency. New availability. Fisher's with the razor calls right 56 The product is really taking off. Taking off, especially in old flask configurations, is becoming the predominant model that our customers are using. So ultimately, of course, customers buy a new product like this on and hyper converts product because of the operational efficiencies and brings to their data centers. The way I present this is you have the personal efficiency off public clouds into your private data center now. But this is for me is thus the stepping stone for even a longer term term, bolder vision will have around the stores, the data management. So, the last several months now, I have been working on a new range of projects. Main theme. There is moving up the stock from stores and the physical infrastructure implications. It has two data management on starting with data protection on overall and managing the life cycle of your data for protection, for disaster recovery, for archival, so that you can have tools to be able to effectively and efficiently discover your data. Mine your data. Use them by new applications, including cloud native applications and a dent even know that this may sound a little controversial coming from Vienna, where sitio even moving your data to public clouds and allow application mobility freely between private public clouds. >> Yeah, it's really interesting and wonder if you can packed out a little bit for us, Veum, where, of course, really dominant, the Enterprise Data Center. We're trying to understand where Veum, where fits into the public cloud on how you cut both support the existing ecosystem and move forward. So, you know, it's interesting off >> course. There are silences. There are many open questions. I do not claim that we have the answers to everything. Everything. But you do see that we put a lot of emphasis on that because it is obvious that the I T world is evolving. Our own customers are gradually slowly, but certainly there start incorporating public clouds into the bigger I T organizations that have. So our goal is to start delivering value to our customers based on clouds, starting with what they have today into the data centers. Let me give you a specific example in the case of Virtual San, who have some really cool tools for Mona's in your infrastructure in a holistic way, computer networking and now stores a SZ part of that you have ah solutions and tools that allow the customer to monitor constantly there covered infrastructure, the configuration of that. The class is the network servers controller's down to individual devices, and we provide a lot of data to the customers, not only for the health but also for the performance off the off the infrastructure data to the customer can today used to perform root cause analysis of potential issues to decide how to optimize there. Infrastructure in the world clothes. But that is actually pretty no sophisticated house. You cannot expect a lot 500 thousands 1000 customers. Of'em were to be ableto do this kind of sophisticate analysis. So what we're working on right now is a set off analytics tools that do all this data Kranz ink and analysis a root cause analysis on DDE evaluation of the infrastructure on because of the customer instead of providing data now we're providing answers and suggestions now way want to be able to deliver those analytics in a very rapid cadence. So what we do is we develop all those things in via Morse. Cloud will collect data from the customer side through telemetry, the emir's phone home product, and we get off the data up in our club. We crunch the data on because of the customer, and we use really sophisticated methods that will be evolving over time and eventually will be delivering feedback and suggestions at a kind level to the customer that can be actionable. For example, weekend point out that certain firm were the 1st 1 off certain controllers, and the infrastructure is falling behind. I may have problems or point out to a certain SS thes uh, a problem getting close to the end off life. For more sophisticated thing. Starts us reconfigure your application with a different policy for data distribution to achieve better performers. The interesting thing is that going to be, you're going to be combining data from must multiple sites, multiple customers to be able to do this holistic analytics and say, You know what? Based on trance, I see. Another customer says. It says You also do that. Now they're really coursing out of this is that the customer does not have to go and use yet another portal on a public cloud to take advantage of that. But they in fact, we send all that feedback through the this fear you. I own premise to the customers, so really cool. So you have the best of both wars. There are big development off analytics using actually behind the senses a really complex cloud native application with the existing tools that the customers are usedto in on premise. So this is just one example >> crystals. Could you give us a little bit of insight as the guiding light for your development process? Do you use that kind of core customers that you're pulling in and working in? Is it a mandate from above that says, you know, Hey, we need to build a more robust and move up the stack. You know, what are some of the pieces that lead to the development that you >> know? This is a very interesting point. I must start by stating that vehement has always bean admitting they're driven company. Um, and look for products were, you know, ideas that were, you know, Martin by engineers, while others thought that was not your not even visible, of course, Mutualization in several stages. But features like the Muslim or stores of emotion Oreo even, you know, ideas kind of ritual, son, right. Claiming that I could do very effectively rate six in