(upbeat electronic music plays) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's coverage of .NEXT 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, hosts of theCube. We have two great guests, Rajiv Mirani, who's the Chief Technology Officer, and Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management. Day Two keynote product, the platform, announcements, news. A lot of people, Rajiv, are super excited about the, the platform, uh, moving to a subscription model. Everything's kind of coming into place. How are the customers, uh, seeing this? How they adopted hybrid cloud as a hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, data, data, data? Those are the, those are the, that's the, that's where the puck is right now. You guys are there. How are customers seeing this? >> Mirani: Um, um, great question, John, by the way, great to be back here on theCube again this year. So when we talk to our customers, pretty much, all of them agreed that for them, the ideal state that they want to be in is a hybrid world, right? That they want to essentially be able to run both of those, both on the private data center and the public cloud, and sort of have a common platform, common experience, common, uh, skillset, same people managing, managing workloads across both locations. And unfortunately, most of them don't have that that tooling available today to do so, right. And that's where the platform, the Nutanix platform's come a long way. We've always been great at running in the data center, running every single workload, we continue to make great strides on our core with the increased performance for, for the most demanding, uh, workloads out there. But what we have done in the last couple of years has also extended this platform to run in the public cloud and essentially provide the same capabilities, the same operational behavior across locations. And that's when you're seeing a lot of excitement from our customers because they really want to be in that state, for it to have the common tooling across work locations, as you can imagine, we're getting traction. Customers who want to move workloads to public cloud, they don't want to spend the effort to refactor them. Or for customers who really want to operate in a hybrid mode with things like disaster recovery, cloud bursting, workloads like that. So, you know, I think we've made a great step in that direction. And we look forward to doing more with our customers. >> Furrier: What is the big challenge that you're seeing with this hybrid transition from your customers and how are you solving that specifically? >> Mirani: Yeah. If you look at how public and private operate today, they're very different in the kind of technologies used. And most customers today will have two separate teams, like one for their on-prem workloads, using a certain set of tooling, a second completely different team, managing a completely different set of workloads, but with different technologies. And that's not an ideal state in some senses, that's not true hybrid, right? It's like creating two new silos, if anything. And our vision is that you get to a point where both of these operate in the same manner, you've got the same people managing all of them, the same workloads anyway, but similar performance, similar SaaS. So they're going to literally get to point where applications and data can move back and forth. And that's, that's, that's where I think the real future is for hybrid >> Furrier: I have to ask you a personal question. As the CTO, you've got be excited with the architecture that's evolving with hybrid and multi-cloud, I mean, I mean, it's pretty, pretty exciting from a tech standpoint, what is your reaction to that? >> Mirani: %100 and it's been a long time coming, right? We have been building pieces of this over years. And if you look at all the product announcements, Nutanix has made over the last few years and the acquisitions that made them and so on, there's been a purpose behind them. That's been a purpose to get to this model where we can operate a customer's workloads in a hybrid environment. So really, really happy to see all of that come together. Years and years of work finally finally bearing fruit. >> Furrier: Well, we've had many conversations in the past, but it congratulates a lot more to do with so much more action happening. Thomas, you get the keys to the kingdom, okay, and the product management you've got to prioritize, you've got to put it together. What are the key components of this Nutanix cloud platform? The hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy that's in place, because there's a lot of headroom there, but take us through the key components today and then how that translates into hybrid multi-cloud for the future. >> Cornely: Certainly, John, thank you again and great to be here, and kind of, Rajiv, you said really nicely here. If you look at our portfolio at Nutanix, what we have is great technologies. They've been sold as a lot of different products in the past, right. And what we've done last few months is we kind of bring things together, simplify and streamline, and we align everything around a cloud platform, right? And this is really the messaging that we're going after is look, it's not about the price of our solutions, but business outcomes for customers. And so are we focusing on pushing the cloud platform, which we encompasses five key areas for us, which we refer to as cloud infrastructure, no deficiencies running your workloads. Cloud management, which is how you're going to go and actually manage, operate, automate, and get governance. And then services on top that started on all around data, right? So we have unified storage, finding the objects, data services. We have database services. Now we have outset of desktop services, which is for EMC. So all of this, the big change for us is this is something that, you know, you can consume in terms of solutions and consume on premises. As Rajiv discussed, you know, we can take the same platform and deploy it in public cloud regions now, right? So you can now get no seamless hybrid cloud, same operating model. But increasingly what we're doing is taking your solutions and re-targeting issues and problems at workers running native public clouds. So think of this as going, after automating more governance, security, you know, finding objects, database services, wherever you're workload is running. So this is taking this portfolio and reapplying it, and targeting on prem at the edge in hybrid and in christening public cloud in ATV. >> Furrier: That's awesome. I've been watching some