>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back inside the Sands. We are in Las Vegas. We are live here on theCUBE along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. We continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2019 by welcoming in Erik Kaulberg, VP of cloud solutions at Infinidat. Erik, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks, it's nice to see you too. >> So share a little bit at home for the folks who might not be too familiar with Infindat. I know you guys, big in the, in data storage, in terms of what's happening in the enterprise, but shed a little bit of light on that for us. >> Yeah, so Infinidat's all about re-inventing the next generation of data storage at multi-petabyte scale, whether that's for on-prem appliances where we have over 5.4 exabytes deployed now around the world, large enterprises, or whether that's through our cloud services like Neutrix Cloud, which we're talking a lot about today and through the conference, we're solving large data challenges for customers with blocker file storage requirements. We're doing that through technology that gets the price point of hard drives with the performance capabilities of solid state media, DRAM and flash, and we're doing it at very large scale, even though we kind of fly under the radar a bit from a marketing standpoint. >> So there's a lot of interesting things going on. Good storage demand. There's no question that the cloud is eating away at some of the traditional on-prem, and there's very few companies that are gaining share rapidly. You happen to be one of them. You know, Pure Storage grew 15% this quarter. Much, much lower. You know, generally HBE's shrinking. I think Delium C grew a little bit. You know, IBM has been down. I don't think they've announced yet. So you're seeing a couple of things. Cloud eating away, and then all this injection of flash. You're really the only guys who can make spinning disk run faster, as fast as flash. Everybody else is just throwing flash at the problem. And that's created headroom. So what are you guys seeing, 'cause you're clearly growing. You're a market share gainer. You have the advantage of being new and smaller. Talk about your business and how you're growing and why you're growing. >> It's nothing but growth, and it comes from this increase in the overall data that, requirements that customers have, and it comes from the economic aspects of that data. Fundamentally, data storage is all about economics, and we're able to deliver through our technical advantage of blending disk, flash, and DRAM an order of magnitude cost basis advantage, and that translates into direct financial benefits that allow ultimately enterprises to do more with their data. That's what we're all about. >> So as workloads shift to the cloud, there's an on-prem component. We're going to talk about cloud, multicloud, hybrid cloud, et cetera. But you've got a product called Neutrix. Talk about that and where it fits into this big macro trend that we've just been talking about. >> Absolutely. So Neutrix fits into the broader landscape in a couple of ways. First of all, many of the clients that we deal with are large enterprises, and they're in their relatively early stages of cloud transformation. So Neutrix provides an easy on ramp for them to come from our best in class on-prem infrastructure and make that data accessible in one or multiple clouds. And that kind of, maybe it's for test dev. Maybe it's for a disaster recovery, a pilot light scenario, or a couple other use cases for general purpose primary data storage. That's their on ramp to then taking advantage of the more strategic value of Neutrix, which is allowing clouds to compete for the business on the compute side of things. >> You kind of hit a key word in there. I'm talking about transform. And we've talked about that a lot, transformation versus transition, in terms of storage capabilities, enterprise storage capabilities, whatever. Take us through that transformation, if you will, and not the transition, and what's the paradigm change? What's going on in that space that's requiring people tom ake this dive into the deep end, if you will, and not just tickling the water with their toes. >> Well, I think there's two elements to it. There's a business and kind of a philosophical reorientation around taking advantage of flexible resources and allowing infrastructure to change over time and pay opex-based business models, that sort of stuff, and getting comfortable with that honestly is a journey into and of itself, because many procurement organizations, especially large organizations, they don't know what to do with a monthly bill or an uncommitted reserve amount or things like that. So part of it is being able to walk with the customer as they transform on the business side of things, and then the other side is accepting and going down the path of variable workloads, being able to accommodate large varieties of mixed data environments, and be agile on the technology side so that you can put the data where it needs to be with the performance that it needs to be and with the capabilities that it needs to be. >> All right, so we're pressed for time, so I really want to get a few topics in. For now, I see three main opportunities, broadly. One is on-prem, stealing market share. We talked about that a little