software was something that was not really, you know, appreciated in the industrial area stages. So a lot of the innovation is a grassroots innovation. We have our engineers exposed directly to customers customer problems off course. They also understand what is happening in the industry. The trends, whether that is encounter as its case these days with a new generation off first or its cover that is emerging, or where that that is a trend. Samoan customers, for example, using public clouds in certain ways where that is for doing testing dead or archiving their data way. Observe those things and then through a grassroots. Therefore, all this get amalgamated into some concrete ideas. I'm not saying that all those ideas result into products, but we definitely have a very open mind in letting engineers experiment and prove sometimes common sense to be wrong. So this is the process thesis. How Virtual Son started were a couple of us went to our CEO back then for marriage and suggested we do this drastic thing that is called no softer stores on that you can run the soft store of stock in software on the same servers that we visualize, and we're under V. M. So this is really how the process has always been working and this is still the case and we're very proud of this culture. This is one way we're actually tracking opens enduring talent in the competent. >> Yeah, I was loved digging into some of the innovation processes. Had a good chat with Steve Harris, former CEO of GM, where if I remember right? One of the thing processes user called flings, whereas you can actually get visibility from the outside it to some of those kind of trials and things that are going on that aren't yet fully supported yet. >> Absolutely. And that is still the case. Probably the best known fling these days is the HTML five days they you I for your sex, which is used extensively, both internally in the humor where it actually started as a tool for that purpose, but now wild by the community. And that Flynn gave us a lot off insides and how to evolve our mainstream user interface for for this fear, proper notes, Astoria sex. So this is exactly this alternative process that leads us to test the water and feel much more confident when we make bigger and investments in in Ireland, >> right architecturally via Moore has been around for quite a while now. I had a good talk with such a Pagani Who? I m f s earlier today and we were talking about, you know, new applications and new architectures when vms foot fest was built. You know, nobody's thinking about containers. You know, they weren't thinking about applications like duper some of these more cloud native applications. How do you take into consideration where things were going? How did these fit into, you know, kind of traditional VM wear V sphere. You know what things need to change? How do you look at kind of the code basis? >> Right. So first of all of'em affairs, I must say it's probably the most mature and most widely adopted class. The file system in the industry for over 10 years now has been used to visualize enterprise grade store, its stores, alien networks, and it was going to have a role for many years to come. But on the other hand, we all are technologists, and we understand that the product is designed with certain assumptions and constraints, and the EM affairs was designed back in the meat to thousands toe address the requirements for ritual izing lungs, and you know the traditional volumes that you'd be consuming from a disgrace. Now the world is changing, right. We have a whole new generation off solid state devices for stores. Servers on softer on commodity servers with Commodity stores Devices is becoming as your own reports that have been indicating the predominant no mortal of delivering stores in there in the enterprise that the sender and off course in even public clouds with copper scale storage. So what? The requirements there? Some things are changing. You need the store. Its plot from that can really take out the violence of the very low latency is off those devices. I was at Intel Developer for form a couple of weeks ago, and their intel announced for first time performance numbers for the new generation off Envy Me devices obtained that include the three D Chris Point technology under the covers. Latents is at around 10 microseconds, right and Iost per second scruples that are in the several kinds of thousands, if not millions so completely young game changer. And that is not the only company that is coming up with this technology. So you need to invest now in new technologies that can take the can harness the capabilities of this new devices, lightweights protocols like Envy me. In fact, I see envy me as the protocol is not just a protocol to accident device, but I can see a future for that off. Replacing Scott Z into the software start soon, and this is committing specific days. But soon will be sipping a vision off this fear that comes with ritual and via me in the guest visual ization of envy Me. So you can see here where we're heading and envy me, becoming a predominant protocol for the transport and for brutalizing stores. >> Interesting. And we've got a long history of things that start on. The guests Usually then takes a lot of engineering work to get them down to the hyper visor themselves. So, you know, without having to give away too much, is that we see that kind of progression sometime in the future. For some of these new memory, architectures >> certainly certainly are the sex store stock, and this is the stuff that is used by Veum infest by ritual son. It has been designed again for another era off stores. Now we are regarding a lot of these things there, and I cannot disclose too much detail, obviously, but I can tell that it's going to be a very different software