of the footage and I was noticing quite a lot of innovation around virtualized, networking, disaster, recovery security, and data services. It's all good. You guys were, and this is in your wheelhouse. I know you guys are doing this for many, many years. I want to dive deeper into that because the theme right now that we've been reporting on, you guys are hitting right here what the keynote is cloud scale is about faster development, right? Cloud native is about speed, it's about not waiting for these old departments, IT or security to get back to them in days or weeks and responding to either policy or some changes, you got to move faster. And data, data is critical in all of this. So we'll start with virtualized networking because networking again is a key part of it. The developers want to go faster. They're shifting left, take us through the virtualization piece of how important that is. >> Mirani: Yeah, that's actually a great question as well. So if you think about it, virtual networking is the first step towards building a real cloud like infrastructure on premises that extends out to include networking as well. So one of the key components of any cloud is automation. Another key component is self service and with the API, is it bigger on virtual networking All of that becomes much simpler, much more possible than having to, you know, qualify it, work with someone there to reconfigure physical networks and slots. We can, we can do that in a self service way, much more automated way. But beyond that, the, the, the notion of watching networks is really powerful because it helps us to now essentially extend networks and, and replicate networks anywhere on the private data center, but in the public cloud as well. So now when customers move their workloads, we'd already made that very simple with our clusters offering. But if you're only peek behind the layers a little bit, it's like, well, yea, but the network's not the same on the side. So now it, now it means that a go re IP, my workloads create new subnets and all of that. So there was a little bit of complication left in that process. So to actual network that goes away also. So essentially you can repeat the same network in both locations. You can literally move your workloads, no redesign of your network acquired and still get that self service and automation capabilities of which cookies so great step forward, it really helps us complete the infrastructure as a service stack. We had great storage capabilities before, we create compute capabilities before, and sort of networking the third leg and all of that. >> Furrier: Talk about the complexity here, because I think a lot of people will look at dev ops movement and say, infrastructure is code when you go to one cloud, it's okay. You can, you can, you know, make things easier. Programmable. When, when you start getting into data center, private data centers, or essentially edges now, cause if it's distributed cloud environment or cloud operations, it's essentially one big cloud operation. So the networks are different. As you said, this is a big deal. Okay. This is sort of make infrastructure as code happen in multiple environments across multiple clouds is not trivial. Could you talk about the main trends and how you guys see this evolving and how you solve that? >> Mirani: Yeah. Well, the beauty here is that we are actually creating the same environment everywhere, right? From, from, from point of view of networking, compute, and storage, but also things like security. So when you move workloads, things with security, posture also moves, which is also super important. It's a really hard problem, and something a lot of CIO's struggle with, but having the same security posture in public and private clouds reporting as well. So with this, with this clusters offering and our on-prem offering competing with the infrastructure service stack, you may not have this capability where your operations really are unified across multicloud hybrid cloud in any way you run. >> Furrier: Okay, so if I have multiple cloud vendors, there are different vendors. You guys are creating a connection unifying those three. Is that right? >> Mirani: Essentially, yes, so we're running the same stack on all of them and abstracting away the differences between the clouds that you can run operations. >> Furrier: And when the benefits, the benefits of the customers are what? What's the main, what's the main benefit there? >> Mirani: Essentially. They don't have to worry about, about where their workloads are running. Then they can pick the best cloud for their workloads. It can seamlessly move them between Cloud. They can move their data over easily, and essentially stop worrying about getting locked into a single, into a single cloud either in a multi-cloud scenario or in a hybrid cloud scenario, right. There many, many companies now were started on a cloud first mandate, but over time realized that they want to move workloads back to on-prem or the other way around. They have traditional workloads that they started on prem and want to move them to public cloud now. And we make that really simple. >> Furrier: Yeah. It's kind of a trick question. I wanted to tee that up for Thomas, because I love that kind of that horizontal scales, what the cloud's all about, but when you factor data into it, this is the sweet spot, because this is where, you know, I think it gets really exciting and complicated too, because, you know, data's got, can get unwieldy pretty quickly. You got state got multiple applications, Thomas, what's your, what can you share the data aspect of this? This is super, super important. >> Absolutely. It's, you know, it's really our core source of differentiation, when you think about it. That's what makes Nutanix special right? In, in the market. When we talk about cloud, right. Actually, if you've been following Nutanix for years, you know, we've been talking a lot about making infrastructure invisible, right? The new way for us to talk about what we're doing, with our vision is, is to make clouds invisible so that in the end, you can focus on your own business, right? So how do you make Cloud invisible? Lots of technology is at the application layer to go and containerize applications, you know, make them portable, modernize them, make them cloud native. That's all fine when you're not talking of state class containers, that the simplest thing to move around. Right. But as we all know, you know, applications end of the day, rely on data and measure the data across all of these different locations. I'm not even going to go seconds. Cause