bit. Two is this multicloud thing, and we'll talk about that, as well. If you're an on-prem company, you got to have a multicloud strategy, and even if you're a pure cloud company, you got to have a multicloud strategy. And the third is the cloud. You've got to embrace the cloud. If you deny the cloud, you're denying the biggest trend. So let's start with the cloud. What's your cloud strategy? What's your relationship with AWS and how are you taking advantage of that? >> So we're all about delivering our data services in whatever means, whatever physical infrastructure, whatever underlying business model the customer requires. With that in mind, we deliver Neutrix Cloud as a service for use with major public cloud environments, including AWS, and our relationship with AWS, you know, they recognize, I think, they would say that we bring access to large-scale, tier one environments all around the world coming from our base on the on-prem, and they're very interested in obviously working with the customers on cloud transformation at the scale that we operate, as well, so it's a mutually beneficial partnership. We're proud to be an APN member and all of that sort of thing. >> Yeah, I mean, if you can put your stack in the AWS cloud, which is what you're doing, it's going to drive other services, right? It's going to drive ML and SageMakers and backup and all kinds of great things. >> Absolutely. >> So the storage guys at AWS may not love you, but everybody else at AWS is going to be happy because you're driving other services. All right, let's talk about multicloud. It's obviously a controversial topic. We've got, John Furrier every year does a exclusive interview with Andy Jassy, and he's on the record, and I think he's right. He says, look it, multicloud is going to be more complex, less secure, and more expensive. He's right. And he goes, but he also recognizes that there are multiple clouds out there, and so organizations have to participate in multicloud strategies. I've predicted, as have Stu Miniman and John Furrier, Amazon's going to participate in that someday. They're going to do what they're doing in hybrid. So Amazon looks at multicloud as multiple public clouds and on-prem as hybrid. Coming back to Infinidat, what's your multicloud strategy? >> So the great thing about our strategy is that we're able to deliver the same data in whatever public cloud environments the customer wants to deploy. So we actually run our own independent infrastructure that sits just outside the walled gardens of all the major public clouds, and then we can provide network connectivity using their direct connect interfaces or similar private network interconnects, all API-driven, customer doesn't have to think about the underlying infrastructure, and fundamentally it allows them to subscribe to our storage as a service directly in whatever public clouds they choose. >> And now let's talk about the on-prem piece of that, which is the hybrid component, using Jassy's sort of definitional framework. You've got Flex. That extends your on-prem story. Talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely. So our customers are saying, "Hey, I want the public cloud business model "on the on-prem environment," and Flex is our answer to that kind of question. So we deliver essentially hardware independence, price per gig per month. We maintain title to the asset, all that sort of stuff. And we're in charge of refreshing the infrastructure every three years, and we back it with a more than public cloud level availability guarantee, 100% availability guarantee for the Flex business model. >> We've seen companies, flash-based products as backup targets. Infinidat uses a combination of flash and spinning disks to keep costs down, and you've got math magic to make it as performant. One of the things I like what you're doing is you're partnering with I think most of, if not all the backup software vendors and opening up new market opportunities and expanding your TAM by partnering with those guys. Talk a little bit about, can you give us some specifics there? >> Absolutely. So, for example, we were presenting at the Veeam booth earlier this week about the intersection between InfiniBox and the Veeam backup software suite, and we have similar capabilities with some of the other backup platforms, as well. So two sides to that, one using the on-prem or cloud environments as a source, and there we have integrations with our snapshot technology specifically, and then two, using our InfiniGuard product on the on-prem side as a target, and there we have deep integration at an API level with the various backup platforms. So it's a cohesive universe where customers can take primary data, they can put it on Infinidat, they can use whatever enterprise backup platform. They can also put it as a target on Infinidat technology. >> And we're talking a lot about today. What about tomorrow? I mean, you know, what's the bigger picture down the road? What's your crystal ball telling you in terms of future complexities and challenges and what you see where this is headed? >> I think from a storage standpoint, at least, obviously lots of other complexities beyond that universe, but from a storage standpoint, people want to stop thinking about infrastructure. They want to think about cloud data services. They want to think about essentially