stock. Much leaner, much more optimized for local, very fast devices and ultimately envying me is going to be a key technology in this new store stock. >> All right, so just last follow up on that topic. I think about kind of a new memory architectures. What's going on? As of September 7th, Del will acquire TMC. There's the relationship between A. M, C and V M wear. So could we expect some of these new memory technologies impacting things to be something that you'll work even closer with a deli emcee? And >> that is definitely case irrespective off the deal between the emcee and Dell, which, as you said, it's going to be closing. It seems pretty soon. From what I read in the newspapers, >> Michael confirmed, it's finally official. Some of the pathetic ALS. >> Yes, we're moving ahead with this new technologists, and we're working closely with all the partners micro intel and many of the other car vendors that are introducing such technologies to incorporate them into our systems into our software, for example, I see great opportunities for this very fast Cayenne dude owns but still quite expensive technologies to be used, for example, to store meta data. Things like duplication. Costabile is those kind off meta data that have an impact through because of my own verification to the performance that is perceived by the application by moving meta data like that into those tears are going to make a great difference in terms of performance consistent, late and see predictability of the day for the application. Now, thanks to the relations with del Auntie em. See, I can hope that some of these technologies will find their way into several platforms sooner than later. So all of us and our customers would benefit from that. >> All right? What? Christos really appreciate getting the update from you. Lots happening on the storage world. We're kind of talking about. One of my things coming into this this'll week was, if we can really simplify storage, we might actually have a storage. This world doesn't mean it reduces the value of storage or the importance of it, but gonna help the users to be able to move beyond that, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the emerald 2016. You're watching the Cube. Glad to be here. Whatever. Apply from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's the King covering via World 2016 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host stew minimum. Welcome back to the Cube here at VM World 2016. Happy to welcome back to the PO program. Christos Caramel analysts. Who's the fellow in CTO of the V A more storage and availability business unit. Thank you for joining us again. >> Glad to be back.

Cisco extracting the signal from the noise it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors now your host still minimun welcome back to vmworld 2015 here in San Francisco this is SiliconANGLE tv's live broadcast of V emerald 2015 I'm stupid a man with Wikibon calm happy to have on this segment talking about the future of software-defined storage hyper converged everything there is Christo's Carol Manolos who's the CTO and principal engineer in the vmware storage group because those first time in the cube thank you for joining us thank you for having me here all right so you know the buzz over the last year when one of the hottest topics inside the vmware ecosystem has been this whole you know virtual sand v vols of course has had you know quite a bit of activity can he first set for us you know what what's your role inside vmware how long you been there sure i've been a long time ER at vmware I've been with VMware for 10 years almost now and for most of this time I've been working on storage and availability products the last few years I've been working on virtual son specifically I was one of very original architects of the product and the people that had the original idea and most recently the last few months have have had a wider olam now the the city of the business unit with a responsibility for technical insight and robot for a range of products not only this on but also our availability products course Torres features and included in this yeah sir Sir sir Sir Christos Charles said I think their stuff ever member 8 500 engineer's inside that the storage unit 10 years ago yeah I'm curious how many were in that group oh we were a handful we could you know you could always walk down the hallway to the engineer you need to deal with so yes it has been a no a very big change in that respect even though invent a new york teams we still maintain a a mentality of a small company startup of you is where everybody works closely with everybody else and even though now we're distributed we organize our projects such a way that teams are very agile they work very closely together yes so I mean I think everybody that watches this space knows that you know VMware's always had a lot of storage pieces and interaction you know back to you know what happens with SRM wood storage vmotion when that came out but the role has become a lot more front and center when you talk about what's happening with v Vols and virtual sand can you just give us kind of your personal journey and insight as that dress actually this goes back many years I would say probably sometime around two thousand nine where we started thinking a little bit more fundamentally about what is the stores how is the industry what in this industry evolving and what do we see VMR all banking this a new world and we made an explicit decision that we need to drive the narration that we need to drive the industry in a direction would be we believe this the best direction for our customers current and future so our vision around stores from back then in 2009 when actually we we shared a white paper with a many partners back then was twofold