(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about the massive $61 billion planned acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And I'm here with Phil Brotherton of NetApp to discuss the implications for customers, for the industry, and NetApp's particular point of view. Phil, welcome. Good to see you again. >> It's great to see you, Dave. >> So this topic has garnered a lot of conversation. What's your take on this epic event? What does it mean for the industry generally, and customers specifically? >> You know, I think time will tell a little bit, Dave. We're in the early days. We've, you know, so we heard the original announcements and then it's evolved a little bit, as we're going now. I think overall it'll be good for the ecosystem in the end. There's a lot you can do when you start combining what VMware can do with compute and some of the hardware assets of Broadcom. There's a lot of security things that can be brought, for example, to the infrastructure, that are very high-end and cool, and then integrated, so it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of upside for it. There's obviously a lot of concern about what it means for vendor consolidation and pricing and things like that. So time will tell. >> You know, when this announcement first came out, I wrote a piece, you know, how "Broadcom will tame the VMware beast," I called it. And, you know, looked at Broadcom's history and said they're going to cut, they're going to raise prices, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen a different tone, certainly, as Broadcom has got into the details. And I'm sure I and others maybe scared a lot of customers, but I think everybody's kind of calming down now. What are you hearing from customers about this acquisition? How are they thinking about it? >> You know, I think it varies. There's, I'd say generally we have like half our installed base, Dave, runs ESX Server, so the bulk of our customers use VMware, and generally they love VMware. And I'm talking mainly on-prem. We're just extending to the cloud now, really, at scale. And there's a lot of interest in continuing to do that, and that's really strong. The piece that's careful is this vendor, the cost issues that have come up. The things that were in your piece, actually. And what does that mean to me, and how do I balance that out? Those are the questions people are dealing with right now. >> Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of talk about the macro, the macro headwinds. Everybody's being a little cautious. The CIOs are tapping the brakes. We all sort of know that story. But we have some data from our partner ETR that ask, they go out every quarter and they survey, you know, 1500 or so IT practitioners, and they ask the ones that are planning to spend less, that are cutting, "How are you going to approach that? What's your primary methodology in terms of achieving, you know, cost optimization?" The number one, by far, answer was to consolidate redundant vendors. It was like, it's now up to about 40%. The second, distant second, was, "We're going to, you know, optimize cloud costs." You know, still significant, but it was really that consolidating the redundant vendors. Do you see that? How does NetApp fit into that? >> Yeah, that is an interesting, that's a very interesting bit of research, Dave. I think it's very right. One thing I would say is, because I've been in the infrastructure business in Silicon Valley now for 30 years. So these ups and downs are, that's a consistent thing in our industry, and I always think people should think of their infrastructure and cost management. That's always an issue, with infrastructure as cost management. What I've told customers forever is that when you look at cost management, our best customers at cost management are typically service providers. There's another aspect to cost management, is you want to automate as much as possible. And automation goes along with vendor consolidation, because how you automate different products, you don't want to have too many vendors in your layers. And what I mean by the layers of ecosystem, there's a storage layer, the network layer, the compute layer, like, the security layer, database layer, et cetera. When you think like that, everybody should pick their partners very carefully, per layer. And one last thought on this is, it's not like people are dumb, and not trying to do this. It's, when you look at what happens in the real world, acquisitions happen, things change as you go. And in these big customers, that's just normal, that things change. But you always have to have this push towards consolidating and picking your vendors very carefully. >> Also, just to follow up on that, I mean, you know, when you think about multi-cloud, and you mentioned, you know, you've got some big customers, they do a lot of M & A, it's kind of been multi-cloud by accident. "Oh, we got all these other tools and storage platforms and whatever it is." So where does NetApp fit in that whole consolidation equation? I'm thinking about, you know, cross-cloud services, which is a big VMware theme, thinking about a consistent experience, on-prem, hybrid, across the three big clouds, out to the edge. Where do you fit? >> So our view has been, and it was this view, and we extend it to the cloud, is that the data layer, so in our software, is called ONTAP, the data layer is a really important layer that provides a lot of efficiency. It only gets bigger, how you do compliance, how you do backup, DR, blah blah blah. All that data layer services needs to operate on-prem and on the clouds. So when you look at what we've done over the years, we've extended to all the clouds, our data layer. We've put controls, management tools, over the top, so that you can manage the entire data layer, on-prem and cloud, as one layer. And we're continuing to head down that path, 'cause we think that data layer is obviously the path to maximum ability to do compliance, maximum cost advantages, et cetera. So we've really been the company that set our sights on managing the data layer. Now, if you look at VMware, go up into the network layer, the compute layer, VMware is a great partner, and that's why we work with them so closely, is they're so perfect a fit for us, and they've been a great partner for 20 years for us, connecting those infrastructural data layers: compute, network, and storage. >> Well, just to stay on that for a second. I've seen recently, you kind of doubled down on your VMware alliance. You've got stuff at re:Invent I saw, with AWS, you're close to Azure, and I'm really talking about ONTAP, which is sort of an extension of what you were just talking about, Phil, which is, you know, it's kind of NetApp's storage operating system, if you will. It's a world class. But so, maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, and how you see it evolving. >> Well, so what we've been seeing consistently is, customers want to use the advantages of the cloud. So, point one. And when you have to completely refactor apps and all this stuff, it limits, it's friction. It limits what you can do, it raises costs. And what we did with VMware, VMware is this great platform for being able to run basically client-server apps on-prem and cloud, the exact same way. The problem is, when you have large data sets in the VMs, there's some cost issues and things, especially on the cloud. That drove us to work together, and do what we did. We GA-ed, we're the, so NetApp is the only independent storage, independent storage, say this right, independent storage platform certified to run with VMware cloud on Amazon. We GA-ed that last summer. We GA-ed with Azure, the Azure VMware service, a couple months ago. And you'll see news coming with GCP soon. And so the idea was, make it easy for customers to basically run in a hybrid model. And then if you back out and go, "What does that mean for you as a customer?", it's not saying you should go to the cloud, necessarily, or stay on-prem, or whatever. But it's giving you the flexibility to cost-optimize where you want to be. And from a data management point of view, ONTAP gives you the consistent data management, whichever way you decide to go. >> Yeah, so I've been following NetApp for decades, when you were Network Appliance, and I saw you go from kind of the workstation space into the enterprise. I saw you lean into virtualization really early on, and you've been a great VMware partner ever since. And you were early in cloud, so, sort of talking about, you know, that cross-cloud, what we call supercloud. I'm interested in what you're seeing in terms of specific actions that customers are taking. Like, I think about ELAs, and I think it's a two-edged sword. You know, should customers, you know, lean into ELAs right now? You know, what are you seeing there? You talked about, you know, sort of modernizing apps with things like Kubernetes, you know, cloud migration. What are some of the techniques that you're advising customers to take in the context of this acquisition? >> You know, so the basics of this are pretty easy. One is, and I think even Raghu, the CEO of VMware, has talked about this. Extending your ELA is probably a good idea. Like I said, customers love VMware, so having a commitment for a time, consistent cost management for a time is a good strategy. And I think that's why you're hearing ELA extensions being discussed. It's a good idea. The second part, and I think it goes to your surveys, that cost optimization point on the cloud is, moving to the cloud has huge advantages, but if you just kind of lift and shift, oftentimes the costs aren't realized the way you'd want. And the term "modernization," changing your app to use more Kubernetes, more cloud-native services, is often a consideration that goes into that. But that requires time. And you know, most companies have hundreds of apps, or thousands of apps, they have to consider modernizing. So you want to then think through the journey, what apps are going to move, what gets modernized, what gets lifted-shifted, how many data centers are you compressing? There's a lot of data center, the term I've been hearing is "data center evacuations," but data center consolidation. So that there's some even energy savings advantages sometimes with that. But the whole point, I mean, back up to my whole point, the whole point is having the infrastructure that gives you the flexibility to make the journey on your cost advantages and your business requirements. Not being forced to it. Like, it's not really a philosophy, it's more of a business optimization strategy. >> When you think about application modernization and Kubernetes, how does NetApp, you know, fit into that, as a data layer? >> Well, so if you kind of think, you said, like our journey, Dave, was, when we started our life, we were doing basically virtualization of volumes and things for technical customers. And the servers were always bare metal servers that we got involved with back then. This is, like, going back 20 years. Then everyone moved to VMs, and, like, it's probably, today, I mean, getting to your question in a second, but today, loosely, 20% bare metal servers, 80% virtual machines today. And containers is growing, now a big growing piece. So, if you will, sort of another level of virtual machines in containers. And containers were historically stateless, meaning the storage didn't have anything to do. Storage is always the stateful area in the architectures. But as containers are getting used more, stateful containers have become a big deal. So we've put a lot of emphasis into a product line we call Astra that is the world's best data management for containers. And that's both a cloud service and used on-prem in a lot of my customers. It's a big growth area. So that's what, when I say, like, one partner that can do data management, just, that's what we have to do. We have to keep moving with our customers to the type of data they want to store, and how do you store it most efficiently? Hey, one last thought on this is, where I really see this happening, there's a booming business right now in artificial intelligence, and we call it modern data analytics, but people combining big data lakes with AI, and that's where some of this, a lot of the container work comes in. We've extended objects, we have a thing we call file-object duality, to make it easy to bridge the old world of files to the new world of objects. Those all go hand in hand with app modernization. >> Yeah, it's a great thing about this industry. It never sits still. And you're right, it's- >> It's why I'm in it. >> Me too. Yeah, it's so much fun. There's always something. >> It is an abstraction layer. There's always going to be another abstraction layer. Serverless is another example. It's, you know, primarily stateless, that's probably going to, you know, change over time. All right, last question. In thinking about this Broadcom acquisition of VMware, in the macro climate, put a sort of bow on where NetApp fits into this equation. What's the value you bring in this context? >> Oh yeah, well it's like I said earlier, I think it's the data layer of, it's being the data layer that gives you what you guys call the supercloud, that gives you the ability to choose which cloud. Another thing, all customers are running at least two clouds, and you want to be able to pick and choose, and do it your way. So being the data layer, VMware is going to be in our infrastructures for at least as long as I'm in the computer business, Dave. I'm getting a little old. So maybe, you know, but "decades" I think is an easy prediction, and we plan to work with VMware very closely, along with our customers, as they extend from on-prem to hybrid cloud operations. That's where I think this will go. >> Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. Look at the business case for migrating off of VMware. It just doesn't make sense. It works, it's world class, it recover... They've done so much amazing, you know, they used to be called, Moritz called it the software mainframe, right? And that's kind of what it is. I mean, it means it doesn't go down, right? And it supports virtually any application, you know, around the world, so. >> And I think getting back to your original point about your article, from the very beginning, is, I think Broadcom's really getting a sense of what they've bought, and it's going to be, hopefully, I think it'll be really a fun, another fun era in our business. >> Well, and you can drive EBIT a couple of ways. You can cut, okay, fine. And I'm sure there's some redundancies that they'll find. But there's also, you can drive top-line revenue. And you know, we've seen how, you know, EMC and then Dell used that growth from VMware to throw off free cash flow, and it was just, you know, funded so much, you know, innovation. So innovation is the key. Hock Tan has talked about that a lot. I think there's a perception that Broadcom, you know, doesn't invest in R & D. That's not true. I think they just get very focused with that investment. So, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's fun being here. >> Yeah, our pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 22. This is the Cube's live presentation streaming out virtually our inaugural event, kind of a pilot I'm John Furo of the cube with Dave ante. Got a great panel here to discuss the enablers and blockers question mark for superclouds. We got, we got kit Culbert, CTO of VMware basketball, Gor CEO platform nine, and has Pani who is the CEO of RA systems. We got a mix of the big leader, VMware and the upstart companies growing into the same space, all cloud native friends of the cube. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Thank >>You. >>Start. All right. So there's no debate cloud native is booming. We see that clearly Kubernetes became a unifying force. It's an ops layer kind of almost like a kind of a midline between dev and ops DevSecOps is happening at scale. What are the blockers and what are the enablers for super cloud? What do we need? Let's see what do get your take? >>Sure. So UN I spoke about this a little bit in, at New York summit, the big trend I'm seeing, and it's, it's a blocker that's being sort of taken care of by enterprises, which is, you know, until very recently, Kubernetes was effectively a project that NA would take on. They'd try things out, they'd go to the cloud, they'd spin things up. And then the next team would come and they'd do the same things. And there was no consistency. There was no ization, it's a mess, right? It's all over the place. Some things are moving fast. Some things are not going fast and this is not how enterprises do business, right? That's not how things work. Traditionally enterprises have had it organizations that create standards, right? So those it organizations now kind of are starting to think like a platform organization. So centrally come up with the right framework for all application teams to consume infrastructure, modern infrastructure. So I'm not using the word Kubernetes here because Kubernetes is an enabler. We are a Kubernetes company, obviously, but it's about modern applications, modern infrastructure. So stepping back and thinking about it as to how an enterprise will do this across the board is the right answer. And I'm seeing this happen in a pretty significant way across all the large enterprises I talked to. >>That's why you've had a great career. And we talked before you came on Opia you did a turnaround there, we, you even go back to the old days of the web web 1.0 and early software. You've seen the movie before. >>Yes. >>You know, complexity is not solved way more complexity. This is kind of the old enterprise way. And they don't want that. They've seen the benefits of self-service. They see architecture and standards as being an enabler. Where are we in here in the market? Is, are we positioned in your opinion for customers to get the value of a super cloud? >>Absolutely. So if you think about, first of all, I think the topic of cloud native developers and app developers picking containers and Kubernetes, that's a done deal, right? That has already happened. So every cloud native developer is already using these tools. Now, I think as has been discussed today in you, in the earlier sessions, is, are the operations and infrastructure catching up or they're lagging behind, right? As more and more developers are using multi-cloud technologies, enterprises are creating a choice, I think operations and what we also strongly believe that's actually part of the name of our company is, is a platform. The platform of which a company uses to transform itself to be cloud native is the big opportunity. I don't think it's a blocker, but it's a huge opportunity. And I think this is where, you know, as you can't stop developers from developing on different clouds, private, public, multi edge, that's gonna happen. Innovation is gonna continue. But then how does the infrastructure in the platform make it seamless? Right? And almost treat all these different clouds as a single pan super cloud platform. That's I think is the >>Opportunity. So we in a platform more than with other companies, or is there one unified platform called cloud native? We know customers been buying tools from security they're they got so many tools in, in their tools shed, so to speak. What is that platform? I mean, is it more unique, fragmentation? Is it unified? >>I mean, if you think about it, a couple of it's a combination of tools that are stitched together to reach a purpose, right? So if you think about, you know, APIs continued APIs that's been discussed earlier today, I think that's, that should be standardized. The other thing is always on monitoring because I think that's a very key aspect. Once you build it, then as the enterprises are using it, the always on monitoring becomes. So I think it's a combination of capabilities that are stitched together to enable the acceleration for companies to become cloud native. >>I, I have a thought on a blocker. None of you guys are gonna like it. Oh, maybe you can come. Maybe some of you guys probably won't but comment, but maybe John will. I think AWS is a blocker to Supercloud cuz they, they don't want those cross cloud service. It's like they, they, for years they wouldn't even say multicloud. The first time I heard it was in Boston three weeks ago, I actually heard it. So Hey, you see, >>You know, I'm gonna disagree with that. Okay. >>But, but okay, go ahead. All >>So we'll get their reaction. So my, we just heard from the last panel that the security should be leading the consortium. Yeah. Because they're, they're not the enemy they're actually, >>Maybe they should be >>Well back in the old web days, when standards were driving things, you had a common enemy, proprietary NASAs, proprietary networking stack. So the evil empire was at and T that's owned Unix. If you remember, they copyright that. >>So you think they're greasing the skids for, >>I think Supercloud, I think the hyperscalers could cuz they're driving the CapEx, they're providing the value. So in my opinion, Amazon and Azure, whoever does the right thing first can win every, maybe >>This is how Google could catch up >>It. It could be a, it could be a Slingshot move. It could, you know, boomerang, someone to the front of the line or extend. Amazon's already huge lead. So if I'm AWS, if I'm Adam Slosky and I'm talking to Andy Jassy, he says, how am I gonna differentiate myself? I'd say, I'm gonna come in and own multicloud. I'm gonna own Supercloud we are the Supercloud and you work with AWS's primitives in a way that makes services work. I would go for that. I'd be like, okay, show me more. What do you >>Think? I, I, I don't think think any one company is going to be a super cloud because I think yes, there is going to be a lot of workloads on public clouds, but there's a huge amount of workloads at the enterprise at the edge at the store. I think those will continue for various reasons, whether it's data, sovereignty regulations. So I think it's going to be a combination. Everybody's not gonna go to one, you know, cloud, it's going to be an amalgamation. >>Okay. But I I've argued that snowflake is a form of a super data cloud and a very specific use case, you know, Aviatrix is trying to be a network, you know, layer and you know, sneak in a security, let me on and on, on a lot of small you get, you get super cloud stove pipes, but, but nonetheless you're, you're still abstracting. I mean, we've this industry attractions, right? >>Well this, this concept I completely agree with, right? This idea that, so, so one of the, my is that right now enterprises buy 500 different technologies and they have to become PhDs in 500 different things. It's just never gonna happen skills issue, which is no way. Right. So what's gonna happen is all of these providers are gonna essentially become managed service providers. Cloud is in manifestation of that. Snowflake is a ation data breaks is a manifestation of that. Right? So in our general industry, there's gonna be a handful of platforms. Right. And they're gonna work across these clouds. Amazon may have one too. Right? Look, they, they, they, for the longest time sort of ignored OnPrem, but now they have something called SSA, which runs on Preem. Right. Why, why would they bother? Because, well, obviously there's a lot of money to be made in a data center as well. >>So I, my sense is they get it completely understand and appreciate that there's other things outside of Amazon. But in terms of what Bosco was talking about, my sense is, you know, these multiple platforms will come about. And to the point we were making earlier about standardization and I, I mean, is it gonna be one company or is it gonna be standards that everybody will else will adopt? There's a topic that the three of us have talked about before, which is this vCenter for Kubernetes. Right. And all due respect to kit. Right. My sense is that there there's gonna be multiple companies that are gonna start working towards a vCenter for Kubernetes. And it is right. I mean, that's how I've, I mean, I've been thinking about this before and a half years, including >>VMware. >>Yeah. And you know, and we, we should compare notes. Right. But what's gonna happen is there was a, there was a distinct advantage VMware had back in the day because ESX was their product. Right. And that was a standard right now. What's the ESX in the new it's sort of Kubernetes, right. I mean, it's on bare metal for the most part or whatever VMs. So that's a standard, that's got standardized APIs, the things around it are standardized APIs. So what is the unfair advantage that one company has other than execution? >>Nothing. Well also composability if you over rotate on Kubernetes, for example, and not take advantage of say C two, for instance. Totally, >>Totally. >>It's a mix and match. >>Yeah. But I think, I think if you get too focused on Kubernetes, it's a means to an end. Yeah. But at the end of the day, it it's a mean to end end. And I think all these tools, there's a lot of standardization happening that's gonna happen. Right. And no one vendor is gonna control that. Right. It's it's going to be, it's gonna continue. I think how you bring these together and orchestrate right. And manage the service. Because I think that if you think about the lack of skills to keep up with the operations and platforms is one of the largest inhibitors right now for enterprises to move as fast as they want to become cloud native. >>And you have the shiny new toy problem kit where people just go and grab it. You know, Keith Townsend has a, as a quote, he says, look, we essentially move at the speed of the CIO or else we're going too fast or too slow. So, so the, to, to the point about the new toy now I've got new skills. >>Yep. Well, so this has been a really good discussion. And I think so there's a couple of things, right. Going back to the, the paper that we wrote, right. How we have these different sort of layers of multi-cloud services or, or categories of multi-cloud services. And it's exactly to capture some of the ex different examples you just mentioned. And yeah, the challenge is that each of them by themselves are a little bit of an island today. Like you don't have that extra level of integration. And so what the platform teams typically do is try to add that extra glue to make the experience more seamless for the, the, the, you know, developers at that company. And so like, you know, for instance, things like identity. So the nice thing about going to a single public cloud is that there's one, usually one identity system for everything. And that's great. All the different services roles are, you know, are back all that. Stuff's all centralized, but you don't have that when you're going across many different multicloud services. So what does that look like? So I think there's some of these different crosscutting concerns that we need to look at how we standardize on as an industry. And that's, again, one of the things >>You felt that part. And I think, I think also the other key thing is yes, you can always say I'll put everything in one world, world garden and I'm done. Yeah. Okay. But that's not the reality because at some point you need, the flexibility and cost comes into play and flexibility to move comes into play. And I think that is a key factor. Yep. Right. >>Yeah. And so like, so then the question is, what degrees of freedom do you give yourself there? And I think that's the architectural question is how you, how do you design it? What sort of abstractions do you leverage? And I think that goes back to some of our discussion before, which is, do you directly go on top of a native cloud service or do you use a multi-cloud service? >>But I think it's a combination of, I don't think it's either or no, it's not, it's not an either or you have to have the ability to choose a public cloud or do it private. Yeah. At the same time you don't change. It's like a common dictionary, right. You're not gonna change every time the accent changes, you know? So that's, >>So here's a question for you guys. So what has to happen for super clouds, be existing assume that AWS and Azure and Google, aren't gonna sit still assume that maybe they normalize into some sort of swim lane or position that they have to rationalize. What, assuming they're not gonna sit still, what has to happen for super clouds to, to actually work >>Well? Well, I think, you know, really quick going back to the platform team point, I would say that the platform teams at various companies, and we got one at VMware two, they're creating a rudimentary form of a super cloud. Right. Cause they, you know, absolutely like if, if they are supporting multiple clouds, like all the things they're stitching together and all that work, that is a super cloud. The problem is that there's not really a standard approach or architecture or reusable things to enable that. I think that's really what's missing. >>Yeah. But I think the key here is standard us reusable. Because for example, we have customers who are in doesn't matter where they are, some of their loads are in public cloud. Some are in private, some are at the edge, but they're still using the same platform. Yeah. Right. So it is a standard open source based technology. So it is standard. There's no lock in for them from an infrastructure point of view. Yep. And it gives them the flexibility because certain apps, you wanna put it on the public cloud, certain apps, you do not, you need the, I mean, for example, some of the AI, I think earlier discussion that was going on about chips and AI and ML workloads. I mean, think about moving all of that to a public cloud, to, and I think a lot of machine learning and AI applications are going to happen where the data is getting created at the edge. Yeah. At the edge >>Public cloud. It's not gonna happen cloud. It's gonna be real time in, >>It's gonna the end time. And so therefore you have to decide based on your workload, what are you gonna move all the way to a public cloud? And what are you need to do to make business decisions at this spot where the data is created? >>That's a huge disruptor potentially to Supercloud. This is a whole new architecture that emerges at the edge with a whole new set of economics. I >>Think the edge is gonna be like massively disruptive. >>I think it's gonna think about, if you think about the edge, go beyond just the classic definition of edge. Think about branches in stores, retail stores. Yeah. Right. I mean, you cannot shut down retail store because you lost connectivity to the network or something you still have to serve your company >>Edge is a disruptive enabler. I think it's gonna change potentially change the position of the players in the business. Whoever embraces the edge. >>Yeah. Maybe going back to the question that you had asked before, which is what is, what is a framework for a super cloud? So you said something that is important, which is your team's burning one. Yeah. I met that team. Actually. They seem to be very sharp guys. >>They're they're mine. They're my are great. They're awesome. >>We got a deal going on here. Yeah. >>I tried. We have >>It. >>So this is the interesting part, right? So I will pause it that the super cloud of the future will be a company that owns zero servers and no network. >>Okay. >>That's gonna happen. Okay. So I just kind of it's >>Full point you >>Made before I made that point just about the public cloud, just so Mr. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that really interesting. Not >>We that, so I've thought about this a long time that in my opinion, and I've, I'm, I'm sure I've said this to you, John, that, you know, the one company that I've always believed has the best shot at doing this well is actually VMware because that's the one company that's, you know, that there's, there's no, you know, infrastructure back haul. Right. You know, that you're carrying, but, but in terms of thinking and getting there, you know, being, being a company that can do it is not the same as being the company who has done it. That's a, there's a distance, but >>I have to defend that now because hyperscalers are not gonna be able to super cloud. They're not now it's hype. See, agreed, great point. Public clouds will be part of the super cloud. Yeah, totally. But they will not, the hyperscalers are not building super clouds. Totally. They're blocking it. Right. Yeah. >>They're enabling it. >>We agree on >>No, they're enabling >>Because it's, it's not in there to their advantage. Right. Look, the, the snowflake example you gave is the pivotal example in this conversation. Yep. Right. Why does snowflake exist at all when Redshift exists and all these other things exist because they provide value that is beyond a single clouds purview. Right. And at that point, just step back from our platforms and what we sell. Forget about that for a minute. Right. It's it's about, look, I think, I think this, we are, this market is early, we're out early, right. 10 years from now, what will a company look like? That actually solves a superly problem they're gonna solve for yeah. Kubernetes, whatever. Right. But they're gonna solve for truly modern applications. >>Yeah. They're gonna refactor application that has new economics new value, right. >>At that point, this idea of edge and cloud, forget about it. Right. This is all distribution issues, right. It doesn't really matter. Is it retail or not? Yeah, absolutely. These are places, but, but the way, the right way to think about this is not about edge versus cloud, right? This is about an app. Sometimes it needs to run in one location and it's good enough. Sometimes it needs to run in 10,000 locations and, and it's a distribution issue. I've always believed there's this idea of edge versus cloud. This is BS, right? Because it, it is a cloud over a different size. Sure. But, but I'm making a slightly different point. Sure. Which is, it's a distribution problem. Right. If you step back and think about distribution, my app could run in Azure or AWS or in a retail store, in a branch or whatever. Right. >>And once that is done, the question is, how am I in, in making all this happen? There was a point made in the prior conversation, in the, in the session about a database kind of popping up in the place where I needed to run. Okay. Nobody does that today, by the way. Right. At least truly well right about that, sir, that will come. Right? Yeah. But when that comes, my application is a conglomerate of compute data. I don't know a, a service bus and network and all these things and they will all kind of pop together. That company does not exist >>Today. Well, we'll, we will be documenting which we have more time. We're gonna document it. We have to unfortunately stop this panel because it's awesome. We can go for another hour. Sure. Let's bring you guys back, but that's it. The super cloud of the future will look like something and we're gonna debate it. And speaking of snowflake, we have the co-founder here next to sit down with us to talk about what he thinks about this super cloud. He, he probably heard the comment, come back more coverage. This break with the co-founder of snowflake after the short break. >>Do thank you.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John Forer host of the cube with Dave Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, two sets for three days. We're on three days, we're here breaking down all the action of what's going on around VMware is our 12th year covering VMware's user conference. Formerly known as world. Now explore as it explores new territory, its future multi-cloud vSphere eight and a variety of new next generation cloud. We're here on day three, breaking out. This is day three more, more intimate, much more deeper conversations. And we have coming back on the Q Keith Norby with NetApp, the worldwide product partner solutions executive at NetApp Keith. Great to see you industry to veteran cube alumni. Thanks for coming back. It's >>Good to see you >>Again. Yeah. I wanted to bring you back for a couple reasons. One is I want to talk about the NetApp story and also where that's going with DM VMware as that's evolving and, and is changing and, and with Broadcom and, and the new next generation, but also analyzing kind of the customer impact piece of it. You're like an analyst who've been in the industry for a long time. Been commentating on the cube. VMware's in an interesting spot right now because I, I mean, I love the story. I mean, we can debate the messaging. Some people are very critical of it a little bit too multicloud, not enough cloud native, but I see the waves, right? I get it. Virtualization kicked ass tech names. Now it moves to hybrid cloud. And now this next gen is a, you know, clear cloud native multi-cloud environment. I, I get that. I can see, I can, I can get there, but is it ready? And the timing. Right. And do they have all the peace parts? What's the role of the ecosystem? These are all open questions. >>Yeah. And, and the reality is no one has a single answer. And that's part of the fun of this, is that not just a NetApp, but the rest of the ecosystem and videos here, as an example, who, who is thinking, you know, the Kings of AI are gonna be sitting at a V VMware show and yet it's absolutely relevant. So you have a very complex set of things that emerge, but yet also it's, it's, that's not overcomplicated. There is a set of primary principles that, you know, organizations I think are all looking to get to. And I think the reality is that this is maturing in different spurts. So whether it's ecosystem or it's, you know, operations modes and several other factors that kind of come into it, you know, that's part of the landscape, >>You know, I gotta ask you, you know, you and I are both kind of historians. We always talk about what's happened and happening and gonna happen. You know, it's interesting 12 years covering world and now explore NetApp has always been such a great company. We've been, I've been following that company, you know, since, you know, 1997, you know, days. And, and certainly with the past decade of the cloud or so the moves you guys may have been really good, but NetApp's never really had the kind of positioning in the VMware story going back in the past 12 years. And this keynote, you guys were mentioned in the keynote. Yeah. Has there ever been a time where NetApp was actually mentioned in a keynote at world or now explore? >>Well, you know, when we started this relationship back when I was a partner, I really monetized and took advantage of some of the advantages that NetApp had with VMware back in the early days, we're talking to ESX three days and they were dominant to the point where the rest of, you know, the ecosystem was trying to catch up. And of course, you know, a lot of competition from there, but yeah, it, it, it was great seeing a day, one VMware keynote with NetApp mentioned in the same relevance as AWS and VMware, which is exactly where we've been. You know, one thing that NetApp has done really well is not just being AWS, but be in all the hyperscalers as first party services and having a, a portfolio of other ways that we deal with things like, you know, data governance and cloud data management and cloud cloud backup, and overall dealing with cyber resiliency and, and ransomware protection and list goes on and on. So we've done our job to really make ourself both relevant and easy for people to consume. And it was great to see VMware and AWS come together. And the funny part was that, you know, we had on, on the previous cube session, you have VMware and AWS in between NetApp, all talking about, we have this whole thing running at all three of our booths. And that's fantastic. You >>Know, I, I can say because I actually was there and documented it and actually wrote about it in the early 20 11, 20 12, the then CEO Georgian's and I had an interview. He actually was the first storage company to actually engage with AWS back then. Yeah. I mean, that's a long time ago. That's that's 10 years ago. And then everyone else kind of followed EMC kind of was deer in the headlights at that point. They were poo pooing, AWS. Oh yeah, no, it'll never work either of which will never work. It's just a, a fluke. Yeah. For developers. NetApp was on the Amazon web services partnership train for a long time. >>Yeah. It, it, it's really amazing how early we got on this thing, which you can see the reason why that matters now is because it's not only in first party service, but that's also very robust and scalable. And this is one of the reasons why we think this opens it up. And, you know, as much as you wanna talk about the technology capabilities in, in this offering, the funny part is, is the intro conversation is how much money you save. So it unlocks all the, the use cases that you weren't able to do before. And when you, when you look at use case after use case on these workloads, they were hell held back. The number one conversation we had at this show was partner after partner, organization, after organization that came into our booth and talked to us about, yeah, I've got a bunch of these scenarios that I've been holding back on because I heard whispers about this. Now we're gonna go in >>Unleash those. All right. So what are, what's the top stories for you guys now at NetApp? What's the update it's been a while, since we had a cube update with you guys, what are you guys showing of the show? What's your agenda? What are your talking points? What's the main story? >>Well, for us, it's, it's, it's, it's always, you know, a cloud and on-prem combination of priorities within our partner ecosystem. The way we kind of communicate that out is really through three lenses. You know, one is on the hybrid cloud opportunity, people taking data center and modernizing the data center with the apps and getting the cloud, just like we're delivering here at this VMware world show. Also the AI and modern data analytics opportunity, and then public cloud, because really in a lot of these situations at apps, you know, the, the buyer, the consumer, the people that are interested in transforming are looking