going from storage arrays to storage clouds. We're doing that on on-prem, we're doing that in public cloud environments, and we're knitting it all together with our initiative called the Elastic Data Fabric. Our ultimate goal there and what we think customers really want is to be able to get the data services that they want at any given instant through the business model they care about independent of the underlying infrastructure, and that's what we're set up to deliver over the next couple of years at Infinidat. >> Well, Erik, thank you for the time. We appreciate that. By the way, Erik has become a very important Cuber, a VIC. His sixth appearance here on theCUBE. I wish we had a plaque or something to give you, but how about just an attaboy? >> Thanks very much. >> We appreciate that. >> Thanks, Erik. >> Back with more coverage here from AWS re:Invent 2019. You're watching us live. We're here on theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering the AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, Keith Townsend, and this is one of the interviews we've been really excited. Of course, we've got about 60 interviews. We love all of them. Lots of good excitement. Lots going on at this ecosystem. Over 43 thousand in attendance here in Las Vegas, but happy to welcome back to the program, Chris Wolf, who's the Vice President and CTO of Global Field and Industry at VMware. Chris, great to see you. >> Thanks Stu, thanks Keith. Great to see you guys. >> So for the year, the whole VMware on AWS has been a hot buzz discussion. We've all been arguing internally and on theCUBE about you know, partnering and how does that work and who gets the most benefit out of it, but let's start, Chris I'd love to hear your viewpoint, you know. You talk to a lot of customers. I've talked to some customers that are really excited about it, especially at VMWorld, that were there testing it and doing it. Give us the customer viewpoint. What's really exciting them? What's interesting them? And I know there's a lot of new news we're wanna gonna get into. >> Yeah, you know, there's so much that I think is exciting to customers because you know, they're struggling with being more agile, being more software defined, being able to have more flexibility in their environments. And to be able to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS allows them to go through data center consolidation easier. It allows them to get applications to the Cloud to take advantage of Cloud services. One of the things people, I think kind of falls between the cracks in VMware Cloud on AWS is the fact that if I want to modernize an application or a traditional application, refactoring an application is enormously expensive. It's very hard to do. It's very time consuming. If I can start to move an application into the VMware Cloud on AWS and then start to integrate that with other native AWS services, I get the benefit of modernizing that application without having to touch any of the application code, which is a huge benefit to customers. >> Yeah, we've spent the last couple of years at this show, which well, do I lift and shift? Do I just re-platform it? Do I refactor it? Do I totally rewrite it? You know, the number of customers that I've talked to at this show, their advice that they give to their peers is like well, go faster. And how do we go faster? Do I just take my VMware stuff that I was doing in my own data center, stick it in VMware on AWS, start using all the cool stuff. Is that kind of the path that you see? >> That's part of it. You know, I think there's a couple threads here. There's the notion that you know, I wanna go faster, but to go faster, I have to slay some old demons in IT. Where I have to change my mindset. You know, I can't say I want to be more software defined and more agile and then have specific hardware requirements in my architecture. Of course, that's not for all applications, but that's part of that shift in mindset is how can I go faster? And if it's harder to transform some of my data centers, if I can get into that operational model by getting on Amazon quicker, then that's good for my business. >> Yeah, let me just poke on one more thing on that and I know Keith wants to jump in here, but one of the great things, I think back to 15 years ago. It was like, you know my Windows operating system going end to life. I'm gonna stick it in VM and keep it there forever. But, boy that application was all the technical data. My users hated it and everything like that. How does VMware go from I managed what you had to enabling your future? >> The thing that we're really focused on here in terms of enabling the future, when you think about programmatic compute and networking and storage and security, all applications need them. I can abstract all that away with a Lambda function or whatever, but at the end of the day, somebody has to do it and that part of the fabric becomes really important for things like having a security auto-trell. The other thread there is where VMware's strategic to customers is that they say, "You know I might wanna start this in the Cloud, "but I wanna maintain full control "of all of the intellectual property, "so I wanna use Kubernetes, I wanna use containers, "I wanna use a variety of open source projects. "I wanna use their native API's for my software engineers, "but I