on one hand we're going to introduce a management model from from storage that is much more application centric a model where the owner the application that administrator can require in at a high level in the form of policies as we call them what they want from the storage without necessarily having to know all the gory details of the hardware or implementation details of every individual vendors products so you say what you want know how to do it and then the storage platform should be able to automatically configure provision your stores and so that you get a quality of service the properties you want for your application that is one side and that led us to a number of projects and features now that range from storage policy based management to virtual volumes and a number of data protection as solutions around that on the other hand we also decided that we should really give to our customers a storage platform that implements that vision in the best possible way so that was that you know the genesis of a virtual son essentially virtual son is vmware's own storage platform that follows a certain architecture we decided that a hyper converts architecture is the best way to go because meth emits the best possible way the requirements of our customers requirements for streamlined simple procurement deployment configuration and operational management of of their stores infrastructure and do that in a way that does not require specialization that doesn't require to be expert in any specific vendors products or you know don't need to even know the gold details of their storage hardware instead of that we want to offer to the customers a way to manage stores in the same way they manage today their computing infrastructure the computer resources and now with NSX also the network resources a unified model we can manage their clusters that provide all the fundamental services they need for their applications yeah I think Charles Phan had a good way of looking at it he said we don't think of a visa and cluster it's just a vsphere cluster that uses V Sam so it's very different operational model you know we know that the growth of the virtualization admin you know highlighted always this year and we see you know record numbers of attendees so talk a little bit about you know is this you know a major shift or you know it just kind of a continuation an expansion of what you know we've been seeing from vSphere so last decade I would like to differentiate here since you know I'm an engineer that's how the technology and the product the the visa on storage space room has been designed as its genetic storage platform and here at vmware will have a number of sessions where we actually talked about that and we stress some of the advantage of that approach now for the specific product we have we're releasing we have released and we are supporting now we decide to take a certain packaging approach if you wish which is make this product very easy to manage by essentially taking making the storage cluster to be the same as your computer pastor that has sounds like a very simple idea but has tremendous benefits starting from the fact that we'd only need to introduce new management obstructions you don't have to configure and provision your store ads and then decide which host has visibility which data store all those no fencing and zoning techniques that you probably are very familiar yourself with which actually the kind of complex management operations we try to eliminate moreover by making this simple constraint very simple constraint on the product we allowed management to be done with simple extensions to existing management abstractions and workflows and even api's that are extremely common among our customers that they're used to write scripts or code that automate the management of every infrastructure so with virtual Sun now we have added a few new API s and extend a few existing API so for the vSphere at mean this is a natural extension of managing their computer clusters yeah I I thought just came to me because you know you think back as to what happened in storage kind of last 15 years you know there was a many attempts to do what we called storage virtualization and what a layer of abstraction in there and try to help clean it up well storage is pretty complex and while virtualization from a compute standpoint we've seen huge benefit from a storage pan standpoint there were usually real limits as to I couldn't leverage the functionality underneath it true head of genera tejan 80 underneath was difficult um you're not trying to virtualize storage here at all i don't think what you really help to simplify what's happening and you're leveraging the platform that you have is that a fair statement it is from from a customer's perspective yes it is but from a technology guess there is there are some complexity there obviously but that is the whole point we're trying to hide the complexities and deal with some of those I've worked on some of those early virtualization products myself what we're trying to do is hide all that complexity that we were exposing to the administrators before and help them in a way which is automated where the options are the obvious ones and because we we have certain constraints we have the class as we have the certain types of hardware we can afford to do some of those things automatically now and so that in addition to an extensive card compatibility list certification process who have allows to deal with a broad range of hardware without having to expose some of the gory details of the decisions of how you configure that hardware up to the administrator so but as you pointed out very well from the administrator this is not really about stores this is about the data consumption needs of their applications and that is