at it from different lenses. And these all start with really the customer journeys, the data ops buyer is different than the data center ops buyer. And, and that's exactly who we target this in is, is NetApp. I think, focuses relentlessly on how we reach them. And by the way, not just on storage products, if you look at like our instant cluster acquisition and all these other things, we're trying to be as relevant, we, as we can in data management and you know, whether that's pipelining data management or storing data management, that's >>Where we're there. You know, I, I was talking with David Nicholson, cuz we have, you know, we joked together. I say the holy Trinity, he goes with the devil's triangle. I'm Catholic, gotta know what his, his denomination is, but storage, networking, and compute. Obviously the, the three majors, it never changes. And I think it was interesting now, and I wanna get your reaction to this and what NetApp's doing around it is that if look at the DevOps movement, it's clearly cloud native, but the it ops is not it anymore. It's basically security and data I'm I'm oversimplifying, but DevOps, the developers now do a lot of that. I call it work in, in the CSD pipeline, but the real challenge is data and ops. That's a storage conversation. Compute is beautiful. You got containers, Kubernetes, all kinds of stuff going on with compute, move, compute around, move the data to compute. But storage is where the action is for cyber and data ops. Yeah. And AI. So like storage is back. They never left, but it's, it's transformed to even be more important because the role of hyper-convergence shows that compute and storage go well together. What's your take on this and how is NetApp modernized to, to solve the data ops and take that to the next level and of obviously enable and, and enable in great security and or defense ability. >>Yeah. And that's why no one architecture is gonna solve every problem. That's why, when we look at the data ops buyer, there's adjacencies to the apps buyer, to the other cloud ops buyer. And there's also the fin ops buyer because all of 'em have to work together. What we're, what we're focusing on. Isn't just storing data. But it's also things around how you discover govern data. You know, how you protect data, even things like in the ed workspace, the chip manufacturers, how we use cloud bursting to be able to accelerate performance on chip design. So whether you're translating this for the industry vernacular about how we help say in the financial sector for AI and what we do within Invidia, or it's something translated to this VMware opportunity on AWS, you know, what we've put together is, is something that has as much meaningful relevance for storing data, but also for all the other adjacencies that kind of extend off there. >>Talk about what you're doing with your partner. I saw last night I did, I did a fly by a NetApp event. It was Nvidia insight, which is a partner, an integrator partner. So you got a lot of the frontline on the front lines, you got partners and you got, you know, big solutions with NetApp and now vendors like Nvidia, what are you actually selling? What's what's getting, I guess what's being put together, not selling, I'm obviously selling gear and what, but like solutions, but what's being packaged to the customer. Where does, what does and video fit in? What are you guys? And what's the winning formula. Take us through the highlights. >>Yeah. And so the VMware highlights here are obviously that we're trying to get infrastructure foundations to just not have, be, be trapped in one cloud or anyone OnPrem. So having a little more E elasticity, but if you extend that out, like you, like you mentioned with a partner that's trying to, to go drive AI within Nvidia, you know, NetApp doesn't create any AI deals cuz no one starts an AI journey with storage. They always start it with the, a with the data model. So the data scientists will actually start these things in cloud and they'll bring 'em on prem. Once the data sets get to a, a big enough scenario and then they wanna build it into a multi-cloud over time. And that's where Nvidia has really led the charge. So someone like an insight or other partners could be Kindra or, or Accenture, or even small boutique partners that are in the data analytics space. They'll go drive that. And we provide not just data storage, but are really complimentary infrastructure. In fact, I always say it like on the AI story alone, we have an integration for the data scientists. So when they go pull the data sets in, you can either do that as a manual copy that takes hours sometimes days, or you can do it instantaneously with our integration to their Jupyter notebook. So I say for AI, as an example, NetApp creates time for data scientists. Got >>It. And where's the, the cloud transformation with you guys right now? How is the hybrid working? Obviously you got the public and hybrids, a steady state right now multi-cloud is still a little fantasy in terms of actual multi-cloud that's coming next, but hybrid and cloud, what's the key key configuration for NetApp what's the hot products? >>Well, I think the key is that you can't just be trapped in one location. So we started this whole thing back with data fabric, as you know, and it's built from there up into, into more of the ops layer and some of the technology layers that have to compliment to come with it. In fact, one of the things that we do that isn't always seen as adjacency to us is our spot product on cloud, which allows you to play in the finops space to be able to look at the analyzed spend and sort of optimized environments for a DevOps environment cloud, to be able to give back a big percentage of what you probably misallocate in those operating models. Once you're working with NetApp and allow it to re re redeploy it in the place that you wanna spend it, you know, so it's, it's both the upper and lower stories coming together. >>Yeah. I was on the walking around the hallway yesterday and I was kind of going through the main event last night, overheard people talking about ransomware. I mean, still ransomware is such a big problem. Security's huge. How are you guys doing there? What's the story with security? Obviously ransomware is a big storage aspect and, and backup recovery and whatnot. All that's kind of tied together. How does NetApp enable better security? What's the story >>There? Yeah, it's funny because that's, that's where a lot of the headlines are at this show at every other show is security for us. It's really about cyber resilience. It is one of the key foundational parts of our hybrid cloud offerings. So as we go out to the partners, you mentioned, you know, insight and there's others, you know, CDW ahead here, and the GSI hosting providers, they're all trying to figure out the security opportunity because that is live. So we have a cyber resiliency solution that isn't just our snapshot technologies, but it's also some of the discovery data governance. But also, you know, you gotta work this with ecosystem, as we said, you know, you have all the other ISVs out there that have several solutions, not just the traditional data protection ones, but also the security players. Because if you look at the full perimeter and you look at how you have to secure that and be able to both block remediate and bring back a site, you know, those are complex sets of things that no one person owns. But what we've tried to do is really be as, as meaningful and pervasive and integrated to that package as possible. That's why it's a lead story in the hybrid clouds. >>Can you share for a minute, just give the NetApp commercial plug cuz you guys have continued to stay relevant. What's the story this year for the folks watching that our customers or potential customers, what's the NetApp story for this year? >>Well, the net, the nets right for this year is kind of what I mentioned, which is, you know, we're in this multi-cloud world. So whether you're coming at this from any perspective, we have relevancy for, for the, the on-prem place that you've always enjoyed us, but at the opposite of the spectrum, if you're coming at us from an AWS show or the cloud op the cloud ops buyer, we have a complete portfolio that if you never knew net from the on-prem, you're gonna see us massively relevant in that, in that environment. And you just go to an AWS show or a Microsoft Azure, so, or a Google show, you'll see us there. You'll see exactly why we were relevant there. You'll see them mention why we're relevant there. So our message is really that we have a full portfolio across the hybrid multi-cloud from anyone buyer perspective, to be able to solve those problems, but by the way, do it with partners cuz the partners are the ones that complete all this. None of us on our own, AWS, Microsoft, VMware, NetApp, none of us have the singular solution ourselves. And we can't deliver ourselves. You have to have those partners that have those skills, those competencies. And that's why we, we leverage it that way. >>Great, great stuff. Now I gotta ask you what what's going on in your world with partners. How's it going? What's the vibe what's that just share some insight into what's happening inside the partners? Are they happy with the margins? Are they shifting behavior? What are some of the, the high order bit news items or, or trends going on at the, on the front lines with your partners? >>Well, I think listen, the, the, the challenges pitfalls, the, the objections, the, all the problems that have been there in the past are even more multiplied with today's economy and all the situations we've gone through with COVID. But the reality is what's emerged is an interesting kind of tapestry of a lot of different partner types. So for us, we recognize that across the traditional GSIs, you see these cloud native partners emerging, which is an exciting realm, you know, to look at folks that really built their business in the cloud with no on-prem and being relevant with them, just consulting partners alone. Like the SAP ecosystem has a very condensed set of partners that really drive a lot of the transformation of SAP. And a lot of them don't, you know, don't do product business. So how does someone like NetApp be relevant with them? You gotta put together an offering that says we do X, Y, and Z for SAP. And so it's, it's a combination of these partners across the, the different >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And I, and I, I'm gonna, I wanna get your reaction to something and you probably don't, you don't have to go out, out in the limb and, and put NetApp in a, in a position on official position. But I've been saying on the cube that no matter what happens with VMware's situation with Broadcom, this is not a dying market, right? I mean like you you'd think when someone gets bought out or, or intention bought out, that'd be like this, this dark cloud that would hang over the, the company and this condition is their user conference. So this is a good barometer to get a feel for it. And I gotta tell you, Sunday night here at VMware Explorer, the expo floor was not dead. It was buzzing. It was packed the ecosystem and even the conversations and the positionings, it's all, all growth. So, so I think VMware's in a really interesting spot here with the Broadcom, because no matter what happens that ecosystem's going to settle somewhere. Yeah. It's not going away cuz they have such great customer base. So, you know, assume that broad Tom is gonna do the right thing and they keep most of the jewels they'll keep all the customers. So, but still that wave is coming. Yeah. It's independent of VMware. Yeah. That's the whole point. So what happens next? >>Well, I think, you know, we, >>We, you guys are gonna get mop up in business. Amazon's gonna get some business, Microsoft, HPE, you name it all gonna, >>Yeah. I think, you know, we've, we've been in business with Broadcom for a long time, whether it be the switch business, the chip business, everything in between. And so we've got a very mature relationship with them and we have a great relationship with VMware. It's it's best. It's almost ever been now and together. I think that will all just rationalize and, and settle over time as this kind of goes through both the next Barcelona show and when it comes back here next year, and I think, you know, what you'll see is probably, you know, some of the stuff settle into the new things they announced here at the show and the things that maybe you haven't heard from, but ultimately the, these, these, these solutions that they have to come forward with, you know, have to land on things that go forward. And so today you just saw that with VMware trying to do VMware cloud and AWS, they realized that there was a gap in terms of people adopting and wanting to do a storage expansion without adding compute. So they made a move with us that made total sense. I think you're gonna see more of those things that are very common sense, ways to solve the, the barriers to, you know, modernization, adoption and maturity. That's just gonna be a natural part of the vetting. And I think they'll probably come a lot more. >>It's gonna be very interesting. We interviewed AJ Patel yesterday. He heads up he's SVP G of the modern app side. He's a middleware guy. So you can almost connect the dots kind of where we're going with this. Yeah. So I assume there's a nice middleware layer of developing everybody wins yeah. In this, if done properly. So it's clearly that VMware, no matter what happens at Broadcom from this show, my assessment's all steam all steam ahead. No, one's holding back at this point. >>Yeah. It's funny. The, the most mature partners we talk to have this interesting sort of upper and lower story and the upper story is all about that, that application data and middleware kind of layer. What are you doing there to be relevant about the different issues they run into versus some of the stuff that we've grown up with on the infrastructure side, they wanna make that as, as nascent as possible, like infrastructure's code and all this stuff that the automation platforms do. But you're right. If you don't get up into that application, middleware space, you know, and work on that, on that side of the house, you know, you're not gonna be >>Relevant. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, you know, most people, people take it literally. It doesn't mean middleware. We don't mean middleware. We mean that what middleware was yeah. In the old metaphor just still has to happen. That's where complexity solved. You got hardware, essentially cloud and you got applications, right. So it's all, all kind of the same, but not >>Yeah. In a lot of cases, it could be conceived as even like pipelining, you know, it's it's, you have data and apps going through a transformation from the old style and the old application structures to cloud native apps and a, a much different architecture. The, the whole deal is how you're relevant there. How you solving real problems about simplifying, improving performance, improving securities, you mentioned all those things are relevant and that's where, that's where you have to place >>Your bets. I love that storage is continuing to be at the center of the value proposition. Again, storage compute, networking never goes away. It's just being kind of flexed in new ways just to continue to say, deliver better value. Keith, thanks for coming on the queue. Great to see you for the, see you again, man, day three for coming back on and give us some commentary. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on all the success with the partners and having the cloud story. Right. Thanks. Cheers. Okay. More cube coverage. After this short break day three, Walter Wall coverage. I'm John furier host Dave ante, Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all here covering VMware. We'll be back with more after this short break.

(soft joyful music) >> Welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore '22. I'm John Furrier with my host Dave Vellante. Three days of wall to wall live coverage. Two sets here at the CUBE, here on the ground floor in Moscone, and we got VMware and HPE back on the CUBE. Paul Turner, VP of products at vSphere and cloud infrastructure at VMware. Great to see you. And Mark Nickerson, Director of Go to Mark for Compute Solutions at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. >> Thank you for having us. >> So we, we are seeing a lot of traction with GreenLake, congratulations over there at HPE. The customers changing their business model consumption, starting to see that accelerate. You guys have the deep partnership, we've had you guys on earlier yesterday. Talked about the technology partnership. Now, on the business side, where's the action at with the HP and you guys with the customer? Because, now as they go cloud native, third phase of the inflection point, >> Yep. >> Multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, steady state. Where's the action at? >> So I think the action comes in a couple of places. Um, one, we see increased scrutiny around, kind of not only the cost model and the reasons for moving to GreenLake that we've all talked about there, but it's really the operational efficiencies as well. And, this is an area where the long term partnership with VMware has really been a huge benefit. We've actually done a lot of joint engineering over the years, continuing to do that co-development as we bring products like Project Monterey, or next generations of VCF solutions, to live in a GreenLake environment. That's an area where customers not only see the benefits of GreenLake from a business standpoint, um, on a consumption model, but also around the efficiency operationally as well. >> Paul, I want to, I want to bring up something that we always talk about on the CUBE, which is experience in the enterprise. Usually it's around, you know, technology strategy, making the right product market fit, but HPE and VMware, I mean, have exceptional depth and experience in the enterprise. You guys have a huge customer base, doesn't churn much, steady state there, you got vSphere, killer product, with a new release coming out, HP, unprecedented, great sales force. Everyone knows that you guys have great experience serving customers. And, it seems like now the fog is clearing, we're seeing clear line of sight into value proposition, you know, what it's worth, how do you make money with it, how do partners make money? So, it seems like the puzzle's coming together right now with consumption, self-service, developer focus. It just seems to be clicking. What's your take on all this because... >> Oh, absolutely. >> you got that engine there at VMware. >> Yeah. I think what customers are looking for, customers want that cloud kind of experience, but they want it on their terms. So, the work that we're actually doing with the GreenLake offerings that we've done, we've released, of course, our subscription offerings that go along with that. But, so, customers can now get cloud on their terms. They can get systems services. They know that they've got the confidence that we have integrated those services really well. We look at something like vSphere 8, we just released it, right? Well, immediately, day zero, we come out, we've got trusted integrated servers from HPE, Mark and his team have done a phenomenal job. We make sure that it's not just the vSphere releases but VSAN and we get VSAN ready nodes available. So, the customers get that trusted side of things. And, you know, just think about it. We've... 200,000 joined customers. >> Yeah, that's a lot. >> We've a hundred thousand kind of enabled partners out there. We've an enormous kind of install base of customers. But also, those customers want us to modernize. And, you know, the fact that we can do that with GreenLake, and then of course with our new features, and our new releases. >> Yeah. And it's nice that the products market fits going well on both sides. But can you guys share, both of you share, the cadence of the relationship? I mean, we're talking about vSphere, every two years, a major release. Now since 6, vSphere 6, you guys are doing three months' releases, which is amazing. So you guys got your act together there, doing great. But, you guys, so many joint customers, what's the cadence? As stuff comes out, how do you guys put that together? How tightly integrated? Can you share a quick... insight into that dynamic? >> Yeah, sure. So, I mean Mark can and add to this too, but the teams actually work very closely, where it's every release that we do is jointly qualified. So that's a really, really important thing. But it's more interesting is this... the innovation side of things. Right? If you just think about it, 'cause it's no use to just qualify. That's not that interesting. But, like I said, we've released with vSphere 8 you know... the new enhanced storage architecture. All right? The new, next generation of vSphere. We've got that immediately qualified, ready on HPE equipment. We built out new AI servers, actually with Invidia and with HPE. And, we're able to actually push the extremes of... AI and intelligence... on systems. So that's kind of work. And then, of course, our Project Monterey work. Project Monterey Distributed Services Engine. That's something we're really excited about, because we're not just building a new server anymore, we're actually going to change the way servers are built. Monterey gives us a new platform to build from that we're actually jointly working. >> So double click on that, and then to explain how HPE is taking advantage of it. I mean, obvious you have more diversity of XPU's, you've got isolation, you've got now better security, and confidential computing, all that stuff. Explain that in some detail, and how does HPE take advantage of that? >> Yeah, definitely. So, if you think about vSphere 8, vSphere 8 I can now virtualize anything. I can virtualize your CPU's, your GPU's, and now what we call DPU's, or data processing units. A data processing unit, it's... think of it as we're running, actually, effectively another version of ESX, sitting down on this processor. But, that gives us an ability to run applications, and some of the virtualization services, actually down on that DPU. It's separated away from where you run your application. So, all your applications get to consume all your CPU. It's all available to you. Your DPU is used for that virtualization and virtualization services. And that's what we've done. We've been working with HPE and HPE and Pensando. Maybe you can talk some of the new systems that we've built around this too. >> Yeah. So, I mean, that's one of the... you talked about the cadence and that... back to the cadence question real briefly. Paul hit on it. Yeah, there's a certain element of, "Let's make sure that we're certified, we're qualified, we're there day zero." But, that cadence goes a lot beyond it. And, I think Project Monterey is a great example of where that cadence expands into really understanding the solutioning that goes into what the customer's expecting from us. So, to Paul's point, yeah, we could have just qualified the ESX version to go run on a DPU and put that in the market and said, "Okay, great. Customers, We know that it works." We've actually worked very tightly with VMware to really understand the use case, what the customer needs out of that operating environment, and then provide, in the first instantiation, three very discrete product solutions aimed at different use cases, whether that's a more robust use case for customers who are looking at data intensive, analytic intensive, environments, other customers might be looking at VDI or even edge applications. And so, we've worked really closely with VMware to engineer solutions specific to those use cases, not just to a qualification of an operating environment, not just a qualification of certain software stack, but really into an understanding of the use case, the customer solution, and how we take that to market with a very distinct point of view alongside our partners. >> And you can configure the processors based on that workload. Is that right? And match the workload characteristics with the infrastructure is that what I'm getting? >> You do, and actually, well, you've got the same flexibility that we've actually built in why you love virtualization, why people love it, right? You've got the ability to kind of bring harness hardware towards your application needs in a very dynamic way. Right? So if you even think about what we built in vSphere 8 from an AI point of view, we're able to scale. We built the ability to actually take network device cards, and GPU cards, you're to able to build those into a kind of composed device. And, you're able to provision those as you're provisioning out VM's. And, the cool thing about that, is you want to be able to get extreme IO performance when you're doing deep learning applications, and you can now do that, and you can do it very dynamically, as part of the provisioning. So, that's the kind of stuff. You've got to really think, like, what's the use case? What's the applications? How do we build it? And, for the DPU side of things, yes, we've looked at how do we take some of our security services, some of our networking services, and we push those services down onto the SmartNIC. It frees up processors. I think the most interesting thing, that you probably saw on the keynote, was we did benchmarks with Reddit databases. We were seeing 20 plus, I'm sure the exact number, I think it was 27%, I have to get exact number, but a 27% latency improvement, to me... I came from the database background, latency's everything. Latency's king. It's not just... >> Well it's... it's number one conversation. >> I mean, we talk about multi-cloud, and as you start getting into hybrid. >> Right. >> Latency, data movement, efficiency, I mean, this is all in the workload mindset that the workhorses that you guys have been working at HPE with the compute, vSphere, this is heart center of the discussion. I mean, it is under the hood, and we're talking about the engine here, right? >> Sure. >> And people care about this stuff, Mark. This is like... Kubernetes only helps this better with containers. I mean, it's all kind of coming together. Where's that developer piece? 'Cause remember, infrastructure is code, what everybody wants. That's the reality. >> Right. Well, I think if you take a look at... at where the Genesis of the desire to have this capability came from, it came directly out of the fact that you take a look at the big cloud providers, and sure, the ability to have a part of that operating environment, separated out of the CPU, free up as much processing as you possibly can, but it was all in this very lockdown proprietary, can't touch it, can't develop on it. The big cloud guys owned it. VMware has come along and said, "Okay, we're going to democratize that. We're going to make this available for the masses. We're opening this up so that developers can optimize workloads, can optimize applications to run in this kind of environment." And so, really it's about bringing that cloud experience, that demand that customers have for that simplicity, that flexibility, that efficiency, and then marrying it with the agility and security of having your on premises or hybrid cloud environment. And VMware is kind of helping with that... >> That's resonating with the customer, I got to imagine. >> Yeah. >> What's the feedback you're hearing? When you talk to customers about that, the like, "Wait a minute, we'd have to like... How long is that going to take? 'Cause that sounds like a one off." >> Yeah. I'll tell you what... >> Everything is a one off now. You could do a one off. It scales. >> What I hear is give me more. We love where we're going in the first instantiation of what we can do with the Distributed Services Engine. We love what we're seeing. How do we do more? How do we drive more workloads in here? How do we get more efficiency? How can we take more of the overhead out of the CPU, free up more cores. And so, it's a tremendously positive response. And then, it's a response that's resonating with, "Love it. Give me more." >> Oh, if you're democratizing, I love that word because it means democratization, but someone's being democratized. Who's... What's... Something when... that means good things are happening, which means someone's not going to be winning out. Who's that? What... >> Well it, it's not necessarily that someone's not winning out. (laughs) What you read, it comes down to... Democratizing means you've got to look at it, making it widely available. It's available to all. And these things... >> No silos. No gatekeepers. Kind of that kind of thing. >> It's a little operationally difficult to use. You've got... Think about the DPU market. It was a divergent market with different vendors going into that market with different kind of operating systems, and that doesn't work. Right? You've got to actually go and virtualize those DPU's. So then, we can actually bring application innovation onto those DPU's. We can actually start using them in smart ways. We did the same thing with GPU's. We made them incredibly easy to use. We virtualized those GPU's, we're able to, you know, you can provision them in a very simple way. And, we did the same thing with Kubernetes. You mentioned about container based applications and modern apps in the one platform now, you can just set a cluster and you can just say, "Hey I want that as a modern apps enabled cluster." And boom. It's done. And, all of the configurations, set up, Kubernetes, it's done for you. >> But the thing that just GreenLake too, the democratization aspect of how that changed the business model unleashes... >> Right. >> ...efficiency and just simplicity. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> But the other thing was the 20% savings on the Reddit's benchmark, with no change required at the application level, correct? >> No change at the application level. In the vCenter, you have to set a little flag. >> Okay. You got to tick a box. >> You got to tick a little box... >> So I can live with that. But the point I'm making is that traditionally, we've had... We have an increasing amount of waste to do offloads, and now you're doing them much more efficiently, right? >> Yes. >> Instead of using the traditional x86 way of doing stuff, you're now doing purpose built, applying that to be much more efficient >> Totally agree. And I think it's becoming, it's going to become even more important. Look at, we are... our run times for our applications, We've got to move to a world where we're building completely confidential applications at all time. And that means that they are secured, encrypted, all traffic is encrypted, whether it's storage traffic, whether it's IO traffic, we've got to make sure we've got complete route of trust of the applications. And so, to do all of that is actually a... compute intensive. It just is. And so, I think as we move forward and people build much more complete, confidential, compute secured environments, you're going to be encrypting all traffic all the time. You're going to be doing micro-zoning and firewalling down at the VM level so that you've got the protection. You can take a VM, you can move it up to the cloud, it will inherit all of its policies, will move with it. All of that will take compute capacity. >> Yup. >> The great thing is that the DPU's give us this ability to offload and to use some of that spare compute capacity. >> And isolate so the application chance can't just tunnel in and get access to that >> You guys got so much going on. You can have your own CUBE show, just on the updating, what's going on between the two companies, and then the innovation. We got one minute left. Just quickly, what's the goal in the partnership? What's next? You guys going to be in the field together, doing joint customer work? Is there bigger plans? Is there events out there? What are some of your plans together in the marketplace? >> That's you. >> Yup. So, I think, Paul kind of alluded to it. Talk about the fact that you've got a hundred thousand partners in common. The venn diagram of looking at the HPE channel and the VMware channel, clearly there's an opportunity there to continue to drive a joint, go to market message, through both of our sales organizations, and through our shared channel. We have a 25,000 strong... solution architect... force that we can leverage. So as we get these exciting things to talk about, I mean, you talk about Project Monterey, the Distributed Services Engine. That's big news. There's big news around vSphere 8. And so, having those great things to go talk about with that strong sales team, with that strong channel organization, I think you're going to see a lot stronger partnership between VMware and HPE as we continue to do this joint development and joint selling >> Lots to get enthused about, pretty much there. >> Oh yeah! >> Yeah, I would just add in that we're actually in a very interesting point as well, where Intel's just coming out with Next Rev systems, we're building the next gen of these systems. I think this is a great time for customers to look at that aging infrastructure that they have in place. Now is a time we can look at upgrading it, but when they're moving it, they can move it also to a cloud subscription based model, you know can modernize not just what you have in terms of the capabilities and densify and get much better efficiency, but you can also modernize the way you buy from us and actually move to... >> Real positive change transformation. Checks the boxes there. And put some position for... >> You got it. >> ... cloud native development. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate you coming out of that busy schedule and coming on and give us the up... But again, we can do a whole show some... all the moving parts and innovation going on with you guys. So thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. I'm John Dave Vellante we're back with more live coverage day two, two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. This is the CUBE at VMware Explorer. We'll be right back.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the words of my colleague CTO David Nicholson, Broadcom buys old cars, not to restore them to their original luster and beauty. Nope. They buy classic cars to extract the platinum that's inside the catalytic converter and monetize that. Broadcom's planned 61 billion acquisition of VMware will mark yet another new era and chapter for the virtualization pioneer, a mere seven months after finally getting spun out as an independent company by Dell. For VMware, this means a dramatically different operating model with financial performance and shareholder value creation as the dominant and perhaps the sole agenda item. For customers, it will mean a more focused portfolio, less aspirational vision pitches, and most certainly higher prices. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll share data, opinions and customer insights about this blockbuster deal and forecast the future of VMware, Broadcom and the broader ecosystem. Let's first look at the key deal points, it's been well covered in the press. But just for the record, $61 billion in a 50/50 cash and stock deal, resulting in a blended price of $138 per share, which is a 44% premium to the unaffected price, i.e. prior to the news breaking. Broadcom will assume 8 billion of VMware debt and promises that the acquisition will be immediately accretive and will generate 8.5 billion in EBITDA by year three. That's more than 4 billion in EBITDA relative to VMware's current performance today. In a classic Broadcom M&A approach, the company promises to dilever debt and maintain investment grade ratings. They will rebrand their software business as VMware, which will now comprise about 50% of revenues. There's a 40 day go shop and importantly, Broadcom promises to continue to return 60% of its free cash flow to shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks. Okay, with that out of the way, we're going to get to the money slide literally in a moment that Broadcom shared on its investor call. Broadcom has more than 20 business units. It's CEO Hock Tan makes it really easy for his business unit managers to understand. Rule number one, you agreed to an operating plan with targets for revenue, growth, EBITDA, et cetera, hit your numbers consistently and we're good. You'll be very well compensated and life will be wonderful for you and your family. Miss the number, and we're going to have a frank and uncomfortable bottom line discussion. You'll four, perhaps five quarters to turn your business around, if you don't, we'll kill it or sell it if we can. Rule number two, refer to rule number one. Hello, VMware, here's the money slide. I'll interpret the bullet points on the left for clarity. Your fiscal year 2022 EBITDA was 4.7 billion. By year three, it will be 8.5 billion. And we Broadcom have four knobs to turn with you, VMware to help you get there. First knob, if it ain't recurring revenue with rubber stamp renewals, we're going to convert that revenue or kill it. Knob number two, we're going to focus R&D in the most profitable areas of the business. AKA expect the R&D budget to be cut. Number three, we're going to spend less on sales and marketing by focusing on existing customers. We're not going to lose money today and try to make it up many years down the road. And number four, we run Broadcom with 1% GNA. You will too. Any questions? Good. Now, just to give you a little sense of how Broadcom runs its business and how well run a company it is, let's do a little simple comparison with this financial snapshot. All we're doing here is taking the most recent quarterly earnings reports from Broadcom and VMware respectively. We take the quarterly revenue and multiply by four X to get the revenue run rate and then we calculate the ratios off of the most recent quarters revenue. It's worth spending some time on this to get a sense of how profitable the Broadcom business actually is and what the spreadsheet gurus at Broadcom are seeing with respect to the possibilities for VMware. So combined, we're talking about a 40 plus billion dollar company. Broadcom is growing at more than 20% per year. Whereas VMware's latest quarter showed a very disappointing 3% growth. Broadcom is mostly a hardware company, but its gross margin is in the high seventies. As a software company of course VMware has higher gross margins, but FYI, Broadcom's software business, the remains of Symantec and what they purchased as CA has 90% gross margin. But the I popper is operating margin. This is all non gap. So it excludes things like stock based compensation, but Broadcom had 61% operating margin last quarter. This is insanely off the charts compared to VMware's 25%. Oracle's non gap operating margin is 47% and Oracle is an incredibly profitable company. Now the red box is where the cuts are going to take place. Broadcom doesn't spend much on marketing. It doesn't have to. It's SG&A is 3% of revenue versus 18% for VMware and R&D spend is almost certainly going to get cut. The other eye popper is free cash flow as a percentage of revenue at 51% for Broadcom and 29% for VMware. 