that's almost a given, you're talking about attribution. You can go straight from edge to on-prem to hybrid, to different public cloud regions. You know, how do you go into the key control of that and get consistency of all of this, right? So that's part of it is being aware of where your data is, right? But the other part is that inconsistency of set up data services regardless of where you're running. And so this is something that we look at the cloud platform, where we provide you the cloud infrastructure go and run the applications. But we also built into the cloud platform. You get all of your core data services, whether you have to consume file services, object services, or database services to really support your application. And that will move with your application, that is the key thing here by bringing everything onto the same platform. You now can see all operations, regardless of where you're running the application. The last thing that we're adding, and this is a new offering that we're just launching, which is a service, it's called, delete the dead ends. Which is a solution that gives you visibility and allow you to go and get better governance around all your data, wherever it may live, across on-prem edge and public clouds. That's a big deal again, because to manage it, you first have to make sense of it and get control over it. And that's what data answer's is going to be all about. >> Furrier: You know, one of the things we've we've been reporting on is data is now a competitive advantage, especially when you have workflows involved, um, super important. Um, how do you see customers going to the edge? Because if you have this environment, how does the data equation, Thomas, go to the edge? How do you see that evolving? >> Cornely: So it's yeah. I mean, edge is not one thing. And that's actually the biggest part of the challenge of defining what the edge is depending on the customer that you're working with. But in many cases you get data ingesting or being treated at the edge that you then have to go move to either your private cloud or your public cloud environment to go and basically aggregate it, analyze it and get insights from it. Right? So this is where a lot of our technologies, whether it's, I think the object's offering built in, we'll ask you to go and make the ingest over great distances over the network, right? And then have your common data to actually do an ethics audit over our own object store. Right? Again, announcements, we brought into our storage solutions here, we want to then actually organize it then actually organize it directly onto the objects store solution. Nope. Using things, things like or SG select built into our protocols. So again, make it easy for you to go in ingest anywhere, consolidate your data, and then get value out of it. Using some of the latest announcements on the API forms. >> Furrier: Rajiv databases are still the heart of most applications in the enterprise these days, but databases are not just the data is a lot of different data. Moving around. You have a lot a new data engineering platforms coming in. A lot of customers are scratching their head and, and they want to kind of be, be ready and be ready today. Talk about your view of the database services space and what you guys are doing to help enterprise, operate, manage their databases. >> Mirani: Yeah, it's a super important area, right? I mean, databases are probably the most important workload customers run on premises and pretty close on the public cloud as well. And if you look at it recently, the tooling that's available on premises, fairly traditional, but the clouds, when we integrate innovation, we're going to be looking at things like Amazon's relational database service makes it an order of magnitude simpler for our customers to manage the database. At the same time, also a proliferation of databases and we have the traditional Oracle and SQL server. But if you have open source Mongo, DB, and my SQL, and a lot of post-grads, it's a lot of different kinds of databases that people have to manage. And now it just becomes this cable. I have the spoke tooling for each one of them. So with our Arab product, what we're doing is essentially creating a data management layer, a database management layer that unifies operations across your databases and across locations, public cloud and private clouds. So all the operations that you need, you do, which are very complicated in, in, in, in with traditional tooling now, provisioning of databases backing up and restoring them providing a true time machine capabilities, so you can pull back transactions. We can copy data management for your data first. All of that has been tested in Era for a wide variety of database engines, your choice of database engine at the back end. And so the new capabilities are adding sort of extend that lead that we have in that space. Right? So, so one of the things we announced at .Next is, is, is, is one-click storage scaling. So one of the common problems with databases is as they grow over time, it's not running out of storage capacity. Now re-provisions to storage for a database, migrate all the data where it's weeks and months of look, right? Well, guess what? With Era, you can do that in one click, it uses the underlying AOS scale-out architecture to provision more storage and it does it have zero downtime. So on the fly, you can resize your databases that speed, you're adding some security capabilities. You're adding some capabilities around resilience. Era continues to be a very exciting product for us. And one of the things, one of the real things that we are really excited about is that it can really unify database operations between private and public. So in the future, we can also offer an aversion of Era, which operates on native public cloud instances and really excited about that. >> Furrier: Yeah. And you guys got that two X performance on scaling up databases and analytics. Now the big part point there, since you brought up security, I got to ask you, how are you guys talking about security? Obviously it's embedded in from the beginning. I know you guys continue to talk about that, but talk about, Rajiv, the security on, on that's on everyone's mind. Okay. It goes evolving. You seeing ransomware are continuing to happen more and more and more, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. What do you guys, how are you guys helping customers stay secure? >> Mirani: Security is something that you always have to think about as a defense in depth when it comes to security, right? There's no one product that, that's going