exactly that the abstractions were exposing upstream to the application of the administrator yeah thnkx it could practically break down some of the technology versus the packaging one of the frustrations I've had when people look at this market is they tend to say okay when the first version comes out there and we shrink wrapped it and you know and shipped it out as here's the skew and here's the sheet metal and they're like oh okay hyper convergence it's a box and it's like hyper convergence as a trend the box is the least interesting piece of this it's super important to have the stack the hard worked out a bit early list who have tested that out I mean that if we simplify that that that's such a huge savings because operationally we know how things break but I want to give you know you're CTO hat you know what do you see as the vision you know this dissolution is good today but it's not the end where does this journey take us and what what's the vision going for this is the few billion dollars question I guess so I see two two directions there on one hand we today we have a platform that as we discuss already the management which is centered around the management of your corner of your computer clusters and those compute classes those management obstructs exists in vsphere today because they they're the core around which we do distributes resource scheduling around which we deploy features such as AIT's a DRS vMotion and why do you have those because applications today are the so-called monolithic applications they do not have natively the ability to be fault tolerant to be highly available to be able to tolerate and co Tori's resource changes themselves so this is why vSphere has been so successful because we add all these business continuity features to applications that had no idea about such concepts when they were in similar design now we're moving gradually towards a wall of cloud native applications their platform applications whatever you want to to call them where we see that the application by definition is more aware of the infrastructure scalability distribution and even fault tolerance features are natively integrating the application so Rick needs for things like DRS or HEA are very different or may not even exist in some of the new applications however now we see these applications having scalability requires which exceed the current limits of vSphere clusters computer classes which are up to 64 node as you understand so one set of challenges and opportunities I see ahead of us is how to deal with storage infrastructures that can meet the demands of those applications how can we use a plot from like a virtual Sun to extend it and deal with the management of infrastructures that span thousands perhaps tens of thousands of physical cause with applications that even our distribute across geographical location so one set of challenges is management of storage infrastructure at very large scale and we have a few interesting ideas and I had the opportunity to talk to customers today in a couple of events about those on one hand what we are exploring as we speak with a few prototypes in the lab is new management models where we collect and process a lot of data that have to do with the physical infrastructure with the application workers that ran on that virtual infrastructure we store them we process them and through that processing and analytics we run on them we provide the users we fed a holistic view of their infrastructure allowing them to zoom in and air in the areas of interest where that those areas have to do with problems and help them do troubleshooting and help them decide what is what are the right remediation actions or there is just a awareness of how the application is doing how it is evolving and what are the chances that should be aware of so they're prepared in terms of investment in hardware infrastructure and so on so that is one one dimension that's I'm very excited that we have some really cool ideas there are other dimension has to do with this consumption of storage I said all these nice things about fine grain policy based management where an application gets the quality of service requires without the administrator need to having to do any fine grain configuration of physical hardware well we want to take this model to go beyond traditional virtual machines with the ritual skazhi disk to a model where applications that use other obstructions perhaps file systems or native blog protocols like nvme or perhaps even object stores like ancestry and similar types of stores that they can really take advantage of a single platform with a unified management model along the lines of what I described a few seconds ago but still be able to consume different types of storage and manage them with the same approaches so that is the other thing offered to the applications for example containerized cloud native applications file systems distribute file systems that solve some of the critical problems that we know the address image management sir data volumes and so on well Christmas I feel like I'm looking back to my year to summary that I did on servers and and one of the critiques I gave is current solutions today they're using the same applications typically that sat in your traditional standard ass environments and they hadn't been it's not the modern applications it's not that you know the cloud native hugely scalable architectures you laid out a bunch of the challenges there do you think we're going to hit from a technology standpoint that the growth of those applications and the maturity of this solution set do you think they match pretty well you know yes that's a good question which is you know what we all are not debating here but I believe at a high level we have the building blocks for the technologies