>> Hi, I'm Peter Buris of Wikibon, and this week, we're going to be running a very special teleconference on true private cloud. The Technology Foundation for Enterprise Cloud Strategies. We're going to conduct the teleconference on Thursday, the 12th of October, at 2 p.m. Eastern Daylight, and 11 a.m. Pacific Daylight. What we're going to do is reveal some new research that we've been doing that supports this whole notion that increasingly, the marketplace is going to adopt what we call true private cloud technologies. These are technologies that are intended to provide the cloud experience wherever the data demands, including on presence, including at the edge, and will be easily integratable with the public cloud. Now, when we talk about new research, we're not just talking about the numbers that we've been put forward over the last couple of years. We're actually talking about new and interesting things. So, for example, one of the key things we're going to look at is what's going on in the world of backup and restore. How are we going to handle this need to manage large amounts of data. Dave Vellante, tell us a little about that. >> Dave: Yeah, so one of the things most I'm excited about, Peter, is working with our community, trying to help them understand how this cloud model is evolving, in SAS, obviously driven by applications, public infrastructure is a service in what we call true private cloud, bringing the cloud model to your data on prem, and one of the areas we're looking at is new data protection models. How do you protect data across multiclouds? Are there ways to get more leverage out of that data beyond just insurance and backup? Are there ways to help with governance and data analytics and other dealings with security threats? We see data protection as one of these key binding technologies that are going to bring together cross cloud disciplines. >> When we think about cross cloud disciplines, you always end up thinking about what are developers going to do, and Stu, we've been pretty hard at work at thinking about the impact of hybrid cloud, and some of the new models of development as we go to a more distributed, more multi-ownership orientation of some of these assets. Any quick observations on what we're going to see next week? >> Stu: Yeah, absolutely, Peter. The whole premise that we've talked about with true private cloud is people love the operating model of the public cloud, and nobody more than developers. The developers have been sitting up, building shipping code in the public cloud, so how can I get that same experience really wherever I'm going to live? So whether that be my data center, the public cloud, or even going to edge configurations now, all the kind of latest and greatest stuff like containers and Kubernetes and serverless is not going to all live in one place, so how does this span this hybrid multicloud world? It's super important to focus always on that application and that developer experience because without that, you're going to fail with really moving to this modern type of architecture. >> Now, as we think about the need for data protection, we think about the need for application development creating value out of this that has significant impacts ultimately on IT operations management. We're also going to be spending some time talking about how new technologies are being bought into the whole IT operations management sphere, machine learning, deep learning, cognitive, et cetera, to dramatically improve the productivity of managing all of these new more complex applications and distributive resources. So, that's going to be a crucial feature of what we'll be talking about at the teleconference, but David Floyer, we're also going to be talking about the impact of this trend on future systems design. We call it unigrid. What are we going to tell people? >> Well, one of the most exciting things is the new technologies that are coming in to the architecture, fundamental architecture of systems. Essentially, storage and networking are combining together to allow an any to any connection between lots and lots of nodes, not just the 16 or 32, up to thousands of nodes, to be able to access that data from any node, and do it at very, very low latencies, indeed. And the exciting thing that this is about is that this is the holy grail of what systems have been trying to do for many, many years. What the want to do is combine systems of record, which are database-heavy type applications, with systems of intelligence, AI systems, other systems of that sort, which can come in and add additional value. What is happening in this architecture is that you can get hundreds or thousands of times more data per unit of work, per transaction or whatever, and this is really, really exciting because we can, for the first time, do real time analytics at the same time, and into the same systems of the current systems, of systems of record. >> As we're writing transactions. >> David: As we're writing transactions. >> So this is unigrid. We think it's going to be a major feature of the industry, and have an enormous impact ultimately on how we think about designing this next wave of applications. All right. So, on Thursday, October 12th, special Wikibon teleconference. The Technology Foundation for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Strategies. Two o'clock Eastern. 11 o'clock Pacific. The key Wikibon team coming together to talk about from the business objectives through software, data protection, systems management, and all the way out to future systems designs. Please join us. We hope to see you there.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Good night everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are live here at VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Kevin Gray is here as the director of product marketing for hybrid cloud platforms at Dell EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> OK, so, we're here talking cloud, everybody's cloud crazy, but it seems like, as Peter said, the technology has matured. >> Kevin: Yeah. >> And we're actually at a point where we can deliver what we've been talking about for the past five or six years. So how does that relate to what you guys have, what are you showing here at the event, and what are customers saying? >> Peter: Yeah, what are the announcements? What's happening? >> Well, one of the things we're announcing is enhancements to Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. You've heard a lot at VMware about VMware Cloud Foundation with added support for the extract SDDC, which is our turnkey VMware cloud foundation platform. We've also enhanced support for VxRail, so we've added multi-site capabilities, so we now support up to four data center sites, and we've also added support for disaster recovery through Recover Point VM. We're also added support for native hybrid cloud, so with native hybrid cloud we now have a support for... we have a new turnkey platform for VxRail, and we're supporting our new access testing tool, which is really focused on helping developers, right? So what the access testing tool does is it really focuses on when companies are going through and really looking at re-factoring applications for things like when they're going to microservices, it has that ability to really go out and test to make sure the dependencies and services are still there. We also have a capability around called our Application Deployment Tool, which really pushes, as you look to push an application out to multiple instances of foundations of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, you can actually help, it does that in one push. So if you look at PCF, you can use a CF pushkim, and push it out to multiple instances, and in this case, it'll do that in one step. >> So that's all the things that you've done on an individual announcements basis in the tools, but Kevin, let's step back. Let's take the customer's perspective for a second. When you summarize all this-- >> Right. >> So you're standing in front of a customer and you're saying to the customer, "We are pointing towards this vision." >> Right. >> "We want you to be here with us." What is that here? Where do you want them to be as you start to think about designing and priority for this broad portfolio that you have? >> So you heard Bob talk a little bit about sort of customers buying more outcomes, per se, and one of the things you'll see, with for instance our native hybrid cloud, is that ability to really get a repeatable process with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. So if you look at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, they're moving real fast, right? They have a release every 90 days, pretty much, and you need to be on the latest release within nine months-- >> Let me make sure that I understand this. >> When you say "repeatable process "with Pivotal Cloud Foundry," what you're talking about is that the organization, the shop, can think about developing an application in Pivotal, deploying it out on Cloud Foundry, and then running it on whatever underlying hybrid or conversion for structure that they might want and being able to do that over and over and over, so they can increase their focus on the application function that they're generatng. Is that basically what you mean? >> Absolutely, and-- >> So it's that level of repeatability. Focus on the business problem, build it, and then take the pain and suffering out of deploying it wherever it needs to be. >> Absolutely, and maintaining it. So if we look at large customers, as I mentioned, one large financial institution was looking at how do they do this repeatably across multiple data center sites, right? And how do they keep pace with that change over time, you know? That's not an easy process when you're moving really fast, and it's just one of those things where they tried to do it themselves for a while and realized it's better to buy that outcome than to try and create it on their own. >> You know, Dave, I was talking to a large user here on the show floor not too long ago, yesterday, in fact, about the fact that DevOps is not taking the world by storm the way that many people thought it might, and he identified specifically, one of the reasons is because there's not enough support from the technology companies to start packaging and organizing their capabilities, their technology set, their product sets, to support a DevOps mentality. It almost sounds, you haven't said this, Kevin, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it almost sounds as if what you guys are saying is, we're going to start designing and packaging and organizing our systems to support that sort of DevOps orientation so the system administrators can evolve in the way that they need to evolve as the business demands new change. >> Yeah, so if you look at our hybrid cloud platforms, they're really intended to be that easy button for deploying either a full vRealize Suite, vRealize Suites stacked in our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, or Pivotal Cloud Foundry for native hybrid cloud. Another thing we introduced this week was our ready systems. We have ready systems for VMware and we have ready systems for Pivotal. If you look at the VMware ready system, one of the things we found, for VMware, one of the things we found was that many customers, if you look at Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, it gives you a lot of benefits that a lot of our large enterprise customers are looking for, so, it supports multiple sites, it supports disaster protection, and it supports a turnkey platform where it's an engineered system, but for a lot of customers, it meant that you were always a couple of releases behind. So we give them that experience, right? And we make it a little bit, we give them an opportunity with the ready system to get that support from VMware, where we'll take on the HCI piece and support it. Same thing with native hybrid cloud and our Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Pivotal ready system, you know, they'll get their support from PCF, from Pivotal, but they'll build it on HCI. And we're also introducing a Pivotal ready system based on PKS. And I think PKS is interesting, simply because if you look at the Kubernetes environment and the work that's been done with Kubo, it's really a platform that's more likely where people are going to want to build, right? If you look at those people that are doing it, they want more control over, you know, their build process and their pipeline, and therefore they're more likely to build, and with the PKS system, the ready system based on Pivotal, Pivotal ready system, they can get that outcome. >> So at the end of the day it's all about changing the operating model, >> Kevin: Absolutely. >> And having a business impact. Peter, we were in our Palo Alto studio, and one of our clients was in, very prominent end user and market practitioner, saying if you can't change the operating model, you know, you might get a little bit of business benefit, but if you're a large company, you're never going to take a billion dollars of cost out. So my question is, what are you guys seeing, are you being able to affect the operating model, and can you share any of your favorite examples or even generic sort of proof points? >> Sure, absolutely. We had one customer, CICC, they're a large HR outsourcer in China, and by implementing Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, they were able to accelerate the time it took to get new application services by 60%. This is simply a means of taking IT out of the middle and really being able to accelerate delivery of-- >> Peter: We're taking certain tasks-- >> Exactly. >> Peter: That IT performs. It's not necessarily taking IT out, it's taking those low-value tasks out, right? >> Kevin: Absolutely. You know, self-service portal pieces, exactly, so-- >> Dave: And then maybe re-deploying those resources to higher-value activities. >> Kevin: Absolutely. Right. So those are the types of outcomes. We also see, if you look at Pivotal and some of the capabilities they have, if you look at sort of traditional IT infrastructure we see many customers moving to, you know, daily, weekly releases, as opposed to, if you think of a traditional model, it would be a much longer process, so that's the type of outcome we see as well. >> Dave: Well, one of the things you've been saying for years, I think Benioff stole it from you, is there's going to be way more SAAS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies to your point, everybody's now a software company, and they're releasing code on a constant basis, but they're not technology companies, so they need help, right? >> He might not have stolen it from me, but it's a nice validation point. And I think we said it before he did. >> Just kidding, Marc. Alright, Kevin, hey thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate having you. >> Appreciate it. Thanks. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Las Vegas Mandalay Bay. Day three, VMworld 2017. We'll be right back. >> Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMWorld 2017 everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris. Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Converged Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, guys. Always a pleasure. >> It's been a good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the Influencer reception last night. Great shindig, thank you for that. >> Peter: Very much. >> Lot of momentum in this ecosystem: VMWAre, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, he has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? >> You know I see the spring in Pat's step, and I look at it and, you know I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. If you remember last year you remember Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMWare has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because, made some big bets, had a plan, and the bets are paying off. And most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy too this week, right? (laughter) So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion, and that's a cloud operating model. It's not a cloud. the cloud's an operating model not a place, and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you look at most large companies, maybe they have Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com. There's multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use on premise equipment, they want to cloud-ify that, right? Is how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on premise equipment, but then working with VMWare, working with Pivotal, is making easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. >> So, we've been talking all week, Peter is really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out to the data. But, the implication there, as you've talked about many times Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and other attributes of the cloud in order to make that brand promise come true, what we call true private cloud. So, what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? >> First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us. Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them. And, there's also preferences. They've got capex versus opex preferences. They're going to make decisions of on premises versus off premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLA's, latency. All these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data; data movement. And, then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself. Or, I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So, we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level, where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick vSAN. Then we have our Ready portfolio. vSAN Ready Nodes covers that, right? So, it's the easiest way to buy vSAN in a PowerEdge server. And, if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles. And then we start moving into where people are realizing I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So, I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, VxRack, VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the life cycle assurance, single contact support. That's from us. Then there's customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars. And VmWare is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent in on premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure, which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMWare, and VMWare taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize. They control the roadmap for that, they know how to do the lifecycle automation updates, so what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talks about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times, and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. There's VMWare, we have for Pivotal, we'll also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure, or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS on hyper-converged infrastructure. >> So Bob, you mentioned early on of having different overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMWare had a plan, and they've been executing about that plan. But, you also got a plan within the hyper-converged team, within the whole enterprise cloud team. So, software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of normal separation, just get the hardware and then you get the software. But, now we're seeing that because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together, talk a little bit about how you're influencing the VMWare plan and the VMWare plan is influencing the hardware side of things. >> You know it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. People were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises. And, it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMWare portfolio to market with full turn key system. Full stop, it's we own it, we will make this stuff work. So, the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich, and remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure, so you basing it on a SAN fabric, VMAX, All-Flash, XtremeIO data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really really hard, right? We don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is, it takes so long to test and QA the new VMWare, perfectly fine, very solid VMWare features, that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this, but for many customers, you end up having this misalignment, where VMWare's saying, "I want you to take these features now", and we're saying, "That's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud." So, what you've seen develop in the Ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world, there's not the largest pharmas or governments. Hyper-converged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of work loads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So, VMWare more takes the lead, on this is how we're going to package these up. This is our software suite. We know how to do life cycle. Together, you work on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which is also co-developed with them. And, it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers, if you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates, versus many thousands that are VMWare Ready system candidates. So, I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. >> So, we Chad on theCube yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions, and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. One of the things he said was, in anticipation of these cloud wars, or in these platform wars, I think was his term, that increasingly it is going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. Interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And, the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word, bind, how well does this bind to that, tell me about how your platform is going to bind to other platforms. And, automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that, as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions. The ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more. >> Right, so, I think it's spot on, first of all. And, if we look at two different use cases. The one use case of most customers today, VMWare customers, they're using the VMWare suite, environment on premises. VMWare actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM Cloud, to Google Cloud. And, for me the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds. You want to do it securely, protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that. NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMWare is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So, whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on, we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMWare doing that. And, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say, hundreds of customers where these are huge deals. These are $50 Million and up deals. Where you're providing incredible value all in, for all their different applications, right? And, most, you know the vast majority of customers today clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be and if the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So, we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that, in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies companies to work together to do this and the more we work together, another great thing happens, is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So, whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud we would have inherit conflict. Because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMWare is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where, when that little friction goes away and you have full alignment, so we're all on the same page, we're all the saying the same things, it's far more credible. >> Well, it also accelerates the customer. >> Bob: It sure does. >> And, I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. >> Yeah, we got to wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMWare is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said today, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. So, you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And, to I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about, forming the cloud model to your business, when you were describing sort of what you do for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise. It requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process, and a lot of good thinking. >> Right, and it is very, it's by definition, customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas, Ready, the Ready solutions portfolio I think are going to be huge. Just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you are ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's Ready Systems, right? If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And, high performance computing has been huge for us. Data analytics, increasingly I think those are connected together. So, there's synergy between the two of them. Then, the Ready nodes, for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself, this is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is, and we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But, it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know that I can help you wherever you are, we have something that is right for you. >> Alright, we got to wrap. Thanks Bob for coming on. Taking you on a journey of Vmworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in theCube. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. Keep right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCube. We're live from VMworld 2017. Be right back. (exciting music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017, brought to you by VM Ware, and it's eco system partners. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are here at VM World 2017 in Las Vegas. This is the eighth year of the Cube doing VM World, it started in Moscow and Moscow is under construction. So we're here back in Vegas. Although they've had VM World in Vegas a couple times. Collin Gallagher is here. He's the senior director of product marketing for Hyper Converged Infrastructure at Dell EMC. Collin, great to see you, thanks for coming to the Cube. >> Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. >> So first of all, how's the show going for you? >> Fantastic. Incredibly busy. As you can see, Hyper Converged is the hot thing yet again. I think last year was a big thing. But it's nice to see it's being... Customers are asking about it, you're seeing it in the keynotes. You know, the products being mentioned, Vsan, VXrail, et cetera. And just being swamped and busy and having a little bit of fun as well. >> So before we get into the announcements and we want to do that and give you the opportunity to talk about that, Peter and I and folks in the Cube have been talking all week, really all year. >> Peter: Yeah. >> About how customers are coming to the reality that I can't just reform my business and try to stuff it into the cloud, I really got to understand the realities of my business and bring the cloud model to the extent that I can, to the business. So what role does Hyper Converged play, in that context of bringing the cloud to my business? >> Well, I think Hyper Converged is the technology that allows you to do that. But as you bring out, as you mentioned, you have to also rethink about how you maintain your business, right? Because Hyper Converged consolidates you compute, your storage, your networking into one system. But that means that you may have to think about consolidating your storage teams, your compute teams and your networking teams as well. Right? And if you're going to keep them separate but merge the technology, there's going to be some impedance mismatched there. So Hyper Converged is an enabler for that, but it requires you to transform not just the technology, but also how you manage and staff your business as well. >> So I remember, I guess it was three years ago now, at VM World, you guys made the sort of first announcement of sort of software defined true Hyper Converged product and it's really evolved quite dramatically from then so maybe bring us up to where we are today and talk about some of the announcements that you made. >> Yeah, so... Yes, when Hyper Converged was announced a couple years ago, in a couple different products, but the point I was making a little bit earlier is that Hyper Converged is not just a single product. It's enabling technology. And much like Flash was five to seven year ago, it's going everywhere. >> Peter: It's a design approach. >> It's a design, exactly. >> Yeah, it's a design approach. And you're seeing it in appliances that have been very successful today, you're seeing it in larger rack scale systems, you're seeing it in software only systems, it depends on how and much, as you said, Dave, you want to transform right? You can do some of your build your own Hyper Converged stuff and not transform very much at all. You can do full turn-key cloud built on Hyper Converged, but that's going to require a vast degree of not just infrastructure transformation, but also work force transformation to go with it. >> Now, one of the things we've observed, Collin, and get some feedback from you on this is that... Cause we totally agree. In fact, we wrote a piece of research we called the Iron Triangle of IT and the fact that there is this very tight linking between people with skills, the automation that they use to manage products, that dictate the skills that dictate the automation, and breaking that as well. And a lot of our CIO clients are telling us, that you guy don't understand. The biggest problem I got is getting my people to work differently together. New processes, new approach to doing things. So one of the forcing funtions has been is historically when we think about designing systems to run work loads, we started with the CPU. We sized the CPU and then we did everything else. Now we start thinking about a lot of these data driven, digital oriented kinds of systems. We're thinking about something different. That catalyzed with this enormous performance improvements and storage over the last few year through Flash, vSAN related types of things. What are some of the new design principles that people have to factor as they start thinking about the role that Hyper Converged is going to play? >> So let me play off that. So yes, people design for the CPU because that was the bottle neck, right? Then as CPU performance grew, 5X, 10X, et cetera, they started designing for storage because that became the bottle neck, right? So part of your question is what's going to be the next bottleneck? Right? And I think you just had Chad talking on before. I think the network may be that upcoming bottleneck right now. You know, particularly in the Hyper Converged world where everything is connected through the network. That's your back plan. It's a different approach to storage. So designing around your network capabilities or your network infrastructure, you know, deploying Hyper Converged in a branch office with one GIG is very different than deploying Hyper Converged in a data center with 25 GIG and how you do it. So that's one, but I think Hyper Converged is all about balance in general, right. There's a fixed ratio depending on the product implementation of storage to compute, right? And generally they like to be in the Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much CPU, just... Not too CPU heavy or not too much storage heavy. And I think as Hyper Converged is going more mainstream and more normal, it's pushing those subtle boundaries there. And I think things like flexing out to the cloud when you need additional storage or additional compute capability, is one of those design considerations you need to take into account as you're deploying Hyper Converged because, as you said, you're designing around constraints and there's some physical constraints you have to manage and you have to figure out how you can tap into some of the extra ones. >> So literally it's start with the outcomes, identify the data that's associated with those outcomes, figure out the physical characteristics necessary to apply and process and move that data or not move it. And use that as the starting point for the design considerations. Being very cognitive, going back to what Chad was talking about, that at the end of the day, it's the network that's binding these things and how far out is a protocol going to go, local versus wide area. >> I'm going to steal something that I read on Twitter the other day, that data is the new oil. Alright, and that's how you run your business. And just like how you ship oil to and from, from a well to a refinery, to finally to your gas station pump, you have to think of it, what's your data chain and how you get it and where you need to move it. >> So that's a term that we started using in the Cube in, I don't know, 2010. But what we found is that data is plentiful, but insights aren't. And so you see organizations really spending a lot of time, money, energy, trying to get to those insights, to give them competitive advantage and a new infrastructure emerging to support those. So I wonder, Collin, if you could talk about the portfolio, the products that you sort of look after and tie it into some of the things that you've announced this week. >> Yeah. So I look after our VM or Hyper Converged systems so Vxrail and Vxrack SDDC. You know, both jointly developed with VM Ware. I'm sure you've heard Pat and everybody else talk about them so if you've been watching any of the keynotes. But we also have a much larger portfolio. We have our Vsan ready nodes for customers who want to do it themselves, want to build their own systems. And again, that's, as we talk about degree of transformation, that allows customers to get into the Hyper Converged space, but not significantly transform how they're managing their business. We have the appliances. Obviously our Vxrail systems. So by the way, the news with the Vsan ready nodes is we're announcing them available on the Dell Poweredge 14G Platforms. Those are available now to order. On our Vxrail appliances, and the rest of the portfolio that'll be out on the 14G platform by the end of the year. But what's new with Vxrail, we're announcing Vxrail 4 dot 5, which provides life cycle management orchestration for the latest and greatest VM Ware software stacks. So Vsan, 6 dot 5, Vsan 6 dot 6 Vsphere 6 dot 5. So both of those are out now and available. With all the great goodness that you've seen and heard about them. We're also announcing new configuration options for our Vxrack SDDC platform. So that's our much larger, it's the big brother to Vxrail, fully turn-key, you know, software defined data center infrastructure including NSX, all managed under one umbrella. >> So a higher-end solution? >> It's a much higher-end solution. Much higher for larger... Not necessarily scale because you know, it's not necessarily scale because you can start pretty small. As low as-- >> Peter: But still organized, coherent, well-packaged. >> But you have to, again, if we're talking about degrees of transformation, if you go with an appliance, okay you manage your compute and storage together. If you're going with a rack scale system, your managing the network as part of that as well. So that's another degree of transformation you have to be willing to make. So that's what's really the big difference between the two. New configuration options, up to 40 different hardware configs available now for that so really driven by customer choice. I want lower powered CPU's for certain workloads, I want higher powered CPU's, I want more all Flash choices, so really flush that portfolio out. And then lastly, we're announcing, our EHC and NHC platforms from Dell EMC are available built on Vxrack SDDC as well. >> EHC acronym? >> Collin: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. >> And? >> Native Hybrid Cloud. EHC and NHC, sorry. Both of those two systems, which had run on our Vblock infrastructure before, are now running on Vxrack SDDC as well. So you get fully turn-key hybrid cloud built on top of an HCI system. >> And when you think of a EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, and Native Hybrid Cloud, NHC, can you talk about the work loads? That customers should think about putting on each? >> Yeah, so EHC is much more for traditional workloads. For customers who are looking to get into hybrid cloud. Actually, we see a lot of, our number one customer for someone who buys EHC, is they've tried to build cloud on their own and failed. They want something turn-key, they don't want to make the same mistakes again, they have the scars, and they want something easier and simpler than building it themselves. But that is traditional workloads, your traditional data center workloads managed in a cloud environment. NHC, our Native Hybrid Cloud product is for cloud native workloads, it's actually turn-key pivotal systems. So it's PSC based so if you're deploying workloads that will run in pivotal and you want it as a test dev system in house, or you want to run that in house and then migrate it later to the cloud, that's what NHC is for. >> Okay, we got to leave it there. But I'll give you a last word on VM World 2017, cloud, Hyper Converged, a lot of new innovation. What's your bumper sticker, Collin, on the show? >> My bumper sticker is again, HCI is primetime, it's here, I used to say that, customers, when I started this job two years ago would tell me, "tell me why I need HCI?" And what customers are asking me now is, last year was, "tell me how I use HCI?" and this year it's "tell me where I can't use HCI?" So there's been this waterfall shift in how they're looking at doing it. >> Dave: So they like it, they're trying to apply it. >> Peter: What is it? How it works? And what's the impact? >> Dave: And I want to apply it in as many places as possible. Where are my blind spots? >> Yeah, where doesn't it fit? What are the constraints where it doesn't fit? >> Collin Gallagher, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, Dave. >> Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back, this is Dave Vellante. For Peter Burris, this is the Cube. We're live at VM World 2017 and we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: It's the Cube. Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform. And HANA Enterprise Cloud. (electronic music) >> Welcome to the Cube everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jason Kotsaftis who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there, full team down there. I know, normally we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio. But EMC's always been on the cube. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done the cube in 2010. >> Jason: That's right, yes, I remember. >> You were that SAP Sapphire. >> You guys were. You were on the Cube. You've been with us for awhile, but the relationship with an SAP, and EMC, now Dell EMC, it's pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP, and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So, yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show, and I thought that really helped set the stage for, not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now, and we're we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after Cloud, go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. >> Well surely SAP, the theme is Cloud, Multi-Cloud is a big message. >> SAP Cloud platform, we had Dan Lahl on the Cube. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud group there also, got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service, Terry Wise, there. We all saw Century Link. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you're starting to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, we'll help people with settling in. Whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a bad way. But it's so big. EMC was already very powerful, and winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, the sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know, we know them. Dell has been lean and mean, like a speed boat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together and now the supplier relationships are changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relations. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. >> Correct. >> You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture dealings changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? >> Sure, you know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary. And we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years right. So I had worked with Dell 10-15 years ago. Very, very complimentary, and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market historically, we're very good at another. You know, for the most part I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is, we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So, HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC world last week, every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. We had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems. And at Dell they have a very good packaged appliances and Scale Up bundles. And right now we feel like we can address the whole breath of what people may want to do with HANA. Whether it's, TDI, Scale Up, Scale Out. Very, very strong and >> John: Where does HANA fit in, because I want you to just take a minute to explain this, because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early. It was great marketing from the beginning, You know, it has legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as SAP changed, they changed from their positioning. Specifically, they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform. And they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they've renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform, which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud, which is really the managed service. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today. And where is is settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP? But how's it relate to all these new things? >> Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics. Collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon, and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications. If we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So it's part of the HANA transformation, where we're going to be getting them, hopefully, on the road to, not just take advantage of HANA today, but as they go forward how are they going to get ready for S4 and have, hopefully, a smooth migration path to that. >> Obviously their cloud platform, I mean, their cloud strategy, or cloud direction. I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy. As Michael Dell said, Clouds like the internet, it's everything. >> Jason: Right. >> So, there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on premise and off premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple Clouds, unlike say Oracle, for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is, is that on premise there's still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing over night. So the on prem Cloud dynamic is interesting, cuz they used the word mission critical. That was a big buzz word with when I talked to Michael Dell, He banged home mission critical. A lot of the teams in Dell EMC World last week was around mission critical work loads and choice. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP, how is that translating for you guys? Big new business, new opportunities? >> Great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space was Virtustream. So they've been a really big off premise cloud provider for us, but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building at EMC even before that we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together. So we can have people have an off premise and an on premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud, and to the point of mission critical like you said is, as much as we see people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in the EHC and Virtustream we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. >> John: What's EHC? >> The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self service automation of software framework that we put around the cloud. >> Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? >> Right now it's our cloud offering. >> So you have a public cloud. >> We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. That you can deploy on premise or off premise, and Virtustream has been historically used off premise. >> So you use Virtustream as your off premise component of that piece? >> Correct. >> That makes sense. Cuz you bought them in January, I get that. >> That's right, and we had to bring the two together, and that's been a big new step for us. In that regard we think it's very, very complementary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right. We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archive, all the things that they do there, they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. >> So what's the big news for SAP this year, obviously we saw the coverage, we got some folks calling in, we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input, but from an SAP EMC, Dell, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news, what's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with, what's the announcements, be specific. >> The big news is we're all about the cloud. The bringing together of the on premise and off premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtustream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud based model, whether it be on premise or off premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. >> You guys released that was a hard news that went out for you guys or... >> Yeah it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out, the other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced but are more things that help the day to day administration of SAP applications, we often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we all talk about cloud. >> So there's no big splash in the pool like, hey we're releasing a new VxRail version of whatever, it's momentum specific. >> Correct. >> What are the big momentum's you plan, you can look back now and we've seen a lot of the evolution, we've seen the relationship with SAP grow, we've seen the converge infrastructure movement, now going to a whole nother level, hybrid cloud and converge infrastructure is happening. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud, it's generically cloud. What's specifically, can the customer pinpoint that you guys have solved? >> I think you just touched upon it, it's the whole build versus buy model. So historically if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the op ex. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. >> You mean like total cost of ownership stuff, just like, easing some of the pain between deployment and costing. >> Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery, all the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. >> Those are the details you got to get down and dirty on. >> Yeah. We've done some great studies with you guys on this, one of the things that, there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and get it together. >> All the provisioning pain that goes with it. >> Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a Vblock, and then we build VxRacks and VxRails. >> Vblock was so successful, it really was, you did a good job of that. >> Yeah, a lot of customers from the SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family, and we've been bringing that in to not only Racks and Rails, but looking at that in terms of building what we call Ready Bundles, where we can actually deliver as a single... >> Think about this ready solution, because the thing that got me at Dell EMC World was two things. The purpose built mission continued, I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data backup protection and backup with the cloud. With the cloud as a new disruptor. For some reason backup and recoveries, clearly different in the cloud than it is on prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas, and then also, dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. >> Yeah, ready solutions was a huge thing, and this is part of the merger we rebranded our solutions organizations into one. Our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy, so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage, which ones do I put together for what reason. We want to give them that menu of choice, whether it's a single node, a bundle of components, or an actual system, and deploy that in any way they want. >> What can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team VZB, with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans, what's the continued momentum playbook? >> Some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the Dell blueprints page where we have all our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA, you'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes, and you'll be seeing much more formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. >> And cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different, great capabilities, people going in analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the cloud. So seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. Dev tests, even though Oracle says dev tests is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting for instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there, in the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery, and by the way you guys have some of the best solutions out there that will data domain, scratch record goes to history, but now it goes to the cloud. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? >> Well I think on the one hand there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical, like you said we have great integrated offerings to the workload, so you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it, it's really up to you. As people go into the cloud I think they have to decide, what's the tiering strategy they want to approach that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, how's that going to, >> Where the hell is the data going? >> Where's the data going, is it safe and secure, and how does that relate to how they're protecting their on premise data. I mean from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that. Whether it's long term data retention, short term backup and recovery, yep. >> Question for you, this is a test, a real time cube test. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors. What is the most, what are the biggest two waves that the customers should be surfing in the enterprise, top two most important waves? >> I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave I think is separate from that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of, with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that, that's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy.. >> So data basically, cloud and data are the two big waves. >> Yeah, digital transformation of data and taking advantage of that data. >> Well they go hand in hand, cuz you got the scale of the cloud for compute and other things, data drives the digital chest of digitalized data, digital assets are data, right, everything's data. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. >> Yes. >> Jason, thanks so much for coming on the Cube special coverage and final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire, I know you got a relationship, you're probably going to be like oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight, what's going on with SAP. What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective. >> I think there's a great opportunity to your point, but there's also a good challenge, cuz we're going through a merger. I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together, and SAP's being a great partner helping working with us. >> And you're cool with them now, you guys feel good about SAP. >> We feel great about them, we use them in our own environment at Dell as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship >> Jeremy's been a remote telecast performer at EMC World. >> As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, we talked a little bit about Oracle over the years, that's fluctuated. >> I was dating myself the other day on a Cube gig, and I said, oh it's a Barney deal, which my language was, you know, no real deal, cuz Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watched, you know, I love you, you love me, it's kind of a love fest, but nothing happens. It's called a Barney deal. I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. >> Oh I remember, we used to joke about him when I was in alliances, we called them Barney meetings. You got a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk and nothing would happen. >> You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP, it's pretty deep across the board, SAP has good relationships, I got to say, they tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, it's pretty obvious. Thank you Jason, so much. Jason Kotsaftis, who's the senior director of the database solutions group with Dell EMC joining us for a special three day coverage of Sapphire now from our studio. Great week, we had Informatica World in San Francisco, Google IO going on today as well, we've got live coverage today with Rob Hove, also VeeamOn is in New Orleans, Dave Vellante is there, and I'm in SAP Sapphire. A lot of coverage for events for the Cube, stay with us more for live coverage after this short break. (techno music)