51%. That's incredible. And that my dear friends is why Broadcom a company with just under 30 billion in revenue has a market cap of 230 billion. Let's dig into the VMware portfolio a bit more and identify the possible areas that will be placed under the microscope by Hock Tan and his managers. The data from ETR's latest survey shows the net score or spending momentum across VMware's portfolio in this chart, net score essentially measures the net percent of customers that are spending more on a specific product or vendor. The yellow bar is the most recent survey and compares the April 22 survey data to April 21 and January of 22. Everything is down in the yellow from January, not surprising given the economic outlook and the change in spending patterns that we've reported. VMware Cloud on AWS remains the product in the ETR survey with the most momentum. It's the only offering in the portfolio with spending momentum above the 40% line, a level that we consider highly elevated. Unified Endpoint Management looks more than respectable, but that business is a rock fight with Microsoft. VMware Cloud is things like VMware Cloud foundation, VCF and VMware's cross cloud offerings. NSX came from the Nicira acquisition. Tanzu is not yet pervasive and one wonders if VMware is making any money there. Server is ESX and vSphere and is the bread and butter. That is where Broadcom is going to focus. It's going to look at VSAN and NSX, which is software probably profitable. And of course the other products and see if the investments are paying off, if they are Broadcom will keep, if they are not, you can bet your socks, they will be sold off or killed. Carbon Black is at the far right. VMware paid $2.1 billion for Carbon Black. And it's the lowest performer on this list in terms of net score or spending momentum. And that doesn't mean it's not profitable. It just doesn't have the momentum you'd like to see, so you can bet that is going to get scrutiny. Remember VMware's growth has been under pressure for the last several years. So it's been buying companies, dozens of them. It bought AirWatch, bought Heptio, Carbon Black, Nicira, SaltStack, Datrium, Versedo, Bitnami, and on and on and on. Many of these were to pick up engineering teams. Some of them were to drive new revenue. Now this is definitely going to be scrutinized by Broadcom. So that helps explain why Michael Dell would sell VMware. And where does VMware go from here? It's got great core product. It's an iconic name. It's got an awesome ecosystem, fantastic distribution channel, but its growth is slowing. It's got limited developer chops in a world that developers and cloud native is all the rage. It's got a far flung R&D agenda going at war with a lot of different places. And it's increasingly fighting this multi front war with cloud companies, companies like Cisco, IBM Red Hat, et cetera. VMware's kind of becoming a heavy lift. It's a perfect acquisition target for Broadcom and why the street loves this deal. And we titled this Breaking Analysis taming the VMware beast because VMware is a beast. It's ubiquitous. It's an epic software platform. EMC couldn't control it. Dell used it as a piggy bank, but really didn't change its operating model. Broadcom 100% will. Now one of the things that we get excited about is the future of systems architectures. We published a breaking analysis about a year ago, talking about AWS's secret weapon with Nitro and it's Annapurna custom Silicon efforts. Remember it acquired Annapurna for a measly $350 million. And we talked about how there's a new architecture and a new price performance curve emerging in the enterprise, driven by AWS and being followed by Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, a trend toward custom Silicon with the arm based Nitro and which is AWS's hypervisor and Nick strategy, enabling processor diversity with things like Graviton and Trainium and other diverse processors, really diversifying away from x86 and how this leads to much faster product cycles, faster tape out, lower costs. And our premise was that everyone in the data center is going to competes, is going to need a Nitro to be competitive long term. And customers are going to gravitate toward the most economically favorable platform. And as we describe the landscape with this chart, we've updated this for this Breaking Analysis and we'll come back to nitro in a moment. This is a two dimensional graphic with net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap formally known as market share or presence within the survey, pervasiveness that's on the horizontal axis. And we plot various companies and products and we've inserted VMware's net score breakdown. The granularity in those colored bars on the bottom right. Net score is essentially the green minus the red and a couple points on that. VMware in the latest survey has 6% new adoption. That's that lime green. It's interesting. The question Broadcom is going to ask is, how much does it cost you to acquire that 6% new. 32% of VMware customers in the survey are increasing spending, meaning they're increasing spending by 6% or more. That's the forest green. And the question Broadcom will dig into is what percent of that increased spend (chuckles) you're capturing is profitable spend? Whatever isn't profitable is going to be cut. Now that 52% gray area flat spending that is ripe for the Broadcom picking, that is the fat middle, and those customers are locked and loaded for future rent extraction via perpetual renewals and price increases. Only 8% of customers are spending less, that's the pinkish color and only 3% are defecting, that's the bright red. So very, very sticky profile. Perfect for Broadcom. Now the rest of the chart lays out some of the other competitor names and we've plotted many of the VMware products so you can see where they fit. They're all pretty respectable on the vertical axis, that's spending momentum. But what Broadcom wants is that core ESX vSphere base where we've superimposed the Broadcom logo. Broadcom doesn't care so much about spending momentum. It cares about profitability potential and then momentum. AWS and Azure, they're setting the pace in this business, in the upper right corner. Cisco very huge presence in the data center, as does Intel, they're not in the ETR survey, but we've superimposed them. Now, Intel of course, is in a dog fight within Nvidia, the Arm ecosystem, AMD, don't forget China. You see a Google cloud platform is in there. Oracle is also on the chart as well, somewhat lower on the vertical axis, but it doesn't have that spending momentum, but it has a big presence. And it owns a cloud as we've talked about many times and it's highly differentiated. It's got a strategy that allows it to differentiate from the pack. It's very financially driven. It knows how to extract lifetime value. Safra Catz operates in many ways, similar to what we're seeing from Hock Tan and company, different from a portfolio standpoint. Oracle's got the full stack, et cetera. So it's a different strategy. But very, very financially savvy. You could see IBM and IBM Red Hat in the mix and then Dell and HP. I want to come back to that momentarily to talk about where value is flowing. And then we plotted Nutanix, which with Acropolis could suck up some V tax avoidance business. Now notice Symantec and CA, relatively speaking in the ETR survey, they have horrible spending momentum. As we said, Broadcom doesn't care. Hock Tan is not going for growth at the expense of profitability. So we fully expect VMware to come down on the vertical axis over time and go up on the profit scale. Of course, ETR doesn't measure the profitability here. Now back to Nitro, VMware has this thing called Project Monterey. It's essentially their version of Nitro and will serve as their future architecture diversifying off x86 and accommodating alternative processors. And a much more efficient performance, price in energy consumption curve. Now, one of the things that we've advocated for, we said this about Dell and others, including VMware to take a page out of AWS and start developing custom Silicon to better integrate hardware and software and accelerate multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. That layer above the cloud, not just running on individual clouds. So this is all about efficiency and simplicity to own this space. And we've challenged organizations to do that because otherwise we feel like the cloud guys are just going to have consistently better costs, not necessarily price, but better cost structures, but it begs the question. What happens to Project Monterey? Hock Tan and Broadcom, they don't invest in something that is unproven and doesn't throw off free cash flow. If it's not going to pay off for years to come, they're probably not going to invest in it. And yet Project Monterey could help secure VMware's future in not only the data center, but at the edge and compete more effectively with cloud economics. So we think either Project Monterey is toast or the VMware team will knock on the door of one of Broadcom's 20 plus business units and say, guys, what if we work together with you to develop a version of Monterey that we can use and sell to everyone, it'd be the arms dealer to everyone and be competitive with the cloud and other players out there and create the de facto standard for data center performance and supercloud. I mean, it's not outrageously expensive to develop custom Silicon. Tesla is doing it for example. And Broadcom obviously is capable of doing it. It's got good relationships with semiconductor fabs. But I think this is going to be a tough sell to Broadcom, unless VMware can hide this in plain site and make it profitable fast, like AWS most likely has with Nitro and Graviton. Then Project Monterey and our pipe dream of alternatives to Nitro in the data center could happen but if it can't, it's going to be toast. Or maybe Intel or Nvidia will take it over or maybe the Monterey team will spin out a VMware and do a Pensando like deal and demonstrate the viability of this concept and then Broadcom will buy it back in 10 years. Here's a double click on that previous data that we put in tabular form. It's how the data on that previous slide was plotted. I just want to give you the background data here. So net score spending momentum is the sorted on the left. So it's sorted by net score in the left hand chart, that was the y-axis in the previous data set and then shared and or presence in the data set is the right hand chart. In other words, it's sorted on the right hand chart, right hand table. That right most column is shared and you can see it's sorted top to bottom, and that was the x-axis on the previous chart. The point is not many on the left hand side are above the 40% line. VMware Cloud on AWS is, it's expensive, so it's probably profitable and it's probably a keeper. We'll see about the rest of VMware's portfolio. Like what happens to Tanzu for example. On the right, we drew a red line, just arbitrarily at those companies and products with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, everything but Tanzu from VMware makes that cut. Again, this is no indication of profitability here, and that's what's going to matter to Broadcom. Now let's take a moment to address the question of Broadcom as a software company. What the heck do they know about software, right. Well, they're not dumb over there and they know how to run a business, but there is a strategic rationale to this move beyond just doing portfolios and extracting rents and cutting R&D, et cetera, et cetera. Why, for example, isn't Broadcom going after coming back to Dell or HPE, it could pick up for a lot less than VMware, and they got way more revenue than VMware. Well, it's obvious, software's more profitable of course, and Broadcom wants to move up the stack, but there's a trend going on, which Broadcom is very much in touch with. First, it sells to Dell and HPE and Cisco and all the OEM. so it's not going to disrupt that. But this chart shows that the value is flowing away from traditional servers and storage and networking to two places, merchant Silicon, which itself is morphing. Broadcom... We focus on the left hand side of this chart. Broadcom correctly believes that the world is shifting from a CPU centric center of gravity to a connectivity centric world. We've talked about this on theCUBE a lot. You should listen to Broadcom COO Charlie Kawwas speak about this. It's all that supporting infrastructure around the CPU where value is flowing, including of course, alternative GPUs and XPUs, and NPUs et cetera, that are sucking the value out of the traditional x86 architecture, offloading some of the security and networking and storage functions that traditionally have been done in x86 which are part of the waste right now in the data center. This is that shifting dynamic of Moore's law. Moore's law, not keeping pace. It's slowing down. It's slower relative to some of the combinatorial factors. When you add up in all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators, et cetera. So we've talked about this a lot in Breaking Analysis episodes. So the value is shifting left within that middle circle. And it's shifting left within that left circle toward components, other than CPU, many of which Broadcom supplies. And then you go back to the middle, value is shifting from that middle section, that traditional data center up into hyperscale clouds, and then to the right toward infrastructure software to manage all that equipment in the data center and across clouds. And look Broadcom is an arms dealer. They simply sell to everyone, locking up key vectors of the value chain, cutting costs and raising prices. It's a pretty straightforward strategy, but not for the fate of heart. And Broadcom has become pretty good at it. Let's close with the customer feedback. I spoke with ETRs Eric Bradley this morning. He and I both reached out to VMware customers that we know and got their input. And here's a little snapshot of what they said. I'll just read this. Broadcom will be looking to invest in the core and divest of any underperforming assets, right on. It's just what we were saying. This doesn't bode well for future innovation, this is a CTO at a large travel company. Next comment, we're a Carbon Black customer. VMware didn't seem to interfere with Carbon Black, but now that we're concerned about short term disruption to their tech roadmap and long term, are they going to split and be sold off like Symantec was, this is a CISO at a large hospitality organization. Third comment, I got directly from a VMware practitioner, an IT director at a manufacturing firm. This individual said, moving off VMware would be very difficult for us. We have over 500 applications running on VMware, and it's really easy to manage. We're not going to move those into the cloud and we're worried Broadcom will raise prices and just extract rents. Last comment, we'll share as, Broadcom sees the cloud data center and IoT is their next revenue source. The VMware acquisition provides them immediate virtualization capabilities to support a lightweight IoT offering. Big concern for customers is what technology they will invest in and innovate, and which will be stripped off and sold. Interesting. I asked David Floyer to give me a back of napkin estimate for the following question. I said, David, if you're running mission critical applications on VMware, how much would it increase your operating cost moving those applications into the cloud? Or how much would it save? And he said, Dave, VMware's really easy to run. It can run any application pretty much anywhere, and you don't need an army of people to manage it. All your processes are tied to VMware, you're locked and loaded. Move that into the cloud and your operating cost would double by his estimates. Well, there you have it. Broadcom will pinpoint the optimal profit maximization strategy and raise prices to the point where customers say, you know what, we're still better off staying with VMware. And sadly, for many practitioners there aren't a lot of choices. You could move to the cloud and increase your cost for a lot of your applications. You could do it yourself with say Zen or OpenStack. Good luck with that. You could tap Nutanix. That will definitely work for some applications, but are you going to move your entire estate, your application portfolio to Nutanix? It's not likely. So you're going to pay more for VMware and that's the price you're going to pay for two decades of better IT. So our advice is get out ahead of this, do an application portfolio assessment. If you can move apps to the cloud for less, and you haven't yet, do it, start immediately. Definitely give Nutanix a call, but going to have to be selective as to what you actually can move, forget porting to OpenStack, or do it yourself Hypervisor, don't even go there. And start building new cloud native apps where it makes sense and let the VMware stuff go into manage decline. Let certain apps just die through attrition, shift your development resources to innovation in the cloud and build a brick wall around the stable apps with VMware. As Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware said, "We are building the software mainframe". Now marketing guys got a hold of that and said, Paul, stop saying that, but it's true. And with Broadcom's help that day we'll soon be here. That's it for today. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who helps research our topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson does the production and he also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and thanks to Rob Hof, who was our editor in chief at siliconangle.com. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETRs website at etr.ai for all the survey action. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Altos studios with continuing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, The Digital Experience. We've been covering this for over 10 years. It's virtual this year, but still have a lot of great content, a lot of great announcements, and a lot of technology that's being released and talked about. So we're excited. We're going to dig a little deep with our next two guests. First of all we have Paul Perez. He is the SVP and CTO of infrastructure solutions group for Dell technologies. Paul's great to see you. Where are you coming in from today? >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin Texas Awesome. And joining him returning to theCUBE on many times, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of VMware cloud for VMware Kit great to see you as well. Where are you joining us from? >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. I'm here in San Francisco. >> Awesome. So let's jump into it and talk about project Monterrey. You know, it's funny I was at Intel back in the day and all of our passwords used to go out and they became like the product names. It's funny how these little internal project names get a life of their own and this is a big one. And, you know, we had Pat Gelsinger on a few weeks back at VM-ware talking about how significant this is and kind of this evolution within the VMware cloud development. And, you know, it's kind of past Kubernetes and past Tanzu and past project Pacific and now we're into project Monterey. So first off, let's start with Kit, give us kind of the basic overview of what is project Monterey. >> Yep. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. What we did last year, we announced project Pacific, which was really a fundamental rethinking of VMware cloud foundation with Kubernetes built in right. Kubernetes is still a core to core part of the architecture and the idea there was really to better support modern applications to enable developers and IT operations to come together to work collaboratively toward modernizing a company's application fleet. And as you look at companies starting to be successful, they're starting to run these modern applications. What you found is that the hardware architecture itself needed to evolve, needed to update, to support all the new requirements brought on by these modern apps. And so when you're looking at project Monterey, it's exactly that it's a rethinking of the VMware cloud foundation, underlying hardware architecture. And so you think about a project model or excuse me, product Pacific is really kind of the top half if you will, Kubernetes consumption experiences great for applications. Project Monterey comes along as the second step in that journey, really being the bottom half, fundamentally rethinking the hardware architecture and leveraging SmartNic technology to do that. >> It's pretty interesting, Paul, you know, there's a great shift in this whole move from, you know, infrastructure driving applications to applications driving infrastructure. And then we're seeing, you know, obviously the big move with big data. And again, I think as Pat talked about in his interview with NVIDIA being at the right time, at the right place with the right technology and this, you know, kind of groundswell of GPU, now DPU, you know, helping to move those workloads beyond just kind of where the CPU used to do all the work, this is even, you know, kind of taking it another level you guys are the hardware guys and the solutions guys, as you look at this kind of continuing evolution, both of workloads as well as their infrastructure, how does this fit in? >> Yeah, well, how all this fit it in is modern applications and modern workloads, require a modern infrastructure, right? And a Kit was talking about the infrastructure overlay. That VMware is awesome at that all being, I was coming at this from the emerging data centric workloads, and some of the implications for that, including Phillip and diversity has ever been used for computing. The need to this faculty could be able to combine maybe resources together, as opposed to trying to shoehorn something into a mechanical chassis. And, and if you do segregate, you have to be able to compose on demand. And when you start comparing those, we realized that we were humping it up on our conversion trajectory and we started to team up and partner. >> So it's interesting because part of the composable philosophy, if you will, is to, you know, just to break the components of compute store and networking down to a small pieces as possible, and then you can assemble the right amount when you need it to attack a particular problem. But when you're talking about it's a whole different level of, of bringing the right hardware to bear for the solution. When you talk about SmartNics and you talk about GPS in DPS data processing units, you're now starting to offload and even FPG is that some of these other things offload a lot of work from the core CPU to some of these more appropriate devices that said, how do people make sure that the right application ends up on the right infrastructure? This is that I'm, if it's appropriate using more of a, of a Monterey based solution versus more of a traditional one, depending on the workload, how is that going to get all kind of sorted out and, and routed within the actual cloud infrastructure itself? That was probably back to you a Kit? >> Yeah, sure. So I think it's important to understand kind of what a smart NIC is and how it works in order to answer that question, because what we're really doing is to kind of jump right to it. I guess it's, you know, giving an API into the infrastructure and this is how we're able to do all the things that you just mentioned, but what does a SmartNic? Well, SmartNic is essentially a NIC with a general purpose CPU on it, really a whole CPU complex, in fact, kind of a whole system on server right there on that, on that Nic. And so what that enables is a bunch of great things. So first of all, to your point, we can do a lot of offload. We can actually run ESX. >> SXI on that. Nic, we can take a lot of the functionality that we were doing before on the main server CPU, things like network virtualization, storage, virtualization, security functionality, we can move that all off on the Nic. And it makes a lot of sense because really what we're doing when we're doing all those things is really looking at different sort of IO data paths. You know, as, as the network traffic comes through looking at doing automatic load balancing firewall and for security, delivering storage, perhaps remotely. And so the NIC is actually a perfect place to place all of these functionalities, right? You can not only move it off the core server CPU, but you can get a lot better performance cause you're now right there on the data path. So I think that's the first really key point is that you can get that offload, but then once you have all of that functionality there, then you can start doing some really amazing things. And this ability to expose additional virtual devices onto the PCI bus, this is another great capability of a SmartNic. So when you plug it in physically into the motherboard, it's a Nic, right. You can see that. And when it starts up, it looks like a Nic to the motherboard, to the system, but then via software, you can have it expose additional devices. It could look like a storage controller, or it could look like an FPGA look really any sort of device. And you can do that. Not only for the local machine where it's plugged in, but potentially remote machines as well with the right sorts of interconnects. So what this creates is a whole new sort of cluster architecture. And that's why we're really so excited about it because you got all these great benefits in terms of offload performance improvement, security improvement, but then you get this great ability to get very dynamic, just aggregation. And composability. >> So Kit, how much of it is the routing of the workload to the right place, right? That's got the right amount of say, it's a super data intensive once a lot of GPU versus actually better executing the operation. Once it gets to the place where it's going to run. >> Yeah. It's a bit of a combination actually. So the powerful thing about it is that in a traditional world, where are you want an application? You know, the server that you run it, that app can really only use the local devices there. Yes, there is some newer stuff like NVMe over fabric where you can remote certain types of storage capabilities, but there's no real general purpose solution to that. Yet that generally speaking, that application is limited to the local hardware devices. Well, the great part about what we're doing with Monterey and with the SmartNic technology is that we can now dynamically remote or expose remote devices from other hosts. And so wherever that application runs matters a little bit less now, in a sense that we can give it the right sorts of hardware it needs in order to operate. You know, if you have, let's say a few machines with a FPGA is normally if you have needed that a Fiji had to run locally, but now can actually run remotely and you can better balance out things like compute requirements versus, you know, specialized Accella Requirements. And so I think what we're looking at is, especially in the context of VMware cloud foundation, is bringing that all together. We can look through the scheduling, figure out what the best host for it to let run on based on all these considerations. And that's it, we are missing, let's say a physical device that needs, well, we can remote that and sort of a deal at that, a missing gap there. >> Right, right. That's great. Paul, I want to go back to you. You just talked about, you know, kind of coming at this problem from a data centric point of view, and you're running infrastructure and you're the poor guy that's got to catch all the ASAM Todd i the giant exponential curves up into the right on the data flow and the data quantity. How is that impacting the way you think about infrastructure and designing infrastructure and changing infrastructure and kind of future proofing infrastructure when, you know, just around the corners, 5g and IOT and, Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the data flow. >> Yeah. So I come at this from two angles. One that we talked about briefly is the evolution of the workloads themselves. The other angle, which is just as important is the operating model that customers are wanting to evolve to. And in that context, we thought a lot about how cloud, if an operating model, not necessarily a destination, right? So what I, and when way we laid out, what Kit was talking about is that in data center computing, you have operational control and data plane. Where did data plane run from the optimized solution? GPU's, PGA's, offload engines? And the control plane can run on stuff like it could be safe and are then I'm thinking about SmartNic is back codes have arm boards, so you can implement some data plane and some control plane, and they can also be the gateway. Cause, you know, you've talked about composability, what has been done up until now is early for sprint, right? We're carving out software defined infrastructure out of predefined hardware blocks. What we're talking about is making, you know, a GPUs residents in our fabric consistent memory residence of a fabric NVME over fabric and being able to tile computing topologies on demand to realize and applications intent. And we call that intent based computer. >> Right. Well, just, and to follow up on that too, as the, you know, cloud is an attitude or as an operating model or whatever you want to say, you know, not necessarily a place or a thing has changed. I mean, how has that had to get you to shift your infrastructure approach? Cause you've got to support, you know, old school, good old data centers. We've got, you know, some stuff running on public clouds. And then now you've got hybrid clouds and you have multi clouds, right. So we know, you know, you're out in the field that people have workloads running all over the place. So, but they got to control it and they've got compliance issues and they got a whole bunch of other stuff. So from your point of view, as you see the desire for more flexibility, the desire for more infrastructure centric support for the workloads that I want to buy and the increasing amount of those that are more data centric, as we move to hopefully more data driven decisions, how's it changed your strategy. And what does it mean to partner and have a real nice formal relationship with the folks over at VMR or excuse me, VMware? >> Well, I think that regardless of how big a company is, it's always prudent. As I say, when I approached my job, right, architecture is about balance and efficiency and it's about reducing contention. And we like to leverage industry R and D, especially in cases where one plus one equals two, right? In the case of, project Monterey for example, one of the collaboration areas is in improving the security model and being able to provide more air gap isolation, especially when you consider that enterprise wants to behave as service providers is concerned or to their companies. And therefore this is important. And because of that, I think that there's a lot of things that we can do between VMware and Dell lending hardware, and for example, assets like NSX and a different way that will give customers higher scalability and performance and more control, you know, beyond VMware and Dell EMC i think that we're partnering with obviously the SmartNic vendors, cause they're smart interprets and the gateway to those that are clean. They're not really analysis, but also companies that are innovating in data center computing, for example, NVIDIA. >> Right. Right. >> And I think that what we're seeing is while, you know, ambivalent has done an awesome job of targeting their capability, AIML type of workloads, what we realized this applications today depend on platform services, right. And up until recently, those platform services have been debases messaging PI active directory, moving forward. I think that within five years, most applications will depend on some form of AIML service. So I can see an opportunity to go mainstream with this >> Right. Right. Well, it's great. You bring up in NVIDIA and I'm just going to quote one of Pat's lines from, from his interview. And he talked about Jensen from NVIDIA actually telling Pat, Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. I love it. You know, let's do the entire AI landscape together and make AI and enterprise class workloads from being more in TANZU, you know, first class citizens. So I, I love the fact, you know, Pat's been around a long time industry veteran, but still, kind of accepted the challenge from Jensen to really elevate AI and machine learning via GPS to first class citizen status. And the other piece, obviously this coming up is ed. So I, you know, it's a nice shot of a, of adrenaline and Kit I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that, you know, in kind of saying, Hey, let's take it up a notch, a significant notch by leveraging a whole another class of compute power within these solutions. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I'll, I'll go real quick. I mean, I, it's funny cause like not many people really ever challenged Pat to say he doesn't think big enough, cause usually he's always blown us away with what he wants to do next, but I think it's, I think it's a, you know, it's good though. It's good to keep us on our toes and push us a bit. Right. All of us within the industry. And so I think a couple of things you have to go back to your previous point around this is like cloud as a model. I think that's exactly what we're doing is trying to bring cloud as a model, even on prem. And it's a lot of these kinds of core hardware architecture capabilities that we do enable the biggest one in my mind, just being enabling an API into the hardware. So the applications can get what they need. And going back to Paul's point, this notion of these AI and ML services, you know, they have to be rooted in the hardware, right? We know that in order for them to be performing for them to run, to support what our customers want to do, we need to have that deeply integrated into the hardware all the way up. But that also becomes a software problem. Once we got the hardware solved, once we get that architecture locked in, how can we as easy as possible, as seamlessly as possible, deliver all those great capabilities, software capabilities. And so, you know, you look at what we've done with the NVIDIA partnership, things around the NVIDIA GPU cloud, and really bringing that to bear. And so then you start having this, this really great full stack integration all the way from the hardware, very powerful hardware architecture that, you know, again, driven by API, the infrastructure software on top of that. And then all these great AI tools, tool chains, capabilities with things like the NVIDIA NGC. So that's really, I think where the vision's going. And we got a lot of the basic parts there, but obviously a lot more work to do going forward. >> I would say that, you know, initially we had dream, we wanted this journey to happen very fast and initially we're baiting infrastructure services. So there's no contention with applications, customer full workload applications, and also in enabling how productive it is to get the data over time, have to have sufficient control over a wide area. there's an opportunity to do something like that to make sure that you think about the probation from bare metal vms (conversation fading) environments are way more dynamic and more spreadable. Right. And they expect hardware. It could be as dynamic and compostable to suit their needs. And I think that's where we're headed. >> Right. So let me, so let me throw a monkey wrench in, in terms of security, right? So now this thing is much more flexible. It's much more software defined. How is that changing the way you think about security and basic security and throughout the stack go to you first, Paul. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like it's actually enables a lot of really powerful things. So first of all, from an architecture and implementation standpoint, you have to understand that we're really running two copies of VXI on each physical server. Now we've got the one running on the X86 side, just like normal, and now we've got one running on the SmartNIC as well. And so, as I mentioned before, we can move a lot of that networking security, et cetera, capabilities off to the SmartNic. And so what does this going toward as what we call a zero trust security architecture, this notion of having really defense in depth at many different layers and many different areas while obviously the hypervisor and the virtualization layer provides a really strong level of security. even when we were doing it completely on the X86 side, now that we're running on a SmartNic that's additional defense in depth because the X86 ESX doesn't really know it doesn't have direct access to the ESX. I run it on the SmartNic So the ESXI running on the SmartNic, it can be this kind of more well defended position. Moreover, now that we're running the security functionality is directly on the data path. In the SmartNic. We can do a lot more with that. We can run a lot deeper analysis, can talk about AI and ML, bring a lot of those capabilities to bear here to actually improve the security profile. And so finally I'd say this notion of kind of distributed security as well, that you don't, that's what I want to have these individual points on the physical network, but I actually distribute the security policies and enforcement to everywhere where a server's running, I everywhere where a SmartNic is, and that's what we can do here. And so it really takes a lot of what we've been doing with things like NSX, but now connects it much more deeply into hardware, allowing for better performance and security. >> A common attack method is to intercept the boot of the server physical server. And, you know, I'm actually very proud of our team because the us national security agency recently published a white paper on best practices for secure group. And they take our implementation across and secure boot as the reference standard. >> Right? Moving forward, imagine an environment that even if you gain control of the server, that doesn't allow you to change bios or update it. So we're moving the root of trust to be in that air gap, domain that Kit talked about. And that gives us a way more capability for zero across the operations. Right. >> Right, right. Paul, I got to ask you, I had Sam bird on the other day, your peer who runs the P the PC group. >> I'm telling you, he is not a peer He's a little bit higher up. >> Higher than you. Okay. Well, I just promoted you so that's okay. But, but it's really interesting. Cause we were talking about, it was literally like 10 years ago, the death of the PC article that came out when, when Apple introduced the tablet and, you know, he's talked about what phenomenal devices that PCs continue to be and evolve. And then it's just funny how, now that dovetails with this whole edge conversation, when people don't necessarily think of a PC as a piece of the edge, but it is a great piece of the edge. So from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to have that kind of presence within the PCs and kind of potentially that intelligence and again, this kind of whole another layer of interaction with the users and an opportunity to define how they work with applications and prioritize applications. I just wonder if you can share how nice it is to have that kind of in your back pocket to know that you've got a whole another, you know, kind of layer of visibility and connection with the users beyond just simply the infrastructure. >> So I actually, within the company we've developed within a framework that we call four edge multicloud, right. Core data centers and enterprise edge IOP, and then off premise. it is a multicloud world. And, and within that framework, we consider our client solutions group products to be part of the yes. And we see a lot of benefit. I'll give an example about a healthcare company that wants to develop real time analytics, regardless of whether it's on a laptop or maybe move into a backend data center, right? Whether it's at a hospital clinic or a patient's home, it gives us a broader innovation surface and a little sooner to get actually the, a lot of people may not appreciate that the most important function within Centene, I considered to be the experienced design thing. So being able to design user flows and customer experience looked at all of use is a variable. >> That's great. That's great. So we're running out of time. I want to give you each the last word you both been in this business for a long time. This is brand new stuff, right? Container aren't new, Kubernetes is still relatively new and exciting. And project Pacific was relatively new and now project Monterrey, but you guys are, you know, you're, multi-decade veterans in this thing. as you look forward, what does this moment represent compared to some of the other shifts that we've seen in IT? You know, generally, but you know, kind of consumption of compute and you know, kind of this application centric world that just continues to grow. I mean, as a software is eating everything, we know it, you guys live it every day. What is, where are we now? And you know, what do you see? Maybe I don't want to go too far out, but the next couple of years within the Monterey framework. And then if you have something else, generally you can add as well. Paul, why don't we start with you? >> Well, I think on a personal level, ingenuity aside I have a long string of very successful endeavor in my career when I came back couple years ago, one of the things that I told Jeff, our vice chairman is a big canvas and I intend to paint my masterpiece and I think, you know, Monterey and what we're doing in support of Monterey is also part of that. I think that you will see, you will see our initial approach focus on, on coordinator. I can tell you that you know how to express it. And we know also how to express even in a multicloud world. So I'm very excited and I know that I'm going to be busy for the next few years. (giggling) >> A Kit to you. >> Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you talk to people about SmartNic and especially those folks that have been around for awhile. And what you hear is like, Hey, you know, people were talking about SmartNic 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that sort of thing. Then they kind of died off. So what's different now. And I think the big difference now is a few things, you know, first of all, it's the core technology of sworn and has dramatically improved. We now have a powerful software infrastructure layer that can take advantage of it. And, you know, finally, you know, applications have a really strong need for it, again, with all the things we've talked about, the need for offload. So I think there's some real sort of fundamental shifts that have happened over the past. Let's say decade that have driven the need for this. And so this is something that I believe strongly as here to last, you know, both ourselves at VMware, as well as Dell are making a huge bet on this, but not only that, and not only is it good for customers, it's actually good for all the operators as well. So whether this is part of VCF that we deliver to customers for them to operate themselves, just like they always have, or if it's part of our own cloud solutions, things like being more caught on Dell, this is going to be a core part about how we deliver our cloud services and infrastructure going forward. So we really do believe this is kind of a foundational transition that's taking place. And as we talked about, there is a ton of additional innovation that's going to come out of it. So I'm really, really excited for the next few years, because I think we're just at the start of a very long and very exciting journey. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for spending some time with us and sharing the story and congratulations. I'm sure a whole bunch of work for, from a whole bunch of people in, into getting to getting where you are now. And, and as you said, Paul, the work is barely just begun. So thanks again. All right. He's Paul's He's Kit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuing coverage of Dell tech world 2020, that digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020 of course, happening virtually. And there are certain people that we talk to every year at theCUBE, and this guest, I believe, has been on theCUBE at VMworld more than any others. It's actually not Pat Gelsinger, Eric Herzog. He is the chief marketing officer and vice president of global storage channels at IBM. Eric, Mr. Zoginstor, welcome back to theCUBE, nice to see you. >> Thank you very much, Stu. IBM always enjoys hanging with you, John, and Dave. And again, glad to be here, although not in person this time at VMworld 2020 virtual. Thanks again for having IBM. >> Alright, so, you know, some things are the same, others, very different. Of course, Eric, IBM, a long, long partner of VMware's. Why don't you set up for us a little bit, you know, 2020, the major engagements, what's new with IBM and VMware? >> So, a couple of things, first of all, we have made our Spectrum Virtualize software, software defined block storage work in virtual machines, both in AWS and IBM Cloud. So we started with IBM Cloud and then earlier this year with AWS. So now we have two different cloud platforms where our Spectrum Virtualize software sits in a VM at the cloud provider. The other thing we've done, of course, is V7 support. In fact, I've done several VMUGs. And in fact, my session at VMworld is going to talk about both our support for V7 but also what we're doing with containers, CSI, Kubernetes overall, and how we can support that in a virtual VMware environment, and also we're doing with traditional ESX and VMware configurations as well. And of course, out to the cloud, as I just talked about. >> Yeah, that discussion of hybrid cloud, Eric, is one that we've been hearing from IBM for a long time. And VMware has had that message, but their cloud solutions have really matured. They've got a whole group going deep on cloud native. The Amazon solutions have been something that they've been partnering, making sure that, you know, data protection, it can span between, you know, the traditional data center environment where VMware is so dominant, and the public clouds. You're giving a session on some of those hybrid cloud solutions, so share with us a little bit, you know, where do the visions completely agree? What's some of the differences between what IBM is doing and maybe what people are hearing from VMware? >> Well, first of all, our solutions don't always require VMware to be installed. So for example, if you're doing it in a container environment, for example, with Red Hat OpenShift, that works slightly different. Not that you can't run Red Hat products inside of a virtual machine, which you can, but in this case, I'm talking Red Hat native. We also of course do VMware native and support what VMware has announced with their Kubernetes based solutions that they've been talking about since VMworld last year, obviously when Pat made some big announcements onstage about what they were doing in the container space. So we've been following that along as well. So from that perspective, we have agreement on a virtual machine perspective and of course, what VMware is doing with the container space. But then also a slightly different one when we're doing Red Hat OpenShift as a native configuration, without having a virtual machine involved in that configuration. So those are both the commonalities and the differences that we're doing with VMware in a hybrid cloud configuration. >> Yeah. Eric, you and I both have some of those scars from making sure that storage works in a virtual environment. It took us about a decade to get things to really work at the VM level. Containers, it's been about five years, it feels like we've made faster progress to make sure that we can have stateful environments, we can tie up with storage, but give us a little bit of a look back as to what we've learned and how we've made sure that containerized, Kubernetes environments, you know, work well with storage for customers today. >> Well, I think there's a couple of things. First of all, I think all the storage vendors learn from VMware. And then the expansion of virtual environments beyond VMware to other virtual environments as well. So I think all the storage vendors, including IBM learned through that process, okay, when the next thing comes, which of course in this case happens to be containers, both in a VMware environment, but in an open environment with the Kubernetes management framework, that you need to be able to support it. So for example, we have done several different things. We support persistent volumes in file block and object store. And we started with that almost three years ago on the block side, then we added the file side and now the object storage side. We also can back up data that's in those containers, which is an important feature, right? I am sitting there and I've got data now and persistent volume, but I got to back it up as well. So we've announced support for container based backup either with Red Hat OpenShift or in a generic Kubernetes environment, because we're realistic at IBM. We know that you have to exist in the software infrastructure milieu, and that includes VMware and competitors of VMware. It includes Red Hat OpenShift, but also competitors to Red Hat. And we've made sure that we support whatever the end user needs. So if they're going with Red Hat, great. If they're going with a generic container environment, great. If they're going to use VMware's container solutions, great. And on the virtualization engines, the same thing. We started with VMware, but also have added other virtualization engines. So you think the storage community as a whole and IBM in particular has learned, we need to be ready day one. And like I said, three years ago, we already had persistent volume support for block store. It's still the dominant storage and we had that three years ago. So for us, that would be really, I guess, two years from what you've talked about when containers started to take off. And within two years we had something going that was working at the end user level. Our sales team could sell our business partners. As you know, many of the business partners are really rallying around containers, whether it be Red Hat or in what I'll call a more generic environment as well. They're seeing the forest through the trees. I do think when you look at it from an end user perspective, though, you're going to see all three. So, particularly in the Global Fortune 1000, you're going to see Red Hat environments, generic Kubernetes environments, VMware environments, just like you often see in some instances, heterogeneous virtualization environments, and you're still going to see bare metal. So I think it's going to vary by application workload and use case. And I think all, I'd say midsize enterprise up, let's say, $5 billion company and up, probably will have at least two, if not all three of those environments, container, virtual machine, and bare metal. So we need to make sure that at IBM we support all those environments to keep those customers happy. >> Yeah, well, Eric, I think anybody, everybody in the industry knows, IBM can span those environments, you know, support through generations. And very much knows that everything in IT tends to be additive. You mentioned customers, Eric, you talk to a lot of customers. So bring us inside, give us a couple examples if you would, how are they dealing with this transition? For years we've been talking about, you know, enabling developers, having them be tied more tightly with what the enterprise is doing. So what are you seeing from some of your customers today? >> Well, I think the key thing is they'd like to use data reuse. So, in this case, think of a backup, a snap or replica dataset, which is real world data, and being able to use that and reuse that. And now the storage guys want to make sure they know who's, if you will, checked it out. We do that with our Spectrum Copy Data Management. You also have, of course, integration with the Ansible framework, which IBM supports, in fact, we'll be announcing some additional support for more features in Ansible coming at the end of October. We'll be doing a large launch, very heavily on containers. Containers and primary storage, containers in hybrid cloud environments, containers in big data and AI environments, and containers in the modern data protection and cyber resiliency space as well. So we'll be talking about some additional support in this case about Ansible as well. So you want to make sure, one of the key things, I think, if you're a storage guy, if I'm the VP of infrastructure, or I'm the CIO, even if I'm not a storage person, in fact, if you think about it, I'm almost 70 now. I have never, ever, ever, ever met a CIO who used to be a storage guy, ever. Whether I, I've been with big companies, I was at EMC, I was at Seagate Maxtor, I've been at IBM actually twice. I've also done seven startups, as you guys know at theCUBE. I have never, ever met a CIO who used to be a storage person. Ever, in all those years. So, what appeals to them is, how do I let the dev guys and the test guys use that storage? At the same time, they're smart enough to know that the software guys and the test guys could actually screw up the storage, lose the data, or if they don't lose the data, cost them hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars because they did something wrong and they have to reconfigure all the storage solutions. So you want to make sure that the CIO is comfortable, that the dev and the test teams can use that storage properly. It's a part of what Ansible's about. You want to make sure that you've got tight integration. So for example, we announced a container native version of our Spectrum Discover software, which gives you comprehensive metadata, cataloging and indexing. Not only for IBM's scale-out file, Spectrum Scale, not only for IBM object storage, IBM cloud object storage, but also for Amazon S3 and also for NetApp filers and also for EMC Isilon. And it's a container native. So you want to make sure in that case, we have an API. So the AI software guys, or the big data software guys could interface with that API to Spectrum Discover, let them do all the work. And we're talking about a piece of software that can traverse billions of objects in two seconds, billions of them. And is ideal to use in solutions that are hundreds of petabytes, up into multiple exabytes. So it's a great way that by having that API where the CIO is confident that the software guys can use the API, not mess up the storage because you know, the storage guys and the data scientists can configure Spectrum Discover and then save it as templates and run an AI workload every Monday, and then run a big data workload every Tuesday, and then Wednesday run a different AI workload and Thursday run a different big data. And so once they've set that up, everything is automated. And CIOs love automation, and they really are sensitive. Although they're all software guys, they are sensitive to software guys messing up the storage 'cause it could cost them money, right? So that's their concern. We make it easy. >> Absolutely, Eric, you know, it'd be lovely to say that storage is just invisible, I don't need to think about it, but when something goes wrong, you need those experts to be able to dig in. You spent some time talking about automation, so critically important. How about the management layer? You know, you think back, for years it was, vCenter would be the place that everything can plug in. You could have more generalists using it. The HCI waves were people kind of getting away from being storage specialists. Today VMware has, of course vCenter's their main estate, but they have Tanzu. On the IBM and Red Hat side, you know, this year you announced the Advanced Cluster Management. What's that management landscape look like? How does the storage get away from managing some of the bits and bytes and, you know, just embrace more of that automation that you talked about? >> So in the case of IBM, we make sure we can support both. We need to appeal to the storage nerd, the storage geek if you will. The same time to a more generalist environment, whether it be an infrastructure manager, whether it be some of the software guys. So for example, we support, obviously vCenter. We're going to be supporting all of the elements that are going to happen in a container environment that VMware is doing. We have hot integration and big time integration with Red Hat's management framework, both with Ansible, but also in the container space as well. We're announcing some things that are coming again at the end of October in the container space about how we interface with the Red Hat management schema. And so you don't always have to have the storage expert manage the storage. You can have the Red Hat administrator, or in some cases, the DevOps guys do it. So we're making sure that we can cover both sides of the fence. Some companies, this just my personal belief, that as containers become commonplace while the software guys are going to want to still control it, there eventually will be a Red Hat/container admin, just like all the big companies today have VMware admins. They all do. Or virtualization admins that cover VMware and VMware's competitors such as Hyper-V. They have specialized admins to run that. And you would argue, VMware is very easy to use, why aren't the software guys playing with it? 'Cause guess what? Those VMs are sitting on servers containing both apps and data. And if the software guy comes in to do something, messes it up, so what have of the big entities done? They've created basically a virtualization admin layer. I think that over time, either the virtualization admins become virtualization/container admins, or if it's a big enough for both estates, there'll be container admins at the Global Fortune 500, and they'll also be virtualization admins. And then the software guys, the devOps guys will interface with that. There will always be a level of management framework. Which is why we integrate, for example, with vCenter, what we're doing with Red Hat, what we do with generic Kubernetes, to make sure that we can integrate there. So we'll make sure that we cover all areas because a number of our customers are very large, but some of our customers are very small. In fact, we have a company that's in the software development space for autonomous driving. They have over a hundred petabytes of IBM Spectrum Scale in a container environment. So that's a small company that's gone all containers, at the same time, we have a bunch of course, Global Fortune 1000s where IBM plays exceedingly well that have our products. And they've got some stuff sitting in VMware, some such sitting in generic Kubernetes, some stuff sitting in Red Hat OpenShift and some stuff still in bare metal. And in some cases they don't want their software people to touch it, in other cases, these big accounts, they want their software people empowered. So we're going to make sure we could support both and both management frameworks. Traditional storage management framework with each one of our products and also management frameworks for virtualization, which we've already been doing. And now management frame first with container. We'll make sure we can cover all three of those bases 'cause that's what the big entities will want. And then in the smaller names, you'll have to see who wins out. I mean, they may still use three in a small company, you really don't know, so you want to make sure you've got everything covered. And it's very easy for us to do this integration because of things we've already historically done, particularly with the virtualization environment. So yes, the interstices of the integration are different, but we know here's kind of the process to do the interconnectivity between a storage management framework and a generic management framework, in, originally of course, vCenter, and now doing it for the container world as well. So at least we've learned best practices and now we're just tweaking those best practices in the difference between a container world and a virtualization world. >> Eric, VMworld is one of the biggest times of the year, where we all get together. I know how busy you are going to the show, meeting with customers, meeting with partners, you know, walking the hallways. You're one of the people that traveled more than I did pre-COVID. You know, you're always at the partner shows and meeting with people. Give us a little insight as to how you're making sure that, partners and customers, those conversations are still happening. We understand everything over video can be a little bit challenging, but, what are you seeing here in 2020? How's everybody doing? >> Well, so, a couple of things. First of all, I already did two partner meetings today. (laughs) And I have an end user meeting, two end user meetings tomorrow. So what we've done at IBM is make sure we do a couple things. One, short and to the point, okay? We have automated tools to actually show, drawing, just like the infamous walk up to the whiteboard in a face to face meeting, we've got that. We've also now tried to make sure everybody is being overly inundated with WebEx. And by the way, there's already a lot of WebEx anyway. I can think of meeting I had with a telco, one of the Fortune 300, and this was actually right before Thanksgiving. I was in their office in San Jose, but they had guys in Texas and guys in the East Coast all on. So we're still over WebEx, but it also was a two and a half hour meeting, actually almost a three hour meeting. And both myself and our Flash CTO went up to the whiteboard, which you could then see over WebEx 'cause they had a camera showing up onto the whiteboard. So now you have to take that and use integrated tools. One, but since people are now, I would argue, over WebEx. There is a different feel to doing the WebEx than when you're doing it face to face. We have to fly somewhere, or they have to fly somewhere. We have to even drive somewhere, so in between meetings, if you're going to do four customer calls, Stu, as you know, I travel all over the world. So I was in Sweden actually right before COVID. And in one day, the day after we had a launch, we launched our new Flash System products in February on the 11th, on February 12th, I was still in Stockholm and I had two partner meetings and two end user meetings. But the sales guy was driving me around. So in between the meetings, you'd be in the car for 20 minutes or half an hour. So it connects different when you can do WebEx after WebEx after WebEx with basically no break. So you have to be sensitive to that when you're talking to your partners, sensitive of that when you're talking to the customers sensitive when you're talking to the analysts, such as you guys, sensitive when you're talking to the press and all your various constituents. So we've been doing that at IBM, really, since the COVID thing got started, is coming up with some best practices so we don't overtax the end users and overtax our channel partners. >> Yeah, Eric, the joke I had on that is we're all following the Bill Belichick model now, no days off, just meeting, meeting, meeting every day, you can stack them up, right? You used to enjoy those downtimes in between where you could catch up on a call, do some things. I had to carve out some time to make sure that stack of books that normally I would read in the airports or on flights, everything, you know. I do enjoy reading a book every now and again, so. Final thing, I guess, Eric. Here at VMworld 2020, you know, give us final takeaways that you want your customers to have when it comes to IBM and VMware. >> So a couple of things, A, we were tightly integrated and have been tightly integrated for what they've been doing in their traditional virtualization environment. As they move to containers we'll be tightly integrated with them as well, as well as other container platforms, not just from IBM with Red Hat, but again, generic Kubernetes environments with open source container configurations that don't use IBM Red Hat and don't use VMware. So we want to make sure that we span that. In traditional VMware environments, like with Version 7 that came out, we make sure we support it. In fact, VMware just announced support for NVMe over Fibre Channel. Well, we've been shipping NVMe over Fibre Channel for just under two years now. It'll be almost two years, well, it will be two years in October. So we're sitting here in September, it's almost been two years since we've been shipping that. But they haven't supported it, so now of course we actually, as part of our launch, I pre say something, as part of our launch, the last week of October at IBM's TechU it'll be on October 27th, you can join for free. You don't need to attend TechU, we'll have a free registration page. So just follow Zoginstor or look at my LinkedIns 'cause I'll be posting shortly when we have the link, but we'll be talking about things that we're doing around V7, with support for VMware's announcement of NVMe over Fibre Channel, even though we've had it for two years coming next month. But they're announcing support, so we're doing that as well. So all of those sort of checkbox items, we'll continue to do as they push forward into the container world. IBM will be there right with them as well because we know it's a very large world and we need to support everybody. We support VMware. We supported their competitors in the virtualization space 'cause some customers have, in fact, some customers have both. They've got VMware and maybe one other of the virtualization elements. Usually VMware is the dominant of course, but if they've got even a little bit of it, we need to make sure our storage works with it. We're going to do the same thing in the container world. So we will continue to push forward with VMware. It's a tight relationship, not just with IBM Storage, but with the server group, clearly with the cloud team. So we need to make sure that IBM as a company stays very close to VMware, as well as, obviously, what we're doing with Red Hat. And IBM Storage makes sure we will do both. I like to say that IBM Storage is a Switzerland of the storage industry. We work with everyone. We work with all these infrastructure players from the software world. And even with our competitors, our Spectrum Virtualized software that comes on our Flash Systems Array supports over 550 different storage arrays that are not IBM's. Delivering enterprise-class data services, such as snapshot, replication data, at rest encryption, migration, all those features, but you can buy the software and use it with our competitors' storage array. So at IBM we've made a practice of making sure that we're very inclusive with our software business across the whole company and in storage in particular with things like Spectrum Virtualize, with what we've done with our backup products, of course we backup everybody's stuff, not just ours. We're making sure we do the same thing in the virtualization environment. Particularly with VMware and where they're going into the container world and what we're doing with our own, obviously sister division, Red Hat, but even in a generic Kubernetes environment. Everyone's not going to buy Red Hat or VMware. There are people going to do Kubernetes industry standard, they're going to use that, if you will, open source container environment with Kubernetes on top and not use VMware and not use Red Hat. We're going to make sure if they do it, what I'll call generically, if they use Red Hat, if they use VMware or some combo, we will support all of it and that's very important for us at VMworld to make sure everyone is aware that while we may own Red Hat, we have a very strong, powerful connection to VMware and going to continue to do that in the future as well. >> Eric Herzog, thanks so much for joining us. Always a pleasure catching up with you. >> Thank you very much. We love being with theCUBE, you guys do great work at every show and one of these days I'll see you again and we'll have a beer. In person. >> Absolutely. So, definitely, Dave Vellante and John Furrier send their best, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you as always for watching theCUBE. (relaxed electronic music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020. This is theCUBE virtual with VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. It's our 11th year covering VMware. We're not in person, we're virtual, but all the content is flowing. Of course, we're here with Pat Galsinger, the CEO of VMware. Who's been on theCUBE all 11 years. This year virtual of theCUBE as we've been covering VMware from his early days in 2010, when theCUBE started 11 years later, Pat is still changing and still exciting. Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time. >> Hey, you guys are great. I love the interactions that we have, the energy, the fun, the intellectual sparring. And of course that audiences have loved it now for 11 years. And I look forward to the next 11 that we'll be doing together. >> It's always exciting cause we'd love great conversations. Dave and I like to drill in and really kind of probe and unpack the content that you're delivering at the keynotes, but also throughout the entire program. It is virtual this year, which highlights a lot of the cloud native changes. Just want to get your thoughts on the virtual aspect of VMworld, not in person, which is one of the best events of the year. Everyone loves it. The great community. It's virtual this year, but there's a slew of content. What should people take away from this virtual VMworld? >> Well, one aspect of it is that I'm actually excited about is that we're going to be well over a hundred thousand people, which allows us to be bigger, right? You don't have the physical constraints. You also are able to reach places like I've gone to customers and maybe they had 20 people attend in prior years. This year they're having a hundred, they're able to have much larger teams. Also like some of the more regulated industries where they can't necessarily send people to events like this, the international audience. So just being able to spread the audience much more broadly well, also our key messages a digital foundation for unpredictable world. And man, what an unpredictable world it has been this past year? And then key messages, lots of key products announcements technology, announcements partnership, announcements and of course in all of the VMworld, is that hands on (murmurs) interactions that we'll be delivering our virtual, you come to the VMware because the content is so robust and it's being delivered by the world's smartest people. >> Yeah. We've had great conversations over the years. And we've talked about hybrid clothing 2012, a lot of this stuff I looked back in lot of the videos was early on, we're picking out all these waves, but it was that moment four years ago or so, maybe even four, three, I can't even remember, seems like yesterday. You gave the Seminole keynote and you said, "This is the way the world's going to happen." And since that keynote I'll never forget was in Moscone. And since then you guys have been performing extremely well both on the business as well as making technology bets and is paying off. So what's next? I mean, you've got the cloud scale. Is it space? Is it cyber? I mean, all these things are going on. What is next wave that you're watching and what's coming out and what can people extract out of VMworld this year about this next wave? >> Yeah, one of the things I really am excited about I went to my buddy Jensen. I said, "Boy, we're doing this work and smart. Next We really liked to work with you and maybe some things to better generalize the GPU." And Jensen challenged me. Now, usually, I'm the one challenging other people with bigger visions, this time Jensen said, "Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. Let's do the entire AI landscape together. And let's make AI a enterprise classwork stowed from the data center to the cloud and to the Edge. And so I'm going to bring all of my AI resources and make VMware, And Tansu the preferred infrastructure to deliver AI at scale. I need you guys to make the GPS work like first class citizens in the vSphere environment, because I need them to be truly democratized for the enterprise. so that it's not some specialized AI development team, it's everybody being able to do that. And then we're going to connect the whole network together in a new and profound way with our Monterey Program as well being able to use the SmartNIC, the DPU as Jensen likes to call it. So now it's CPU, GPU and DPU, all being managed through a distributed architecture of VMware." This is exciting. So this is one in particular that I think we are now rearchitecting the data center, the cloud in the Edge. And this partnership is really a central point of that. >> Yeah, the Nvid thing's huge. And I know Dave, Perharbs has some questions on that. But I ask you a question because a lot of people ask me, is it just a hardware deal? I mean, talking about SmartNIC, you talking about data processing units. It sounds like a motherboard in the cloud, if you will, but it's not just hardware. Can you talk about the aspect of the software piece? Because again, Nvidia is known for GP use, we all know that, but we're talking about AI here. So it's not just hardware. Can you just expand and share what the software aspect of all this is? >> Yeah. Well, Nvidia has been investing in their AI stack and it's one of those where I say, this is Edison at work, right? The harder I work, the luckier I get. And Nvidia was lucky that their architecture worked much better for the AI workload, but it was built on two decades of hard work in building a parallel data center architecture. And they have built a complete software stack for all of the major AI workloads running on their platform. All of that is now coming to vSphere and Tansu, that is a rich software layer across many vertical industries. And we'll talk about a variety of use cases. One of those that we highlight at Vmworld is the university of California, San Francisco partnership UCSF one of the world's leading research hospitals, some of the current vaccine use cases as well, the financial use cases for threat detection and trading benefits. It really is about how we bring that rich software stack. this is a decade and a half of work to the VMware platform so that now every developer and every enterprise could take advantage of this at scale, that's a lot of software. So in many respects, yeah, there's a piece of hardware in here, but the software stack is even more important. >> So well on the sort of Nvidia the arm piece, there's really interesting, these alternative processing models. And I wonder if you could comment on the implications for AI inferencing at the Edge. It's not just as well processor implications, it's storage, it's networking. It's really a whole new fundamental paradigm. How are you thinking about that Pat? >> Yeah, we've thought about, there's three aspects, but what we said three problems that we're solving. One is the developer problem, what we said, now you develop once, right? And the developer can now say, "Hey, I want to have this new AI centric app and I can develop, and it can run in the data center on the cloud or at the Edge." You'll secondly, my operations team can be able to operate this just like I do all my infrastructure. And now it's VMs containers and AI applications and third, and this is where your question really comes to bear. Most significantly is data gravity, right? These data sets are big. Some of them need to be very low latency as well. They also have regulatory issues. And if I have to move these large regulated data sets to the cloud, boy, maybe I can't do that generally for my apps or if I have low latency heavy apps at the Edge, ah, I can't pull it back to the cloud or to my data center. And that's where the uniform architecture and aspects of the Monterey program, where I'm able to take advantage of the network and the SmartNIC that are being built, but also being able to fully represent the data gravity issues of AI applications at scale 'cause in many cases I'll need to do the processing, both the learning and the inference at the Edge as well. So that's a key part of our strategy here with Nvidia. And I do think is going to be a lock, a new class of apps because when you think about AI and containers, what am I using it for? Well, it's the next generation of applications. A lot of those are going to be Edge 5G based. So very critical. >> We got to talk about security now, too. I mean, I'm going to pivot a little bit here John if it's okay. Years ago you said security is a do over. You said that on theCUBE, It stuck with us. There's there's been a lot of complacency it's kind of, if it didn't broke, don't fix it, but COVID kind of broke it. That's why you see three mega trends. You've got cloud security, you see in Z scaler rocket, you got identity access management and I'll check, I think a customer of yours. And then you've got endpoint you're seeing CrowdStrike explode. You guys pay 2.7 billion I think for carbon black yet CrowdStrike has this huge valuation. That's a mega opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing there? How are you bringing that all together? You've got NSX components, EUC components. You've got sort of security throughout your entire stack. How should we be thinking about that? >> Well, one of the announcements that I am most excited about at Vmworld is the release of carbon black workload, this research we're going to take those carbon black assets and we're going to combine it with workspace one. We're going to build it in NSX. We're going to make it part of Tansu and we're going to make it part of vSphere. And carbon black workload is literally the vSphere embodiment of carbon black in an agentless way. Ans so now you don't need to insert new agents or anything. It becomes part of the hypervisor itself, meaning that there's no attack surface available for the bad guys to pursue, but not only is this an exciting new product capability, but we're going to make it free, right? And what I'm announcing at VMworld and everybody who uses vSphere gets carbon black workload for free for an unlimited number of VMs for the next six months. And as I said in the keynote today is a bad day for cybercriminals. This is what intrinsic security is about, making it part of the platform. Don't add anything on, just click the button and start using what's built into vSphere. And we're doing that same thing with what we're doing at the networking layer. This is the act, the last line acquisition. We're going to bring that same workload kind of characteristic into the container. That's why we did the Octarine acquisition. And we're releasing the integration of workspace one with a carbon black client, and that's going to be the differentiator. And by the way, CrowdStrike is doing well, but guess what? So are we, and like both of us are eliminating the rotting dead carcasses of the traditional AV approach. So there is a huge market for both of us to go pursue here. So a lot of great things in security. And as you said, we're just starting to see that shift of the industry occur that I promised last year in theCUBE. >> So it'd be safe to say that you're a cloud native in a security company these days? >> You all, absolutely. And the bigger picture of us, is that we're critical infrastructure layer for the Edge for the cloud, for the telco environment and for the data center from every end point, every application, every cloud. >> So Padagonia asked you a virtual question, we got from the community, I'm going to throw it out to you because a lot of people look at Amazon, The cloud and they say, "Okay, we didn't see it coming. We saw it coming. We saw it scale all the benefits that are coming out of cloud, Well-documented." The question for you is what's next after cloud, as people start to rethink, especially with COVID highlighting all the scabs out there. As people look at their exposed infrastructure and their software, they want to be modern. They want the modern apps. What's next after cloud. What's your vision? >> Well, with respect to cloud, we are taking customers on the multicloud vision, right? Where you truly get to say, "Oh, this workload, I want to be able to run it with Azure, with Amazon. I need to bring this one on premise. I want to run that one hosted. I'm not sure where I'm going to run that application." So develop it and then run it at the best place. And that's what we mean by our hybrid multicloud strategy is being able for customers to really have cloud flexibility and choice. And even as our preferred relationship with Amazon is going super well. We're seeing a real uptick. We're also happy that the Microsoft Azure VMware services now GA so they're in marketplace, our Google, Oracle, IBM and Alibaba partnerships in the much broader set of VMware cloud Partner Program. So the future is multicloud. Furthermore, it's then how do we do that in the Telco Network for the 5G build out, The Telco cloud? And how do we do that for the Edge? And I think that might be sort of the granddaddy of all of these because increasingly in a 5G world will be a nibbling Edge use cases. We'll be pushing AI to the Edge like we talked about earlier in this conversation, will be enabling these high bandwidth, with low latency use cases at the Edge, and we'll see more and more of the smart embodiment, smart cities, smart street, smart factory, or the autonomous driving. All of those need these type of capabilities. >> So there's hybrid and there's multi, you just talked about multi. So hybrid are data partner ETR, they do quarterly surveys. We're seeing big uptick in VMware cloud and AWS, you guys mentioned that in your call. we're also seeing the VMware cloud, VMware cloud Coundation and the other elements, clearly a big uptake. So how should we think about hybrid? It looks like that's an extension of on-prem maybe not incremental, maybe a share shift whereas multi looks like it's incremental, but today multi has really running on multiple clouds, but vision toward incremental value. How are you thinking about that? >> Yeah, so clearly the idea of multi is to link multiple. Am I taking advantage of multiple clouds being my private clouds, my hosted clouds. And of course my public cloud partners, we believe everybody will be running a great private cloud, picking a primary, a public cloud, and then a secondary public cloud. Hybrid then is saying, which of those infrastructures are identical so that I can run them without modifying any aspect of my infrastructure operations or applications. And in today's world where people are wanting to accelerate their move to the cloud, a hybrid cloud is spot on with their needs because if I have to refactor my applications it's a couple million dollars per app, And I'll see you in a couple of years. If I can simply migrate my existing application to the hybrid cloud, what we're consistently seeing is the time is one quarter and the cost is one eight, four less. Those are powerful numbers. And if I need to exit a data center, I want to be able to move to a cloud environment, to be able to access more of those native cloud services. Wow. That's powerful. And that's why for seven years now we've been preaching that hybrid is the future. It is not a waystation to the future. And I believe that more fervently today than when I declared it seven years ago. So we are firmly on that path that we're enabling a multi and a hybrid cloud future for all of our customers. >> Yeah. You addressed that like CUBE 2013. I remember that interview vividly was not a waystation. I got (murmurs) the answer. Thank you Pat, for clarifying than going back seven years. I love the vision. You're always got the right wave. It's always great to talk to you, but I got to ask you about these initiatives you seeing clearly last year or a year and a half ago, project Pacific name out almost like a guiding directional vision, and then put some meat on the bone Tansu and now you guys have that whole Cloud Native Initiative is starting to flower up thousand flowers are blooming. This year Project Monterrey has announced same kind of situation. You're showing out the vision. What are the plans to take that to the next level and take a minute to explain how project Monterey, what it means and how you see that filling out. I'm assuming it's going to take the same trajectory as Pacific. >> Yeah. Monetary is a big deal. This is rearchitecting The core of vSphere. It really is ripping apart the IO stack from the intrinsic operation of a vSphere and ESX itself, because in many ways, the IO we've been always leveraging the NIC and essentially virtual NICs, but we never leverage the resources of the network adapters themselves in any fundamental way. And as you think about SmartNICs, these are powerful resources now where they may have four, eight, 16, even 32 cores running in the smartNIC itself. So how do I utilize that resource? But it also sits in the right place in the sense that it is the network traffic cop. It is the place to do security acceleration. It is the place that enables IO bandwidth optimization across increasingly rich applications where the workloads, the data, the latency get more important both in the data center and across data centers to the cloud and to the Edge. So this rearchitecting is a big deal. We announced the three partners, Intel, Nvidia, Mellanox, and Penn Sandow that we're working with. And we'll begin the deliveries of this as part of the core vSphere offerings of beginning next year. So it's a big rearchitecting. These are our key partners. We're excited about the work that we're doing with them. And then of course our system partners like Dell and Lenovo, who've already come forward and says, "Yeah, we're going to be bringing these to market together with VMware." >> Pat, personal question for you. I want to get your personal take, your career, going back to Intel. You've seen it all, but the shift is consumer to enterprise. And you look at just recently snowflake IPO, the biggest ever in the history of wall street, an enterprise data's company. And the enterprise is now relevant. Enterprise feels consumer. We talked about consumerization of IT years and years ago, but now more than ever the hottest financial IPO enterprise, you guys are enterprise. You did enterprise at Intel. (laughs) You know the enterprise, you doing it here at VMware. The enterprise is the consumer now with cloud and all this new landscape. What is your view on this? Because you've seen the waves, and you've seen the historical perspective. It was consumer, was the big thing. Now it's enterprise, what's your take on all this? How do you make sense of it? Because it's now mainstream. what's your view on this? >> Well, first I do want to say congratulations to my friend Frank, and the extraordinary snowflake IPO, and by the way, they use VMware. So not only do I feel a sense of ownership 'cause Frank used to work for me for a period of time, but they're also a customer of ours. So go Frank, go snowflake. We're we're excited about that. But there is this episodic, this to the industry where for a period of time it is consumer-driven and CES used to be the hottest ticket in the industry for technology trends. But as you say, it is now shifted to be more business centric. And I've said this very firmly, for instance, in the case of 5G where I do not see consumer a faster video or a better Facebook, isn't going to be why I buy 5G. It's going to be driven by more business use cases where the latency, the security and the bandwidth will have radically differentiated views of the new applications that will be the case. So we do think that we're in a period of time and I expect that it's probably at least the next five years where business will be the technology drivers in the industry. And then probably, hey, there'll be a wave of consumer innovation and I'll have to get my black turtlenecks out again and start trying to be cool, but I've always been more of an enterprise guy. So I like the next five to 10 years better. I'm not cool enough to be a consumer guy. And maybe my age is now starting to conspire against me as well. >> Hey, Pat, I know you've got to go, but quick question. So you guys, you gave guidance, pretty good guidance, actually. I wondered have you and Zane come up with a new algorithm to deal with all this uncertainty or is it kind of back to old school gut feel? (laughs) >> Well, I think as we thought about the year as we came into the year and obviously, COVID smacked everybody, we laid out a model, we looked at various industry analysts, what we call the swoosh model, right? Q2, Q3 and Q4 recovery, Q1 more so, Q2 more so, and basically, we build our own theories behind that. We test it against many analysts, the perspectives, and we had vs and we had Ws and we had Ls and so on. We picked what we thought was really sort of grounded of the best data that we could put our own analysis, which we have substantial data of our own customer's usage, et cetera, and pick the model. And like any model, you put a touch of conservatism against it, and we've been pretty accurate. And I think there's a lot of things, we've been able to sort of, with good data good thoughtfulness, take a view and then just consistently manage against it and everything that we said when we did that back in March, sort of proven out incrementally to be more accurate. And some are saying, "Hey, things are coming back more quickly." And then, oh we're starting to see the fall numbers climb up a little bit. Hey, we don't think this goes away quickly. There's still a lot of secondary things to get flushed through the various economies, as stimulus starts tailoring off small businesses are more impacted and we still don't have a widely deployed vaccine. And I don't expect we will have one until second half of next year. Now there's the silver lining to that, as we said, which means that these changes, these faster to the future shifts in how we learn, how we work, how we educate, how we care for, how we worship, how we live, they will get more and more sedimented into the new normal relying more and more on the digital foundation. And we think ultimately that has extremely good upsides for us longterm, even as it's very difficult to navigate in the near term. And that's why we are just raving optimists for the longterm benefits of a more and more digital foundation for the future of every industry, every human, every workforce, every hospital, every educator, they are going to become more digital. And that's why I think going back to the last question, this is a business driven cycle, we're well positioned, and we're thrilled for all of those who are participating with VMworld 2020. This is a seminal moment for us and our industry. >> Pat, thank you so much for taking the time. It's an enabling model. It's what platforms are all about. You get that. My final parting question for you is whether you're a VC investing in startups or a large enterprise who's trying to get through COVID with a growth plan for that future. What is a modern app look like? And what does a modern company look like in your view? >> Well, a modern company would be that instead of having a lot of people looking down at infrastructure, the bulk of my IT resources are looking up at building apps. Those apps are using modern CICD data pipeline approaches built for a multicloud embodiment, right? And of course, VMware is the best partner that you possibly could have. So if you want to be modern, cool on the front end, come and talk to us. >> All right. Pat Galsinger the CEO of VMware here on theCUBE for VML 2020 virtual here with theCUBE virtual. Great to see you virtually Pat. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for your time. >> Hey, thank you so much. Love to see you in person soon enough, but this is pretty good. Thank you, Dave. Thank you so much. >> Okay. You're watching theCUBE virtual here for VMworld 2020. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallente with Pat Gelsinger. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCube virtual coverage of VMworld 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. VMworld's not in person this year, it's on the virtual internet. A lot of content, check it out, vmworld.com, a lot of great stuff, online demos, and a lot of great keynotes. Here we got a great conversation to unpack, the NVIDIA, the AI and all things Cloud Native. With Krish Prasad, who's the SVP and GM of Cloud Platform, Business Unit, and Manuvir Das head of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. Gentlemen, great to see you virtually. Thanks for joining me on the virtual Cube, for the virtual VMworld 2020. >> Thank you John. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Quite a world. And I think one of the things that obviously we've been talking about all year since COVID is the acceleration of this virtualized environment with media and everyone working at home remote. Really puts the pressure on digital transformation Has been well discussed and documented. You guys have some big news, obviously on the main stage NVIDIA CEO, Jensen there legend. And of course, you know, big momentum with with AI and GPUs and all things, you know, computing. Krish, what are your announcements today? You got some big news. Could you take a minute to explain the big announcements today? >> Yeah, John. So today we want to make two major announcements regarding our partnership with NVIDIA. So let's take the first one, and talk through it and then we can get to the second announcement later. In the first one, as you well know, NVIDIA is the leader in AI and VMware as the leader in virtualization and cloud. This announcement is about us teaming up, deliver a jointly engineered solution to the market to bring AI to every enterprise. So as you well know, VMware has more than 300,000 customers worldwide. And we believe that this solution would enable our customers to transform their data centers or AI applications running on top of their virtualized VMware infrastructure that they already have. And we think that this is going to vastly accelerate the adoption of AI and essentially democratize AI in the enterprise. >> Why AI? Why now Manuvir? Obviously we know the GPUs have set the table for many cool things, from mining Bitcoin to really providing a great user experience. But AI has been a big driver. Why now? Why VMware now? >> Yes. Yeah. And I think it's important to understand this is about AI more than even about GPUs, you know. This is a great moment in time where AI has finally come to life, because the hardware and software has come together to make it possible. And if you just look at industries and different parts of life, how is AI impacting? So for example, if you're a company on the internet doing business, everything you do revolves around making recommendations to your customers about what they should do next. This is based on AI. Think about the world we live in today, with the importance of healthcare, drug discovery, finding vaccines for something like COVID. That work is dramatically accelerated if you use AI. And what we've been doing in NVIDIA over the years is, we started with the hardware technology with the GPU, the Parallel Processor, if you will, that could really make these algorithms real. And then we worked very hard on building up the ecosystem. You know, we have 2 million developers today who work with NVIDIA AI. That's thousands of companies that are using AI today. But then if you think about what Krish said, you know about the number of customers that VMware has, which is in the hundreds of thousands, the opportunity before us really now is, how do we democratize this? How do we take this power of AI, that makes every customer and every person better and put it in the hands of every enterprise customer? And we need a great vehicle for that, and that vehicle is VMware. >> Guys, before we get to the next question, I would just want to get your personal take on this, because again, we've talked many times, both of you've been on theCube on this topic. But now I want to highlight, you mentioned the GPU that's hardware. This is software. VMware had hardware partners and then still software's driving it. Software's driving everything. Whether it's something in space, it's an IOT device or anything at the edge of the network. Software, is the value. This has become so obvious. Just share your personal take on this for folks who are now seeing this for the first time. >> Yeah. I mean, I'll give you my take first. I'm a software guy by background, I learned a few years ago for the first time that an array is a storage device and not a data structure in programming. And that was a shock to my system. Definitely the world is based on algorithms. Algorithms are implemented in software. Great hardware enables those algorithms. >> Krish, your thoughts. we live we're living in the future right now. >> Yeah, yeah. I would say that, I mean, the developers are becoming the center. They are actually driving the transformation in this industry, right? It's all about the application development, it's all about software, the infrastructure itself is becoming software defined. And the reason for that is you want the developers to be able to craft the infrastructure the way they need for the applications to run on top of. So it's all about software like I said. >> Software defined. Yeah, just want to get that quick self-congratulatory high five amongst ourselves virtually. (laughs) Congratulations. >> Exactly. >> Krish, last time we spoke at VMworld, we were obviously in person, but we talked about Tanzu and vSphere. Okay, you had Project Pacific. Does this expand? Does this announcement expand on that offering? >> Absolutely. As you know John, for the past several years, VMware has been on this journey to define the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, right? Essentially is the software stack that we have, which will enable our customers to provide a cloud operating model to their developers, irrespective of where they want to land their workloads. Whether they want to land their workloads On-Premise, or if they want it to be on top of AWS, Google, Azure, VMware stack is already running across all of them as you well know. And in addition to that, we have around, you know, 4,000, 5,000 service providers who are also running our Platform to deliver cloud services to their customers. So as part of that journey, last year, we took the Platform and we added one further element to it. Traditionally, our platform has been used by customers for running via VMs. Last year, we natively integrated Kubernetes into our platform. This was the big re architecture of vSphere, as we talked about. That was delivered to the market. And essentially now customers can use the same platform to run Kubernetes, Containers and VM workloads. The exact same platform, it is operationally the same. So the same skillsets, tools and processes can be used to run Kubernetes as well as VM applications. And the same platform runs, whether you want to run it On-Premise or in any of the clouds, as we talked about before. So that vastly simplifies the operational complexity that our customers have to deal with. And this is the next chapter in that journey, by doing the same thing for AI workload. >> You guys had great success with these Co-Engineering joined efforts. VMware and now with NVIDIA is interesting. It's very relevant and is very cool. So it's cool and relevant, so check, check. Manuvir, talk about this, because how do you bring that vision to the enterprises? >> Yeah, John, I think, you know, it's important to understand there is some real deep Computer Science here between the Engineers at VMware and NVIDIA. Just to lay that out, you can think of this as a three layer stack, right? The first thing that you need is, clearly you need the hardware that is capable of running these algorithms, that's what the GPU enable. Then you need a great software stack for AI, all the right Algorithmics that take advantage of that hardware. This is actually where NVIDIA spends most of its effort today. People may sometimes think of NVIDIA as a GPU company, but we have much more a software company now, where we have over the years created a body of work of all of the software that it actually takes to do good AI. But then how do you marry the software stack with the hardware? You need a platform in the middle that supports the applications and consumes the hardware and exposes it properly. And that's where vSphere, you know, as Krish described with either VMs or Containers comes into the picture. So the Computer Science here is, to wire all these things up together with the right algorithmics so that you get real acceleration. So as examples of early work that the two teams have done together, we have workloads in healthcare, for example. In cancer detection, where the acceleration we get with this new stack is 30X, right? The workload is running 30 times faster than it was running before this integration just on CPUs. >> Great performance increase again. You guys are hiring a lot of software developers. I can attest to knowing folks in Silicon Valley and around the world. So I know you guys are bringing the software jobs to the table on a great product by the way, so congratulations. Krish, Democratization of AI for the enterprise. This is a liberating opportunity, because one of the things we've heard from your customers and also from VMware, but mostly from the customer's successes, is that there's two types of extremes. There's the, I'm going to modernize my business, certainly COVID forcing companies, whether they're airlines or whatever, not a lot going on, they have an opportunity to modernize, to essentially modern apps that are getting a tailwind from these new digital transformation accelerated. How does AI democratize this? Cause you got people and you've got technology. (laughs) Right? So share your thoughts on how you see this democratizing. >> That's a very good question. I think if you look at how people are running AI applications today, like you go to an enterprise, you would see that there is a silo of bare metal sun works on the side, where the AI stack is run. And you have people with specialized skills and different tools and utilities that manage that environment. And that is what is standing in the way of AI taking off in the enterprise, right? It is not the use case. There are all these use cases which are mission critical that all companies want to do, right? Worldwide, that has been the case. It is about the complexity of life that is standing in the way. So what we are doing with this is we are saying, "hey, that whole solution stack that Manuvir talked about, is integrated into the VMware Virtualized Infrastructure." Whether it's On-Prem or in the cloud. And you can manage that environment with the exact same tools and processes and skills that you traditionally had for running any other application on VMware infrastructure. So, you don't need to have anything special to run this. And that's what is going to give us the acceleration that we talked about and essentially hive the Democratization of AI. >> That's a great point. I just want to highlight that and call that out, because AI's every use case. You could almost say theCube could have AI and we do actually have a little bit of AI and some of our transcriptions and work. But it's not so much just use cases, it's actually not just saying you got to do it. So taking down that blocker, the complexity, certainly is the key. And that's a great point. We're going to call that out after. Alright, let's move on to the second part of the announcement. Krish Project Monterey. This is a big deal. And it looks like a, you know, kind of this elusive, it's architectural thing, but it's directionally really strategic for VMware. Could you take a minute to explain this announcement? Frame this for us. >> Absolutely. I think John, you remember Pat got on stage last year at Vmworld and said, you know, "we are undertaking the biggest re architecture of the vSphere platform in the last 10 years." And he was talking about natively embedding Kubernetes, in vSphere, right? Remember Tanzu and Project Pacific. This year we are announcing Project Monterrey. It's a project that is significant with several partners in the industry, along with NVIDIA was one of the key partners. And what we are doing is we are reimagination of the data center for the next generation applications. And at the center of it, what we are going to do is rearchitect vSphere and ESX. So that the ESX can normally run on the CPU, but it'll also run on the Smart Mix. And what this gives us is the whole, let's say data center, infrastructure type services to be offloaded from running on the CPU onto the Smart Mix. So what does this provide the applications? The applications then will perform better. And secondly, it provides an extra layer of security for the next generation applications. Now we are not going to stop there. We are going to use this architecture and extended it so that we can finally eliminate one of the big silos that exist in the enterprise, which is the bare metal silo. Right? Today we have virtualized environments and bare metal, and what this architecture will do is bring those bare metal environments also under ESX management. So you ESX will manage environments which are virtualized and environments which are running bare metal OS. And so that's one big breakthrough and simplification for the elimination of silo or the elimination of, you know, specialized skills to keep it running. And lastly, but most importantly, where we are going with this. That just on the question you asked us earlier about software defined and developers being in control. Where we want to go with this is give developers, the application developers, the ability to really define and create their run time on the Fly, dynamically. So think about it. If dynamically they're able to describe how the application should run. And the infrastructure essentially kind of attaches computer resources on the Fly, whether they are sitting in the same server or somewhere in the network as pools of resources. Bring it all together and compose the runtime environment for them. That's going to be huge. And they won't be constrained anymore by the resources that are tied to the physical server that they are running on. And that's the vision of where we are taking it. It is going to be the next big change in the industry in terms of enterprise computing. >> Sounds like an Operating System to me. Yeah. Run time, assembly orchestration, all these things coming together, exciting stuff. Looking forward to digging in more after Vmworld. Manuvir, how does this connect to NVIDIA and AI? Tie that together for us. >> Yeah, It's an interesting question, because you would think, you know, okay, so NVIDIA this GPU company or this AI company. But you have to remember that INVIDIA is also a networking company. Because friends at Mellanox joined us not that long ago. And the interesting thing is that there's a Yin and Yang here, because, Krish described the software vision, which is brilliant. And what this does is it imposes a lot on the host CPU of the server to do. And so what we've be doing in parallel is developing hardware. A new kind of "Nick", if you will, we call it a DPU or a Data Processing Unit or a Smart Nick that is capable of hosting all this stuff. So, amusingly when Krish and I started talking, we exchanged slides and we basically had the same diagram for our vision of where things go with that software, the infrastructure software being offloaded, data center infrastructure on a chip, if you will. Right? And so it's a very natural confluence. We are very excited to be part of this, >> Yeah. >> Monterey program with Krish and his team. And we think our DPU, which is called the NVIDIA BlueField-2, is a pretty good device to empower the work that Krish's team is doing. >> Guys it's awesome stuff. And I got to say, you know, I've been covering Vmworld now 11 years with theCube, and I've known VMware since its founding, just the evolution. And just recently before VMworld, you know, you saw the biggest IPO in the history of Wall Street, Snowflake an Enterprise Data Cloud Company. The number one IPO ever. Enterprise tech is so exciting. This is really awesome. And NVIDIA obviously well known, great brand. You own some chip company as well, and get processors and data and software. Guys, customers are going to be very interested in this, so what should customers do to find out more? Obviously you've got Project Monterey, strategic direction, right? Framed perfectly. You got this announcement. If I'm a customer, how do I get involved? How do I learn more? And what's in it for me. >> Yeah, John, I would say, sorry, go ahead, Krish. >> No, I was just going to say sorry Manuvir. I was just going to say like a lot of these discussions are going to be happening, there are going to be panel discussions there are going to be presentations at Vmworld. So I would encourage customers to really look at these topics around Project Monterey and also about the AI work we are doing with NVIDIA and attend those sessions and be active and we will have a ways for them to connect with us in terms of our early access programs and whatnot. And then as Manuvir was about to say, I think Manuvir, I will give it to you about GTC. >> Yeah, I think right after that, we have the NVIDIA conference, which is GTC, where we'll also go over this. And I think some of this work is a lot closer to hand than people might imagine. So I would encourage watching all the sessions and learning more about how to get started. >> Yeah, great stuff. And just for the folks @vmworld.com watching, Cloud City's got 60 solution demos, go look for the sessions. You got the EX, the expert sessions, Raghu, Joe Beda amongst other people from VMware are going to be there. And of course, a lot of action on the content. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations on the news, big news. NVIDIA on the Bay in Virtual stage here at VMworld. And of course you're in theCube. Thanks for coming. Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. Okay. >> Thank you very much. >> This is Cube's coverage of VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube virtual, here in Palo Alto, California for VMworld 2020. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. We're digging in with Pensando. Talking about the technologies that they're using. And happy to welcome to the program, two of Pensando's technical leaders. We have Krishna Doddapaneni, he's the Vice President of Software. And we have here Pirabhu Raman, he's a Principal Engineer, both with Pensando. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right. >> Thank you for having us here >> Krishna, you run the Software Team. So let's start there and talk about really the mission and shortly obviously, bring us through a little bit of architecturally what Pensando was doing. >> To get started, Pensando we are building a platform, which can automate and manage the network storage and security services. So when we talk about software here, it's like the better software as you start from all the way from bootloader, to all the way it goes to microservices controller. So the fundamentally the company is building a domain specific processor called a DSP, that goes on the card called DSC. And that card goes into a server in a PCIe slot. Since we go into a server and we act as a NIC, we have to do drivers for Windows, all the OS' Windows, Linux, ESX and FreeBSD. And on the card itself, the chip itself, there are two fundamental pieces of the chip. One is the P4 pipelines, where we run all our applications, if you can think like in the firewalls, in the virtualization, all security applications. And then there's Arm SoC, which we have to bring up the platform and where we run the control plane and data and management plane so that's one piece of the software. The other big piece of software is called PSM. Which kind of, if you think about it in data center, you don't want to manage, one DSC at a time or one server at a time. We want to manage all thousands of servers, using a single management and control point. And that's where the test for the PSM comes from. >> Yeah, excellent. You talked about a pretty complex solution there. One of the big discussion points in the networking world and I think in general has been really the role of software. I think we all know, it got a little overblown. The discussion of software, does not mean that hardware goes away. I wrote a piece, many years ago, if you look at how hyperscalars do things, how they hyper optimize. They don't just buy the cheapest, most generic thing. they tend to configure things and they just roll it out in massive scale. So your team is well known for, really from a chip standpoint, I think about the three Cisco spin-ins. If you dug underneath the covers, yes there was software, but there was an Async there. So, when I look at what you're doing in Pensando, you've got software and there is a chip, at the end of the day. It looks, the first form factor of this looks like, a network card, the NIC that fits in there. So give us in there some of the some of the challenges of software and there's so much diversity in hardware these days. Everything getting ready for AI and GPUs. And you listed off a bunch of pieces when you were talking about the architecture. So give us that software/hardware dynamic, if you would. >> I mean, if you look at where the industry has been going towards, right, I mean, the Moore's law has been ending and Dennard scale is a big on Dennard scaling. So if you want to set all the network in certain security services on x86, you will be wasting a bunch of x86 cycles. The customer, why does he buy x86? He buys x86 to run his application. Not to run IO or do security for IO or policies for IO. So where we come in is basically, we do this domain specific processor, which will take away all the IO part of it, and the computer, just the compute of the application is left for x86. The rest is all offloaded to what we call Pensando. So NIC is kind of one part of what we do. NIC is how we connect to the server. But what we do inside the card is, firewalls, all the networking functions: SDNs, load balancing in all the storage functions, NVMe virtualization, and encryption of all the packets, data of data at rest and data of data in motion. All these services is what we do in this part. And you know, yes, it's an Async. But if you look at what we do inside, it's not a fixed Async. We did work on the previous spin-ins as you said, with Async, but there's a fundamental difference between that Async can this Async. In those Asyncs for example, there's a hard coded routing table or there's a hard coded ACL table. This Async is a completely programmable. It's more like it's a programmable software that we have domain specific language called P4. We use that P4 to program the Async. So the way I look at it, it's an Async, but it's mostly software driven completely. And from all the way from controllers, to what programs you run on the chip, is completely software driven. >> Excellent. Pirabhu of course, the big announcement here, HPE. You've now got the product. It's becoming generally available this month. We'd watch from the launch of Pensando, obviously, having HPE as not only an investor, but they're an OEM of the product. They've got a huge customer base. Maybe help explain, from the enterprise standpoint, if I'm buying ProLion, where now does, am I going to be thinking about Pensando? What specific use cases? How does this translate to the general and enterprise IP buyer? >> We cover of whole breadth of use cases, at the very basic level, if your use cases or if your company is not ready for all the different features, you could buy it as a basic NIC and start provisioning it, and you will get all the basic network functions. But at the same time in addition to the standard network functions, you will get always on telemetry. Like you will get rich set of metrics, you will get packet capture capabilities, which will help you very much in troubleshooting issues, when they happen, or you can leave them always on as well. So, you can do some of these tap kind of functionalities, which financial services do. And all these things you will get without any impact on the workload performance. Like the customers' application don't see any performance impact when any of these capabilities are turned on. So once this is as a standard network function, but beyond this when you are ready for enforcing policies at the edge or you're ready for enforcing stateful firewalls, distributed firewalling capabilities, connection tracking, some of the other things, like Krishna touched upon NVMe virtualization, there are all sorts of other features you can add on top of. >> Okay, so it sounds like what we're really democratizing some of those cloud services or cloud like services for the network, down to the end device, if I have this right. >> Exactly. >> Maybe if you could, networking, we know, our friends in network. We tend to get very acronym driven, to overlays and underlays and various layers of the stack there. When we talk about innovation, I'd love to hear from both of you, what are some of those kind of key innovations, if you were to highlight just one or two? Pirabhu, maybe you can go first and then Krishna would would love your follow up from that. >> Sure, there are many innovations, but just to highlight a few of them, right. Krishna touched upon P4, but even on the P4, P4 is very much focused on manipulating the packets, packets in and packets out, but we enhanced it so that we can address it in such a way that from memory in-packet out, packet in-memory out. Those kind of capabilities so that we can interface it with the host memory. So those innovations we are taking it to the standard and they are in the process of getting standardized as well. In addition to this, our software stack, we touched upon the always on telemetry capabilities. You could do flow based packet captures, NetFlow, you could get a lot of visibility and troubleshooting information. The management plane in itself, has some of the state of the art capabilities. Like it's distributed, highly available, and it makes it very easy for you to manage thousands of these servers. Krishna, do you want to add something more? >> Yes, the biggest thing of the platform is that when we did underlays and overlays, as you said there, everything was like fixed. So tomorrow, you wake up and come with a new protocol, or you may come up with a new way to do storage, right? Normally, in the hardware world, what happens is, Oh, you have to I have to sell you this new chip. That is not what we are doing. I mean, here, whatever we ship on this Async, you can continue to evolve and continue to innovate, irrespective of changing standards. If NVMe goes from one dot two to one dot three, or you come up with a new encapsulation of VXLAN, you do whatever encapsulations, whatever TLVs you would want to, you don't need to change the hardware. It's more about downloading new firmware, and upgrading the new firmware and you get the new feature. That is that's one of the key innovation. That's why most of the cloud providers like us, that we are not tied to hardware. It's more of software programmable processor that we can keep on adding features in the future. >> So one way to look at it, is like, you get the best of both worlds kind of a thing. You get power and performance of Async, but at the same time you get the flexibility of closer to that of a general purpose processor. >> Yeah, so Krishna, since you own the software piece of thing, help us understand architecturally, how you can deploy something today but be ready for whatever comes in the future. That's always been the challenge is, Gee, maybe if I wait another six months, there'll be another generation something, where I don't want to make sure that I miss some window of opportunity. >> Yeah, so it's a very good question. I mean, basically you can keep enhancing your features with the same performance and power and latency and throughput. But the other important thing is how you upgrade the software. I mean today whenever you have Async. When you have changed the Async, obviously, you have to pull the card out and you put the new card in. Here, when you're talking upgrading software, we can upgrade software while traffic is going through. With very minimal disruption, in the order of sub second. Right, so you can change your protocol, for example, tomorrow, we change from VXLAN to your own innovative protocol, you can upgrade that without disrupting any existing network or storage IO. I mean, that's where the power of the platform is very useful. And if you look at it today, where cloud providers are going right, and the cloud providers, you don't want to, because there are customers who are using that server, and they're deploying their application, they don't want to disturb that application, just because you decided to do some new innovative feature. The platform capability is that you could upgrade it, and you can change your mind sometime in the future. But whatever existing traffic is there, the traffic will continue to flow and not disrupt your app. >> All right, great. Well, you're talking about clouds one of the things we look at is multi cloud and multi vendor. Pirabhu, we've got the announcement with HPE now, ProLion and some of their other platforms. Tell us how much work will it be for you to support things like Dell servers or I think your team's quite familiar with the Cisco UCS platform. Two pieces on that number one: how easy or hard is it to do that integration? And from an architectural design? Does a customer need to be homogeneous from their environment or is whatever cloud or server platform they're on independent, and we should be able to work across those? >> Yeah, first off, I should start with thanking HPE. They have been a great partner and they have been quick to recognize the synergy and the potential of the synergy. And they have been very helpful towards this integration journey. And the way we see it, a lot of the work has already been done in terms of finding out the integration issues with HPE. And we will build upon this integration work that has been done so that we can quickly integrate with other manufacturers like Dell and Cisco. We definitely want to integrate with other server manufacturers as well, because that is in the interest of our customers, who want to consume Pensando in a heterogenous fashion, not just from one server manufacturer. >> Just want to add one thing to what Pirabhu's saying. Basically, the way we think about it is that, there's x86 and then the all the IO, the infrastructure services, right. So for us, as long as you get power from the server, and you can get packets and IO across the PCIe bus, we are kind of, we want to make it a uniform layer. So the Pensando, if you think about it, is a layer that can work across servers, and could work inside the public cloud and when we have, one of our customers using this in hybrid cloud. So we want to be the base where we can do all the storage network and security services, irrespective of the server and where the server is placed. Whether it's placed in the call log, it's placed in the enterprise data center, or it's placed in the public cloud. >> All right, so I guess Krishna, you said first x86. Down the road, is there opportunity to go beyond Intel processors? >> Yes. I mean, we already support AMD, which is another form of x86. But other architecture doesn't prevent us from any servers. As long as you follow the PCIe standard, we should, it's more of a testing matrix issue. It's not about support of any other OS, we should be able to support it. And initially, we also tested once on PowerPC. So any kind of CPU architecture, we should be able to support. >> Okay, so walk me up the application stack a little bit though. Things like virtualization, containerization. There's the question of does it work but does it optimize? Any of us live through those waves of, Oh, okay, well it kind of worked, but then there was a lot of time to make things like the origin networking work well in virtualization and then in containerization. So how about your solution? >> I mean you should look at, a good example is AWS, like what AWS does with Nitro. So on Nitro, you do EBS, you do security, and you do VPC. In all the services is effectively, we think about it, all of those can be encapsulated in one DSC card. And obviously, when it comes to this kind of implementation on one card, right, the first question you would ask what happens to the noisy neighbor? So we have the right QOS mechanisms to make sure all the services go through the same card, at the same time giving guarantees to the customer that (mumbles) especially in the multi-tenant environment, whatever you're doing on one VPC will not affect the other VPC. And the advantage of the platform that what we have is very highly scalable and highly performing. Scale will not be the issue. I mean, if you look at existing platforms, even if you look at the cloud, because when you're doing this product, obviously, we'll do benchmarking with the cloud and enterprises. With respect to scale, performance and latency, we did the measurements and we are order of magnitude compared to (sneezes) given the existing clouds and currently whatever enterprise customers have. >> Excellent, so Pirabhu, I'm curious, from the enterprise standpoint, are there certain applications, I think about like, from an analytic standpoint, Splunk is so heavily involved in data that might be a natural fit or other things where it might not be fully tested out with anything kind of that ISV world that we need to think about. >> So if we're talking in terms of partner ecosystems, our enterprise customers do use many of the other products as well. And we are trying to integrate with other products so that we can get the maximum value. So if you look at it, you could get rich metrics and visualization capabilities from our product, which can be very helpful for the partner products because they don't have to install an agent and they can get the same capability across bare metal virtual stack as well as containers. So we are integrating with various partners including some CMDB configuration management database products, as well as data analytics or network traffic analytics products. Krishna, do you want to add anything? >> Yeah, so I think it's just not the the analytics products. We're also integrating with VMware. Because right now VMware is a computer orchestrated and we want to be the network policy orchestrator. In the future, we want to integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift. So we want to add integration so that our platform capability can be easily consumable irrespective of what kind of workload you use or what kind of traffic analytics tool you use or what kind of data link that you use in your enterprise data center. >> Excellent, I think that's a good view forward as to where some of the work is going on the future integration. Krishna and Pirabhu, thank you so much for joining us. Great to catch up. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to this CUBE conversation, I'm Stu Min and I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, we've been digging in with the Pensando team, understand how they're fitting into the cloud, multi-cloud, edge discussion, really thrilled to welcome to the program, first time guest, Silvano Gai, he's a fellow with Pensando. Silvano, really nice to see you again, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Stuart, it's so nice to see you, we used to work together many years ago and that was really good and is really nice to come to you from Oregon, from Bend, Oregon. A beautiful town in the high desert of Oregon. >> I do love the Pacific North West, I miss the planes and the hotels, I should say, I don't miss the planes and the hotels, but going to see some of the beautiful places is something I do miss and getting to see people in the industry I do like. As you mentioned, you and I crossed paths back through some of the spin-ins, back when I was working for a very large storage company, you were working for SISCO, you were known for writing the book, you were a professor in Italy, many of the people that worked on some of those technologies were your students. But Silvano, my understanding is you retired so, maybe share for our audience, what brought you out of that retirement and into working once again with some of your former colleagues and on the Pensando opportunity. >> I did retire for a while, I retired in 2011 from Cisco if I remember correctly. But at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017, some old friend that you may remember and know called me to discuss some interesting idea, which was basically the seed idea that is behind the Pensando product and their idea were interesting, what we built, of course, is not exactly the original idea because you know product evolve over time, but I think we have something interesting that is adequate and probably superb for the new way to design the data center network, both for enterprise and cloud. >> All right, and Silvano, I mentioned that you've written a number of books, really the authoritative look on when some new products had been released before. So, you've got a new book, "Building a Future-Proof Cloud Infrastructure," and look at you, you've got the physical copy, I've only gotten the soft version. The title, really interesting. Help us understand how Pensando's platform is meeting that future-proof cloud infrastructure that you discuss. >> Well, network have evolved dramatically in the data center and in the cloud. You know, now the speed of classical server in enterprise is probably 25 gigabits, in the cloud we are talking of 100 gigabit of speed for a server, going to 200 gigabit. Now, the backbone are ridiculously fast. We no longer use Spanning Tree and all the stuff, we no longer use access code aggregation. We switched to closed network, and with closed network, we have huge enormous amount of bandwidth and that is good but it also imply that is not easy to do services in a centralized fashion. If you want to do a service in a centralized fashion, what you end up doing is creating a giant bottleneck. You basically, there is this word that is being used, that is trombone or tromboning. You try to funnel all this traffic through the bottleneck and this is not really going to work. The only place that you can really do services is at the edge, and this is not an invention, I mean, even all the principles of cloud is move everything to the edge and maintain the network as simple as possible. So, we approach services with the same general philosophy. We try to move services to the edge, as close as possible to the server and basically at the border between the sever and the network. And when I mean services I mean three main categories of services. The networking services of course, there is the basic layer, two-layer, three stuff, plus the bonding, you know VAMlog and what is needed to connect a server to a network. But then there is the overlay, overlay like the xLAN or Geneva, very very important, basically to build a cloud infrastructure, and that are basically the network service. We can have others but that, sort of is the core of a network service. Some people want to run BGP layers, some people don't want to run BGP. There may be a VPN or kind of things like that but that is the core of a network service. Then of course, and we go back to the time we worked together, there are storage services. At that time, we were discussing mostly about fiber tunnel, now the BUS world is clearly NVMe, but it's not just the BUS world, it's really a new way of doing storage, and is very very interesting. So, NVMe kind of service are very important and NVMe as a version that is called NVMeOF, over fiber. Which is basically, sort of remote version of NVMe. And then the third, least but not last, most important category probably, is security. And when I say that security is very very important, you know, the fact that security is very important is clear to everybody in our day, and I think security has two main branches in terms of services. There is the classical firewall and micro-segmentation, in which you basically try to enforce the fact that only who is allowed to access something can access something. But you don't, at that point, care too much about the privacy of the data. Then there is the other branch that encryption, in which you are not trying to enforce to decide who can access or not access the resource, but you are basically caring about the privacy of the data, encrypting the data so that if it is hijacked, snooped or whatever, it cannot be decoded. >> Eccellent, so Silvano, absolutely the edge is a huge opportunity. When someone looks at the overall solution and say you're putting something in the edge, you know, they could just say, "This really looks like a NIC." You talked about some of the previous engagement we'd worked on, host bus adapters, smart NICs and the like. There were some things we could build in but there were limits that we had, so, what differentiates the Pensando solution from what we would traditionally think of as an adapter card in the past? >> Well, the Pensando solution has two main, multiple pieces but in term of hardware, has two main pieces, there is an ASIC that we call copper internally. That ASIC is not strictly related to be used only in an adapter form, you can deploy it also in other form factors in another part of the network in other embodiment, et cetera. And then there is a card, the card has a PCI-E interface and sit in a PCI-E slot. So yes, in that sense, somebody can can call it a NIC and since it's a pretty good NIC, somebody can call it a smart NIC. We don't really like that two terms, we prefer to call it DSC, domain specific card, but the real term that I like to use is domain specific hardware, and I like to use domain specific hardware because it's the same term that Hennessy and Patterson use in a beautiful piece of literature that is the Turing Award lecture. It's on the internet, it's public, I really ask everybody to go and try to find it and listen to that beautiful piece of literature, modern literature on computer architecture. The Turing Award lecture of Hennessy and Patterson. And they have introduced the concept of domain specific hardware, and they explain also the justification for why now is important to look at domain specific hardware. And the justification is basically in a nutshell and we can go more deep if you're interested, but in a nutshell is that the specing, that is the single tried performer's measurement of a CPU, is not growing fast at all, is only growing nowadays like a few point percent a year, maybe 4% per year. And with this slow grow, over specing performance of a core, you know the core need to be really used for user application, for customer application, and all what is known as Sentian can be moved to some domain specific hardware that can do that in a much better fashion, and by no mean I imply that the DSC is the best example of domain specific hardware. The best example of domain specific hardware is in front of all of us, and are GPUs. And not GPUs for graphic processing which are also important, but GPU used basically for artificial intelligence, machine learning inference. You know, that is a piece of hardware that has shown that something can be done with performance that the purpose processor can do. >> Yeah, it's interesting right. If you term back the clock 10 or 15 years ago, I used to be in arguments, and you say, "Do you build an offload, "or do you let it happen is software." And I was always like, "Oh, well Moore's law with mean that, "you know, the software solution will always win, "because if you bake it in hardware, it's too slow." It's a very different world today, you talk about how fast things speed up. From your customer standpoint though, often some of those architectural things are something that I've looked for my suppliers to take care of that. Speak to the use case, what does this all mean from a customer stand point, what are some of those early use cases that you're looking at? >> Well, as always, you get a bit surprised by the use cases, in the sense that you start to design a product thinking that some of the most cool thing will be the dominant use cases, and then you discover that something that you have never really fought have the most interesting use case. One that we have fought about since day one, but it's really becoming super interesting is telemetry. Basically, measuring everything in the network, and understanding what is happening in the network. I was speaking with a friend the other day, and the friend was asking me, "Oh, but we have SNMP for many many years, "which is the difference between SNMP and telemetry?" And the difference is to me, the real difference is in SNMP or in many of these management protocol, you involve a management plan, you involve a control plan, and then you go to read something that is in the data plan. But the process is so inefficient that you cannot really get a huge volume of data, and you cannot get it practically enough, with enough performance. Doing telemetry means thinking a data path, building a data path that is capable of not only measuring everything realtime, but also sending out that measurement without involving anything else, without involving the control path and the management path so that the measurement becomes really very efficient and the data that you stream out becomes really usable data, actionable data in realtime. So telemetry is clearly the first one, is important. One that you honestly, we had built but we weren't thinking this was going to have so much success is what we call Bidirectional ERSPAN. And basically, is just the capability of copying data. And sending data that the card see to a station. And that is very very useful for replacing what are called TAP network, Which is just network, but many customer put in parallel to the real network just to observe the real network and to be able to troubleshoot and diagnose problem in the real network. So, this two feature telemetry and ERSPAN that are basically troubleshooting feature are the two features that are beginning are getting more traction. >> You're talking about realtime things like telemetry. You know, the applications and the integrations that you need to deal with are so important, back in some of the previous start-ups that you done was getting ready for, say how do we optimize for virtualization, today you talk cloud-native architectures, streaming, very popular, very modular, often container based solutions and things change constantly. You look at some of these architectures, it's not a single thing that goes on for a long period of time, but it's lots of things that happen over shorter periods of time. So, what integrations do you need to do, and what architecturally, how do you build things to make them as you talk, future-proof for these kind of cloud architectures? >> Yeah, what I mentioned were just the two low hanging fruit, if you want the first two low hanging fruit of this architecture. But basically, the two that come immediately after and where there is a huge amount of radio are distributor's state for firewall, with micro-segmentation support. That is a huge topic in itself. So important nowadays that is absolutely fundamental to be able to build a cloud. That is very important, and the second one is wire rate encryption. There is so much demand for privacy, and so much demand to encrypt the data. Not only between data center but now also inside the data center. And when you look at a large bank for example. A large bank is no longer a single organization. A large bank is multiple organizations that are compartmentalized by law. That need to keep things separate by law, by regulation, by FCC regulation. And if you don't have encryption, and if you don't have distributed firewall, is really very difficult to achieve that. And then you know, there are other applications, we mentioned storage NVME, and is a very nice application, and then we have even more, if you go to look at load balance in between server, doing compression for storage and other possible applications. But I sort of lost your real question. >> So, just part of the pieces, when you look at integrations that Pensando needs to do, for maybe some of the applications that you would tie in to any of those that come to mind? >> Yeah, well for sure. It depends, I see two main branches again. One is the cloud provider, and one are the enterprise. In the cloud provider, basically this cloud provider have a huge management infrastructure that is already built and they want just the card to adapt to this, to be controllable by this huge management infrastructure. They already know which rule they want to send to the card, they already know which feature they want to enable on the card. They already have all that, they just want the card to provide the data plan performers for that particular feature. So they're going to build something particular that is specific for that particular cloud provider that adapt to that cloud provider architecture. We want the flexibility of having an API on the card that is like a rest API or a gRPC which they can easily program, monitor and control that card. When you look at the enterprise, the situation is different. Enterprise is looking to at two things. Two or three things. The first thing is a complete solution. They don't want to, they don't have the management infrastructure that they have built like a cloud provider. They want a complete solution that has the card and the management station and there's all what is required to make from day one, a working solution, which is absolutely correct in an enterprise environment. They also want integration, and integration is the tool that they already have. If you look at main enterprise, one of a dominant presence is clearly VMware virtualization in terms of ESX and vSphere and NSX. And so most of the customer are asking us to integrate with VMware, which is a very reasonable demand. And then of course, there are other player, not so much in the virtualization's space, but for example, in the data collections space, and the data analysis space, and for sure Pensando doesn't want to reinvent the wheel there, doesn't want to build a data collector or data analysis engine and whatever, there is a lot of work, and there are a lot out there, so integration with things like Splunk for example are kind of natural for Pensando. >> Eccellent, so wait, you talked about some of the places where Pensando doesn't need to reinvent the wheel, you talk through a lot of the different technology pieces. If I had to have you pull out one, what would you say is the biggest innovation that Pensando has built into the platform. >> Well, the biggest innovation is this P4 architecture. And the P4 architecture was a sort of gift that was given us in the sense that it was not invented for what we use it. P4 was basically invented to have programmable switches. The first big P4 company was clearly Barefoot that then was acquired by Intel and Barefoot built a programmable switch. But if you look at the reality of today, the network, most of the people want the network to be super easy. They don't want to program anything into the network. They want to program everything at the edge, they want to put all the intelligence and the programmability of the edge, so we borrowed the P4 architecture, which is fantastic programmable architecture and we implemented that yet. It's also easier because the bandwidth is clearly more limited at the edge compared to being in the core of a network. And that P4 architecture give us a huge advantage. If you, tomorrow come up with the Stuart Encapsulation Super Duper Technology, I can implement in the copper The Stuart, whatever it was called, Super Duper Encapsulation Technology, even when I design the ASIC I didn't know that encapsulation exists. Is the data plan programmability, is the capability to program the data plan and programming the data plan while maintaining wire-speed performance, which I think is the biggest benefit of Pensando. >> All right, well Silvano, thank you so much for sharing, your journey with Pensando so far, really interesting to dig into it and absolutely look forward to following progress as it goes. >> Stuart, it's been really a pleasure to talk with you, I hope to talk with you again in the near future. Thank you so much. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special Cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere seven dot O. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of VMware and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud, so this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So we talked at VMworld about Project Pacific, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio. And you know, as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads though, this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application. And on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so, these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure. So I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all of that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere. But to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides seeing the VMs and things the developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created. The compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised, they like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs see Kubernetes. And really bringing those together in a unified environment so that, depending on what your job is, and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud, it involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of, these two extremes. Either you're here where you are, with kind of the old current world, and you got the bright nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very error-prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, is you call it the messy middle, I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time and resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense, as you said, not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. So you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7 is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this Firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud, and so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications, and more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down, and hardened, and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that, and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e., building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction, it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other but in fact now, they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance and so forth. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere, and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll take a look at what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focus on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying lifecycle. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed, so you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity slash challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities. Things around DRS and VMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA, or Oracle Databases. And how do we ensure that VMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. All right, so Jared, I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while, there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them, what should they be excited about, what are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery, and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation, again both of you, for you getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students leaky bomb John free we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere seven I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of Product Management guys thanks for coming in and talking about the big news thank you for having us you guys announced some interesting things back in march around containers kubernetes and the vSphere there's just about the hard news what's being announced today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7 John it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years we previewed it this project Pacific a few months ago with this release we are putting kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform what that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on kubernetes and containers as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform and it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release this is a key part of our tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year and it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications and the specific news is vSphere 7 is general available you know really vSphere 7 yes ok that so let's on the trend line here the relevance is what what's the big trend line that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMworld last year and throughout the year there's a lot of buzz Pat Keller says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expanded and and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment both on Prem and public cloud together so they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack but modernize their infrastructure stack which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications kubernetes or container based applications and VMs what's excited about this trend Chris we were talking with us at VMworld last year and we've had many conversations around cloud native but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business I mean this is really the move to the cloud if you look at the successful enterprises even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move to the cloud native marketplace technologies the on premise isn't effective so it's not so much on premises going away we know it's not but it's turning into cloud native this is the move to the cloud generally this is a big wave yeah absolutely I mean if Jon if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share by far the leader in the market and so what we are trying to do with this is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using but bring their application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a stack for the traditional applications you have operators and administrators who are specialized in kubernetes on one side and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side with this move what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had and at the same time offer the developers what they like which is kubernetes dial-tone that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications yep all Pat said Cuba is gonna be the dial tone on the internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but a buddy mince is is that's the key fabric there's gonna work a straight and you know we've heard over the years skill gap skill gap not a lot of skills out there but when you look at the reality of skills gap it's really about skills gaps and shortages not enough people most CIOs and chief and major security are so that we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi-cloud this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model they like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way and we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem to Google cloud to Amazon Cloud to Microsoft cloud to any of our VC peepee partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by a kubernetes based dial-tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me when he says dial tone of the internet kubernetes does he mean always on or what does he mean specifically just that it's always available what's what says what's the meaning behind that that phrase the the first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure which is the VMware cloud foundation and be able to work with a set of api's that are kubernetes api s-- so developers understand that they're looking for that they understand that dial tone right and you come to our VMware cloud foundation that runs across all these clouds you get the same API said that you can use to deploy their application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does VMware vSphere 7 specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or are you running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey just Bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody's actually tried deploying kubernetes first it's it's highly complicated um so so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt on but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple you talked about IT operational shortages customers want to be able to deploy kubernetes environments in a very simple way the easiest way that we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out ninety percent of IT and just turn on turn on the kubernetes dial tone and it is as simple as that now it's much more than that in version 7 as well we're bringing in a couple things that are very important you also have to be able to manage at scale just like you would in the cloud you want to be able to have infrastructure almost self-managed and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself and so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large scale environments both on-premise and public cloud environments and scale and then associated with that as well is you must make it secure so there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security which is how can we actually build in truly a trusted platform for your developers and IIT yeah I mean I I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the the way we are addressing that is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with kubernetes the same way administered the older laces so they don't have to learn anything new they're just working the same way we are not changing any tools process technologies so same as it was before same as it was before more capable dealer and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's infrastructure as code means as app developers on the other side taking advantage of it what's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7 so I think it's it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right there is DevOps as a real trend inside an IT organizations they need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker they need to be able to respond to the business and to do that what they are doing is is they need infrastructure that is on demand so what what we're really doing in the core kubernetes kind of enablement is allowing that on-demand fulfillment of infrastructure so you get that agility that you need but it's it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your monitoring applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's a that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and m/l applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA were FPGA awareness that we built into the platform so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications so you've got the ability to run those applications as well as your kubernetes and container based applications that's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs Chris I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned I get the lifestyle improvement a life cycle improvement I get the application acceleration innovation but the intrinsic security is interesting could you take a minute explain what that is yeah so there's there's a few different aspects one is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment and that means that you need to have a way that the the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom as we would call it you you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your Intel or internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment in independent we've got these fair trust Authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know continuous runtime now not only that we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform so that you've got negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot conversations the carbon black in the security piece Chris obviously have vsphere everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is got the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your Google IBM cloud Oracle cloud so all the major clouds there is a vSphere stack running so it allows customers if you think about it right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it once it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all for a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take Derek take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean I think what we're if we look at it for developers we are democratizing kubernetes we already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere we are bringing to every one of those be sphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators they can now manage kubernetes environments you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment that's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage so so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP partners you have one hybrid platform that you can run with and that's got operational benefits that's got efficiency benefits that's got agility benefits yeah I just add to that and say that look we want to meet customers where they are in their journey and we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way and I think the announcement that we made today with vSphere 7 is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey without making trade-offs on people process and technology and there's more to come that we're laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud and so you'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned oh one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome vSphere core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna be important five years from now because of what I just said it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds right which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go to Amazon native and then you have orc Lord and as your you're going to have different tools different processes different people trained to work with those clouds but when you come to VMware and you use our cloud foundation you have one operating model across all these environments and that's going to be game-changing great stuff great stuff thanks for unpacking that for us graduates on the insulin Thank You Vera bees fear 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Farrar your thanks for watch [Music] and welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we are having a very special Q conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil if you will of the new VMware vSphere 7 dot gonna get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have a longtime cube alumni kit Kolbert here is the vp and CTO cloud platform at being work it great to see you yeah and and new to the cube jared rose off he's a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm guessin had a whole lot to do with this build so Jared first off congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board alright so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect what is so different about vSphere seven yeah great so vSphere seven baek's kubernetes right into the virtualization platform and so this means that as a developer I can now use kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment and it means as an IT admin I'm actually able to deliver kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run so I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming when the with the acquisition of the hefty Oh team so really exciting news and I think it you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments regardless of whether that's on Prem public cloud this public cloud that public cloud so this really is the the realization of that vision yes yeah so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific right this technology preview and as Jared mentioned of what that was was how do we take kubernetes and really build it into vSphere as you know we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now how do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio and you know as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises at the edge with service providers there's a secondary question how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads but also modern work clothes as well right all right so I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo so why don't ya well into there and let's see what it looks like you guys can cube the demo yes we're gonna start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation for an vSphere 7 so what you're seeing here is the developers actually using kubernetes to deploy kubernetes the self eating watermelon right so the developer uses this kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole kubernetes cluster and the whole developer experience now is driven by kubernetes they can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of kubernetes api is and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere and so you know that's not just provisioning workloads though this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed so go look at hey what's the IP address that got allocated to that or what's the CPU load on this you know workload I just deployed on top of kubernetes we've integrated a container registry into vSphere so here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images and you know one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint now the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control I can check in not just my code but also the description of the kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app so now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left-hand side we see V Center and what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through kubernetes those are showing up right inside of the V center console and so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names and so this means what a developer calls their IT department says hey I got a problem with my database we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about they got the same name they say they see the same information so what we're gonna do is that you know we're gonna push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and you know what you'll see here is that V Center is the V Center you've already known and loved but what's different is that now it's much more application focused so here we see a new screen inside of V Center vSphere namespaces and so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications like a whole distributed system now as a single object inside a V Center and when I click into one of these apps this is a managed object inside of e spear I can click on permissions and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure so I can use the same you know corporate credentials to access the system I tap into all my existing storage so you know this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers can use storage policy based management to provide storage for kubernetes and it's hooked in with things like DRS right so I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory and all that's going to be enforced by Drs inside the cluster and again as an as an admin I'm just using vSphere but to the developer they're getting a whole kubernetes experience out of this platform now vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the kubernetes environment so besides you know seeing the VMS and and things that developers have deployed I can see all of the desired state specifications all the different kubernetes objects that the developers have created the compute network and storage objects they're all integrated right inside the the vCenter console and so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective this data is invaluable it often saves hours just in trying to figure out what what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue so the you know as you can see this is all baked right into V Center the V Center experience isn't transformed a lot we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say where's the kubernetes and they're surprised that like they've been managing kubernetes all this time it just looks it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got but all those kubernetes objects the pods and containers kubernetes clusters load balancer stores they're all represented right there natively in the V Center UI and so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins well that's a it's pretty it's pretty wild you know it really builds off the vision that again I think you kind of outlined kid teased out it at VMworld which was you know the IT still sees vSphere which is what they want to see when they're used to seeing but devs siku Nettie's and really bringing those together in a unified environment so that depending on what your job is and what you're working on that's what you're gonna see in this kind of unified environment yeah yeah as the demo showed it is still vSphere at the center but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere the kubernetes base one which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks as well as the traditional vSphere interface API is which is great for VI admins and IT operations right and then and really it was interesting to you tease that a lot that was a good little preview of people knew they're watching but you talked about really cloud journey and and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are that are running in their classic memes and then kind of the modern you know county cloud native applications built on kubernetes and youyou outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle if you will and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps ya know I think we think a lot about it like that that we look at we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go their future state architecture and that involves embracing cloud it involves modernizing applications and you know as you mentioned that it's it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are kind of the old current world and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there and they believe it's the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other that you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you and that's obviously very expensive very time-consuming and very error-prone as well there's a lot of things that can go wrong there and so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it the the messy middle I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources how come you able people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost right and its really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about about one of the fundamental things is we're now the application defines a reach sources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the what the application can't do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as as makes sense you said not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey you see that yeah definitely I mean I think that you know certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from you know looking historically at how we managed infrastructure one of things we enable in VCR 7 is how we manage applications right so a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know your your resource allocation you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure you talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is gonna have this firewall rule and what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management so you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU or I want this application to be have these security rules on it and so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level right yeah and like I kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say you know if you look back one thing we did was something like V San before that people had to put policies on a LUN you know an actual storage LUN and a storage array and then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array it inherited certain policies right and so these have turned that around allows you to put the policy on the VM but what jerez talking about now is that for a modern workload a modern were close not a single VM it's it's a collection of different things you've got some containers in there some VMs probably distributed maybe even some on-prem some in the cloud and so how do you start managing that more holistically and this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere it's really powerful and very simplifying one right and why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time that's it's a nice big word but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications and more importantly how do you continue to evolve them and change them you know based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace yeah well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance right so today if I want to check of this app is compliant I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and hardened and secured the right way but now instead what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of each Center set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are gonna inherit that stuff so it really simplifies that it also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications you know if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory when you log in with vSphere seven what you see is a few dozen applications so a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure many more applications and they could before because we automate so much of that operation and it's not just the scale part which is obviously really important but it's also the rate of change and this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done done ie building applications well at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns these sorts of elements and so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better they're not stepping over each other but in fact now they can both get what they need to get done done and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance is ready fourth so there's a lot more to this is a very significant release right again a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves that's a pretty significant you know kind of RER context or many many parts of ease of beer so beyond the kubernetes you know kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out and there's a very significant release yeah it's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about kubernetes what was project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point you know vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features and so instead of a demo here let's pull up with some slides right look at what's there so outside of kubernetes there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere seven so the first first one is simplified lifecycle management and then really focus on security it's a second one and then applications as well out both including you know the cloud native apps that don't fit in the kubernetes bucket as well as others and so we go on the first one the first column there there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying life cycle so let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics so we have this new technology vSphere lifecycle management VL cm and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts how do we make them more declarative with a single image you can now specify for an entire cluster we find that a lot of our vSphere admins especially at larger scales have a really tough time doing this there's a lot of in and out today it's somewhat tricky to do and so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well so if you're doing kubernetes on kubernetes I suppose you're gonna have automation on automation right because they're upgrading to the sevens is probably not any consequent inconsequential tasks mm-hm and yeah and going forward and allowing you know as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well right next big thing you talk about is security yep we just got back from RSA thank goodness we got that that show in before all the badness started yeah but everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top yeah talk about kind of the the changes in the security so done a lot of things around security things around identity Federation things around simplifying certificate management you know dramatic simplifications there across the board one I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust Authority and so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base when we talk to customers what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones right how do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted and obviously if you're hiring someone you somewhat trust them but you know what what's how do you implement that the concept of least privilege right or zero trust right yeah topic exactly so the idea with trust authorities that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and sure fully secure those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very lockdown only a few people have access to it and then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay these untrusted hosts haven't been modified we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing so is this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment right and then the third kind of leg of the stool is you know just better leveraging you know kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you know what things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application could draw the appropriate resources as needed so you've done a lot of work here as well yeah there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space as you mentioned all sort of accelerators coming out we all know about GPUs and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases not to mention 3d rendering but you know FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there and so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization ie silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using and you know what you find is all things we found before you found we find very low utilization rates inability to automate that inability to manage that well putting security and compliance and so forth and so this is really the reality that we see at most customers and it's funny because and some ones you think well well shouldn't we be past this as an industry shouldn't we have solved this already you know we did this with virtualization but as it turns out the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network but now we really needed to virtualize all these accelerators and so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere it really comes to the forefront so if you see in the current slide we're showing here the challenge is that just these separate pools of infrastructure how do you manage all that and so if you go to the we go to the next slide what we see is that with bit fusion you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use we can you know have multiple people sharing a GPU we can do it very dynamically and the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use they don't even need to think about it in fact integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows so it's pretty it's pretty trick is because the classifications of the assets now are much much larger much varied and much more workload specific right that's really the opportunities flash they are they're good guys are diverse yeah and so like you know a couple other things just I don't have a slide on it but just things we're doing to our base capabilities things around DRS and vmotion really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads right so you look at some of the massive sa P Hana or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that the emotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else they're making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth right now a lot of this stuff not just kind of brand new cool new accelerator stuff but it's also how do we ensure the core ass people have already been running for many years we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well right all right so do I give you the last word you've been working on this for a while there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys what do you what do you tell them what should they be excited about what are you excited for them in this new release I think what I'm excited about is how you know IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps right I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure right and so now I think we can shift that story around I think that there's you know there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and appdev teams are gonna be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team make you more productive give you better performance availability disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities awesome well Jared congratulations that get both of you for forgetting to release out I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive I'm sure there's ton more resources from people I even want to go down into the weeds so thanks for stopping by thank you thank you all right ease Jared he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're in the Palo Alto studios thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] hi and welcome to a special cube conversation I'm Stu min a minute and we're digging into VMware vSphere seven announcement we've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people but we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it so really happy to have joined me for the program I have Bill Buckley Miller who is in infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond bill thanks so much for joining us nice - all right so Phil let's start of course British Telecom I think most people know you know what BT is and it's a you know a really sprawling company tell us a little bit about you know your group your role and what's your mandate okay so my group it's called service platforms it's the bit of BT that services all of our multi millions of our customers so they we have broadband we have TV we have mobile we have DNS and email systems and one and it's all about our customers it's not a B to be part of BT you with me we we specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services I'm in particular my group is for we do infrastructure so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just past boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above okay great we definitely gonna want to dig in and talk about that that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams but let's talk a little bit first you know we're talking about VMware so you know how long's your organization been doing VMware and tell us you know what you see with the announcement that VMware's making work BC or seven sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about twelve thirteen years something like that and it's a absolutely key part of our of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really in every part of our operations design development and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products and so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know in particular with serving us and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that we're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while we currently use extensively we use vSphere NSX t.v raps log insight network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications and our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize they know how to capacity plan and troubleshoot so that's that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade at least we've been really really confident with our ability to still with Yemen where environments and Along Came containers and like I say multi cloud as well and what we were struggling with was the inability to have a cell pane a glass really on all of that and to use the same people and the same same processes to manage a different kind of technology so we we'd be working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products for several years now I would really closely with the b-string integrated containers guys in particular and now with the Pacific guys with really the idea that when we we bring in version 7 and the containerization aspects of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container that's really the holy grail right so we'll be able to allow our developers to develop our operations team to deploy and to operate and our designers to see the same infrastructure whether that's on premises cloud or off premises and be able to manage the whole piece in that was bad ok so Phil really interesting things you walked through here you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds I manage all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs you know if I think back you know from an application standpoint it was you know let's stick it in a vm I don't need to change it and once I spin up a VM often that's gonna sit there for you know months if not years as opposed to you know I think about a containerization environment it's you know I really want a pool of resources I'm gonna create and destroy things all the time so you know bring us inside that organizational piece you know how much will there need to be interaction and more interaction or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team well yes making absolutely right that's the nature and that the time scales that were talking about between VMs and containers oh he's wildly different as you say we we probably oughta certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2000 and 2018 certainly but I imagine I haven't haven't really been touched whereas as you say VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time there are parts of our architecture that require that in particular the very client facing bursty stuff it you know does require spinning up spinning down pretty quickly but some of our smaller the containers do sit around for weeks if not if not months I really just depend on the development cycle aspects of that but the heartbeat that we've we've really had was just the visualizing it and there are a number different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment allows troubleshoot and so on but they are not they need their new products their new things that we we would have to get used to and also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products quite a Venn diagram if in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that so through again again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how the behave in terms of their networking to be able to essentially put our deployments on Rails by using in particular tag based policies means that we can take the onus of security we can take the onus of performance management and capacity management away from the developers you don't really care about a lot of time and they can just get on with their job which is to develop new functionality and help our customers so that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies and making sure that they're adhered to but again we know how to do that with VMs new visa so the fact that we can actually apply that straightaway just to add slightly different completely unit which is really what we're talking about here is ideal and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well because we do use multiple cards where AWS and as your customers and were between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything of them be you know excited about take oh yeah still I really like how you described it really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talked about some of the new world and it's like oh can the platform underneath this take care of it well there there's some things platforms take care of there's some things that the software or you know your theme is going to need to understand so maybe if you could dig in a little bit some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio what is the business asking of your organization that that's driving this change and you know being one of those you know tailwind pushing you towards you know kubernetes and the the vSphere 7 technologies well it all comes down with the customers right our customers want new functionality they want new integrations they want new content and they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well so they're the real ultimate we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services so we have to address that really from a development perspective it's our developers that have the responsibility to design them to deploy those so we have to in infrastructure we have to act as a firm foundation really underneath all of that that allows them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted as performant we understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in in the short term and in the long term for that and it's secure as well obviously is a big aspect to it so really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted great Phil you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as you know your your your your VMware farm one of make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things number one is when it comes to your team especially your infrastructure team how much are they involved with setting up some of the the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud and secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but you know maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to you know what cloud really means to your organization and your applications sure well I mean to us climate allows us to accelerate development she's nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality or so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud but very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching same goes for broadband really but we generally we're well more than an eight-hour application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have well it makes sense we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever then we can do that as well but where we say for instance we have a boxing match on and we're going to be seen enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our order journey for to allow them to view that and to gain access to that well why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity so we do absolutely have hybrid applications not sorry hybrid blocks we have blocks of suburb locations you know dozens of them really to support oil platform and what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platform as I mentioned that some of the smoothers application blocks I have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that again by policy as to where they run and to you know have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running how they're running and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well and that way we best serve our customers we you know we get to get our customers yeah what they need all right great Phil final question I have for you you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMS containers public cloud what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago well I'll be honest I was a little bit surprised by vSphere so we knew that VMware we're working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as we MS I mean they're called VMware after all we knew that they were looking it's no surprise by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really it's you know if you look at the whole tansy stuff from the Mission Control stuff I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves and from an application perspective you know and to really leap forward and this is the very between version six and seven I've been following these since version three at least and it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture the aims to - what they want to achieve with the application and you know luckily the nice thing is is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that but my word there's no awful lot of work underneath that underneath the covers and I'm really excited and I think other people in my position should really just take it as an opportunity to really revisit what they can achieve with them in particular with vSphere and with in combination with and SXT it's it's but you know it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slide or slides about it and useless you've seen the products just how revolutionary the the version 7 is compared to previous revisions which have kind of evolved for a couple of years so yeah I think I'm really excited to run it and know a lot of my peers other companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well so yeah I'm really excited about the whole ball base well Phil thank you so much absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around helped move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom I'm Stu minimun thank you so much for watching the queue

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to the Palo Alto Studios, theCube. I'm John Furrier, we here for a special Cube Conversation and special report, big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7. I'm here with Krish Prasad SVP and General Manager of the vSphere Business and Cloud Platform Business Unit. And Paul Turner, VP of vSphere Product Management. Guys, thanks for coming in and talking about the big news. >> Thank you for having us. >> You guys announced some interesting things back in March around containers, Kubernetes and vSphere. Krish, tell us about the hard news what's being announced? >> Today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7. John, it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years. We premiered it as project Pacific few months ago. With this release, we are putting Kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform. What that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on Kubernetes and containers, as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform. And it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers, cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release. This is a key part of our (murmurs) portfolio solutions and products that we announced this year. And it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications. >> And the specific news is vSphere.. >> Seven is generally available. >> Generally a vSphere 7? >> Yes. >> So let's on the trend line here, the relevance is what? What's the big trend line, that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMware last year, and throughout the year, there's a lot of buzz. Pat Gelsinger says, "There's a big wave here with Kubernetes." What does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend? >> Yes what Kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation, they're trying to modernize the IT applications. And the best way to do that, is build off your current platform, expand it and make it a an innovative, an Agile Platform for you to run Kubernetes applications and VM applications together. And not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment, both on-prem and public cloud together. So they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack, but modernize their infrastructure stack, which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications Kubernetes or container based applications and VMs. >> What's exciting about this trend, Krish, we were talking about this at VMworld last year, we had many conversations around cloud native, but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business. I mean, this is really the move to the cloud. If you look at the successful enterprises, leaving the suppliers, the on premises piece, if not moved to the cloud native marketplace technologies, the on-premise isn't effective. So it's not so much on-premises going away, we know it's not, but it's turning into cloud native. This is the move to the cloud generally, this is a big wave. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, John, if you think about it on-premise, we have, significant market share, we are by far the leader in the market. And so what we are trying to do with this, is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using, but bring their modern application development on top of the same platform. Today, customers tend to set up stacks, which are different, so you have a Kubernetes stack, you have stack for the traditional applications, you have operators and administrators who are specialized in Kubernetes on one side, and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side. With this move, what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform, you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had, and at the same time, offer the developers what they like, which is Kubernetes dial-tone, that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications. >> Yeah, Paul, Pat said Kubernetes can be the dial-tone of the internet. Most millennials might even know what dial-tone is. But what he meant is that's the key fabric, that's going to orchestrate. And we've heard over the years skill gap, skill gap, not a lot of skills out there. But when you look at the reality of skills gap, it's really about skills gaps and shortages, not enough people, most CIOs and chief information security officers, that we talk to, say, I don't want to fork my development teams, I don't want to have three separate teams, I don't have to, I want to have automation, I want an operating model that's not going to be fragmented. This kind of speaks to this whole idea of, interoperability and multi cloud. This seems to be the next big way behind hybrid. >> I think it is the next big wave, the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model. They like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way. And we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem, to Google Cloud, to Amazon cloud to Microsoft Cloud to any of our VCPP partners. You get the same cloud operating experience. And it's all driven by a Kubernetes based dial-tone that's effective and available within this platform. So by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can run in this hybrid manner, and give you the cloud operating agility the developers are looking for, that's what's key in version seven. >> Does Pat Gelsinger mean when he says dial-tone of the internet Kubernetes. Does he mean always on? or what does he mean specifically? Just that it's always available? what's the meaning behind that phrase? >> The first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure, which is, The VMware Cloud Foundation, and be able to work with a set of API's that are Kubernetes API's. So developers understand that, they are looking for that. They understand that dial-tone, right? And you come to our VMware cloud foundation that runs across all these clouds, you get the same API set that you can use to deploy that application. >> Okay, so let's get into the value here of vSphere 7, how does VMware and vSphere 7 specifically help customers? Isn't just bolting on Kubernetes to vSphere, some will say is that's simple or (murmurs) you're running product management no, it's not that easy. Some people say, "He is bolting Kubernetes on vSphere." >> it's not that easy. So one of the things, if anybody has actually tried deploying Kubernetes, first, it's highly complicated. And so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt on, but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple. You talked about IT operational shortages, customers want to be able to deploy Kubernetes environments in a very simple way. The easiest way that you can do that is take your existing environment that route 90% of IT, and just turn on the Kubernetes dial-tone, and it is as simple as that. Now, it's much more than that, in version seven, as well, we're bringing in a couple things that are very important. You also have to be able to manage at scale, just like you would in the cloud, you want to be able to have infrastructure, almost self manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself. And so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large scale environments, both on-premise and public cloud environments at scale. And then associated with that as well is you must make it secure. So there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security, which is how can we actually build in a truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT. >> I was just going to touch on your point about this, the shortage of IT staff, and how we are addressing that here. The way we are addressing that, is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with Kubernetes, the same way they administered the older releases, so they don't have to learn anything new. They are just working the same way. We are not changing any tools, process, technologies. >> So same as it was before? >> Same as before. >> More capability. >> More capability. And developers can come in and they see new capabilities around Kubernetes. So it's a best of both worlds. >> And what was the pain point that you guys are solving? Obviously, the ease of use is critical, obviously, operationally, I get that. As you look at the cloud native developer cycles, infrastructure as code means, as app developers, on the other side, taking advantage of it. What's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7. >> So I think it's multiple factors. So first is we've talked about agility a few times, there is DevOps is a real trend inside an IT organizations. They need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker, they need to be able to respond to the business. And to do that, what they are doing is they need infrastructure that is on demand. So what we're really doing in the core Kubernetes kind of enablement, is allowing that on demand fulfillment of infrastructure, so you get that agility that you need. But it's not just tied to modern applications. It's also all of your existing business applications and your monitoring applications on one platform, which means that you've got a very simple and low cost way of managing large scale IT infrastructure. So that's a huge piece as well. And then I do want to emphasize a couple of other things. We're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for SAP HANA databases, where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there. And you have all of the capabilities like the GPU awareness and FPGA awareness that we built into the platform, so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications. So you've got the ability to run those applications, as well as your Kubernetes and Container based application. >> That's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right? >> That's right, yeah. It's quite powerful that we've actually brought in, basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers, whether that's through containers or through VMs. >> Krish, I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned. I get the lifestyle improvement, life lifecycle improvement, I get the application acceleration innovation, but the intrinsic security is interesting. Could you take a minute, explain what that is? >> Yeah, so there's a few different aspects. One is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment. And that means that you need to have a way that the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom, as we would call it. You want to have a controlled environment that, some of the worst security challenges inside in some of the companies has been your internal IT staff. So you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment independent. We've got vSphere Trust Authority that we released in version seven, that actually gives you a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates. So you've got this, continuous runtime. Now, not only that, we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features, and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform. So that you've got native security of even your application ecosystem. >> Yeah, that's been coming up a lot conversations, the carbon black and the security piece. Krish obviously vSphere everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense, but you have a lot of touch points, you got cloud, hyper scalars got the edge, you got partners. >> We have that dominant market share on private cloud. We are on Amazon, as you will know, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud. So all the major clouds, there is a vSphere stack running. So it allows customers if you think about it, it allows customers to have the same operating model, irrespective of where their workload is residing. They can set policies, components, security, they set it once, it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud, and it's all supported by our VMware Cloud Foundation, which is powered by vSphere 7. >> Yeah, I think having that, the cloud as API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model. Alright guys, so let's summarize the announcement. What do you guys their takeaway from this vSphere 7, what is the bottom line? What's it really mean? (Paul laughs) >> I think what we're, if we look at it for developers, we are democratizing Kubernetes. We already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere. We are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators, they can now manage Kubernetes environments, you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment. That's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage. So I think that is one of the key things that's in here. The other thing though, I don't think any other platform out there, other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's, in Amazon's, in Microsoft's, in thousands of VCPP partners. You have one hybrid platform that you can run with. And that's got operational benefits, that's got efficiency benefits, that's got agility benefits. >> Great. >> Yeah, I would just add to that and say that, look, we want to meet customers, where they are in their journey. And we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way. And I think the announcement that we made today, with vSphere 7, is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey, without making trade offs on people, process and technology. And there is more to come. Look, we are laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry, for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud. And so you will see more capabilities coming in the future. Stay tuned. >> Well, one final question on this news announcement, which is awesome, vSphere, core product for you guys, if I'm the customer, tell me why it's going to be important five years from now? >> Because of what I just said, it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds, which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the cloud. So think about it. If you go to Amazon native, and then you have a workload in Azure, you're going to have different tools, different processes, different people trained to work with those clouds. But when you come to VMware and you use our Cloud Foundation, you have one operating model across all these environments, and that's going to be game changing. >> Great stuff, great stuff. Thanks for unpacking that for us. Congratulations on the announcement. >> Thank you. >> vSphere 7, news special report here, inside theCube cCnversation, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We are having a very special Cube Conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will of the new VMware vSphere 7.0 we're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have longtime Cube alumni, Kit Colbert here, is the VP and CTO of Cloud Platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. And, and new to theCube, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management VMware, and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release. And great to have you on board. >> Feels pretty good, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7, bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that might be coming with the acquisition of the FTO team. So really exciting news. And I think Kit you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud. So this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So, we talked at VMworld about project Pacific, this technology preview, and as Jared mentioned, what that was, is how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere. As you know, we had Hybrid Cloud Vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible. Now part of the broader VMware Cloud Foundation portfolio. And as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question, how do we actually evolve that platform? So it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> All right. So I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo. So why (murmurs) and let's see what it looks like. You guys can keep the demo? >> Narrator: So we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware Cloud Foundation for and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is a developer is actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The selfie in watermelon, (all laughing) So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads, though. This is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed, so go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed. On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And one of the amazing things about this is, from an infrastructure is code standpoint. Now, the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in, not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at sort of a side by side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things, the same names, and so this means what a developer calls their IT department and says, "Hey, I got a problem with my database," we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter vSphere namespaces. And so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now as a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my active directory infrastructure, so I can use the same, corporate credentials to access the system, I tap into all my existing storage. So, this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere, but to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides, seeing the VMs and things that developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created, the compute network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again, from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data is invaluable, often saves hours, just to try to figure out what we're even talking about more trying to resolve an issue. So, as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot, we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, "Where's the Kubernetes?" And they're surprised. They're like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks, it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer stores, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well, it's pretty wild. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined Kit teased out at VMworld, which was, the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but (murmurs) see Kubernetes and really bringing those together in a unified environment. So that, depending on what your job is and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see in this kind of unified environment. >> Yeah, as the demo showed, (clears throat) it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere, Kubernetes base one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as the traditional vSphere interface API's, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> And then it really is interesting too, you tease that a lot. That was a good little preview, people knew they're watching. But you talked about really cloud journey and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are that are running in their classic VMs, and then kind of the modern, kind of cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum, and getting from one to the other, but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will, and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum, they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, I think we think a lot about it like that, we talk to customers, and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go, their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud and involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them. Because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are, kind of the old current world, and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other, they have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming, and very error prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it, the messy middle, I would say it's more like, how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources? How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps, each of which have a lot of business value, but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application, where there's a lot of things that are different about it. But one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate, versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities what the application can do. And that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense. As you said, not all applications need to make that move, but most of them should, and most of them are, and most of them are at least making that journey. Do you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that, certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from, looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7, is how we manage applications. So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings, or, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure, you talk about it in terms of, this VM is going to be encrypted, or this VM is going to have this firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say, I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> And like, I can even zoom back a little bit there and say, if you look back, one thing we did was something like vSAN before that people had to put policies on a LAN an actual storage LAN, and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, inherited certain policies. And so, vSAN will turn that around allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared is talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workloads is not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. You got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some on the cloud. And so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere is really powerful and very simplified one. >> And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view, which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but when the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications. And more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them, based on on either customer demands or competitive demands, or just changes in the marketplace. >> Yeah when you look at something like a modern app that maybe has 100 VMs that are part of it, and you take something like compliance. So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down hardened and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. If you think about vCenter today, you might log in and see 1000 VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before. Because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e. building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level, and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction. It actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other. But in fact, now they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe, and in compliance, and so forth. >> So there's a lot more to this, this is a very significant release, right? Again, a lot of foreshadowing, if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant kind of re-architecture of many, many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question, because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific, but it's now just part of vSphere. And certainly, that is a very large aspect of it. But to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so there is a demo here, let's pull up some slides. And we're ready to take a look at what's there. So, outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first first one is simplified Lifecycle Management. And then really focused on security as a second one, and then applications as well, but both including, the cloud native apps that could fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing, around simplifying life cycles. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology vSphere Lifecycle Management, vLCM. And the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative, with a single image, you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of ins and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really, really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, because upgrading to the sevens is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing you as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip. How do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well. >> Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep >> We just got back from RSA. Thank goodness, we got that show in before all the badness started. But everyone always talks about security is got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. Talk about kind of the the changes in the security. >> So I've done a lot of things around security, things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, dramatic simplifications they're across the board. What I want to focus on here, on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere Trust Authority. And so with that one, what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces, and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats, including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted. And obviously, if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them. How do you implement the concept of least privilege. >> Jeff: Or zero trust (murmurs) >> Exactly. So they idea with trust authority that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down ensure a fully secure, those can be managed by a special vCenter Server, which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that, okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay, so they're okay to actually run workloads or they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, just better leveraging, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs, and kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed. So you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space, as you mentioned, all sorts of accelerators coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3D rendering. But FPGAs, and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization, i.e. silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And what you find is, all the things we found before you find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, putting security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see in most customers and it's funny because, and sometimes you think, "Wow, shouldn't we be past this?" As an industry should we have solved this already, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage network. But now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere, really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide, we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if the we go to the next slide, what we see is that, with that fusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization, you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together. So they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, have multiple people sharing a GPU, we can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it, in fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's free, it's pretty cheap, because the classifications of the assets now are much, much larger, much varied and much more workload specific right. That's really the opportunity slash challenge there. >> They are a lot more diverse And so like, a couple other things just, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities, things around DRS and vMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right. So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA or Oracle databases, and how do we ensure that vMotion can scale to handle those, without impacting their performance or anything else there? Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing, and so forth. So a lot of the stuff not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core as people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> All right. So Jared I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while. There's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them? What should they be excited about? What are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps. I think today, you look at all of these organizations, and what ends up happening is, the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure. And so, now, I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple of years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team? Make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation and Kit both of you for getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift. And it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it. And thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive into this ton more resources for people that didn't want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. We're in the Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to a special Cube Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're digging into VMware vSphere 7 announcement. We've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people, but we know that there's no better way to really understand the technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it. So really happy to have joined me on the program. I have Philip Buckley-Mellor, who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond. Phil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Nice too. >> Alright, so Phil, let's start of course, British Telecom, I think most people know, you know what BT is and it's, really sprawling company. Tell us a little bit about, your group, your role and what's your mandate. >> Okay, so, my group is called service platforms. It's the bit of BT that services all of our multi millions of our customers. So we have broadband, we have TV, we have mobile, we have DNS and email systems. And it's all about our customers. It's not a B2B part of BT, you're with me? We specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services. And in particular, my group we do infrastructure. we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just pass boot time, and the application developers look after that stage and above. >> Okay, great, we definitely going to want to dig in and talk about that, that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams. But let's talk a little bit first, we're talking about VMware. So, how long has your organization been doing VMware and tell us, what you see with the announcement that VMware is making for vSphere 7? >> Sure, well, I mean, we've had really great relationship with VMware for about 12, 13 years, something like that. And it's a absolutely key part of our infrastructure. It's written throughout BT, really, in every part of our operations, design, development, and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products. And so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment, And as you know, in particular with serverless, and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that. We're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while. We currently use extensively we use vSphere NSXT, VROPs, login site, network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications. And our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize, they know how to pass the plan, and (murmurs). So that's great. And that's been like that for half a decade at least, we've been really, really confident with our ability to deal with VMware environments. And along came containers and like, say, multi cloud as well. And what we were struggling with was the inability to have a single pane of glass, really on all of that, and to use the same people and the same processes to manage a different kind of technology. So we, we've been working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products. For several years now, I've worked really closely with the vSphere integrated containers, guys in particular, and now with the Pacific guys, with really the ideal that when we bring in version seven and the containerization aspects of version seven, we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container. That's really the Holy Grail. So we'll be able to allow our developers to develop, our operations team to deploy and to operate, and our designers to see the same infrastructure, whether that's on-premises, cloud or off-premises, and be able to manage the whole piece in that respect. >> Okay, so Phil, really interesting things you walk through here, you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years, want to understand and the organizational piece just a little bit, because it sounds great, I manage all the environment, but, containers are a little bit different than VMs. if I think back, from an application standpoint, it was, let's stick it in a VM, I don't need to change it. And once I spin up a VM, often that's going to sit there for, months, if not years, as opposed to, I think about a containerization environment. It's, I really want to pool of resources, I'm going to create and destroy things all the time. So, bring us inside that organizational piece. How much will there needs to be interaction and more interaction or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team? >> Well, yes, me absolutely right, that's the nature and the timescales that we're talking about between VMs and containers is wildly different. As you say, we probably almost certainly have Vms in place now that were in place in 2018 certainly I imagine, and haven't really been touched. Whereas as you say, VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time. There are parts of architecture that require that, in particular, the very client facing bursty stuff, does require spinning up and spinning down pretty quickly. But some of our some of our other containers do sit around for weeks, if not months, really does depend on the development cycle aspects of that, but the heartbeat that we've really had was just visualizing it. And there are a number of different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment. Allies troubleshoot and seven. But they need any problems, the new things that we we will have to get used to. And also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products, quite a Venn diagram of in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that. So again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere. And to be able to have a list of VMs on alongside is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how they behave in terms of their networking, to be able to essentially put our deployments on rails by using in particular tag based policies, means that we can take the onus of security, we can take the onus of performance management and capacity management away from the developers who don't really have a lot of time, and they can just get on with their job, which is to develop new functionality, and help our customers. So that means then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies, and making sure that they're adhered to. But again, we know how to do that with the VMs through vSphere. So the fact that we can actually apply that straight away, just with slightly different compute unit, is really what we're talking about here is ideal, and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well, because we do use multiple clouds where (murmurs) and as your customers, and we're between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything other than be excited about (murmurs) >> Yeah, Phil, I really like how you described really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand, right? There's things that developers care about the they want to move fast, they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about. And, you know, we talked about some of the new world and it's like, oh, can the platform underneath this take care of it? Well, there's some things platforms take care of, there's some things that the software or your team is going to need to understand. So maybe if you could dig in a little bit, some of those, what are the drivers from your application portfolio? What is the business asking of your organization that's driving this change? And being one of those tail winds pushing you towards, Kubernetes and the vSphere 7 technologies? >> Well, it all comes down to the customers, right? Our customers want new functionality. They want new integrations, they want new content, they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well. So there will be ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services. So we have to have address that really from a development perspective, it's our developers have the responsibility to, design and deploy those. So, in infrastructure, we have to act as a firm, foundation, really underneath all of that. That allows them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performant. We understand where the capacity requirements are coming from in the short term, and in the long term for that, and he's secure as well, obviously, is a big aspect to it. And so really, we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted. >> Great, Phil, you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as, your VMware firm. Want to make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things. Number one is, when it comes to your team, especially your infrastructure team, how much are they in involved with setting up some of the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud. And secondly, when you look at your applications, or some of your clouds, some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud. And I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around. But you know, maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to, what cloud really means to your organization and your applications? >> Sure, well, I mean, tools. Cloud allows us to accelerate development, which is nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality are so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud. But very often, applications really make better sense, especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time. I mean, yes, there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching. Same goes for broadband really. But we generally were well more than an eight hour application profile. So what that allows us to do then is to have applications that are, well, it makes sense. We run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for, data protection reasons or whatever, then we can do that as well. But where we say, for instance, we have a boxing match on. And we're going to be seeing an enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our auto journey to allow them to view that and to gain access to that, well, why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity? So we do absolutely have hybrid applications, not sorry, hybrid blocks, we have blocks of sub applications, dozens of them really to support our platform. And what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platforms, I mentioned, that some of the some of those application blocks have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that, again, by policies to where they run, and to, have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running, how they're running, and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well. And that way, we best serve our customers. We got to get our customers yeah, what they need. >> All right, great, Phil, final question I have for you, you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMs containers, public cloud, what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at, say a year or two ago? >> Well, I'll be honest, I was a little bit surprised by vSphere 7. We knew that VMware will working on trying to make containers on the same level, both from a management deployment perspective as VMs. I mean, they're called VMware after all right? And we knew that they were looking at that. But I was surprised by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent the application, really. It's, you know, if you look at the whole Tansy stuff and the Mission Control stuff, I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves from an application perspective, and to really leap forward. And this is, between version six and seven. I've been following these since version three, at least. And it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture. The aims to, to what they want to achieve with the application. And luckily, the nice thing is, is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal, it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all, it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that. But my word, there's an awful lot of work underneath that, underneath the covers. And I'm really excited. And I think all the people in my position should really use take it as an opportunity to revisit what they can achieve with, in particular with vSphere, and with in combination with NSXT, it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slides about it and unless you've seen the product, just how revolutionary the version seven is compared to previous versions, which have kind of evolved through a couple of years. So yeah, I think I'm really excited about it. And I know a lot of my peers or the companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well. So yeah, I'm really excited about though the whole base >> Well, Phil, thank you so much. Absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware, the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around, help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go. Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah, >>already. Welcome back, Cube alum Dave Volante. We're covering the transformation of Oracle Consulting. Specifically focused on really, what is what I consider a rebirth from really staff augmentation to a much more strategic partner for customers and with me to explore that a little bit of Sherry Latin back. She is the senior vice president of Cloud Key accounts at Oracle, and we're also joined by Pat McGovern. Who's the group? EVP for the North American Cloud strategy. Also Oracle folks, welcome to the Cube. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks >>for having us. >>You're welcome. So, Sheri, you're out talking to customers a lot. Um, I'm curious as to what that conversation is like specifically as it relates to consulting. I talked about the rebirth of Oracle consulting. You? Probably not, you know, earlier, years ago, leading with staff augmentation. That's not strategic. But are you bringing Oracle consulting now into the conversation? What's that conversation like? >>Absolutely. In fact, every conversation we have relating to our cloud strategy. Oracle consultants part and parcel to that they are not staff augmentation. They're actually the digital transformation arm of what we do around cloud. So it's been really interesting to see what they've been able to do in terms of changing the narrative of what we do it Oracle from just a software company to really transform into. I thought provider >>and Chris I'm interested in Sorry, pat. I'm interested in your title group. VP Cloud strategy. Right? So gravity, obviously a fundamental part of any customer interaction. But what are you seeing? What underscores customer strategies? What are the business drivers for them right now? One of the catalysts that are driving their their technology spending decisions? >>Yeah, it's a great question, and I think a lot of it depends upon, especially in the times that we're in now depends upon the industry that they're in. But, um, most importantly, what we're seeing is right now is durability. So we want to make sure that the customers of our Oracle customers and others have an opportunity to have disaster recovery business continuity. Um, in this stage, right now, it's less about expansion per se. Unless in an industry that's uniquely positioned for that more about durability, of the overall strategy that when we look at that, your ability, we think about kind of the core missions we think about, um so the back office operations and continuity and then we think about transformational revenue generation. And so when we partner with us, yes, we want to make sure that we have both of those concepts in mind. So >>I want to ask you both. Um, you know, it was a lot of we have a lot of talk about in our community about cloud first. Um, big oracle is sort of put forth the gauntlet of Look, we're we're leading now with cloud. You both have cloud in your title. But obviously being cloud first is is more than that sharing. What if you could talk about your customers and your cloud journey and share with us and convince us that you are cloud first? >>That's a great question. And in fact, I joined Oracle about 11 months ago, was in the industry for about 25 years and enjoying simply because I believe in what Oracle is doing around this journey. We're in our second generation of cloud capabilities, and that's purposeful. And we do that because we realized that where cloud started and where we are today, are two totally different things. And so we have capabilities around security viability extensions with autonomous that other cloud providers just simply don't have built these ground up to make sure that we can run Oracle for blitz databases and applications far better than any other cloud provider. So that's super exciting time you got Oracle, and it's absolutely fascinating what our customers are going to a doctor. Apology? >>Yes, so s so pat. I wanna ask you, Ah, sort of similar question. How fundamental is, uh, you know, Cloud to organizations, strategies, and obviously everybody is a cloud strategy. But I'm specifically asking as it relates to mission critical workloads because, let's face it, that's been the hardest to move into the cloud. So when you're out talking to customers about their strategy and obviously dovetailing at the Oracle strategy, how do you align those two views? >>Yeah, so it's actually really fascinating question. So first I think I would respond in the following away. When I think about our portfolio, I don't necessarily say cloud First, I say customer first, and I really want the customer to make a decision based upon a deployment model that makes sense for that. Think of the customer whether it's a regulated industry or the public sector or, you know, any sort of compliance considerations. So Oracle's one of the very few, uh, you know, enterprise Last Mile providers that has obviously on premise capabilities as well. And so 99% of the cases that we see, with the exception of some of the sort of startup S and B five folks that are born in the cloud, we're dealing with the hybrid cloud model anyway. And so that's the kind of the first order priorities what's right for the customer. And let's make sure that we get the appropriate I'm all for that customer in terms of enterprise essentially the workloads that we have, whether it's cloud or on Prem or enterprise workloads. And those were kind of separated into two buckets, one of the core mission of the revenue generation side. And what would be mission critical sort of the back office, the oracles historically tremendous at the back office side, running finance, running operations, running supply chain, you know, doing those things that are mission critical on the core mission side. That's really where we're starting to focus now, which is getting out into the revenue generation. The mission of the entity with things like high performance. Compute on making sure that we have an ability to support our customers on both sides of those. >>You got a follow up question on strategy. You talked about hybrid. And you know the hybrid. Clearly, riel, whatever the big buzzword today is multi cloud. My question is, is multi cloud the actual strategy of customers or is it actually just an outcome of multi vendor and and shadow I t. But what if you could address that? Yeah, >>So another great question. So I think if you're on one side of the fence, you call it a strategy on maybe risk mitigation on the other side of the fence, you could say, you know, I don't When people talk about multi cloud, they tend to say, Hey, you know that one of the big names that you hear, whether it's Oracle or aws, um you know Microsoft etcetera? Uh huh. But the reality is anybody who's running those are also running, you know, hundreds of father for SAS applications. Whether the department allowed sort of that shadow, I t. I think in part you call it a strategy. In part, you'd say it's just sort of propagation of cloud capabilities that have sprung up, Do you think? Based on, you know, security integration, performance considerations as well as sort of the general expansiveness of enterprise class capabilities? You probably see if you're niche players over time and you'll see kind of the broader bets happening around enterprise class capabilities. >>So, Sheri, you're relatively new to the oracle of just under a year. But you've been around the industry, and you know that the chairman of a horrible loves technology you love speeds and feeds and shares that Oracle Open World but and, you know or was a product company. But the conversation is changing. You kind of alluded to that before. It's not just about feature function speeds and feeds. Maybe you could address that. And where does Oracle consulting fit in that equation? >>Right, So it kind of detail of what Pat was just saying around the hybrid notion. We firmly believe that every customer is gonna wanna have different options for what they do in the cloud and based on the providers. So we want. We've partnered with Microsoft. We actually can interconnect are clouds together to provide that kind of flexibility to our customers. Yeah, it is a key component of that Azure customers and talk about. I'm going to stop integration. Our partnership or consultant is the arm that does that work for us. So we are seeing them come, come about in a much different way in a way that's different, you know? And other consulting, you know, staff augmentation firms. >>Well, that Microsoft is interesting to us. Uh, actually, a lot of people in the press might have put food. It saw that and said, Wow, this is This is pretty curious both from a strategy standpoint, but it really. But I think it's premature on Oracle. So you got the Number one database. Everybody knows Oracle's got the native get this hyper cloud partner now saying, Yeah, we can run. You're kind of seamlessly. I know that's an overused word, but what is the reaction been in the customer base? That deal? >>It's phenomenal. It's infinite, especially for a lot of our retailers that are being Microsoft Cloud companies. They're seeing that they can put their Microsoft applications in the Microsoft class. They can run the Oracle databases in the Oracle Cloud and Inter Operability is tremendous and they're not any sort of service as it relates to putting, you know, using a multi cloud strategy. And for us, we're seeing that as a differentiator for us in the market. >>So what's the strategy behind that? I want you to talk about that a little bit, because, I mean, you know, it was it was an interesting chess move by Oracle you got, you know, Amazon's out there doing their thing, and there's plenty of Oracle running on on AWS. But there's a lot of head bashing going on, and then you guys partner up with Microsoft that caught a lot of people off guard. Can you help us, You know, give us a little color on the strategy behind that? >>Yeah, so I think that there's a There's a technical component of the strategy which Sherry alluded to, but I also think that there's a cultural component of the strategy and so, you know, obviously Microsoft has been around for a long time. ESX has Oracle that they have a substantial on from this friend. But as much as any other company on the Lana, probably Microsoft has this hybrid strategy just like Oracle. And so, as we look at, you know, the partner ecosystem and what makes sense the partner and how can we diversify the workloads like Microsoft is one of those companies? That's just sort of, Ah, very vertical industry focused great portfolio products. I'm slightly differentiated in terms of the space that they would buy in versus an Oracle. As you pointed out, So, uh, cultural standpoint, I think it's quite a good fit for us to find, you know, as we look at partners to find a partner like Microsoft to work with an integrated workloads. It >>was kind of a judo move for both companies in my mind, because you see a lot of companies that are predominantly on Prem, just like Oracle has been historically saying with Microsoft and basically kind of going on to hybrid, obviously they want on Prem and multi Cloud, which is okay, we're going to span multiple clouds. But both Oracle Now and Microsoft, with its hybrid strategy, as I call it, a judo move because essentially you're doing things that maybe some of the other cloud providers can't do because of your own prim present. So you're turning what may have been perceived as a disadvantage, you know, a legacy business. You know, it's funny in our business legacies of >>a >>bad word, but but it's usually as good connotations. But turning that on Prem legacy into an advantage. Cherry. Is that a reasonable premise that I'm putting forth and you having conversations with customers in that regard? >>Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a very fair statement to make, because we do have again. I oversee the top 120 Oracle's and in that they have years and years of investment in Oracle databases in Oracle applications and for us agreeable by the capabilities to move that to your cloud. Integrate with other things such as Microsoft, you know, applications and whatnot is huge issue, and no other cloud provider can say that. So I do think that good to see that we are uniquely differentiated. >>I want to ask you about lock in because that's always the criticism of Oracle. I talked to a lot of work with customers in particular exit data. People say, Why would anybody buy exit data locks in what you by AWS and why would you buy any product. You, uh, disk drive a lock in. So So I want to ask you about that because my research shows that while there's a there's a segment of customers that are very much concerned about that, and that's a primary concern you lock in. It's actually a small percentage, maybe 10 15%. Most of the customers that I to talk to the Oracle world will say, Listen, I'm willing to risk that lock in If if If the business value overwhelms that And again I ask you, Is that is that something that is a viable conversation with your customers? Do you see the same thing? I mean, I see it as kind of a strong indication. If they kind of poo poo the lock in pieces, they look at the business value that I'm driving from my organization. I wonder if you could >>Yes. So I think value is the crux of the conversation. And if you look at sort of the legacy business, just put it that for a second. You know that what people would call legacy, uh, the US is a tremendous asset because we have 400,000 customers or so around the world. Those are folks that we're giving choice. You can run on Prem. You can run in the cloud. You can find an engineered systems or into the data box behind your firewall. You can run it as a data cloud at customer, which is behind your firewall, but leveraging Native Public Cloud services. Or you can run that same capability and exit out of service. So really again, that deployment model choice about what, folks? You how folks wanna consume their services in terms of lock in. I don't think it's so much lock in, as you point out, is value if a customer's deriving value from a given solution, especially in the cloud world, they're going to consume right, and if they're going to consume the probability and higher likelihood is that they'll expand as well. So I look it. I essentially look at consumption in the cloud world being value that's been realized, and once you have value that's been realized, it's critical conversation. I don't I don't view it is lock. In fact, there's a lot of fun, mobility and portability that can occur when you talk about hybrid cloud multi cloud environments. I view it much more is identifying the value and then executing against that value so that folks consume cloud services. >>Why, Cheri, why are customers wanting to put mission critical workloads in the cloud? Is it the same sort of cloud, agility and cost, etcetera, etcetera. I mean, why not just leave it on Prem and keep it protected and maybe spend a little bit more? What's the driver for moving mission Critical workloads? >>Well, I think it's it's dependent upon you know what? The initiatives are in the company right now. They're looking for cost reduction for top line growth, either looking for different capabilities around security that the cloud provides. The great thing about what we do is we have optimized all of our work lives but our database and our applications into our class of providing additional capabilities. But we're also seeing a lot more. So we, uh we say all the time you put us to the test, let us, you know, quantify what we would look like in the cloud with our workloads versus competitors, er and we will guarantee that will save you a lot of money. So I think that a lot of it has to do with one. It starts with potentially cost reduction, but then they start seeing additional business value driven out of and back to Oracle Consulting. What Oracle consultant provides in terms of business value in the cloud is transformative for our customers. >>Well, that this is valued to is a component of the business case that has to be risk mitigation. And, you know, if you just want to buy some object storage, you know, probably not gonna work is not going to be my first call. But if I have a mission critical set of workloads that are running on Oracle, I'm really going to think twice about migrating that, you know, somewhere else I'm either gonna leave it on, Prem, or I'm gonna look look hard that Oracle's same same approach. And we've done some research on this that the risk and cost of actually migrating to a new environment is is potentially really detrimental to companies. I wonder if you could talk about how that plays into your and customers strategies. >>Yeah, and I think, you know, is, um, reference in what? What Kerry said. So it depends on the choice of the customer, but what I would say is if a customer is driving a lot of value on premise, um, that might look something like exists ts and the cloud for D. R. So they're actually have a disaster recovery plan that's file based. I think Cloud is one of these sort of unicorn conversations. Everybody, everybody wants to have a cloud conversation. And so, making sure that that cloud of conversation in the context of the customer, um, is what's crucial for us. And so, you know, as you look at mission critical workloads, those are the workloads that we want. We want either core mission, our mission critical. It's just object storage or just something, you know, that people want to spin up and spin down. Yeah, that's interesting to Oracle, but for us, as a B two b, your B two b enterprise class, um, software company, we want to be in your core mission or in your back office, you know, helping you execute against that mission. >>So share here, going in with a stacked deck. I mean, you're not going in trying to go head to head with the hyper scale you going in saying, Look, this is our wheelhouse, and I think I'm hearing in your wheelhouse you'll take anybody on. But I wonder if you could sort of affirm that and maybe talk about how you lead in these customer conversations, >>right? Well, normally, our entry point is one. Understanding with business drivers are right. It has to be a business led recession. Really? Isn't a technology starting point right? It really is around what business problems we're trying to solve and how can we help you solve them? And because we know your environments, we know what data bases air deployed in. Other public. What is your lover? Dji to run your business? We can, I think, successfully position ourselves very, very competitively against other cloud providers. And I think that is something that resonated incredibly well with our customers and back. >>Yes, So it seems like Oracle Consulting is an important ingredient as part of that strategy, Cause again, If it was, you know, five years ago it was just stack staff augmentation. That's really not a compelling conversation to have with customers. But if you can come in with A with the mindset of strategic partner you're bringing in Deloitte, we've been talking to some of their professionals about the elevate program with with Oracle, that is, that's a nice lever that your you can take advantage of. >>Absolutely. And in fact, we've seen that that is a huge opportunity. For one, the partnership with Deloitte is incredibly strategic. We also partner with other companies like Accenture and DXC and IBM Candidly and Oracle is consulting is incredibly flexible in terms of what kind of partnerships and the line they have with our customers is really based. Yeah, >>I want to end on a growth path and maybe talk about everyone wants to weaken. Cloud Cloud is the growth business. You look at Oracle's business, you know everybody's business. This cloud is growing. Everything else is either hanging on or declining. So it's all about growth. How do you drive growth? What what is Cloud's role in terms of, you know, the growth strategy and maybe had some color to that narrative? >>Yeah, so from a from an execution standpoint, how we drive growth is we have a kind of a core part capability, its value volume, velocity burger. Those are very simplistic approach that we take in each of our line of businesses and then across each of the segments of the market size pass and I as an engineer systems as well. The values crucial If you're not, you're not selling with value and kind of positioning value at the up front part of it. You know, the customers may book, but it won't consume and don't consume. They're not going to renew. So ensuring that customers are realizing value from the process is essential. And then with volume and velocity, you know, our legacy business was much more kind of chunkier, so you could focus on big quarter ends or a big year end on. You had impending events through, you know, started compliance considerations or contract negotiations, etcetera. We have to be in a volume and velocity business in order to scale out and also the average transaction sizes. Historically, although it's growing for us, >>it >>is slightly lower than what a license on premise capability would be. As you'd expect, um, from, uh, from a product perspective, I think, you know, we were sort of a luxury of riches around the autonomous capabilities. If you haven't so that's something that's incredibly unique. Oracle. You know, the Economist database and all the economist services that we're rolling out and that Autonomous gets back to what we talked about earlier, around security, around performance, around scale, ability and all these things. Ultimately, we're positioning the capabilities of the future, but we're positioning them today. So we're a market leader in this space. You're not only is the Oracle database. As you pointed out, the market leader were market leaders here. If you found a bunch of the SAS areas, this eponymous segment of the market is crucial for us and crucial to our growth. >>Yeah, it really isn't enabling. What I've been saying. That you it's almost compulsory for Oracle to participate and compete in the cloud because it gives you that automation and that that scale. But you're talking about also setting up, you know, some future advantages of being able to take advantage of data. The combination of data ai and Cloud is the new superpower with within the industry. Sherry, I want O end on you. 11 months in an oracle. Let's say things work out great. You're here 234 years down the road. You look back. What does success look like? >>Success looks like everyone of our customers moving to the Oracle cloud and see incredible business value from that partnering with Oracle Consulting. That's what my successful curious >>guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube where we've been we've been tracking this transformation of Oracle consulting and one of the things that's very clear. There was Oracle's obviously serious about cloud, but also seriously about bringing in new talent and new skill sets really not only transform Oracle but help transform your customers. So thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. >>Thanks so much. >>You bet. Thank you. >>All right. Thank you. Everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. We'll see you next time. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.