that are required I believe we have the ability to scale to infrastructures of thousands of physical we have the ability to provide the storage even a third model of storage with high availability and served by the platform for cloud native applications where I think the bigger the biggest challenges are and where things really you know make a difference is the model of managing those infrastructures and this is something which is a little subjective that is something you have to develop in an iterative fashion jointly with customers and see you know what is the right motor because nobody quite know these things today with this a few of software development teams that have currently built such applications they are very sophisticated or they build applications for very specific environments I think the talents and the opportunity for companies like VMware is to develop a model a management model that allows and facilitates many different software organizations from different companies to take advantage of these new ideas without having to reinvent the wheel from Scrubs all right well Chris does really appreciate you taking time I know you've been talking a lot this week as with all of us trying to keep our voices through the final sprint here lots of stuff to look forward as to the maturation growth of you know this really important trend so then you offend you forget I'm here it was an opportunity to talk with you and appreciate it awesome thank you for watching we'll be right back wrapping up day three here over the next couple hours here were SiliconANGLE tv's coverage of v emerald 2015 thanks for watching you

(upbeat techno music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and it's eco-system partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage day three of three days of coverage, VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas, CUBE wall-to-wall coverage, 94 interviews, two sets, our ninth year covering VMworld, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stuart Miniman on this segment, our next guest is Milin Desai, who is the Vice President and general manager of Cloud Services at VMware, formerly driving the NSX business, been there for multiple years, eight years. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So you've seen the evolution, you've been there, you've been in the boat. NSX, on a good path, doing really well, cloud services, very clear visibility on what strategy is. >> Mm-hmm. >> Private and public, hybrid multi-cloud, validated by the leader AWS and Andy Jassy, again for the second year. So pretty clear visibility at least on what the landscape looks like. >> Mm-hmm. Multiple clouds, software driving all the value. What's the cloud services piece that you're running now? Take a minute to explain what the landscape looks like, what's your charter, what are you trying to do, and what's happening with news and announcements? >> Sure, so about two years back we started on this journey around cloud services. And the premise was that, increasingly, there are two trends taking place which is; SaaS delivered experiences for on prem. So how can we deliver SaaS experiences on prem? As well as the partnership with, you know AWS for VMware cloud on AWS. So the two things started coming together both in terms of a product opportunity, which is VMware cloud AWS. But overall delivering our capabilities as SaaS, both hybrid as well as in the public clouds. So cloud services is a portfolio that delivers VMware services from management, to security, to operations, as SaaS services to the private cloud as well as to the public cloud. >> Tom Corn, the Senior Vice President of general security projects, was just on theCUBE today as well before you came on. He said, I asked him for a prediction and I'll ask you at the end too, for a 2019 prediction, but he said, "I see the conversation starting to be "security as a service someday," and he's kind of like connecting the dots a bit. But that proves the point it's a SAS business model. The services need to be consumable and scalable. This is a key design criteria and a product guiding principal right, for you guys? >> Yes, So increasingly SaaS makes it easy. The value benefits on that is I don't need to operate, it just works and I can get the value out of what we are delivering. And that's really what's driving the adoption of SaaS. It's easy to use, it gets you to outcomes quicker, and I don't need to worry about the management elements of that and so whether it's you take our updates to cloud management, we announced Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, and Code Stream, all delivered as SaaS to our hybrid infrastructure as well as if you want to deploy workloads in AWS or Azure, same thing. AppDefense, Tom's product, is delivered as a SaaS service. VMC on AWS is a managed SaaS service. So you're seeing that come together as VMware. The idea is can we bring that experience on prem as well as in the hybrid cloud? >> Yeah, Milin really interesting topic because often what gets lost when we're talking about multi cloud is what really matters, is applications and the data that sits on top of it. Maybe walk through a little bit, my on premises vs my SASified stuff vs the cloud native and PKS. How much of the business is driven from all of these pieces? >> So the majority of our business right now, is on premise software. Where customers are building and operating the infrastructure with our software. Now the first evolution into SAS was actually with our service providers, who are using the subscription model to deliver VMware as a service to their end customers. And then the second iteration of that is VMware cloud on AWS, which is growing really well. Both in terms of adoption as well of number of customers and now you are seeing the next evolution. So I would say from a numbers standpoint it's low, but in terms of number of customers adopting it, that number is high. So whether it's cloud operations with Wavefront or the whole automations suite that was launched, AppDefense. We are starting to see the shift to SAS but I would say the majority of our customers are on on prem software with VMware cloud foundation which includes NSX, and a visualized management portfolio which has been driving the majority of the revenue. >> I got to ask you about NSX relative to the cloud services because one of the things we've been pontificating and analyzing is how multi cloud is really going to work and we always try to compare and contrast to networking because Stu and I love networking and storage and some of the infrastructure stuff but if you go back into the evolution of TCPIP and what that did for the industry and Gelsinger likes to talk about this too, is NSX the kind of enabler that TCPIP was? TCP and then you had IP, created a lot of value, in inter-networking. What does the customer challenge look like when you're doing multi-cloud? It's not trivial it's hard to do. Is there a inter-operability framework, is it NSX? What could that be? >> Great question. I think as we go from private, to public, to the edge the virtual cloud network is what connects it all together and so definitely from within the data center with now the Velo Cloud acquisition the WAN, and then layering it with analytics and observability with visualized network insight, the portfolio of NSX allows you to connect these disparate data islands and operate very seamlessly, in this hybrid cloud world. Now the same construct applies, when you go native public cloud, where you can connect into AWS or an Azure and that's where, again the Velo Cloud acquisition alongside how NSX is extending its security policy, into AWS and Azure so that you can get the same security posture on prem, at the Edge, in VMC on AWS, with our VCP providers, as well as Native AWS and native Azure. So definitely NSX is that connective tissue, that's why we call it the Virtual Cloud Network, connects the Hybrid Cloud to the Multi Cloud. >> Seamlessly? >> Seamlessly. >> One of the feedbacks I get from users is, you know multi-cloud is challenging. There's that big elephant, how do I get my arms around all of the pieces where'll my data lives? Maybe give us an update there. I did have a chat with Joe Kinsella on theCUBE yesterday. So if CloudHealth Technologies fits into that overall cloud management piece, I'm sure it does, and you can give a little bit of guidance? I'd like to understand how that fits. >> Yes, you know we talked a lot about SAS and delivering VMware services as SAS to vSphere customers but there's this other world where people are going native AWS, native Azure, native GCP. The interesting thing I tell folks is it's very easy to consume cloud but as you start consuming it, you start dealing with tens of thousands of objects, across multiple projects, hundreds of projects across thousands of users. And when you start looking at the problem statements, same things, visibility, lack of visibility, resource management, you tend to over provision to in the cloud, right? By now you're paying by the drip so there's a definite impact to the bottom line. End to end observability and then configuration compliance. Think about this, you're operating at 10X in terms of changes, the chances of making a configuration mistake like leaving an S3 bucket open, are quite high. >> We've seen examples of that, too. >> Exactly, many a CIO have been fired because of that issue. So what we've been seeing with our customers is this has become a data problem, right? So the acquisition of CloudHealth allows us to essentially provide a platform that has that data, and then deliver to our customers in the native cloud, visibility, I say cost management so using reserved instances over on demand, resource management, hey your old provision on your elastic block storage we can reduce the storage capacity and save money. I can optimize RDS better. Sequel right sizing in Azure, so resource management becomes very interesting. Returns on a typical customer with CloudHealth are upwards of 60%. When you take that into consideration with real time security configuration, Secure State was just announced in beta, this week so real time security configuration. When that mistake happens with an S3 bucket being open? Sub 10 seconds we will notify the user that there is a mis-configuration in the cloud, please go fix it. >> Yeah, I'm curious, one of the other challenges is when I have, especially using lots of different SAS providers, public cloud, private cloud, data protection is a big challenge there. I know VMware has a lot of ecosystem partners, one of the hottest things over the couple years. Is that primarily an ecosystem play? How does VMware position there? >> Yeah so in the hybrid cloud world, like you said we have a very strong ecosystem, multiple vendors here exhibiting, there will be some default elements that we bring into vSAN to help kind of the basics of data, you know back up and management but we will definitely continue to partner with our ecosystem when it comes to an aggregate stack of data management but there will be pockets of just simple back up capabilities that you'll start seeing in vSAN, I think we announced the beta of that this week. >> Talk about your organization, do the general managers, do you have a profit loss responsibility so do you have revenue? >> Yes. >> Talk about the team, how you guys are set up. How big is the team? What's the focus? >> Our team, there's two elements to my team. One is my team drives cloud service across VMware so there are folks developing services themselves. The size of the team is now 70 strong across product, marketing and engineering. And then I also work with my counterparts like Mark Lohmeyer, AJ Singh who are building services on our common platform, right? And it's an aggregate to the customer, they come to cloud.vmware.com they federate their enterprise identity, they log in, they see our catalog. It's like a Netflix-like catalog. You can subscribe to it, you get a common experience in terms of billing and essentially start using the services. So it's not only what my team builds but an aggregate what VMware is building and offering to our end users. >> And what go to market do you have? Which products are you doing that go to market for? >> It's all of our SAS based cloud services. We collectively drive the go to market for that as a team working with our corporate marketing team. >> Awesome. >> Yep. >> So that would be a combination of VMware on AWS, AppDefense, now Secure State, Wavefront, and very soon CloudHealth. >> Yeah, a lot of pressure. (laughing) >> Do the SAS product share, do they live in like the AWS marketplace, IBM, you know DOC or what? Where can they get all of them? >> Today you go to cloud.vmare.com and subscribe to them. Certain offers are starting to get into AWS Marketplace, so CloudHealth is actually in the AWS marketplace. >> Sure, sure. >> And we are looking at Wavefront, which is a hidden jewel in our portfolio is also we are thinking about how can get it into the respective marketplaces of Azure, GCP, and others. But today if you want to access any of these services, you simply go and trial it by just going to our website and starting a trial. >> So they've given you all the new stuff, make it happen. AWS, VMware, AWS, vice versa. RDS on premises, you doing that as well? >> Yes. RDS on vSphere, since the announce we've had phenomenal conversations over here. >> Yeah, it's really exciting, I think people don't understand how big this is. >> John, I had a phenomenal conversation with Yanbing and Christos from the storage and availability business who just really broke down how all of that worked in detail. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> The customer interest is high. Someone asked me, why RDS? And they said it's such a hard problem and that was my point exactly, there is such a pain when it comes to managing databases and just like everything else, we started off the conversation, customers want a managed service. They don't want to deal with the intricacies of managing databases, they just want the outcomes from how they access databases. Amazon has solved it very elegantly with RDS, it's one of their most popular services. Why not bring it on prem? So that's been a great engineering partnership we are driving with them, and I'm really excited to bring it to market, shortly. >> Well we're looking forward to keeping in touch, we wanted to actually follow up with you on that. It's a story we're going to be following, certainly developing, it's big news, we love it. Thanks for coming on and spending the time. I got to get you to put a prediction out there for 2019. What do you see happening in 2019 that we're going to be talking about next year at VMworld? Personal prediction, could be a VMware prediction. You've seen a lot of what's going on with NSX, you see what's going on in the big picture, wholistically what is the prediction for 2019? >> It might be a boring prediction, but I fundamentally believe this notion of hybrid being bi-directional in nature. I think you'll see more of that. Even Google announced GKE on vSphere, as an example. So I think you will see more of that come through and it won't be a one way destination conversation that we keep having. And you will see VMware truly be a multicloud company. It won't matter if you're deploying the application in the native cloud, or in a vSphere based cloud. We will help the customer where they land the application. My firm belief is next year when we are here, we'll be talking about stories about how we are helping scale customers in Azure and AWS and GCP on one end, and about how we brought cloud on prem with services like RDS. >> Final question, I'm going to put you on the spot. What do you think is the biggest disruptive enabler for the next 10 years in this bi-directional multi cloud world? Can you point to one this that says, that's going to be the disruptive enabler for the next 10 to 20 years? Is there something out there you can point to, trend, technology, the standard? >> So the way I think about the world is a little bit differently in terms of I truly believe that we are getting inundated by data. I'm not talking about the data that you store in terms of running your business but in terms of the metadata that you run your operations and your infrastructure with. And I believe that the layer that will control that portion, the metadata of infrastructure and applications, we have not even begun to understand where that goes and then you apply AI and ML techniques to that? The idea of, I'll throw a term around here, self driving data centers and self optimizing applications I get really excited but it all begins with that data layer. And we are starting to put the beginning signs with CloudHealth, our private cloud assets to start that process. I'm really excited about how AI/ML meets that data layer to achieve those outcomes. >> It automates IT operations, sounds like automation's coming. Milin, thanks for coming on. Milin Desai, he's the vice president general manager of VMware's cloud services. The hottest area, it's emerging, it's got a lot of attention. We'll be following it, of course, on siliconANGLE and Wikibon and theCUBE. We're day three coverage here in the broadcast booth in Las Vegas in the VM village. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat techno music)