wanna have flexibility to build these applications "without pre-destining their future." Maybe it runs in a Cloud today, maybe it runs in a data center tomorrow, maybe it runs out at the edge. Maybe I do an acquisition and it has to run in that facility. The bottom line is, I don't always know what the future holds for my apps. And for the aspect of the apps that are core to your business, there's a lot value in running them on VMware because we can allow you to maintain that flexibility and independence, just like we've done way back in the past with your traditional enterprise applications. >> So Chris, that's a great setup for the next set of questions, which is, VMware has been known to move at the speed of the CIO. We're at AWS re:Invent. These folks move much faster than the speed of the CIO. The question is around, what's VMware's focus? You know, there's VMware Cloud on AWS, there's PKS, there's VIG. You guys came out with Openstack, VMware integrated Openstack 4.0, and then even VMware Cloud on AWS, the promised innovation three and a half months after the release. Iteration on that. That's much faster than what the CIO used to have. How are those conversations balanced between the CIO and the new business user here at AWS? >> Yeah, way to sugarcoat Keith. That's a good question. Look at CIOs today. There's very innovative CIOs. We had the NFL CIO up on stage in the morning Keynote, right? And I thought that was highly dynamic, really talking about how you have to transform business. What we're really focused on in terms of helping customers is making sure that that fabric that runs their business applications is just as fluid and dynamic as their businesses. The security has to be as fluid and dynamic or more dynamic than the threats that you face. So, these are areas that we're focused on, but your point is: how can VMware continue to deliver quick innovation? I think VMware integrated Openstack actually is an example of VMware integration or innovation, so I'm glad you brought it up. We don't talk about Openstack that much now, but VMware was the very first Openstack distro-vendor to make upgrades of Openstack versions they feature as software. Where our competitors in that space were making it a professional services engagement. You look at us, what we've done in terms of supporting containers natively on vSphere. We announced PKS and we were very quick to embrace Kubernetes. We announced Greengrass preview that we're bringing to market as well on vSphere. So, you're absolutely right to give us the feedback that in the past, you could say Vmware was a bit conservative of a company. We were slow and deliberate in some of our innovations. They were important and we were deliberate because we had a reputation to uphold for product quality. That's what our customers expect, but at the same time, it's very good feedback to say that we have to work quicker, and that's the model that we're in. I think that the AWS partnership for Vmware is one example of how we've had a couple of companies learning from each other in terms of AWS and interacting with the enterprise and VMware in terms of innovating a Cloud space, and you're staring to see the benefits and the fruits of that labor now. >> So, ironically I ran into the VMUG president, Ben Clayton doing a show floor. It's amazing to see the crossover between the VMware community and the AWS community. I think VMware Cloud on AWS has been a boom, a realizing that Cloud is coming into the enterprise in a great way. Let's talk about the community and the users. How do you help move that traditional community of, I think VMUG is 200,000 users. How do you help move that membership forward to this new speed of IT? >> It's a terrific question. There's definitely some challenges with getting folks. Part of it is IT folks, we're builders at heart. We love building everything. We love the pieces and parts. We can understand how they matter, but even if they matter like this much, it doesn't necessarily mean that I should build a snowflake for my business because some of the problems that VMware solves, you could say that every business in the world has to solve the same problems. So why focus on some of those smaller nuisances? What we've been really after is providing much more content into the VMUG communities around transformation, around how more modular IT architectures are important. Even beyond the VMUG community, if you think about some traditional VMware channel partners, where their core focus was on some very tightly integrated hardware-based solutions. Those partners, the more innovative ones, are now building hybrid applications across VMware and AWS components and modernizing enterprises that way. We're trying to encourage our VMUG community to do the same thing. I've had talks with VMUG events this year talking to them about Edge Compute and how VMware is investing there and what R&D looks like. Part of this is, I think all of us in IT, we have to have that point in time where we say "I have to let go, "I know the market's shifting, "I know I have to do something different." If I didn't let go in my past, I would still be known for being a Certified Novell Engineer, right? Times change and we have to change too, so it's really important to be prescriptive and give our community all the tools they need to evolve with us. >> Chris, you mention the Greengrass thing that you have in preview for a bit. I want you talk about that a little bit and when I heard Andy Jassy this morning, he talked about the continuum. Instances, which underneath, that's virtualization from VMware. There's containers and there's serverless. Andy says if he was to build IWBS today, he'd build it all serverless. We know it's not a zero sum game and nothing changes overnight, but virtualization is not decimated by containers overnight and containers doesn't go away now that serverless comes out. I want you to talk about the Greengrass and how that spectrum fits into the customers you're talked to in the VMware journey. >> I think it's really, really exciting and certainly I'm a huge proponent of serverless. My 14 year old son has an Echo Dot in his bedroom and he likes to program it to do really fun things. My favorite example is he had it talking about who the ugliest person in the world is and wanted Alexa to name his sister. There's a part of me that's like "No don't do that, son" but then the other part's like "I'm so proud of you." >> That's awesome. But if we step back, there's this huge press to start doing more in terms of getting the analytics and the intelligence to either where the data's being created or where the data's being consumed. We've had a lot of customers come to us jointly, saying "Look, I can't move the data to the Cloud "to do deep analytics or machine learning. "It defies the laws of physics "or the networking costs are just too much. "Or there's latency considerations. "I need a faster transaction execution time." We have a customer, a joint customer, where they're monitoring the heat of the brake pad on a train and they're trying to understand in real time, how that impacts the train's maintenance schedule and when they should take it out of service. They need to get the intelligence of the Cloud closer to where these things are occurring. Let's bring that all back to Greengrass on vSphere. You heard an announcement of machine learning on Greengrass today. To do machine learning, I need some considerable compute horsepower to really make it effective. Most of our customers already have a lot of that horsepower already out at the edge. One of our customers has six to 10 servers. This is very common of a lot of retail organizations, six to 10 servers per stores times 10,000 stores. They're trying to do more with IOT and more analytics. They want to leverage the investments that they already have an infrastructure. The other part that's strategically important to VMware is this: we want to have Cloud services be able to execute where the data's being created and that's a natural use case for virtualization. Then second, we want to have a platform that can allow the most popular opensource technologies to also run there to give customers all of that choice. So for us, it's all about promoting heterogeneity at the edge. We see those Cloud services as really that new generation of application platforms that customers, they don't want some artificial constraint of a Cloud data center to say "this is where it has to run." I want it to run wherever the business requirements say it needs to run and that's what's important and that's what we're doing with this announcement. >> Chris, we talk to a lot of CTOs, senior architects, CIOs and even looking at VMware, trust that part of it has been very stable in the environment for years, the product selection can be overwhelming. CIOs, CTOs need to focus their investment and their strategies in a certain area. Conversations, where are you telling CTOs, CIOs to focus their investment? >> It's a really good question. You definitely have to have a focus area and for us, it's about a platform for rapid agility and innovation. That's really key. We don't know what the future's gonna be. We can guess and you are both two very visionary guys and you have a general idea of what's gonna happen over the next 12, 18 months, but there's things that are just unexpected, especially in the business context. We can understand technology, but business dynamics change very quickly. Helping CTOs and CIOs understand how to build a fabric that can make them more agile and flexible is really key. That's one. So, greater automation, greater efficiencies, rapid innovation, but even more importantly for a lot that's really top of mind is security. Giving them a way to do rapid recovery, being able to start to segment some of their resources, being able to dynamically offer and adjust security and understand threats in real time and combat them in real time is key. The traditional model of security is: I have a dynamic threat so I'm gonna have increased layers of static security to combat it and I'll just add more layers. Doesn't work. We've had customers have massive outages that we've worked with because they've had ransomware attacks and things like that, so they want to be more agile and more dynamic. Their VMware environments, they've been able to get up very quickly, but these lessons are teaching organizations that they have to think differently. So really, that security and agility I see is really top of line for a lot of folks. >> Chris, I've seen lots of traffic at the VMware booth, talked to a lot of customers that are interested. The elephant in the room when I talk to all of them is cost. We've looked at Big Bear Metal, Amazon released that instance. That's a big hunking instance, a lot of memory, a lot of networking. I've talked to a couple customers that said, "I did the analysis on VMware over AWS "versus heck, just buying a rack "and stick it in my environment." You get a significant difference in there. One customer is like "Hey, it was 3x the cost "for me to just buy it and do it myself, "and I didn't feel I was gonna get any "operational efficiencies even doing it "'cause I know VMware and I know how to run it." What do you say to those customers? What are they missing? I'd love any misconceptions that you're hearing out there. >> I'll give ya an example. Let's use the cost analogy. My daughter wants a new radio for Christmas. I can go to Best Buy and buy a really nice stereo, but that's actually 3x the cost of me buying the circuit board kit, say on Amazon, and soldering in the components myself. When you think about that in a practical, real world example, we used to buy motherboards and build PCs and servers back in the day. We don't even think about doing it anymore and even if I could save 25 dollars doing it, I still wouldn't do it because there's more important things I can be doing with my time to differentiate my business. Look, we are-- >> I wanna poke at that. Because you're partners at Delium Sig and I buy one of the VX whatever family from their team. It's pretty easy to ploy, I do that. I understand how to do VMware. It's not gonna take me months to deploy. I know how to a VMware environment and it's that type of configuration. They're saying it's not building versus buying and I understand there's a spectrum there, but just the raw VMware and AWS. They said "I'm gonna get two bills. "I'm gonna get one from VMware and one from Amazon" and the price of it does seem pretty massive compared to what they were doing. So, are they wrong about that? >> I'm really surprised at that. We're not hearing that from our customers We're seeing them have very solid in terms of cost saving, in terms of running on AWS because unlike a traditional Cloud environment, I can oversubscribe physical hosts, I can run more workloads because it is native VMware. You're also getting additional benefits. I'm getting V-SAN storage, I'm getting NSX for networking and security. To say I'm just gonna take vSphere and compare, I would say that that's probably not the closest comparison. There's other aspects that we're providing that operate in a Cloud environment. And, listen, we had this before. Five years ago, people were saying, "Well, Cloud's too expensive so I'm gonna stay on premises." We don't even think that way anymore. There's other benefits that you're getting in the Cloud model that you have to weigh into consideration and we've seen VMware Cloud on AWS is as price competitive as a lot of the native public Cloud services are without all the added benefits of networking and security and management and other things that we throw in. >> Chris, wanna give you the final word. What's exciting you these days? You used to sit on kind of this side of the table, look at the environment. You're deep in some of the emerging pieces. What's getting you excited? I'd love to hear any final insights on partnering between VMware and Amazon, which a lot of us on the outside are like cats and dogs living together. >> Okay, let's hit a couple of them. First, certainly for me, the innovation that's occurring at the edge, I think is extremely exciting. Driving new use cases around augmented reality, more machine learning. How we're looking in terms of moving services to where data's being generated instead of moving the data, which is always problematic. That's a new wave of innovation that I think is really exciting. So that's the certainly the area I'd say that's most exciting for me, is how we can innovate there. It's also around hybrid applications. It's the integration of things like Lambda functions in a traditional file system. I was with a major global financial services organization yesterday and we were not talking about traditional Lambda function use cases. We were talking about integrating Lambda with database and file system events and VM's running on vSphere. So, there's this whole new way to modernize applications that we're just at the cusp of. That pace of innovation's happening faster and faster. I'll say this about Amazon: we are really committed to working together and I think what you're seeing in the industry in general, it's not just VMware with AWS, but it's with our partners in the container spaces. An example is containers as a service and platform as a service, is we're being very pragmatic about focusing on what we're really, really good at. And there's areas where VMware is fantastic at it, in terms of reliability and heterogeneity at the edge and there's natural synergies where we can work together with Amazon web services. In my opinion, they've been a fantastic partner. All of the work that we've done with the Greengrass team and the IOT team, in terms of bringing Greengrass to market on vSphere, has been an enormously positive experience. We share lessons learned, we share engineering, work together. It's extremely collaborative because just like all of our technology partners, there's always areas where we're going to compete a little bit and there can be some overlap, but there's a lot more areas where we get to work together and that's what we're really focused on with VMware and AWS. >> Well, Chris, I know Keith and I always appreciate your perspectives, the VMware community engagement, know you're always open to having some good, real discussions here, so really appreciate you coming sharing all our viewpoints. Congratulations on all the progress here. We're certainly excited to see where it goes. >> I appreciate the opportunity. >> Alright, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(techno music) >> Announcer: It's the Cube, covering Sapphire Now 2017, brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform, and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Hey, welcome back to our exclusive SAP coverage here in our studio in Palo Alto, our 4,500 square foot studio. I'm John Furrier. Our three days, we're on third day, of Sapphire Now 2017 coverage. I'm on the phone with RJ Bibby, who's the SAP Global Alliance Manager for SAP. Handles the relationship. RJ, great to have you on the phone and thanks for calling in from Orlando, really appreciate it. >> RJ: You bet, John. Love the Cube. Love SiliconANGLE. We're great partners. It's been a great week and looking forward to talking to you about it. >> Tell us what's going on on the ground. First, give us the updates on day three. So, pretty much everyone's coming-- And always a great activities at night as well. So, SAP, a lot of business done during the day. They work hard. They play hard. But, day three, what's it like? What's settling in as the storylines for Sapphire 2017? >> RJ: Yeah, absolutely. So, you're starting to feel-- You've gone through about-- We're in our third tour. For the partner's community, we're in day four, cause we had the partner day. Last night was the big partner night. We actually NetApped with our partners with Cisco and KPIT did a private event at Universal Studios at the Jimmy Fallon Theme Park that was highly successful. What was great about today, was in the morning, we kicked off will Bill McDermott on stage with Kobe Bryant and Derek Jeter. And it was all about leadership and mentorship and experience in being in the business, whatever industry that you're in for so long and how you just stay creative, hungry, and passionate. And it was packed. One of the comments was they couldn't believe, on the day after the big party night of all the partners that you still have a lot of energy on the floor. Ultimately, it's still about data, which is great for our business that we can get into at NetApp. There's a lot of buzzword bingo going on here, John, all week, whether it's machine to machine, blocked chain, Cloud-- And at the end of it, it's still our customers who we've talked to a lot this week, and wow. What are we going to do with out data? How do we analyze it? And how do we improve that user experience based on all this data that we have? And I think that's one of the things that I see on the floor that's almost overwhelming with the amount of people, 30,000, all the partners. Just a lot of information. And lastly, I'll say, the good news with that is everybody is hungry for content. Whether it's a mini-theater, whether it's at one of the booths, interactions one-on-one, it's people are hungry for what is happening in the industry. And I think that's exciting for all of us. >> Well, we do our part and try and get as much coverage as possible, even if we are going to do it from Palo Alto. Question for you on NetApp. I mean, you guys have been-- The scuttlebutt in Silicon Valley is that NetApp is doing very well with the Hyperscale (mumbles). I know for a fact. I've interviewed the former CEO and others within NetApp. They were really on early with AWS. And obviously, AWS a big part of the announcement at Sapphire. So, you guys are kind of like getting these relationships with these key players. It's changed a little bit of the business model, or culture within NetApp. What's different about NetApp right now? With resect to some of the big players that you've had relationships with. It's not this new relationship with SAP. You guys have a deep relationship. What's changing as the CloudWave hits, as the DataWave hits? Those are the biggest waves hitting the world right now. How are you guys playing in that world? And share some insight there. >> RJ: Absolutely. Great question. 'Cause the world is going through digital transformation and so is NetApp. So, we are actually celebrating our 25th year as a company right now and we've been a traditional, global technology and data management company. And, the digital shift to Hybrid Cloud is where we're moving. So, specifically with partners like AWS, Microsoft and Azure, the Hyperscalers like CenturyLink, it's how we can help our customers really collect, transport, analyze, protect data, in whatever environment they want to hold their data. Whether it's On-Premises, if your in a Cloud, you can choose whatever Hyperscaler you want. You still have to deal with the data. And then, how do we manage it? How do we consume it? Where is dead data that needs to be taken out? So, data's the currency and with our data fabric methodology and tools from software, hardware, we're really able to help manage that complete life cycle, whether it's SAP, or any other type of environment we hold. So, the exciting thing for us, and the stock prices is showing that at an all time high, is what Bill McDermott said on Monday, in the keynote, or excuse me, Tuesday, "Data is the currency. "Our new mission statement is we're trying "to empower our customers to change the world with data." So, back to the buzzWord bingo comment I made earlier, we're still dealing with fact that we have all these great technologies: all these censors, machine-to-machine, On-Print to Cloud. At the heart of everything is the data and what you do with it. And I think that one of the things that NetApp does and the best in the world of, is we continually evolve digital transformations with the tools on how we deal with data. So, that's high level. >> How about the data dynamic? >> Data is the fundamental story, in my opinion. Cloud has been around, the Clouderati. We were part of that from the beginning. Now, Cloud is mainstream. Amazon stock prices looking like a hockey stick now, it's going straight up. But, that took years of development, right? I mean, you saw the Cloud formation coming, really, in the mid-2000s and then, really at 2008, -09, -10 was the foundational years and then the rest is history. Data's now going through the same thing. As people get over themselves and say, "Okay, big data's not a dupe. It's everything." IOT is certainly highlighting a lot of that. SAP has recognized that legacy systems have to move to a MultiCloud and certainly multi-vendor world in a whole new way. But, at the end of the day, you still got to store this stuff. So, that's your business. How are you keeping up with the moving train of data as is architecturally shifts in the marketplace? >> RJ: Great question. I think that we have some of the best minds in Silicon Valley. Again, been there 25 years. I think with the deep relationships we have with companies like SAP. On the front end, I think the one thing that we bring as a value to SAP is the consumption model, life exists. Through owning the data and the user experience, we're able to enable and accelerate the license consumption to the edge. Right from application in to the system. From an architectural standpoint, it still comes down to the thing that we are creating and blabs and launching around, like the data fabric, the tool system, really software. The software that can help from an analytical perspective affect the user experience. Everybody wants it live. And the other part is the data protection and the DR aspect of it. And I think that's another core competency that we're continuing to develop as a service for the customer. So, I hop I've answered your question. >> Yup. >> RJ: But if-- >> (mumbles) a bottom line then, why NetApps? Say I'm a customer. Okay, I get the SAP. Why should I go with you guys over new the Delium see powerhouse over there, or the White-Box Storage? >> RJ: At the end of the day, we are best at capitalizing the value of data in the Hybrid Cloud. Nobody can help collect, analyze, test, and do life-cycle management live like NetApp can. And that's the reason that we are going more upstream, selling like we say at EPC, always selling to the CXO. I think we're changing the landscape from a true storage company on the infrastructure side to a full end-to-end Hybrid Cloud data management portfolio company. And it's been proven by the acquisition of Salazar from bringing Slash in to the portfolio, our cloning, and snapshot capabilities. So, anywhere in the stack at any time during the day when you're looking live at your operations or your data that you can take live snapshots. Just so if there's a glitch from a data protection side, or there's some type of spike from a request on the ticketing side or demand side of your system. So, I think that's some of the things that we're differentiating. And that's the reason that the AWSs and the Azures and the SAPs are so excited about co-innovating together to again, improving the customer experience with their data. >> RJ, final question. What's the net-net? What's the bumper sticker for you this year at Sapphire 2017? What's the walk-away revelation? >> RJ: Well, I think from the SAP side, it's the revelation on the push of Leonardo. I think that SAP-- I'd like to see them continue to hone out the 'what' and the 'if' from partners with Leonardo from blotching in machine-to-machine and IOT. For us, it is the beautiful fact that now at the center of everything that SAP and the ecosystem is trying to do is around the data side of it and it's the actual currency. And the fact that we have kind of the leading-edge tools to enhance the customer experience with our platform for customers' and partners' data is really, really exciting for us. And we're excited. We're all psyched to be partnered with the Cube. And everything we do is in the Cloud. So, I'm here to help. >> Alright. >> RJ, thanks so much for takin' the time callin' in from Orlando. RJ Bibby, SAP Global Alliance Executive with NetApp. He runs the the relationship with NetApp. And again, it's been a long-term relationship. I remember takin' photos on my phone, way back in the day, years ago. So, not a new relationship and continued momentum. Congratulations and thanks for sharing the insight from Orlando. 'Preciate it. >> RJ: You bet. Thanks for the partnership. Have a great day. >> 'Kay, more coverage from the Cube in Palo Alto on SAP, Sapphire 2017 after this short break. Stay with us. (techno music)