to do everything for you. That said, what we are trying to do is to essentially go with the gamut of detection, prevention, and response with our security, and ransom ware is a great example of that, right. We've partnered with Qualys to essentially be able to do a risk assessment of your workloads, to basically be able to look into your workloads, see whether they have been bashed, whether they have any known vulnerabilities and so on. To try and prevent malware from infecting your workloads in the first place, right? So that's, that's the first line of defense. Now not systems will be perfect. Some, some, some, some malware will probably get in anyway But then you detect it, right. We have a database of all the 4,000 ransomware signatures that you can use to prevent ransomware from, uh, detecting ransom ware if it does infect the system. And if that happens, we can prevent it from doing any damage by putting your fire systems and storage into read-only mode, right. We can also prevent lateral spread of, of your ransomware through micro-segmentation. And finally, if you were, if you were to invade, all those defenses that you were actually able to encrypt data on, on, on a filer, we have immutable snapshots, they can recover from those kinds of attacks. So it's really a defense in depth approach. And in keeping with that, you know, we also have a rich ecosystem of partners while this is one of them, but older networks market sector that we work with closely to make sure that our customers have the best tooling around and the simplest way to manage security of their infrastructure. >> Furrier: Well, I got to say, I'm very impressed guys, by the announcements from the team I've been, we've been following Nutanix in the beginning, as you know, and now it's back in the next phase of the inflection point. I mean, looking at my notebook here from the announcements, the VPC virtual networking, DR Observability, zero trust security, workload governance, performance expanded availability, and AWS elastic DR. Okay, we'll get to that in a second, clusters on Azure preview cloud native ecosystem, cloud control plane. I mean, besides all the buzzword bingo, that's going on there, this is cloud, this is a cloud native story. This is distributed computing. This is virtualization, containers, cloud native, kind of all coming together around data. >> Cornely: What you see here is, I mean, it is clear that it is about modern applications, right? And this is about shifting strategy in terms of focusing on the pieces where we're going to be great at. And a lot of these are around data, giving you data services, data governance, not having giving you an invisible platform that can be running in any cloud. And then partnering, right. And this is just recognizing what's going on in the world, right? People want options, customers and options. When it comes to cloud, they want options to where they're running the reports, what options in terms of, whether it be using to build the modern applications. Right? So our big thing here is providing and being the best platform to go and actually support for Devers to come in and build and run their new and modern applications. That means that for us supporting a broad ecosystem of partners, entrepreneur platform, you know, we announced our partnership with Red Hat a couple of months ago, right? And this is going to be a big deal for us because again, we're bringing two leaders in the industry that are eminently complimentary when it comes to providing you a complete stack to go and build, run, and manage your client's applications. When you do that on premises, utilizing like the preferred ATI environment to do that. Using the Red Hat Open Shift, or, you're doing this open to public cloud and again, making it seamless and easy, to move the applications and their supporting data services around, around them that support them, whether they're running on prem in hybrid winter mechanic. So client activity is a big deal, but when it comes to client activity, the way we look at this, it's all about giving customers choice, choice of that from services and choice of infrastructure service. >> Furrier: Yeah. Let's talk to the red hat folks, Rajiv, it's you know, it's, they're an operating system thinking company. You know, you look at the internet now in the cloud and edge, and on-premise, it's essentially an operating system. you need your backup and recovery needs to disaster recovery. You need to have the HCI, you need to have all of these elements part of the system. It's, it's, it's, it's building on top of the existing Nutanix legacy, then the roots and the ecosystem with new stuff. >> Mirani: Right? I mean, it's, in fact, the Red Hat part is a great example of, you know, the perfect marriage, if you will, right? It's, it's, it's the best in class platform for running the cloud-native workloads and the best in class platform with a service offering in there. So two really great companies coming together. So, so really happy that we could get that done. You know, the, the point here is that cloud native applications still need infrastructure to run off, right? And then that infrastructure, if anything, the demands on that and growing it since it's no longer that hail of, I have some box storage, I have some filers and, you know, just don't excite them, set. People are using things like object stores, they're using databases increasingly. They're using the Kafka and Map Reduce and all kinds of data stores out there. And back haul must be great at supporting all of that. And that's where, as Thomas said, earlier, data services, data storage, those are our strengths. So that's certainly a building from platform to platform. And then from there onwards platform services, great to have right out of the pocket. >> Furrier: People still forget this, you know, still hardware and software working together behind the scenes. The old joke we have here on the cube is server less is running on a bunch of servers. So, you know, this is the way that is going. It's really the innovation. This is the infrastructure as code truly. This is what's what's happened is super exciting. Rajiv, Thomas, thank you guys for coming on. Always great to talk to you guys. Congratulations on an amazing platform. You guys are developing. Looks really strong. People are giving it rave reviews and congratulations on, on, on your keynotes. >> Cornely: Thank you for having us >> Okay. This is theCube's coverage of.next global virtual 2021 cube coverage day two keynote review. I'm John Furrier Furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching.