(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the cube's coverage here at IBM Think 2018. We are in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay, for IBM Think. Six shows are coming into one packed house. We have two great guests here, Brian Wallace, who's the CTO of Insurance for DXC technologies, and we have, Bala, The Bala, but goes by Bala, banking and capital markets CTO for DXC technologies. Guys, welcome to the cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It's our pleasure, yeah, thanks. >> So, the innovation sandwich, I'm calling it IBM strategy. You've got in the middle, the meat, is data. And the bread is blockchain and AI. Two really fundamental technologies powered by cloud and a variety of other things. Obviously, AI is disrupted, we know what that looks like. Block Chain now emerging as a viable infrastructure enabler that's creating token economics, a lot of cool things, certainly on the banking side, seeing a lot of controversy. Block Chain really is driving it. You guys are out on the front lines. You're doing a lot crowd chats, been following your digital transformation story that you guys have been putting out there. Really you're on this. So, what's the conversations like that you guys are having with block chain and AI; Share? >> Bala: So, let me begin with a couple of quick points on block chain. DXC has done some fantastic work around the world leveraging both the trust capability that block chain brings to bear in financial banking industry use cases, like KYC for instance, institutional KYC in particular, but also, in simplification of entire value chains such as lending. And we're doing very interesting work in lending where not only are we looking at the up-front origination process of lending but also the downstream securitization. Which is where the tokenization of principle and interest payments and those type of things happen. >> John: Energy too? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So there are a number of these creating type use cases that follow into securitization. And with that, we're doing some very interesting work. >> John: Bala, talk about the globalization because one of the things we're seeing in the US a shrinking middle class, but outside the US in emerging markets, a growing middle class. Thanks to mobile technology, thanks to data, thanks to block chain, you're seeing, you know, countries that "hey, we have infrastructure but we don't have the core and modern infrastructure but you throw in a decentralized capability, You've got all these capabilities, and the killer app in all this is money. You're in, that's your vertical. >> Bala: Yes. >> That's your industry. The killer app is money and marketplaces. Your thoughts? >> Bala: I think, the beauty of what these technologies are doing, is for the first time creating financial inclusion to happen and the very first case of where financial inclusion is enabled, is in payments. So, when we open up the banking system predominantly from a payment perspective, which is what things like blockchain and others enable, if we succeed in doing that, then for the first time we've enabled, that's 2 billion people unbanked or underbanked-2 billion. >> John: Yeah. >> Bringing them into this financial system allows for. >> And some people are discriminated against too because they don't have a track record. Banks can't handle some of the things that others are now filling the void with crypto and blockchain. >> Bala: Right, or they can't service them profitably. But for the first time now, you're looking at the economics that cloud, and AI, and blockchain, these technologies bring, not just into banking and capital markets areas but into insurance and I'd love to have my colleague, Brian, talk with the insurance cases are enabled as well. >> John: Brian, insurance- go. >> Yeah, so it's a slightly different dynamic. There it's the, if you think about the fundamental pattern of blockchain it's around eliminating a central or a middle-man or a central, you know, gatekeeper, if you will. And the entire insurance industry is largely made up of middle-men, right? You've got people with risk at one end and you've got sources of capital at the other end and everybody's playing a role between a broker, and a carrier, and a re-insurer. In sort of facilitating that management and that transfer of risk. >> John: So you've got to extract some efficiencies out of that. Business model opportunity. >> So efficiencies, there's a lot of conversations around efficiencies, around automation, but interestingly, it's around the disruptive business model, right? The technology is mildly interesting but it's the new business models that blockchain will enable. >> John: Yeah, I see banking picking up. The early adopter on blockchain but I see, maybe it lagging a bit in insurance but I definitely see some opportunity there. But short term, data is driving insurance because, you know, I don't have a Tesla but my friend has a Tesla. The insurance company will know exactly who is rolling through those stop signs. They know everything that he's doing, All the data is there, so AI becomes really the low hanging fruit for insurance in that industry. Do you agree with that? Comment, reaction? >> Brian: Yeah, and we're just at the beginning, right? Because as you say, data is the asset that we manage. So we have a lot of data in terms of transactional data, the traditional operational data. What we're discovering, and what we're sort of licking our lips over almost is all of this new unstructured data, whether it's sensor data, behavioral data, and you're right, 'cause the challenge that we had around automation and cognitive computing, if you will. We're here at IBM with the Watson tech, was enough data, and the consistency and quality of that data. So we have that now, and we're making tremendous strides around in particular here, with the Watson brand, and the Watson cognitive. >> John: You know, one of the things I wish, was Dan Hutches was here, he's not, he's the CTO in charge. You've guys have been doing all these crowd chats our software that we wrote. That's pretty interesting. I've personally enjoyed all the conversations and give a shout out to Dan and you guys for really great conversation. You guys know what you're talking about. It's clear in the data you guys are taking an outside-in approach and collaborating. But your topics are on target. You're talking about digital transformation kind of holistically, but then you start to dive down into specific use cases. So, Bala, what is the favorite, or the most popular digital disruptive topic that's being discussed within DXC and your clients and in the marketplace? >> So, at the outset, within DXC, as digital transformation takes hold with our customers and we aim to be the premier provider of that enablement, what we've realized ourselves is that we provide a lot of services to our clients across many industries but there are commonalities across what we provide in terms of service delivery. And so it made sense for us to, number one: look at the commonalities and create a platform that was common across industries, across offerings that we bring to the marketplace. That commonality is what we call internally, and externally now, as bionics. And it's a platform that we are bringing forward that for the first time ties together what we are talking about both here at this event but also with our clients. Ties together intelligence, orchestration, and automation which are the fundamental, >> John: It's called bionics? >> Bionics. And internally we call it platform DXC upon which all of our offerings and services are brought to market. >> John: Well there's disruption going on in your business. So, I want to talk about, double-down on that for a second. I'm seeing a trend, certainly in the public sector market where the use cases are well enough defined. So you're seeing automatic code generation becoming a real part of the delivery process. Now, what that's going to do is essentially, think of provisioning and configuration management in cloud. If you could apply actual process code that you've done before in the commonalities, this is going to change the delivery timeframe. So you're looking at essentially auto-provisioning software. Not just like, configuration management resources. No, I'm saying here's a value chain, here's a block chain, here's some AI, just configure it like a LEGO block, push. That could take months to deliver the old way. >> Bala: Right. >> Your thoughts to that? Are you guys on that? Do you guys see that as something that's going to be an opportunity for you? Some companies, I've seen, Global system integrator, is being disrupted by this, cause they don't have this. New SI's, new system integrators, are thinking this way and that's a DevOps mindset. Are you prepared for that, do you see it coming? And what's your answer to that? >> So we saw that coming about 3 and a half plus years ago. And our shift away from being a pure SI began then. And so we are an SI, but we are a service integrator rather than a systems integrator. And we began that trend in our journey, 3 plus years ago. And the reason we began that trend was what you pointed out. Today, infrastructure is delivered as a code. So not even as a service but as a code, and so imagine provisioning infrastructure and all the capabilities that ride on it, just as code. And that's where this is headed. In that model, we become provider and provisioner of services, rather than just a system. >> John: And the cost structure is completely changed because the services, Amazon has proven, and now IBM is following suit with their power platform and other things, that you can actually have the kind of compute but it's a catalog of services. So this is going to change the price competitiveness. So you know, big bids, that used to be billions of dollars, you guys can compete. I mean, am I seeing it right? >> Brian: That transition's already, that ship's sailed, so to speak, in terms of the large outsourcing deals the large, where there's apps or infrastructure, it's all moving to digital transformation consumption based commercial models. And it's really bionics that Bala mentioned a minute ago, that is our answer to the threat you described a minute ago. It's really about automating and digitizing and building intelligence into the entire, if you will, build, deliver, operate value chain of our business. >> John: Talk about the multi-vendor, multi-choice, technology-choice, as your customers and people in general on this journey of digital transformation. They have to make, they used to make technology decisions. Now they're making business logic decisions around how to reconfigure their value chains to optimize for new efficiencies and extract away inefficiencies. Blockchain is a great example, AI is another, automation is in the middle, all the cloud. So you have now business logic as the risk, technology not so much because infrastructure as code has proven that you can have server-less, you can have all kinds of coolness that can be managed in an agile way. So the business model aspect is key. How are you guys dealing with that, cause I know you're here at the IBM Think Show, their partner. I see you at the Amazon shows. We see you guys everywhere. So you're horizontally scaling. By design, is that what customers want? What is the DXC view on this? >> So our value proposition has always had partners as the key element of what we do. And so if you look at what we do, you can look at it from two perspectives. One, proprietary ways of thinking, proprietary systems are long since gone. >> And waterfall methodologies, gone, dead. >> Yes, those are all long since gone. >> If you're still doing that, note to self: you're going to be out of business. >> Exactly, so we've actually hinged a lot of what we do on our offerings, our capabilities, and so on around openness, around open source, and so forth. So that's number one. Number Two: In this world, it's no longer about just DXC or just IBM or just somebody, one person bringing everything to our clients. It's about how do you engage proactively and build co-innovation and co-services with our partners and bring that to our clients. >> I mean, IBM just announced that a deal with Google. They've got tensorflow and their deal. So you have all kinds of melting pot. Okay, let's talk about blockchain again. Go back to my favorite topic. So, if you look up that stack, you've got blockchain, you've got cryptocurrency, protocols, and what-not, mentioned securitization, you've got security tokens, you've got utility tokens. You can almost see where this is going. And then you've got on top of that, what's coming, is a mass in-migration of decentralized application developers. Okay, kind of cloud plus. You know, they know cloud, they know DevOps, infrastructure as code, but they're looking at it from a decentralization standpoint, different makeup. And you see, ICOs, initial coin offerings, I think this is an application of you know, inefficiencies around capital markets but that's, you know, put that aside for a second. But blockchain, crypto currency, and decentralized applications, how do you guys see that trend? What are you guys doing? Are you integrating it in? You mentioned token economics, you're in the banking field. Your thoughts on that? >> Bala: Sure, on the blockchain front, as I mentioned to you, there are a number of platforms that are out there. There is the R3 Corda platform. There's a platform that JPMorgan initiated that we're leveraging as well. >> John: Yeah, so they pooh-poohed Bitcoin but then they're back in the game again. (laughter) >> Bala: Yes, that's right. And then there is the Hyperledger Fabric as well. So these platforms are going to take their course of evolution and we are working across all of those platforms. Now, the more interesting thing that you mentioned is people and skills. What we've find today in the marketplace is with our clients is a dramatic shortage of skills in these areas. And so internally, what we have done at DXC is actually open our own service delivery to a vast pool of developers that you talked about earlier as being freelance, independent folks. We open our entire service delivery to them as well. And we look at that global talent pool for our own service delivery. >> Using community as a way to scale. >> Bala: Using communities, yes. And that's exactly what we're doing in our talent process. It's not just about our people, our employees, but our partners as well as what exists in the open marketplace. >> Brian, talk about the insurance area as a way to tease out other trends. Specifically, the question is What is the biggest things that people know they're walking into? What's the tail-wind that they see, that's going to give them hope? And then, What's the head-winds? What are the blockers? And what should they be aware of? What are some of the marketplace dynamics that translate into other industries? >> Brian: Well, let's start with the obvious blocker is legacy debt, right? So you talked about the risk of all that business knowledge, that domain expertise, that's all today encapsulated in existing, what you may call legacy systems, right? So that's the head-wind by far. The tail-wind is that unlike, say 15 years ago, and we were in the last sort of, dot-com boom, when it was all about the front office and customer experience, the customer is way ahead of us. So culturally, the customer is challenging industry to catch up. So that's the tail-wind in my mind. And the real opportunity is to think about it in terms of a dual agenda. So think about it in terms as progressively, simultaneously building new digital capability, whilst ultimately beginning to unbundle and tackle that legacy debt. And I think customers now are starting to see a path forward. We're in the market in both banking and insurance with digital platforms, with industry resource models, API fabrics that can go back in, modernize legacy systems. So there's a real fast time to market. >> And it changes your engagement with clients. It's not a one and done, you're sticking through the service layer. >> Brian: Oh it's a journey, but the difference, I think, between DXC and a lot of other people is that we are in the market, in production, with real assets. And you can show that journey. So it just becomes a conversation around what's your pain point? Where are you starting from? Where do you want to go? >> And you're bringing the community in to help on the delivery side, everyone wins. >> Brian: And that community is a combination of three things. That's our own employees, obviously within the industry, and within our offerings that know banking, that know insurance. It's all of the DXC people in the horizontals. Because we're bringing everything now. These platforms encapsulate infrastructure, security, service management, analytics, mobility, all of that is built into these platforms. And then, it's going out into our partner community. And then, it's going out into the open community. And we're tapping into all of those. >> John: Brian and Bala, thanks so much. 2 power CTOs here on the Cube, having a CTO conversation around how scale, cloud, AI, blockchain, new technologies are enabling new business models at a faster pace of change, with a lower cost structure, and more time to value. Again, it's all about the value creation. The killer app is money and marketplaces and community. Guys, thanks so much for sharing. I'm John Furrier here at IBM Think 2018 Cube Studios. More after this short break. (electronic music)

Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to Wikibon's Action Item. (electronic music) Every week, we bring together the Wikibon research team and we present the action items that we believe are most crucial for users to focus on against very important topics. This week, I'm joined by George Gilbert, David Floyer, here in the Cube studios in Palo Alto. And on the phone we have Ralph Phinos, Dave Vellante, and Jim Kobielus. Thank you guys, thank you team for being part of today's conversation. What were going to talk about today in Action Item is the notion of what we're calling enterprise hyperscale. Now we're going to take a route to get there that touches upon many important issues, but fundamentally the question is, at what point should enterprises choose to deploy their own hardware at scale to support applications that will have a consequential business impact on their shareholder, customer, and employee value? Now to kick us off here, 'cause this is a very complex topic, and it involves a lot of different elements, David Floyer, first question to you. What is the core challenge that enterprises face today as they think about build, buy, or rent across this increasingly mushed hardware continuum, or system continuum? >> So the biggest challenge from the traditional way that enterprises have put together systems is that the cost and the time to manage these systems is going up and up. And as we go from just systems of record, to with analytic systems being mainly in bash mode, towards systems of intelligence where the real-time analytics are going to combine in with the systems of record. So the complexity of the systems and the software layers are getting more and more complicated. And it takes more and more time and effort and elapsed time to keep things current. >> Why is it that not everybody can do this, David? Is there a fundamental economic reason to play here? >> Well, if you take systems, and build them yourself and put them together yourself, you'll always end up with the cheapest system. The issue is that the cost of maintaining those systems, and even more, the elapsed time cost of maintaining those systems, the time to value to putting in new releases, etc., has been extending. And there comes a time when that cost of delaying implementing new systems overwhelms the cost that you can save in the hardware itself. >> So there's some scale efficiencies in thinking about integration from a time standpoint. Dave Vellante, we've been looking at this for quite some time, and we think about true private could, for example. But if you would, kind of give us that core dynamic in simple terms between what is valuable to the business, what isn't valuable to the business, and the different options between renting and buying your cells, what is that kind of core dynamic at play? >> OK, so as we talked about a lot in our true private cloud research, hyper-converged systems are an attempt to substantially mimic public cloud environments on-prem. And this creates this bifurcated buying dynamic that I think is worth exploring a little bit. The big cloud players, as everybody talks about, have lots of engineers running around, they have skill, and they have time. So they'll spend time to build proprietary technologies and use their roll-your-own components to automate processes. In other words, they'll spend time to save money. And this is essentially the hyperscale as a form of their R&D, and they have an end-year lead, whatever it's five, six, four years on the enterprise. And that's not likely to change, that dynamic. The enterprise buyers, on the other hand, they don't have the resources, they're stretched thin, so they'll spend money to save time. So enterprises they want to cut labor costs, and shift useless IT labor to so-called vendor R&D. To wit, our forecasts show that about $150 billion is going to come out of low-value IT operations over the next ten years, and will shift to integrated products. >> So ultimately we end up seeing the vendors effectively capturing a lot of that spend that otherwise had been internally. Now this raises a new dynamic, when we think about this, David Floyer, in that there are still vendors that have to return something to their shareholders. There's this increased recognition that businesses or enterprises want this cloud experience, but not everybody is able to offer it, and we end up then with some really loosely-defined definitions. What's the continuum of where systems are today, from traditional all the way out to cloud, what does that look like? >> So a useful way of looking at it is to see what has happened over time and where we think it's going. We started with separate systems completely. Converged systems then came in, where the vendor put them together and reduced the time a little bit to value. But really the maintenance was still a responsibility of-- >> [Peter] But what was brought together? >> [David F] It was the traditional arrays, it was the servers-- >> Racks, power supplies-- >> All of that stuff put together, and delivered as a package. The next level up was so-called hyper-converged, where certainly some of the hyperconverged vendors went and put in software for each layer, software for the storage layer, software for the networking layer, put in more management. But a lot of vendors really took hyperconverged as being the old stuff with a few extra flavors. >> So they literally virtualized those underlying hardware sources, got some new efficiencies and economies. >> That's right, so they software virtualized each of those components. When you look at the cloud vendors, just skipping one there, they have gone hyperscale. And they have put in, as Dave spoke earlier, they have put in all of their software to make that hyperscale work. What we think in the middle of that is enterprise hyperscale, which is coming in, where you have the what we call service end. We have that storage capability, we have the networking capability, and the CPU capabilities, all separated, able to be scaled in whatever direction is required, and any processor to be able to get at any data through that network, with very, very little overhead. And it's software for the storage, it's software and firmware for the networking. The processor is relieved of all that processing. We think that architecture is going to mimic what the hyperscale have. But the vendors now have an opportunity of putting in the software to emulate that cloud experience, and take away from the people who want on-site equipment, take away all of the work that's necessary to keep that software stack up to date. The vendors are going to maintain that software stack as high as they can go. >> So David, is this theory, or are there practical examples of this happening today? >> Oh, absolutely, there are practical examples of those happening. There are practical examples at the lower levels, with people like Micron and SolidScale. That's at a technology level, when we're talking about hyperscale-- Well if you're looking at it from a practical point of view, ARCOL have put it into the marketplace. ARCOL cloud on-premises, ARCOL converged systems, where they are taking the responsibility of maintaining all of the software, all the way up to the database stack. And in the future, probably beyond that, towards the ARCOL applications as well. So they're taking that approach, putting it in, and arguing, persuasively, that the customer should focus on time to value as opposed to cost of just the hardware. >> Well we can also look at SaaS vendors right, who many of the have come off of infrastructure as a service, deployed their own enterprise hyperscale, increasingly starting to utilize some of this hyperscale componentry, as a basis for building things out. Now one of the key reasons why we want to do this, and George I'll turn it to you, is because as David mentioned earlier, the idea is we want to bring analytics and operations more closely together to improve automation, augmentation, other types of workloads. What is it about that effort that's encouraging this kind of adoption of these new approaches? >> [George] Well databases typically make great leaps forward when we have changes in the underlying trade-offs or relative price performance of compute storage and networking. What we're talking about with hyperscale, I guess either on-prem or the cloud version, is that we can build scale out that databases can support without having to be rewritten, so that they work just the way they did on tightly-coupled symmetric multiprocessors, shared memory. And so now they can go from a few nodes, or half a dozen nodes, or even say a dozen nodes, to thousands. And as David's research has pointed out, they have latency to get to memory in any node from any node in five microseconds. So building up from that, the point is we can now build databases that really do have the horsepower to handle the analytics to inform the transactions in the same database. Or, if you do separate them, because you don't want to touch a current system of record, you have a very powerful analytic system that can apply more data and do richer analytics to inform a decision in the form of a transaction, than you could with traditional architectures. >> So it's the data that's driving the need for a data-rich system that's architected in the context of data needs, that's driving a lot of this change. Now, David Floyer, we've talked about data tiering. We've talked about the notion of primary, secondary, and tertiary data. Without revisiting that entirely, what is it about this notion of enterprise hyperconverge that's going to make it easier to naturally place data where it belongs in the infrastructure? >> Well underlying this is that moving data is extremely expensive, so you want to, where possible, move the processing to the data itself. The origin of that data may be at the edge, for example, in IOT. It may be in a large central headquarters. It may be in the cloud, it may be operational data, end-user data, for people using their phones, which is available from the cloud. So there are multiple sources. So you want to place the processing as close to that data as possible so that you have the least cost of both moving it, and you have the lowest latency. And that's particularly important when you've got systems of intelligence where you want to combine the two. >> So Jim Kobielus, it seems as though there's a compelling case to be made here to focus on time, time to value, time to deploy, on the one hand, as well as another aspect of time, the time associated with latency, the time associated with reducing path length, and optimizing for path length. Which again has a scale impact. What are developers thinking? Are developers actually going to move the market to these kinds of solutions, or are they going to try to do something different? >> I think what developers will do is that they will begin to move the market towards hyperconverged systems. Much of the development that's going on now is for artificial intelligence, deep learning, and so forth, where you're building applications that have an increasing degree of autonomy, being able to make decisions based on system of record data, system of engagement data, system of insight data, in real time. What that increasingly requires, Peter, is a development platform that combines those different types of data bases, or data stores, and also combines the processing for deep learning, machine learning, and so forth. On devices that are increasingly tinier and tinier, and embedded in mobile devices and what not. So what I'm talking about here is an architecture for development where developers are going to say, I want to be able to develop it in the cloud, I'm going to need to. 'Cause we have huge teams of specialists who are building and training and deploying and iterating these in a cloud environment, a centralized modeling context, but then deploying their results of their work down to the smallest systems where these models will need to run, if not autonomously, in some loosely-coupled fashion with tier two and tier three systems, which will also be hyperconverged. And each of those systems in each of those tiers will need a self-similar data fabric, and an AI processing fabric. So what developers are saying is, I want to be able to take it and model it, and deploy it to these increasingly nano-scopic devices at the edge, and I need each of those components at every tier to have the same capabilities and hyperconverged form factors, essentially. >> For hyperscale, so here's where we are, guys. Where we are is that there are compelling economic reasons why we're going to see this notion of enterprise hyperscale emerge. It appears that the workloads are encouraging that. Developers seem to be moving towards adopting these technologies. But there's another group that we haven't talked about. Dave Vellante, the computing industry is not a simple go-to-market model. There's a lot of reasons why channels, partnerships, etc. are so complex. How are they going to weigh in on this change? >> [Dave Vellante] Well the cloud clearly is having an impact on the channel. I mean if you look at sort of the channel guys, you got the sort of box sellers, which still comprises most of the channel. You got more solution orientation, and then increasingly, you know, the developers are becoming a form of a channel. And I think the channel still has a lot of influence over how customers buy, and I think one of the reasons that people buy roll-your-own still, and it's somewhat artificial, is that the channel oftentimes prefers it that way. It's more complicated, and as their margins get squeezed, the channel players can maintain services, on top of those roll-your-own components. So I think buyers got to be careful, and they got to make sure that their service provider's motivations align with, you know, their desired outcomes, and they're not doing the roll-your-own bespoke approach for the wrong reasons. >> Yeah, and we've seen that a fair amount as we've talked to senior IT folks, that there's a clear misalignment, often, between what's being pushed from a technology standpoint and what the application actually requires, and that's one of the reasons why this question is so rich and so important. But Ralph Phinos, kind of sum up, when you think about some of these issues as they pertain to where to make investments, how to make investments. From our perspective, is there a relatively simple approach to thinking this through, and understanding how best to put your money to get the most value out of the technologies that you choose? (static hissing) Alright, I think we've lost Ralph there, so I'll try to answer the question myself. (chuckles) (David laughs) So here's how we would look at it, and David Floyer, help me out and see if you disagree with me. But at the end of the day, what we're looking for is we're suggesting to customers that have a cost orientation should worry a little bit less about risk, a little bit less about flexibility, and they can manage how that cost happens. And the goal is to try to reduce the cost as fast as possible, and not worry so much about the future options that they'll face in terms of how to reduce future types of cost out. And so that might push them more towards this public hyperscale approach. But for companies that are thinking in terms of revenue, that have to ensure that their systems are able to respond to competitive pressures, customer needs, that are increasingly worried about buying future options with today's technology choices. That there's a scale, but that's the group that's going to start looking more at the enterprise hyperscale. Clearly that's where SAS players are. Yeah. And then the question is and what requires further research is, where's that break point going to be? So if I'm looking at this from an automation, from a revenue standpoint, then I need a little bit greater visibility in where that break point's going to be between controlling my own destiny, with the technology that's crucial to my business, versus not having to deal with the near-term costs associated with doing the integration myself. But this time to value, I want to return to this time to value. >> [David] It's time to value that is the crucial thing here, isn't it? >> [Peter] Time to value now, and time to future value. >> And time to future value, yes. What is the consequence of doing everything yourself is that the time to put in new releases, the time to put in patches, the time to make your system secure, is increasingly high. And the more that you integrate systems into systems of intelligence, with the analytics and the systems of record, the more you start to integrate, the more complex the total environment, the more difficult it's going to be for people to manage that themselves. So in that environment, you would be pushing towards getting systems where the vendor is doing as much of that integration as they can-- And that's where they get the economies from. The vendors get the economies of scale because they can feed back into the system faster than anybody else. Rather than taking a snowflake approach, they're taking a volume approach, and they can feed back for example artificial intelligence in operational efficiency, in security. There's many, many opportunities for vendors to push down into the marketplace those findings. And those vendors can be cloud vendors as well. If you look at Microsoft, they can push down into their Azure Stack what they're finding in terms of artificial intelligence and in terms of capabilities. They can push those down into the enterprises themselves. So the more that they can go up the stack into the database layers, maybe even into the application layers, the higher they can go, the lower the cost, the lower the time to value will be for them to deploy applications using that. >> Alright, so we've very quickly got some great observations on this important dynamic. It's time for action items. So Jim Kobielus, let me start with you. What's the action item for this whole notion of hyperscale? Action items, Jim Kobielus. >> Yeah, the action item for hyperscale is to consider the degree of convergence you require at the lowest level of the system, the edge device. How much of that needs to be converged down to a commoditized component that can be flexible enough that you can develop a wide range of applications on top of that-- >> Excellent, hold on, OK. George Gilbert, action item. >> Really quickly you have to determine, are you going to keep your legacy system of record database, and add like an analytic database on a hyperscale infrastructure, so that you're not doing a heart and lung transplant on an existing system. If you can do that and you can manage the latency between the existing database and culling to the analytic database, that's great. Then there's little disruption. Otherwise you have to consider integrating the analytics into a hyperscale-ready legacy database. >> David Vellante, action item. >> Tasks like LUN management, and server provisioning, and just generally infrastructure management, and non-strategic. So as fast as possible, shift your "IT labor resources" up the stack toward more strategic initiatives, whether they're digital initiatives, data orientation, and other value-producing activities. >> David Floyer, action item. >> Well I was just about to say what Dave Vellante just said. So let me focus a little bit more on a step in order to get to that position. >> So Dave Floyer, action item. (David laughs) >> So the action item that I would choose would be that you have to know what your costs are, and you have to be able to, as senior management, look at those objectively and say, "What is my return on spending all of "this money and making the system operate?" The more that you can reduce the complexity, buy in, converge systems, hyperconverge systems, hyperscale systems, that are going to put that responsibility onto the vendors themselves, the better position you're going to be to really add value to the bottom line of applications that really can start to use all of this capability, advanced analytics that's coming into the marketplace. >> So I'm going to add an action item before I do a quick summary. And I'm just going to insert it. My action item, the relationship that you have with your vendors is going to change. It used to be focused on procurement and reducing the cost of acquisition. Increasingly, for those high-value, high-performing, revenue-producing, differentiating applications, it's going to be strategic vendor management. That implies a whole different range of activities. And companies that are going to build their business with technology and digital are going to have to move to a new relationship management framework. Alright, so let's summarize today's action item meeting. First of I want to thank very much George Gilbert, David Floyer, here in the studio with me. David Vellante, Ralph Phinos, Jim Kobielus on the phone. Today we talked about enterprise hyperscale. This is part of a continuum that we see happening, because the economics of technology are continuing to assert themselves in the marketplace, and it's having a significant range of impacts on all venues. When we think about scale economies, we typically think about how many chips we're going to stamp out, or how many copies of an operating system is going to be produced, and that still obtains, and it's very important. But increasingly users have to focus their attention to how we're going to generate economies out of the IT labor that's necessary to keep the digital businesses running. If we can shift some of those labor costs to other players, then we want to support those technology sets that embed those labor costs directly in the form of technology. So over the next few years, we're going to see the emergence of what we're calling enterprise hyperscale that embeds labor costs directly into hyperscale packaging, so that companies can focus more on generating revenue out of technology, and spend less time on the integration of work. The implications of that is that the traditional buying process of trying to economize on the time to purchase, the time to get access to the piece parts, is going to give way to a broader perspective on time to ultimate value of the application or of the outcome that we seek. And that's going to have a number of implications that CIOs have to worry about. From an external standpoint, it's going to mean valuing technology differently, valuing packaging differently. It means less of a focus on the underlying hardware, more of a focus on this common set of capabilities that allow us to converge applications. So whereas converge technology talked about converging hardware, enterprise hyperscale increasingly is about converging applications against common data, so that we can run more complex and interesting workloads and revenue-producing workloads, without scaling the labor and management costs of those workloads. A second key issue is, we have to step back and acknowledge that sometimes the way products go to market, and our outcomes or our desires, do not align. That there is the residual reality in the marketplace that large numbers of channel partners and vendors have an incentive to try to push more complex technologies that require more integration, because it creates a greater need for them and creates margin opportunities. So ensure that as you try to achieve this notion of converged applications and not converged infrastructure necessarily, that you are working with a partner who follows that basic program. And the last thing is I noted a second ago, that that is going to require a new approach to thinking about strategic vendor management. For the last 30 years, we've done a phenomenal job of taking cost out of technology, by focusing on procurement and trying to drive every single dime out of a purchase that we possibly could. Even if we didn't know what that was going to mean from an ongoing maintenance and integration and risk-cost standpoint, what we need to think about now is what will be the cost to the outcome. And not only this outcome, but because we're worried about digital business, future outcomes, that are predicated on today's decisions. So the whole concept here is, from a relationship management standpoint, the idea of what relationship is going to provide us the best time to value today, and streams of time to value in the future. And we have to build our relationships around that. So once again I want to thank the team. This is Peter Burris. Thanks again for participating or listening to the Action Item. From the Cube studios in Palo Alto, California, see you next week. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE and we're going to go deeper into a deep dive into unified cloud networking solution from Pluribus and NVIDIA. And we'll examine some of the use cases with Alessandro Barbieri, VP of product management at Pluribus Networks and Pete Lumbis, the director of technical marketing and video remotely. Guys thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Yeah thanks a lot. >> I'm happy to be here. >> So a deep dive, let's get into the what and how. Alessandro, we heard earlier about the Pluribus and NVIDIA partnership and the solution you're working together in. What is it? >> Yeah, first let's talk about the what. What are we really integrating with the NVIDIA BlueField the DPU technology? Pluribus has been shipping in volume in multiple mission critical networks, this Netvisor ONE network operating systems. It runs today on merchant silicon switches and effectively it's standard based open network operating system for data center. And the novelty about this operating system is that it integrates distributed the control plane to automate effect with SDN overlay. This automation is completely open and interoperable and extensible to other type of clouds. It's not enclosed. And this is actually what we're now porting to the NVIDIA DPU. >> Awesome, so how does it integrate into NVIDIA hardware and specifically how is Pluribus integrating its software with the NVIDIA hardware? >> Yeah, I think we leverage some of the interesting properties of the BlueField DPU hardware which allows actually to integrate our network operating system in a manner which is completely isolated and independent from the guest operating system. So the first byproduct of this approach is that whatever we do at the network level on the DPU card is completely agnostic to the hypervisor layer or OS layer running on the host. Even more, we can also independently manage this network node this switch on a NIC effectively, managed completely independently from the host. You don't have to go through the network operating system running on X86 to control this network node. So you truly have the experience effectively top of rack for virtual machine or a top of rack for Kubernetes spots, where if you allow me with analogy, instead of connecting a server NIC directly to a switchboard, now we are connecting a VM virtual interface to a virtual interface on the switch on an niche. And also as part of this integration, we put a lot of effort, a lot of emphasis in accelerating the entire data plan for networking and security. So we are taking advantage of the NVIDIA DOCA API to program the accelerators. And these you accomplish two things with that. Number one, you have much better performance. They're running the same network services on an X86 CPU. And second, this gives you the ability to free up I would say around 20, 25% of the server capacity to be devoted either to additional workloads to run your cloud applications or perhaps you can actually shrink the power footprint and compute footprint of your data center by 20% if you want to run the same number of compute workloads. So great efficiencies in the overall approach. >> And this is completely independent of the server CPU, right? >> Absolutely, there is zero code from Pluribus running on the X86. And this is why we think this enables a very clean demarcation between compute and network. >> So Pete, I got to get you in here. We heard that the DPU enable cleaner separation of DevOps and NetOps. Can you explain why that's important because everyone's talking DevSecOps, right? Now, you've got NetSecOps. This separation, why is this clean separation important? >> Yeah, I think, it's a pragmatic solution in my opinion. We wish the world was all kind of rainbows and unicorns, but it's a little messier than that. I think a lot of the DevOps stuff and that mentality and philosophy. There's a natural fit there. You have applications running on servers. So you're talking about developers with those applications integrating with the operators of those servers. Well, the network has always been this other thing and the network operators have always had a very different approach to things than compute operators. And I think that we in the networking industry have gotten closer together but there's still a gap, there's still some distance. And I think that distance isn't going to be closed and so, again, it comes down to pragmatism. And I think one of my favorite phrases is look, good fences make good neighbors. And that's what this is. >> Yeah, and it's a great point 'cause DevOps has become kind of the calling car for cloud, right? But DevOps is a simply infrastructures code and infrastructure is networking, right? So if infrastructure is code you're talking about that part of the stack under the covers, under the hood if you will. This is super important distinction and this is where the innovation is. Can you elaborate on how you see that because this is really where the action is right now? >> Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where one from the policy, the security, the zero trust aspect of this, right? If you get it wrong on that network side, all of a sudden you can totally open up those capabilities. And so security's part of that. But the other part is thinking about this at scale, right? So we're taking one top of rack switch and adding up to 48 servers per rack. And so that ability to automate, orchestrate and manage its scale becomes absolutely critical. >> Alessandro, this is really the why we're talking about here and this is scale. And again, getting it right. If you don't get it right, you're going to be really kind of up you know what? So this is a huge deal. Networking matters, security matters, automation matters, DevOps, NetOps, all coming together clean separation. Help us understand how this joint solution with NVIDIA fits into the Pluribus unified cloud networking vision because this is what people are talking about and working on right now. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think here with this solution we're attacking two major problems in cloud networking. One, is operation of cloud networking and the second, is distributing security services in the cloud infrastructure. First, let me talk about first what are we really unifying? If we're unifying something, something must be at least fragmented or disjointed. And what is disjointed is actually the network in the cloud. If you look wholistically how networking is deployed in the cloud, you have your physical fabric infrastructure, right? Your switches and routers. You build your IP clause, fabric leaf and spine topologies. This is actually a well understood problem I would say. There are multiple vendors with let's say similar technologies, very well standardized, very well understood and almost a commodity I would say building an IP fabric these days, but this is not the place where you deploy most of your services in the cloud particularly from a security standpoint. Those services are actually now moved into the compute layer where cloud builders have to instrument a separate network virtualization layer where they deploy segmentation and security closer to the workloads. And this is where the complication arise. This high value part of the cloud network is where you have a plethora of options that they don't talk to each other and they're very dependent on the kind of hypervisor or compute solution you choose. For example, the networking API between an ESXi environment or an Hyper-V or a Zen are completely disjointed. You have multiple orchestration layers. And then when you throw in also Kubernetes in this type of architecture, you are introducing yet another level of networking. And when Kubernetes runs on top of VMs which is a prevalent approach, you actually are stuck in multiple networks on the compute layer that they eventually ran on the physical fabric infrastructure. Those are all ships in the knights effectively, right? They operate as completely disjointed and we're trying to tackle this problem first with the notion of a unified fabric which is independent from any workloads whether this fabric spans on a switch which can be connected to bare metal workload or can span all the way inside the DPU where you have your multi hypervisor compute environment. It's one API, one common network control plane and one common set of segmentation services for the network. That's problem number one. >> It's interesting I hear you talking and I hear one network among different operating models. Reminds me of the old serverless days. There's still servers but they call it serverless. Is there going to be a term network-less because at the end of the day it should be one network, not multiple operating models. This is a problem that you guys are working on, is that right? I'm just joking serverless and network-less, but the idea is it should be one thing. >> Yeah, effectively what we're trying to do is we're trying to recompose this fragmentation in terms of network cooperation across physical networking and server networking. Server networking is where the majority of the problems are because as much as you have standardized the ways of building physical networks and cloud fabrics with IP protocols and internet, you don't have that sort of operational efficiency at the server layer. And this is what we're trying to attack first with this technology. The second aspect we're trying to attack is how we distribute security services throughout the infrastructure more efficiently whether it's micro-segmentation is a stateful firewall services or even encryption. Those are all capabilities enabled by the BlueField DPU technology. And we can actually integrate those capabilities directly into the network fabric limiting dramatically at least for east west traffic the sprawl of security appliances whether virtual or physical. That is typically the way people today segment and secure the traffic in the cloud. >> Awesome. Pete, all kidding aside about network-less and serverless kind of fun play on words there, the network is one thing it's basically distributed computing, right? So I'd love to get your thoughts about this distributed security with zero trust as the driver for this architecture you guys are doing. Can you share in more detail the depth of why DPU based approach is better than alternatives? >> Yeah, I think what's beautiful and kind of what the DPU brings that's new to this model is completely isolated compute environment inside. So it's the, yo dog, I heard you like a server so I put a server inside your server. And so we provide ARM CPUs, memory and network accelerators inside and that is completely isolated from the host. The actual X86 host just thinks it has a regular niche in there, but you actually have this full control plane thing. It's just like taking your top of rack switch and shoving it inside of your compute node. And so you have not only this separation within the data plane, but you have this complete control plane separation so you have this element that the network team can now control and manage, but we're taking all of the functions we used to do at the top of rack switch and we're distributing them now. And as time has gone on we've struggled to put more and more and more into that network edge. And the reality is the network edge is the compute layer, not the top of rack switch layer. And so that provides this phenomenal enforcement point for security and policy. And I think outside of today's solutions around virtual firewalls, the other option is centralized appliances. And even if you can get one that can scale large enough, the question is, can you afford it? And so what we end up doing is we kind of hope that NVIDIA's good enough or we hope that the VXLAN tunnel's good enough. And we can't actually apply more advanced techniques there because we can't financially afford that appliance to see all of the traffic. And now that we have a distributed model with this accelerator, we could do it. >> So what's in it for the customer real quick and I think this is an interesting point you mentioned policy. Everyone in networking knows policy is just a great thing. And as you hear it being talked about up the stack as well when you start getting to orchestrating microservices and whatnot all that good stuff going on there, containers and whatnot and modern applications. What's the benefit to the customers with this approach because what I heard was more scale, more edge, deployment flexibility relative to security policies and application enablement? What's the customer get out of this architecture? What's the enablement? >> It comes down to taking again the capabilities that we're in that top of rack switch and distributing them down. So that makes simplicity smaller, blast radius' for failures smaller failure domains, maintenance on the networks and the systems become easier. Your ability to integrate across workloads becomes infinitely easier. And again, we always want to kind of separate each one of those layers so just as in say a VXLAN network, my leaf in spine don't have to be tightly coupled together. I can now do this at a different layer and so you can run a DPU with any networking in the core there. And so you get this extreme flexibility. You can start small, you can scale large. To me the possibilities are endless. >> It's a great security control plan. Really flexibility is key and also being situationally aware of any kind of threats or new vectors or whatever's happening in the network. Alessandro, this is huge upside, right? You've already identified some successes with some customers on your early field trials. What are they doing and why are they attracted to the solution? >> Yeah, I think the response from customer has been the most encouraging and exciting for us to sort of continue and work and develop this product. And we have actually learned a lot in the process. We talked to tier two, tier three cloud providers. We talked to SP, Soft Telco type of networks as well as inter large enterprise customers. In one particular case one, let me call out a couple of examples here just to give you a flavor. There is a cloud provider in Asia who is actually managing a cloud where they're offering services based on multiple hypervisors. They are native services based on Zen, but they also on ramp into the cloud workloads based on ESXi and KVM depending on what the customer picks from the menu. And they have the problem of now orchestrating through their orchestrate or integrating with Zen center, with vSphere, with OpenStack to coordinate this multiple environments. And in the process to provide security, they actually deploy virtual appliances everywhere which has a lot of cost complication and eats up into the server CPU. The promise that they saw in this technology, they call it actually game changing is actually to remove all this complexity, having a single network and distribute the micro segmentation service directly into the fabric. And overall they're hoping to get out it tremendous OPEX benefit and overall operational simplification for the cloud infrastructure. That's one important use case. Another global enterprise customer is running both ESXi and Hyper-V environment and they don't have a solution to do micro segmentation consistently across hypervisors. So again, micro segmentation is a huge driver security. Looks like it's a recurring theme talking to most of these customers. And in the Telco space, we're working with few Telco customers on the CFT program where the main goal is actually to harmonize network cooperation. They typically handle all the VNFs with their own homegrown DPDK stack. This is overly complex. It is frankly also slow and inefficient. And then they have a physical network to manage. The idea of having again one network to coordinate the provisioning of cloud services between the Telco VNFs and the rest of the infrastructure is extremely powerful on top of the offloading capability opted by the BlueField DPUs. Those are just some examples. >> That was a great use case. A lot more potential I see that with the unified cloud networking, great stuff, Pete, shout out to you 'cause at NVIDIA we've been following your success us for a long time and continuing to innovate as cloud scales and Pluribus with unified networking kind of bring it to the next level. Great stuff, great to have you guys on and again, software keeps driving the innovation and again, networking is just a part of it and it's the key solution. So I got to ask both of you to wrap this up. How can cloud operators who are interested in this new architecture and solution learn more because this is an architectural shift? People are working on this problem, they're try to think about multiple clouds, they're try to think about unification around the network and giving more security, more flexibility to their teams. How can people learn more? >> Yeah, so Alessandro and I have a talk at the upcoming NVIDIA GTC conference. So it's the week of March 21st through 24th. You can go and register for free nvidia.com/gtc. You can also watch recorded sessions if you end up watching this on YouTube a little bit after the fact. And we're going to dive a little bit more into the specifics and the details and what we're providing in the solution. >> Alessandro, how can we people learn more? >> Yeah, absolutely. People can go to the Pluribus website, www.pluribusnetworks.com/eft and they can fill up the form and they will contact Pluribus to either know more or to know more and actually to sign up for the actual early field trial program which starts at the end of April. >> Okay, well, we'll leave it there. Thank you both for joining, appreciate it. Up next you're going to hear an independent analyst perspective and review some of the research from the enterprise strategy group ESG. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Overnight COVID completely exposed those companies that were really not ready for the digital age. There was a mad rush to the cloud in an effort to reshape the very notion of business resiliency and enable employees to remain productive so that they continue serve customers. Data protection was at the heart of this shift and cloud data protection has become a fundamental staple of organizations operating models. Hello, everyone. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm joined by two longtime friends of theCUBE, Rob Emsley is the director of product marketing at Dell Technologies. And Stephen Manley is the Chief Technology Officer at Druva. Guys, great to have you on the program. Thanks for being here. >> Yeah, great to be here, Dave. >> This is the high point of my day, Dave. >> I'm glad to hear it, Stephen. It's been a while since we... Missing you guys to tell you face to face maybe it'll happen before 22, >> We haven't aged a bit, Dave. >> (laughing) Ditto. Listen, we've been talking for years about this shift to the cloud. In the past 12 months, boy, we've seen the pace of workloads that have moved to the cloud really accelerate. So Rob, maybe you could start it off. How do you see the market and perhaps what are some of the blind spots maybe that people need to think about when they're moving workloads so fast in the cloud? >> Yeah. Good question Dave. I mean, you know, we've spoken a number of times around how our focus has significantly shifted over the last couple of years. I mean, only a couple of years ago, our focus was very much on on-premise data protection, but over the last couple of years, more workloads have shifted to the cloud. Customers have started adopting SaaS applications and all of these environments are creating data that is so critical to these customers to protect, we've definitely found that more and more of our conversations have been centered around what can you do for me when it comes to protecting workloads in the client environment? >> Yeah. Now of course, Stephen, this is kind of your wheelhouse. How are you thinking about the these market shifts? >> Yeah. You know, it's interesting in the data protection market. heck the data market in general, you see these sort of cycles happen. And for a long time, we had a cycle where applications and environments were consolidating a lot. It was all VMs and Oracle and SQL and we seem to be exploding out the other way to this massive sprawl of different types of applications in different places. Like Rob said, we've got Microsoft 365 and you've got Salesforce and you've got workloads running in the cloud. The world looks different. And you add on top of that the new security threats as people moving to the cloud. A number of years ago we talked how ransomware was an emerging threat. We're way past emerging into... there's a ransomware attack every six seconds and everybody wakes up terrified about it. And so we really see the market has shifted I think in terms of what the apps are and also in terms of what the threats and the focus and this that's come into play. >> Right. Well, thanks for that. There's some hard news which we're going to get to, but before we do, Rob, Stephen was mentioning the SaaS apps and we've been sort of watching that space for a while but a lot of people will ask why do I need a separate data protection layer? Doesn't my SaaS provider protect my data? Don't they replicate it? They're cloud vendors, why do I need to buy yet another backup product? >> Yeah, that's a fairly common misconception, Dave, that both SaaS application vendors and cloud vendors, inherently are providing all of the data protection that you need. The reality is that they're not, you know I think when you think about a lot of the data within those environments, certainly they're focused on providing availability. And availability is absolutely one thing that you can, for the most part, rely on the cloud vendors to deliver to you. But when it comes to actually protecting yourself from accidental deletion. Protecting yourself from cyber threats and cyber crime that may infect your data through malicious acts, that's really where you need to supplement the environment that the cloud providers provide you, with best in class data protection solutions. And this is really where, waywardly looking to introduce new innovations into the market to really, really help customers with that cloud based data protection. >> Yeah. Now you got some news here. Let's kind of dig in, if we could, to the innovations behind that. Maybe Rob, you could kick it off and then, Stephen, we'll bring you in. >> Yeah. So first piece of news that we're really happy to announce is the introduction of a new Dell EMC PowerProtect backup service which is a new cloud data protection solution powered by Druva, hence the reason that Stephen and I are here today. It's designed to deliver additional protection without increasing IT complexity. >> So powered by Druva. what does that mean? Can you add some color to that? >> Absolutely. So, when we really started looking at the expansion of our PowerProtect portfolio, we already have the ability to deliver both on-premises protection and to deliver that same software within the public cloud from a PowerProtect software delivery model. But what we really didn't have within the portfolio is a cloud data protection platform. And we really looked at what was available in the market. We looked at our ability to develop that ourselves. And we decided that the best path for our customers to bring capability to them as soon as we possibly could was to partner with Druva. And we really looked at the capabilities that Druva has been delivering for many years, the capabilities that they have across many dimensions of cloud-based workloads. And we already engaged with them probably about six months ago, first introduced Druva as an option to be resold by ourselves, Salesforce and partners. And then we're pleased to introduce a Dell EMC branded service PowerProtect backup service. >> Okay, so just one more point of clarification, then, Stephen, I want to bring you in. So we're talking about... this includes SaaS apps as well, I'm talking 365, the Google apps which we use extensively, CRM, Salesforce, for example. >> Absolutely. >> What platforms are you actually connecting to and providing protection for? >> Yeah, so the real priority for us was to expand our PowerProtect portfolio to support a variety of SaaS applications. You mentioned, real major ones with respect to Microsoft 365, Google workplace, as well as Salesforce. But the other thing that we also get with PowerProtect backup service is the ability to provide a cloud-based data protection service that supports endpoints such as laptops and desktops but also the ability to support hybrid workloads. So for some customers the ability to use PowerProtect backup service to give them support for virtual machine backups, both VMware and Hyper-V, but also application environments like Oracle and SQL. And lastly, but not least, one of the things that backup service also provides when it comes to virtual machines is not only virtual machines on premises, but also virtual machines within the public cloud, specifically VMware cloud on AWS. >> So, Stephen, I remember I was talking to Jaspreet several years ago, and I've always liked sort of the Druva model but it felt at the time you were like a little ahead of your time, but boy, the market has really come to you. Maybe you could just tell us a little bit more about the just generally cloud-based data protection and the sort of low down on your platform. >> Yeah, and I think you're right, the market has absolutely swept in this direction. Like we were talking about with applications in so many places and end points in so many places and data centers and remote offices with data sprawled everywhere. We find customers are looking for a solution that can connect to everything. I don't want seven different backup solutions, one for each of those things, I want one centralized solution. And so kind of a data protection as a service becomes really appealing because instead of setting all of these things up on your own, well, it's just built in for you. And then the fact that it's as a service helps with things like the ransomware protection because it's off site in another location under another account. And so we really see customers saying this is appealing because it helps keep my costs down. It helps keep my complexity down. There's fewer moving parts. And one of the nicest things is as I move to the cloud I get that one fixed cost, right? I'm not dealing with the, oh, wow, this bill is not what I was expecting. It just comes in with what I was carrying. And so it really comes down to, as you go to the cloud, you want a platform that's got everything built in, something that, and let's face it, Dell EMC, this has always been the case, that storage of last resort that backup that you can trust, right? You want something with a history, like you said, you've been talking to Jaspreet for awhile, Druva is a company that's got a proven track record that your data is going to be safe and it's going to be recoverable and you're going to want someone that can innovate quickly, right? So that as more new cloud applications arise, we're there to help you protect them as they emerge. >> So talk a little bit more about the timing. I mean, we talked earlier about, okay, COVID really forced this shift to the cloud and you guys clearly have skated to the pocket and you also... You referenced sort of new workloads and I'm just wondering how you see that from a timing standpoint. And at this moment in time why this is such a, you know, the right fit. >> We've seen a lot of customers over the last again 12 months or so, one really accelerate their shift to things like SaaS applications, Microsoft 365, and we're not just talking exchange online and One Drive, but SharePoint online, Microsoft teams, really going all in because they're finding that, as I'm distributed, as I have a remote workforce, my end points became more important again, but also the ability to have collaboration became important. And the more I depend on those tools to collaborate, the more I'm depending on them to replace what used to be in-person meetings where we could have a whiteboard and discuss things. And it's done through collaboration online tools. Well, I need to protect that. Not just because the data's important, but because that's now how my business is running. And so that entire environment is important. And so it's really accelerated people coming and looking for solutions because they've realized how important these environments and this data is. >> So, Stephen, you mentioned that you guys, I mean, obviously you have a track record but you got some vision too. And I want to sort of poke at that a little bit. I mean, essentially is what you're building is an abstraction layer that is essentially my data protection cloud. Is that how we should think about this? And you've referenced pricing, I've seen your pricing, it's clean. It looks to me anyway like a true cloud pricing. Going to dial it up, dial it down, pay as you go, consume it as you wish. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah. I mean, I think if you think about the future of consumption is that so many customers are looking for different choices than what many vendors have provided them in the past. I think the days of of going through a long procurement cycle and working through purchasing in order to get a big capital expense approved it's just not the way that many of our customers are looking to operate now. So I think that one of the things that we're looking at across the portfolio, whether or not it be on premises solutions or cloud-based services, is to provide all of that capability as a service. I think that that will be a real future point of arrival for us as we really rotate to offer that across all of our capabilities, Dave, whether or not it be in the domain of storage, or in the domain of data protection, the concept of everything as a service is really something which is going to become more of the norm versus the exception. >> So what does a customer have to do to be up and running? What's that experience like, is he just going to log on and everything's sort of there to them, what do they see? What's the experience like? >> Yeah, that's one of the great things about PowerProtect backup services, that once the customer has worked through that, their Dell technologies sells a team or the Dell technologies partner, they effectively get an activation code to sign up and set up the credentials with PowerProtect backup service. And once they actually do that, one of the things that they don't have to worry about is the deployment of the infrastructure. The infrastructure is always on ready to go. So all they do is they simply point PowerProtect backup service at the data sources that they wish to protect. That's one of the great advantages around a SaaS based data protection platform and it's one of the things that makes it very easy to get customers up and running with PowerProtect backup service. >> So I'm guessing you have a roadmap, you may be, you may be not, you may be holding out on us in some of the other things that you're doing in this space, but what can you tell us about other things you might be doing or what might be coming? What can we expect? >> Well, I mean, Dave, that one of the things that we always talk about is the power of the portfolio. So, with the addition of PowerProtect backup service, it's not the only news that we're making with respect to client data protection. You know, I mentioned earlier that we have the ability to deploy our on premises solutions in the public cloud with PowerProtect data manager and our PowerProtect virtual appliances, and with this announcement that brings backup service into the portfolio. We're also pleased to expand our support of the public cloud with full support of Google cloud platform, making PowerProtect data manager available in the Google marketplace. And then lastly, but not least, you know our other cloud snapshot manager offering is now also fully integrated with our PowerProtect virtual appliances to allow customers to store AWS snapshots in a debilitative fashion within AWS S3. So that's an excellent capability that we've introduced to reduce the cost of storing AWS infrastructure backups for longer periods of time. So really, we've really continued to double down in bringing new client data protection capabilities to our customers, wherever they may be. >> And nice to have, Stephen, you guys must be stoked to have a partner like Dell, a massive distribution channel. I wonder if you could give us any final thoughts, thoughts on the relationship, how you see the future unfolding. >> Yeah, I mean, and obviously I've got history with Dell and EMC and Rob. And one of the things I think Dell has always been fabulous at is giving customers the flexibility to protect their data when they want, how they want, where they want, with the investment protection that if it shifts over time, they'll be there for them, right. Going all the way back to the data protection suite and all those fantastic things we've done historically. And so it's really, it's great to align with somebody that's got the same kind of value as we do, which is with Druva, it's that same model, right? Wherever you want to protect your data, wherever it is, we're going to be there for you. And so it was great that I think Dell and Druva both saw this demand from our customers. And we said, this is the right match, right? This is how we're going to help people keep their data safe as they start and continue and extend their journeys to the cloud. And so, Dell proposes the PowerProtect backup service powered by Druva. And everybody wins. The Dell's customers are safer. Dell completes this offering, and let's face it, it does help to really accelerate our momentum. So this is and it's a lot of fun just hanging out with the people I used to work with especially it's good seeing them again. >> Well, you guys both have kind of alluded to the portfolio and the optionality that Dell brings to its customers, but Rob, you know, I'll give you the final word. A lot of times optionality brings complexity, but this seems to be a really strong step in the direction of simplifying the world for your customers. But, Rob, we'll give you the last word. >> Yeah, for sure. I mean, we've always said that it's not a one size fits all world. You know, I think that one of the things that this evolution of a PowerProtect portfolio brings is an excellent added option for our customers. Many of the customers, if not, almost all of the customers that we currently sell to, have a requirement for SaaS application protection. Many of them now, especially after the last year, have an added sensitivity to endpoint protection. So those two things alone I think are two things that all Dell technology customers can really take advantage of with the introduction of perhaps that backup service. This is just a continued evolution of our capabilities to bring innovative data protection for multi-cloud workloads. >> That last point is a great point about the end points because you've got remote workers, so exposed, guys, thanks so much for sharing the announcement details, and the relationship, and really good luck with the offering. We'll be watching. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to the CUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin joined by a couple of guys from Dell Technology. Please welcome Martin Glynn, the senior director for product management for PowerMax Martin good morning. >> Good morning. >> Nice to see you. And joining Martin is Matthew Paul, the senior director of product management for PowerFlex at Dell Technologies. Matthew, nice to see you. >> Nice to see you thanks for having us Lisa. >> So our virtual cube this year can't be with you guys in person or the 14,000 other folks that usually attend at Dell Technologies World but a lot of opportunities to engage customers and partners and present analysts digitally, which is great. So Matthew, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what's new with PowerFlex, this was the kind of the end of the rebrand under the power portfolio that Dell Technologies undertook the last couple of years formerly the VXFlex excuse me, from Scale IO, what's new with PowerFlex? >> Yeah, that's a spot on. So really the idea of us aligning the full power portfolio is kind of a big deal, right? Part of the winning roadmap to at IO, kind of assigned to our customers and our field and everyone that software defined storage is a critical part of the Dell Technologies strategy. If you think about PowerFlex, just to kind of level set, it's really a software defined infrastructure kind of system that brings you the best of traditional three tier infrastructure and the best of HCI infrastructure while being able to make that experience really simple in the enterprise while still delivering exemplary really great performance and scale. In terms of new things, well, just real quick, in terms of kind of new things, we brought interesting topics like native Async replication, secure snapshots, some end to end lifecycle management pieces. So a lot of great innovation in the last year. >> And that was some of the recent announcements. Tell me Matthew, from a customer perspective since you've announced Asynchronous replication snapshots, what's the customer adoption, customer feedback been like? >> Yeah, it's been fantastic. We continue to grow this market really strong, you know, we're focusing on high end large enterprise customers working towards, bringing down also into kind of enterprise and commercial customers, so it'll make things easier to use. But very strong adoption and great investments here at Dell with this product. >> All right, so PowerFlex, Martin, let's go to you PowerMax, talk to us about PowerMax. And then also how it kind of fits into the whole power portfolio. >> Sure, yeah, so thanks Lisa. The PowerMax products, I think was the first product other than of course, the server products to be powered up in the storage portfolio, PowerMax is the sort of flagship sort of derived product that we've had now for, you know, a few decades really been a leader in mission critical data centers. But I think that pace of innovation over the last year just like Matt describing the PowerFlex side has been a really phenomenal. Just about a year ago he came out with a storage class memory, we did fiber channel Endymion over fiber channel, and more recently brought in a few really interesting new technologies, like support for replication, with VVols, cloud mobility, and now, efficient encryption. So the set of things we're enabling our customers to do with their you know, sort of traditional three tier SAN infrastructure is really just unmatched. >> So Matt talk to me about the last six seven months, where are these enterprise customers in terms of leveraging PowerMax for example, when everything just changed dramatically almost overnight. Enterprises in every industry had to suddenly remote workforce. How did PowerMax help your customers pivot and ensure that their digital transformation could support this business surviving? >> Yeah, well, like everybody we were a little worried at the outset, you know lot of uncertainty about how things would play out and the response from our customers has been amazing. You know, they've all sort of really doubled down on using our technology to support their businesses through this new model. So, you know, the business has been really amazing really incredible, and it's been great to partner with our customers that help them continue to deliver the services that they need you know, in this new model. So that part's been, been really wonderful, and as we work really closely with them, some of the things we just came out with, you know, they've helped us to design and deliver in a way that they can best take advantage of so, you know, for example the new cloud mobility functionality that's letting them take information directly off of their mission, critical sort of bedrock sand infrastructure and push it up to an object store. And that could be a local private object store, it could be a public object store like AWS. And so that's you know, it's enabling them to take advantage of some new models and a new approach to doing things. And I think ultimately that's going to help them work through this you know, new normal, we're all participating in. >> Yeah, we want to help those businesses not just survive this time, but be able to thrive, especially as we don't know how much of this remote scattered workforce is going to remain. We're hearing estimates from some of the big technology leaders at all. 50% percent of the workforce is going to remain at home so really helping organizations to maneuver and navigate these challenging landscapes is a big priority I know for Dell Technologies we talked about that with some other guests. Matthew, over to you talk to me about PowerFlex from a workloads perspective, so we can get a good idea for the workloads that it's really ideally best suited for. >> Yeah, I think wanted to just take a quick second on the COVID piece, because we have a couple of really big customers that we had to enable really quickly for curbside checkout and, you know, they were trying to run things, they were putting it on their existing infrastructure, their existing systems, and it just wasn't fast enough, it wasn't keeping up. And by working closely with the customer and designing a system with PowerFlex as the core, allowed us to enable them really quickly to turn from a customer who didn't have this idea of curbside checkout to enabling curbside checkout. So I think working and partnering closely with our customers is a critical part of how Dell Tech is successful and enabling them to kind of work through these tough times. With workloads, Yeah, oh, go ahead sorry. >> That's okay go ahead. >> I was going to say with workloads in general, the way that we have to think about them with enterprise quality or enterprise requirements is really in kind of a scheme of looking at performance, understanding scalability, ensuring we have enterprise class availability, and then last but definitely not least is like how we manage that and how we make it easier for customers to work through those. And when I think about Flex there's two or three key areas that we try to go after, if you, one of the key differentiation pieces around Flex is the fact that we can deploy it in multiple manners. So you can deploy it in an HCI mode, where you have the compute and networking together, or you can go deploy it in a dis-aggregated mode where you have compute and networking, I mean, compute and storage separate. And if those are separate that allows you to scale those independently work really, really well for key database workloads, key workloads like, let's say even like Honda, where you maybe have really high compute but little less storage requirements. So that really allows customers to dial up and down what makes the most sense for them right? The other angle that we're seeing pretty big adoption is around this idea of re-platform or realigning the data center with transformation with software defined scale all block storage. So think about deploying Powerflex in an environment and then being able to use that in a virtual environment in a physical environment, in a container environment being able to have your traditional applications like SQL or Oracle, right along really cool new applications like the ELK Stack or Mongo DB or other things, because of the way that we design our layout, it's really aligned towards being able to re-platform and align in a software defined infrastructure. So customers are using to kind of align those pieces meaning platforms, re-platforming and then also aligning specific applications that require high performance. >> I heard a lot in that and one word that pops up is no, that's good. >> No, I can tell you're passionate about it. >> I love it, yeah. >> And also the customer influence is absolutely critical. I think this is a time you mentioned the curbs I check in, and then I was reading a few months ago about some of the huge brands that were filing for chapter 11 and companies like big retailers that simply couldn't pivot, couldn't digitally transform to even offer curbside check in so that factor alone since us consumers are so demanding was table stakes a few months ago. It still is, but getting an organization able to pivot so quickly is key. Martin let's go over to you, PowerMax, workloads. Talk to me about some differentiators as well. >> Yeah Aatually, if I could I'll start with sort of some similar examples that Matt laid out there, you know, just like we have customers who chose PowerFlex you know, were in environments that made sense for them. We had customers who chose PowerMax to meet similar new demands with the whole, you know pandemic. So we had some really big customers just so okay, now we have sort of line of sight and, you know, across both products, I think the thing that our customers value most is you know, the quality of the experience, the performance of the experience, some of the things Matt mentioned already. But they really pull forward, you know, huge numbers of systems and business, and be able to support you know, where they saw things going. So that was really great to partner with them on that and be ready to help support them and provide a product that they felt really good about making such huge investments in, you know, it was great to see their trust in us and be able to deliver for them. So, that was, I think a big part of the first half of the year, that sort of new, you know, new workloads and new use cases for us on the PowerMax side really revolve around giving our customers new capabilities that can deliver new services for their end users. So one of those is our new support for VVols remote replication. And this really lets us tie together the way that the infrastructure is managed at the VMware level, much more closely to the way that the storage infrastructure is managed. And the result is that our, our customers can do more granular operations for their end users, they can simplify the whole process, and now they can do it on top of our remote replication solution, which, you know going on 20 plus years now, it's really been sort of the gold standard in which they've come to rely on so much. So that's really exciting to be able to offer that to them now, to have it be part of the whole VMware stack that they're deploying and let them use you know, new things like, you know the way VVols works with our cyber site recovery manager, to let them automate you know, the testing, I feel always in the actual fail over. There's an interesting example of how I think our customers are going to take advantage of some of these new technologies as we go forward. >> You mentioned giving customers the ability with the right infrastructure to offer new services. And that's another critical component as we've seen in 2020 is businesses needing to pivot continuously and come up with new creative ideas, products, and services and new ways of delivering those to their existing customers holding onto them and hopefully growing their customer base. And that ability to leverage technology, to deliver new services is also one of the key kind of foundations that will allow businesses to be the winners of tomorrow. Matthew, to you talk to me when you're in customer situations, customers have choice, we know this, ding into me, give me the top three differentiators when you're talking to customers, why PowerFlex is the ideal solution for them? >> That's a great question. I'm glad you asked. (laughs) So I think, you know, as part of being a product guy it's really cool when the intellectual property within your product is software that your company owns and hardware, your company owns. So we're able to do some really cool stuff together to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. But, you know, when I think about my product I think first and foremost, around performance and scale right? You know, several million, IO'S a sub-millisecond response time and anytime someone wants more performance they just add another server, right? So this idea that we scale literally is a key differentiator for the product. A second key differentiator is this idea that I talked a little bit about before that we, you can kind of multi-platform this. So when you roll this out, you can deploy to use it with virtual environments, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V or other virtual environments. You can have bare metal deployment. So if you want to run this with Linux and use software defined storage in the bare metal, we can support that. Or we can go directly to containers. So you can use containers, bare metal or virtual. And so this idea of choice is a huge differentiator. And then the last one is anchored around this idea that when you scale and you get the benefit of management, you don't have to scale everything at the same time. So in traditional software defined infrastructure on the HCI side you have to scale compute and storage together. So every time you add a node you add compute power and storage power. With power flex, we've been able to effectively split those two pieces off, so a customer could actually only scale what they need. And in fact, if they only want to buy storage side of the solution, you can just buy storage side solution and then you can have existing infrastructure connect to that and it behaves just like a traditional three tier model. So those are, I think are the key things that I think differentiate the product and kind of make it special here at Dell and for our customers. >> Matthew, sticking with you, are there any, I think of things like compliance and healthcare and financial services, especially right now, what are some of the key benefits that PowerFlex delivers, say for some of those essential industries right now? >> Yeah, I think, you know it's interesting 'cause those are two of our largest space and financial is probably our largest space. And really for them, it comes down to, you talked about compliance, you talk about scale and then you talk about management. So we said some really interesting requirements because of scale so large, for example, in our last release we're able to start to do rack level firmware and software updates. So when you look at other solutions they might be doing system at a time, doing updates taking them offline and then running those around. But in our scenario, since we kind of own the SDS layer and the compute side, we can actually do update these for an entire rack in one shot. Dramatically reducing the complexity, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to do updates. So that's a real big deal in financial space. And then in terms of healthcare, for example we're the only software defined solution product that can run all of Epic healthcare, all pieces of Epic within our product. All other products run out of bandwidth, run out of performance. So they end up not being able to run all sides of the requirement, whether it's the database back end, or the VDI front end, we're the only one on the market that can do all of that. >> It seems to really be a big differentiator in healthcare as a lot of organizations run on Epic or try to, to help with patient care and care delivery. Martin, last question for you. Give me a snapshot of the partner's perspective over the last couple of years with the rebrand under Dell Technologies, with the power portfolio, how have your partners embraced the simplification? >> So, you know, I think that the overall, this gave them clearer understanding of where and what to sell and what made sense for power max in particular, you know, I think it let them anchor on, you know the flagship product of the legendary performance and reliability of that platform and, you know, gave them an easy way to think about where to position that with, you know, our end customers and, you know, in what ways that the products would benefit their customers the most. So, you know, as Matt described on the PowerFlex side, it starts with our performance and reliability and then ultimately, you know enabling them to do whatever they need to do, so across all the different data services and we got to talk ready about some of the new ones you know, but we also have a lot that we've you know, refined over the years and, you know making it sort of official and sort of the PowerMax envelope what everyone really just sort of simplify how they would consume it all. So, you know, I think, you know maybe one of the thing, you know, worth mentioning in all these new use cases and environments and, you know, all the different applications that our customers are trying to operate and deliver on is, you know, security, you know, so we developed a new capability that we call end-to-end efficient encryption. And this really lets customers do encryption all the way from the host through to the storage. And, you know I think ultimately that's going to help them sleep better at night and also, you know help them avoid some of the things that you've seen crop up now. Now that the world is so digital and all the different threats that our customers face. So we're keeping our finger on the pulse of a lot of different needs you know, whether it's flexibility, performance reliability, but all these new new technologies as well to make sure that we set our customers up to be successful as possible. >> That's exactly what they want to be, successful. Martin, Matthew, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube, sharing the updates for PowerMax, PowerFlex, the differentiators. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Yeah, thank you Lisa this was fun. Alright from my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cubes coverage, Dell Technologies World at 2020, the digital experience. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. Please welcome Puneet Dhawan, the Director of Product Management, Hyper-converged infrastructure for Dell Technologies. Puneet great to see you today. >> Thank you, for having me over. >> And we've got a customer that's going to be articulating all the value that Puneet's going to talk about. Please welcome Greg Altman, the IT infrastructure manager from Swiff-Train. Hey, Greg, how are you today? >> I'm doing well. Thank you. >> Excellent. All right guys. So Puneet, let's start with you, give us a little bit of an overview of your role. You lead product management, for Dell Technologies partner aligned HCI systems. Talk to us about that? >> Sure, absolutely. Um so, you know, it's largely about providing customers the choice. My team specifically focuses on developing Hyper-converged infrastructure products for our customers that are aligned to key technologies from our partners, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, et cetera. And that, you know, falls very nicely with meeting our customers on what technology they want to pick on, what technology they want to go with, whether it's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, we have to source from the customers. >> Let's dig into Microsoft. Talk to us about Azure Stack HCI. How is Dell Tech working with them to position this in the market? >> Sure, um, this is largely about following the customer journey towards digital transformation. So both in terms of where they are in digital transformation and how they want to approach it. So for example, we have a large customer base who's looking to modernize their legacy Hyper-V architectures, and that's where Azure Stack HCI fits in very nicely, and not only our customers are able to modernize the legacy architectures using the architectural benefits of simplicity, high performance, simple management, scalability. (Greg breathes heavily) For HCI for Hyper-V, at the same time, they can connect to Azure to get the benefits of the bullet's force. Now on the other end, we have a large customer base who started off in Azure, you know, they have cloud native applications, you know, kind of born in the cloud. But they're also looking to bring some of the applications down to on-prem, or things like disconnected scenarios, regulatory concerns, data locality reasons. And for those customers, Microsoft and Dell have a department around Dell EMC Integrated solutions for Azure Stack Hub. And that's what essentially brings Azure ecosystem, on-prem so it's like running cloud in your own premises. >> So you mentioned a second ago giving customers choice, and we always talk about that at pretty much every event that we do. So tell me a little bit about how the long standing partnership that Dell Technologies has with Microsoft decades. How is that helping you to really differentiate the technology and then show the customers the different options, together these two companies can deliver? >> Sure, so we've had a very long standing partnerships, actually over three decades now. Across the spectrum whether we talk about our partnership more on the Windows 10 side, and the modernization of the workforce, to the level of hybrid cloud and cloud solutions, and helping even customers, you know, run their applications on Azure to our large services offerings. Over the past several years, we have realized how important is hybrid cloud and multicloud for customers. And that's where we have taken our partnership to the next level, to co-develop, co-engineer and bring to the market together our full portfolio of Azure Stack Hybrid Solutions. And that's where I've said, meeting customers on where they are either bringing Azure on-prem, or helping customers on-prem, modernize on-prem architectures using Azure Stack HCI. So, you know, there's a whole lot of core development we have done together to simplify how customers manage on-prem infrastructures on a day-to-day basis, how do they install it, even how they support it, you know, we have joined support agreements with Microsoft that encompassed and bearing the entirety of the portfolio so that customers have one place to go, which is Dell Technologies to get not only the product, either in US or worldwide, to a very secure supply chain to Dell EMC, at the same time for all their support consulting services, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. We offer all those services in very close partnership with Microsoft. >> Terrific. Great. Let's switch over to you now, probably we talk about what Swiff-Train is doing with its Azure Stack HCI, tell our audience a little bit about Swiff-Train what you guys are what you do. >> Well, Swiff-Train is a full covering flooring wholesaler, we sell flooring across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, even into Florida. And we're an 80 year old company, 80 plus. And we've been moving forward with kind of hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense. And when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old, well five, six years old, running Windows 2012 2016, it was time to upgrade. And when we look at doing a large scale upgrade, like that, we called Dell and say, you know, this is what we're trying to do, and what's the new technologies that we can do that makes the migration work easier. And that's where we wound up with Azure Stack. >> So from a modernization perspective, you mentioned 80 plus year old company, I was looking on the website 1937. I always like to talk to companies like that, because modernizing when you've been around for that long it's challenging, it's challenging culturally , it's challenging historically, But talk to us a little bit about some of the specifics, that you guys were looking to Dell and Microsoft to help modernize. And was this really to drive things like, you know, operational simplicity, allow the business to have more agility so that it can expand in some of those other cities, like we talked about? >> Absolutely. We were dealing with a long maintenance window five or six hours every week patching, updating. Since we moved to Azure Stack HCI, we have virtually zero downtime. That allows our night shifts or weekend crews to be able to keep working. And the system is just bulletproof. It just does not go down. And with the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center, and Dell's OpenManage Plug-in, I log into one pane of glass in the morning, and I look and I say, "Hey, all my servers are going great. Everything's in the green." I know that that day, I'm not going to have any infrastructure issues, I can deal with other issues that make the business money. >> And I'm sure they appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the the actual implementation and the support as, as Puneet talked about all of the core development, the joint support that these two powerhouses deliver. Tell us about that implementation. And then for your day to day, what's your interaction with Dell and or Microsoft like? >> Well, for the implementation, we worked with our Dell representative. And we came up with a sizing plan. This is what we needed to do, we had eight or nine physical servers that we wanted to get rid of. And we wanted to compress down. Now we're definitely went from eight or nine to you servers down to three rack units of space with an edge, including the extra switches and stuff that we had to do. So I mean we were able to get rid of a lot of storage space or rack space. And as far as the implementation was really easy. Dell literally has a book, you follow the book and it's that simple. (Puneet chuckles) >> I like that I think more of us these days, can you somewhat write a book that we can just follow? That would be fantastic. One more question, Greg for you, before we go back to Puneet. As Puneet talked about in the beginning from describing his role, that you know, Dell Technologies works with a lot of other vendors. Why Azure Stack HCI for Swiff-Train? >> Well, it made sense for us. We were already moving, several of our websites were already moved to Azure, we've been a Hyper-V user for many years. So it was just kind of a natural evolution to migrate in that direction, because it kind of pulls all of our management tools into one, well you know, a one pane of glass type of scenario. >> Excellent. All right Puneet back to you. With some of the things that you talked about before and that Greg sort of articulated about simplifying day-to-day. Greg, I saw in my notes that you had this old aging infrastructure, you were spending five hours a week patching maintain, that you say is now virtually eliminated, Puneet, Dell Technologies and Microsoft had done quite a bit of work to simplify the operational experience. Talk to us about that, and what are some of the measurable improvements that you guys have made? >> Sure. It all starts with neither on how we approach the problem, and we have always taken a very product-centric approach at Azure Stack HCI. You know, unlike, some of our competition, which had followed. There is a reference architecture, you can put Windows Server 2019 on it and go run your own servers, and the Hyper-converged Stack on it, but we have followed a very different approach where we have learned quite a lot, you know, we are the number one vendor in HCI space, and we know a thing or two about HCI and what customers really need there. So that's why from the very beginning, we have taken a product-centric approach, and doing that allows us to have product type offers in terms of our Kx notes that are specifically designed and built for Azure Stack HCI. And on top of that, we have done very specific integration to the management Stack, we've been doing Admin Center, that is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage, both on-prem, Hyper-converged infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VM's that you're running on Azure, to provide customers a very seamless, you know, a single pane of glass for both the on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services. And in doing that, our customers have really appreciated how simple it is to keep their clusters running, to reduce the maintenance windows, based on some of our internal testing that we have done. IT administrators can reduce the time they spend on maintaining the clusters by over 90%. Over 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself. And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state. So you don't have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right founder from 10 different places, making sure whether they are qualified or not when running together, we provide one single pane of glass that customers can click on, and you know, see whether their questions are compliant or not, and if yes go update. And all this has been possible by a joint engineering with Microsoft. >> Can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution, which is what you're delivering, versus competitors that are only delivering a reference architecture? >> Absolutely. So if you're running just a reference architecture, you are running an operating system, systems Stack on a server, we know that when it comes to running HCI, that means running also business critical applications on a clustered environment. You need to make sure that all the hardware, the drivers, the founder, the hard drives, the memory configuration, the network configurations, all that can be very complex very easily. And if you have reference architectures, there is no way to know, but then running certified components in my note are not. How do you tell then? If a part fails? How do which part to sell or send, you know, for a replacement? If you're just running a reference architecture, you have no way to say the part the hard drive that failed, the one that was sent to the customer to replace whether that is certified for Azure Stack HCI or not? You know, what, how do you really make a determination, what is the right firmware that needs to be applied to a cluster of what other drivers that apply to be cluster, that are compliant and tested for Azure Stack HCI. None of these things are possible, if you just have a reference architecture approach. That's why we have been very clear that our approach is a product-based approach. And, you know, very frankly this is how we have... that's the feedback we've provided the Microsoft to, and we've been working very, you know, closely together. And you see that, now in terms of the new Azure Stack HCI, that Microsoft announced at Inspirely this year, that brings Microsoft into the mainstream HCI space as a product offering, and not just as a feature or a few features within the Windows Server program. >> Greg, I saw in the notes with respect to Swiff-Train that you guys have with Azure Stack HCI, you have reduced Rackspace by 50%, you talked about some of the Rackspace benefits. But you've also reduced energy by 70%. Those are big, impactful numbers, impacting not just your day-to-day but the overall business. >> That's true, >> Last question for you, Greg. If you think about how can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution versus a reference architecture. For your peers watching in any industry. what's your... what are your top recommendations for going with a validated all in one solution? >> Well, we looked at doing the reference architecture's path, if you will, because we're hands on we like to build things and I looked at it and like Puneet said, "Drivers and memory and making sure that everything is going to work well together." And not only that everything is going to work well together. But when something fails, then you get into the finger pointing between vendors, your storage vendor, your process vendor, that's not something that we need to deal with. We need to keep a business running. So we went with Dell, it's one box, you know, but one box per unit and then you Stack two of them together you have a cluster. >> You make it sound so easy. >> Let us question-- >> I put together children's toys that were harder than building the Stack I promise you, I did it in an afternoon. >> Music to my ears Greg, thank you. (Greg giggles) >> It was that easy >> That is gold >> Easier to put together Azure Stack HCI than some, probably even opening the box of some children's toys I can imagine. (all chuckling) >> We should use that as a tagline. >> Exactly. You should, I think you have a new tagline there. Greg, thank you. Puneet, well last question for you, Would Dell Technologies World sessions on hybrid cloud benefits with Dell and Microsoft? Give us a flavor of what some of the things are that the audience will have a chance to learn. >> Yeah, this is a great session with Microsoft that essentially provides our customers an overview of our joint hybrid cloud solutions, both for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Azure stack HCI as well as our joint solutions on VMware in Azure. But much more importantly, we also talk about what's coming next. Now, especially with Microsoft as your Stack at CIO's a full blown product. Hyper hybrid, you know, HCI offering that will be available as, Azure service. So customers could run on-prem infrastructure that is Hyper-converged but managed pay bill for as an Azure service, so that they have always the latest and greatest from Microsoft. And all the product differentiation we have created in terms of a product-centric approach, simpler lifecycle management will all be applicable, in this new hybrid, hybrid cloud solution as well. And that led essentially a great foundation for our customers who have standardized on Hyper-V, who are much more aligned to Azure, to not worry about the infrastructure on-prem. But start taking advantages of both the modernization benefits of HCI. But much more importantly, start coupling back with the hybrid ecosystem that we are building with Microsoft, whether it's running an Azure Kubernetes service on top to modernize the new applications, and bringing the Azure data services such as Azure SQL Server on top, so that you have a consistent, vertically aligned hybrid cloud infrastructure Stack that is not only easy to manage, but it is modern, it is available as a pay as you go option. And it's tightly integrated into Azure, so that you can manage all your on-prem as well as public cloud resources on one single pane of glass, thereby providing customers whole lot more simplicity, and operational efficiency. >> And as you said, the new tagline said from, beautifully from Greg's mouth, "The customer easier to put together than many children's toys." Puneet, thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on with Azure Stack HCI, what folks can expect to learn and see at Dell Tech World of virtual experience. >> Thank you. >> And Greg, thank you for sharing the story, what you're doing. Helping your peers learn from you. And I'm going to say on behalf of Dell Technologies, that awesome new tagline. That was cool. (Greg chuckles) (Lisa chuckles) >> Thank you. 'Preciate your time. >> We're going to use it for sure. (Greg chuckles) >> All right, for Puneet Dhawan and Greg Altman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience. (soft 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)

>> Jeff: Hello everybody, and thank you for joining us today for the virtual Vertica BDC 2020. Today's break-out session has been titled, "Migrating Your Vertica Cluster to the Cloud." I'm Jeff Healey, and I'm in Vertica marketing. I'll be your host for this break-out session. Joining me here are Sumeet Keswani and Chris Daly, Vertica product technology engineers and key members of our customer success team. Before we begin, I encourage you to submit questions and comments during the virtual session. You don't have to wait, just type your question or comment in the question box below the slides and click Submit. As always, there will be a Q&A session at the end of the presentation. We'll answer as many questions as we're able to during that time. Any questions that we don't address, we'll do our best to answer them offline. And alternatively, you can visit Vertica forums at forum.vertica.com to post your questions there after the session. Our engineering team is planning to join the forums to keep the conversation going. Also as a reminder that you can maximize your screen by clicking the double arrow button in the lower right corner of the slides. And yes, this virtual session is being recorded and will be available to view on demand this week. We'll send you a notification as soon as it's ready. Now let's get started. Over to you, Sumeet. >> Sumeet: Thank you, Jeff. Hello everyone, my name is Sumeet Keswani, and I will be talking about planning to deploy or migrate your Vertica cluster to the Cloud. So you may be moving an on-prem cluster or setting up a new cluster in the Cloud. And there are several design and operational considerations that will come into play. You know, some of these are cost, which industry you are in, or which expertise you have, in which Cloud platform. And there may be a personal preference too. After that, you know, there will be some operational considerations like VM and cluster sizing, what Vertica mode you want to deploy, Eon or Enterprise. It depends on your use keys. What are the DevOps skills available, you know, what elasticity, separation you need, you know, what is your backup and DR strategy, what do you want in terms of high availability. And you will have to think about, you know, how much data you have and where it's going to live. And in order to understand the cost, or the cost and the benefit of deployment and you will have to understand the access patterns, and how you are moving data from and to the Cloud. So things to consider before you move a deployment, a Vertica deployment to the Cloud, right, is one thing to keep in mind is, virtual CPUs, or CPUs in the Cloud, are not the same as the usual CPUs that you've been familiar with in your data center. A vCPU is half of a CPU because of hyperthreading. There is definitely the noisy neighbor effect. There is, depending on what other things are hosted in the Cloud environment, you may see performance, you may occasionally see performance issues. There are I/O limitations on the instance that you provision, so that what that really means is you can't always scale up. You might have to scale up, basically, you have to add more instances rather than getting bigger or the right size instances. Finally, there is an important distinction here. Virtualization is not free. There can be significant overhead to virtualization. It could be as much as 30%, so when you size and scale your clusters, you must keep that in mind. Now the other important aspect is, you know, where you put Vertica cluster is important. The choice of the region, how far it is from your various office locations. Where will the data live with respect to the cluster. And remember, popular locations can fill up. So if you want to scale out, additional capacity may or may not be available. So these are things you have to keep in mind when picking or choosing your Cloud platform and your deployment. So at this point, I want to make a plug for Eon mode. Eon mode is the latest mode, is a Cloud mode from Vertica. It has been designed with Cloud economics in mind. It uses shared storage, which is durable, available, and very cheap, like S3 storage or Google Cloud storage. It has been designed for quick scaling, like scale out, and highly elastic deployments. It has also been designed for high workload isolation, where each application or user group can be isolated from the other ones, so that they'll be paid and monitored separately, without affecting each other. But there are some disadvantages, or perhaps, you know, there's a cost for using Eon mode. Storage in S3 is neither cheap nor efficient. So there is a high latency of I/O when accessing data from S3. There is API and data access cost. There is API and data access cost associated with accessing your data in S3. Vertica in Eon mode has a pay as you go model, which you know, works for some people and does not work for others. And so therefore it is important to keep that in mind. And performance can be a little bit variable here, because it depends on cache, it depends on the local depot, which is a cache, and it is not as predictable as EE mode, so that's another trade-off. So let's spend about a minute and see how a Vertica cluster in Eon mode looks like. A Vertica cluster in Eon mode has S3 as the durability layer where all the data sits. There are subclusters, which are essentially just aggregation groups, which is separated compute, which will service different workloads. So for in this example, you may have two subclusters, one servicing ETL workload and the other one servicing (mic interference obscures speaking). These clusters are isolated, and they do not affect each other's performance. This allows you to scale them independently and isolate workloads. So this is the new Vertica Eon mode which has been specifically designed by us for use in the Cloud. But beyond this, you can use EE mode or Eon mode in the Cloud, it really depends on what your use case is. But both of these are possible, and we highly recommend Eon mode wherever possible. Okay, let's talk a little bit about what we mean by Vertica support in the Cloud. Now as you know, a Cloud is a shared data center, right. Performance in the Cloud can vary. It can vary between regions, availability zones, time of the day, choice of instance type, what concurrency you use, and of course the noisy neighbor effect. You know, we in Vertica, we performance, load, and stress test our product before every release. We have a bunch of use cases, we go through all of them, make sure that we haven't, you know, regressed any performance, and make sure that it works up to standards and gives you the high performance that you've come to expect. However, your solution or your workload is unique to you, and it is still your responsibility to make sure that it is tuned appropriately. To do this, one of the easiest things you can do is you know, pick a tested operating system, allocate the virtual machine, you know, with enough resources. It's something that we recommend, because we have tested it thoroughly. It goes a long way in giving you predictability. So after this I would like to now go into the various platforms, Cloud platforms, that Vertica has worked on. And I'll start with AWS, and my colleague Chris will speak about Azure and GCP. And our thoughts forward. So without further ado, let's start with the Amazon Web Services platform. So this is Vertica running on the Amazon Web Services platform. So as you probably are all aware, Amazon Web Services is the market leader in this space, and indeed really our biggest provider by far, and have been here for a very long time. And Vertica has a deep integration in the Amazon Web Services space. We provide a marketplace offering which has both pay as you go or a bring your own license model. We have many, you know, knowledge base articles, best practices, scripts, and resources that help you configure and use a Vertica database in the Cloud. We have several customers in the Cloud for many, many years now, and we have managed and console-based point and click deployments, you know, for ease of use in the Cloud. So Vertica has a deep integration in the Amazon space, and has been there for quite a bit now. So we communicate a lot of experience here. So let's talk about sizing on AWS. And sizing on any platform comes down to you know, these four or five different things. It comes down to picking the right instance type, picking the right disk volume and type, tuning and optimizing your networking, and finally, you know, some operational concerns like security, maintainability, and backup. So let's go into each one of these on the AWS ecosystem. So the choice of instance type is one of the important choices that you will make. In Eon mode, you know, you don't really need persistent disk. You can, you should probably choose ephemeral disk because it gives you extra speed, and speed with the instance type. We highly recommend the i3.4x instance types, which are very economical, have a big, 4 terabyte depot or cache per node. The i3.metal is similar to the i3.4, but has got significantly better performance, for those subclusters that need this extra oomph. The i3.2 is good for scale out of small ad hoc clusters. You know, they have a smaller cache and lower performance but it's cheap enough to use very indiscriminately. If you were in EE mode, well we don't use S3 as the layer of durability. Your local volumes is where we persist the data. Hence you do need an EBS volume in EE mode. In order to make sure that, you know, that the instance or the deployment is manageable, you might have to use some sort of a software RAID array over the EBS volumes. The most common instance type you see in EE mode is the r4.4x, the c4, or the m4 instance types. And then of course for temp space and depot we always recommend instance volumes. They're just much faster. Okay. So let's go, let's talk about optimizing your network or tuning your network. So the best, the best thing you can do about tuning your network, especially in Eon mode but in other modes too, is to get a VPC S3 endpoint. This is essentially a route table that makes sure that all traffic between your cluster and S3 goes over an internal fabric. This makes it much faster, you don't pay for egress cost, especially if you're doing external tables or your communal storage, but you do need to create it. Many times people will forget doing it. So you really do have to create it. And best of all, it's free. It doesn't cost you anything extra. You just have to create it during cluster creation time, and there's a significant performance difference for using it. The next thing about tuning your network is, you know, sizing it correctly. Pick the closest geographical region to where you'll consume the data. Pick the right availability zone. We highly recommend using cluster placement groups. In fact, they are required for the stability of the cluster. A cluster placement group is essentially, it operates this notion of rack. Nodes in a cluster placement group, are, you know, physically closer to each other than they would otherwise be. And this allows, you know, a 10 Gbps, bidirectional, TCP/IP flow between the nodes. And this makes sure that, you know, you get a high amount of Gbps per second. As you probably are all aware, the Cloud does not support broadcast or UDP broadcast. Hence you must use point-to-point UDP for spread in the Cloud, or in AWS. Beyond that, you know, point-to-point UDP does not scale very well beyond 20 nodes. So you know, as your cluster sizes increase, you must switch over to large cluster mode. And finally, use instances with enhanced networking or SR-IOV support. Again, it's free, it comes with the choice of the instance type and the operating system. We highly recommend it, it makes a big difference in terms of how your workload will perform. So let's talk a little bit about security, configuration, and orchestration. As I said, we provide CloudFormation scripts to make the ease of deployment. You can use the MC point and click. With regard to security, you know, Vertica does support instance profiles out of the box in Amazon. We recommend you use it. This is highly desirable so that you're not passing access keys and secret keys around. If you use our marketplace image, we have picked the latest operating systems, we have patched them, Amazon actually validates everything on marketplace and scans them for security vulnerabilities. So you get that for free. We do some basic configuration, like we disable root ssh access, we disallow any password access, we turn on encryption. And we run a basic set of security checks to make sure that the image is secure. Of course, it could be made more secure. But we try to balance out security, performance, and convenience. And finally, let's talk about backups. Especially in Eon mode I get the question, "Do we really need to back up our system, "since the data is in S3?" And the answer is yes, you do. Because you know, S3's not going to protect you against an accidental drop table. You know, S3 has a finite amount of reliability, durability, and availability. And you may want to be able to restore data differently. Also, backups are important if you're doing DR, or if you have additional cluster in a different region. The other cluster can be considered a backup. And finally, you know, why not create a backup or a disaster recovery cluster, you know, storage is cheap in the Cloud. So you know, we highly recommend you use it. So with this, I would like to hand it over to my colleague Christopher Daly, who will talk about the other two platforms that we support, that is Google and Azure. Over to you, Chris, thank you. >> Chris: Thanks, Sumeet, and hi everyone. So while there's no argument that we here at Vertica have a long history of running within the Amazon Web Services space, there are other alternative Cloud service providers where we do have a presence, such as Google Cloud Platform, or GCP. For those of you who are unfamiliar with GCP, it's considered the third-largest Cloud service provider in the marketspace, and it's priced very competitively to its peers. Has a lot of similarities to AWS in the products and services that it offers, but it tends to be the go-to place for newer businesses or startups. We officially started supporting GCP a little over a year ago with our first entry into their GCP marketplace. So a solution that deployed a fully-functional and ready-to-use Enterprise mode cluster. We followed up on that with the release and the support of Google storage buckets, and now I'm extremely pleased to announce that with the launch of Vertica 10, we're officially supporting Eon mode architecture in GCP as well. But that's not all, as we're adding additional offerings into the GCP marketplace. With the launch of version 10 we'll be introducing a second listing in the marketplace that allows for the deployment of an Eon mode cluster. It's all being driven by our own management consult. This will allow customers to quickly spin up Eon-based clusters within the GCP space. And if that wasn't enough, I'm also pleased to tell you that very soon after the launch we're going to be offering Vertica by the hour in GCP as well. And while we've done a lot to automate the solutions coming out of the marketplace, we recognize the simple fact that for a lot of you, building your cluster manually is really the only option. So with that in mind, let's talk about the things you need to understand in GCP to get that done. So wag me if you think this slide looks familiar. Well nope, it's not an erroneous duplicate slide from Sumeet's AWS section, it's merely an acknowledgement of all the things you need to consider for running Vertica in the Cloud. In Vertica, the choice of the operational mode will dictate some of the choices you'll need to make in the infrastructure, particularly around storage. Just like on-prem solutions, you'll need to understand the disk and networking capacities to get the most out of your cluster. And one of the most attractive things in GCP is the pricing, as it tends to run a little less than the others. But it does translate into less choices and options within the environment. If nothing else, I want you to take one thing away from this slide, and Sumeet said this earlier. VMs running, about AWS, Sumeet said this about AWS earlier. VMs running in the GCP space run on top of hardware that has hyperthreading enabled. And that a vCPU doesn't equate to a core, but rather a processing thread. This becomes particularly important if you're moving from an on-prem environment into the Cloud. Because a physical Vertica node with 32 cores is not the same thing as a VM with 32 vCPUs. In fact, with 32 vCPUs, you're only getting about 16 cores worth of performance. GCP does offer a handful of VM types, which they categorize by letter, but for us, most of these don't make great choices for Vertica nodes. The M series, however, does offer a good core to memory ratio, especially when you're looking at the high-mem variants. Also keep in mind, performance in I/O, such as network and disk, are partially dependent on the VM size, so customers in GCP space should be focusing on 16 vCPU VMs and above for their Vertica nodes. Disk options in GCP can be broken down into two basic types, persistent disks and local disks, which are ephemeral. Persistent disks come in two forms, standard or SSD. For Vertica in Eon mode, we recommend that customers use persistent SSD disks for the catalog, and either local SSD disks or persistent SSD disks for the depot and the temp space. Couple of things to think about here, though. Persistent disks are provisioned as a single device with a settable size. Local disks are provisioned as multiple disk devices with a fixed size, requiring you to use some kind of software RAIDing to create a single storage device. So while local SSD disks provide much more throughput, you're using CPU resources to maintain that RAID set. So you're giving, it's a little bit of a trade-off. Persistent disks offer redundancy, either within the zone that they exist or within the region, and if you're selecting regional redundancy, the disks are replicated across multiple zones in the region. This does have an effect in the performance to VM, so we don't recommend this. What we do recommend is the zonal redundancy when you're using persistent disks, as it gives you that redundancy level without actually affecting the performance. Remember also, in the Cloud space, all I/O is network I/O, as disks are basically block storage devices. This means that disk actions can and will slow down network traffic. And finally, the storage bucket access in GCP is based on GCP interoperability mode, which means that it's basically compliant with the AWS S3 API. In interoperability mode, access to the bucket is granted by a key pair that GCP refers to as HMAC keys. HMAC keys can be generated for individual users or for service accounts. We will recommend that when you're creating HMAC keys, choose a service account to ensure that the keys are not tied to a single employee. When thinking about storage for Enterprise mode, things change a little bit. We still recommend persistent SSD disks over standard ones. However, the use of local SSD disks for anything other than temp space is highly discouraged. I said it before, local SSD disks are ephemeral, meaning that the data's lost if the machine is turned off or goes down. So not really a place you want to store your data. In GCP, multiple persistent disks placed into a software RAID set does not create more throughput like you can find in other Clouds. The I/O saturation usually hits the VM limit long before it hits the disk limit. In fact, performance of a persistent disk is determined not just by the size of the disk but also by the size of the VM. So a good rule of thumb in GCP is to maximize your I/O throughput for persistent disks, is that the size tends to max out at two terabytes for SSDs and 10 terabytes for standard disks. Network performance in GCP can be thought of in two distinct ways. There's node-to-node traffic, and then there's egress traffic. Node-to-node performance in GCP is really good within the zone, with typical traffic between nodes falling in the 10-15 gigabits per second range. This might vary a little from zone to zone and region to region, but usually it's only limited, they're only limited by the existing traffic where the VMs exist. So kind of a noisy neighbor effect. Egress traffic from a VM, however, is subject to throughput caps, and these are based on the size of the VM. So the speed is set for the number of vCPUs in the VM at two gigabits per second per vCPU, and tops out at 32 gigabits per second. So the larger the VM, the more vCPUs you get, the larger the cap. So some things to consider in the NAV ring space for your Vertica cluster, pick a region that's physically close to you, even if you're connecting to the GCP network from a corporate LAN as opposed to the internet. The further the packets have to travel, the longer it's going to take. Also, GCP, like most Clouds, doesn't support UDP broadcast traffic on their virtual NAV ring, so you do have to use the point-to-point flag for spread when you're creating your cluster. And since the network cap on VMs is set at 32 gigabits per second per VM, maximize your network egress throughput and don't use VMs that are smaller than 16 vCPUs for your Vertica nodes. And that gets us to the one question I get asked the most often. How do I get my data into and out of the Cloud? Well, GCP offers many different methods to support different speeds and different price points for data ingress and egress. There's the obvious one, right, across the internet either directly to the VMs or into the storage bucket. Or you can, you know, light up a VPN tunnel to encrypt all that traffic. But additionally, GCP offers direct network interconnect from your corporate network. These get provided either by Google or by a partner, and they vary in speed. They also offer things called direct or carrier peering, which is connecting the edges of the networks between your network and GCP, and you can use a CDN interconnect, which creates, I believe, an on-demand connection from the GCP network, your network to the GCP network provided by a large host of CDN service providers. So GCP offers a lot of ways to move your data around in and out of the GCP Cloud. It's really a matter of what price point works for you, and what technology your corporation is looking to use. So we've talked about AWS, we've talked about GCP, it really only leaves one more Cloud. So last, and by far not the least, there's the Microsoft Azure environment. Holding on strong to the number two place in the major Cloud providers, Azure offers a very robust Cloud offering that's attractive to customers that already consume services from Microsoft. But what you need to keep in mind is that the underlying foundation of their Cloud is based on the Microsoft Windows products. And this makes their Cloud offering a little bit different in the services and offerings that they have. The good news here, though, is that Microsoft has done a very good job of getting their virtualization drivers baked into the modern kernels of most Linux operating systems, making running Linux-based VMs in Azure fairly seamless. So here's the slide again, but now you're going to notice some slight differences. First off, in Azure we only support Enterprise mode. This is because the Azure storage product is very different from Google Cloud storage and S3 on AWS. So while we're working on getting this supported, and we're starting to focus on this, we're just not there yet. This means that since we're only supporting Enterprise mode in Azure, getting the local disk performance right is one of the keys to success of running Vertica here, with the other major key being making sure that you're getting the appropriate networking speeds. Overall, Azure's a really good platform for Vertica, and its performance and pricing are very much on par with AWS. But keep in mind that the newer versions of the Linux operating systems like RHEL and CentOS run much better here than the older versions. Okay, so first things first again, just like GCP, in Azure VMs are running on top of hardware that has hyperthreading enabled. And because of the way Hyper-V, Azure's virtualization engine works, you can actually see this, right? So if you look down into the CPU information of the VM, you'll actually see how it groups the vCPUs by core and by thread. Azure offers a lot of VM types, and is adding new ones all the time. But for us, we see three VM types that make the most sense for Vertica. For customers that are looking to run production workloads in Azure, the Es_v3 and the Ls_v2 series are the two main recommendations. While they differ slightly in the CPU to memory ratio and the I/O throughput, the Es_v3 series is probably the best recommendation for a generalized Vertica node, with the Ls_v2 series being recommended for workloads with higher I/O requirements. If you're just looking to deploy a sandbox environment, the Ds_v3 series is a very suitable choice that really can reduce your overall Cloud spend. VM storage in Azure is provided by a grouping of four different types of disks, all offering different levels of performance. Introduced at the end of last year, the Ultra Disk option is the highest-performing disk type for VMs in Azure. It was designed for database workloads where high throughput and low latency is very desirable. However, the Ultra Disk option is not available in all regions yet, although that's been changing slowly since their launch. The Premium SSD option, which has been around for a while and is widely available, can also offer really nice performance, especially higher capacities. And just like other Cloud providers, the I/O throughput you get on VMs is dictated not only by the size of the disk, but also by the size of the VM and its type. So a good rule of thumb here, VM types with an S will have a much better throughput rate than ones that don't, meaning, and the larger VMs will have, you know, higher I/O throughput than the smaller ones. You can expand the VM disk throughput by using multiple disks in Azure and using a software RAID. This overcomes limitations of single disk performance, but keep in mind, you're now using CPU cycles to maintain that raid, so it is a bit of a trade-off. The other nice thing in Azure is that all their managed disks are encrypted by default on the server side, so there's really nothing you need to do here to enable that. And of course I mentioned this earlier. There is no native access to Azure storage yet, but it is something we're working on. We have seen folks using third-party applications like MinIO to access Azure's storage as an S3 bucket. So it might be something you want to keep in mind and maybe even test out for yourself. Networking in Azure comes in two different flavors, standard and accelerated. In standard networking, the entire network stack is abstracted and virtualized. So this works really well, however, there are performance limitations. Standard networking tends to top out around four gigabits per second. Accelerated networking in Azure is based on single root I/O virtualization of the Mellanox adapter. This is basically the VM talking directly to the physical network card in the host hardware, and it can produce network speeds up to 20 gigabits per second, so much, much faster. Keep in mind, though, that not all VM types and operating systems actually support accelerated networking, and you know, just like disk throughput, network throughput is based on VM type and size. So what do you need to think about for networking in the Azure space? Again, stay close to home. Pick regions that are geographically close to your location. Yes, the backbones between the regions are very, very fast, but the more hops your packets have to make, the longer it takes. Azure offers two types of groupings of their VMs, availability sets and availability zones. Availability zones offer good redundancy across multiple zones, but this actually increases the node-to-node latency, so we recommend you avoid this. Availability sets, on the other hand, keep all your VMs grouped together within a single zone, but makes sure that no two VMs are running on the same host hardware, for redundancy. And just like the other Clouds, UDP broadcast is not supported. So you have to use the point-to-point flag when you're creating your database to ensure that the spread works properly. Spread time out, okay, this is a good one. So recently, Microsoft has started monthly rolling updates of their environment. What this looks like is VMs running on top of hardware that's receiving an update can be paused. And this becomes problematic when the pausing of the VM exceeds eight seconds, as the unpaused members of the cluster now think the paused VM is down. So consider adjusting the spread time out for your clusters in Azure to 30 seconds, and this will help avoid a little of that. If you're deploying a large cluster in Azure, more than 20 nodes, use large closer mode, as point-to-point for spread doesn't really scale well with a lot of Vertica nodes. And finally, you know, pick VM types and operating systems that support accelerated networking. The difference in the node-to-node speeds can be very dramatic. So how do we move data around in Azure, right? So Microsoft views data egress a little differently than other Clouds, as it classifies any data being transmitted by a VM as egress. However, it only bills for data egress that actually leaves the Azure environment. Egress speed limits in Azure are based entirely on the VM type and size, and then they're limited by your connection to them. While not offering as many pathways to access their Cloud as GCP, Azure does offer a direct network-to-network connection called ExpressRoute. Offered by a large group of third-party processors, partners, the ExpressRoute offers multiple tiers of performance that are based on a flat charge for inbound data and a metered charge for outbound data. And of course you can still access these via the internet, and securely through a VPN gateway. So on behalf of Jeff, Sumeet, and myself, I'd like to thank you for listening to our presentation today, and we're now ready for Q&A.

(upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to another Cube Conversation where we speak with thought leaders in depth about the topics that are most important to the overall technology community. I'm Peter Burris, your host. Every business inspires to be a digital business, which is every business, faces a significant challenge. They need to use their data in new and value creating ways. But some of that data is not lending itself to new applications, new uses because it's locked up in formats, in technologies and applications that don't lend themselves to change. That's one of the big challenges that every business faces. What can they do to help unlock, to help liberate their data from older formats and older approaches so they can create new sources of value with it. To have that conversation, we're joined by a great guest. Greg Tinker is the CTO and Founder of SereneIT. Greg, welcome back to theCube. >> Thank you Peter, very appreciate it buddy. >> It's been a long time. This is your first time here with SereneIT so why don't you tell us a little bit about SereneIT. >> Sure, so at a high level we are a technology partner. SereneIT focuses on the next generation model structures of engineering first. There's a lot of VARS, in simplest terms, I would say we're a value at a reseller, sure. But we capitalize and focus just on the VA. Anybody can bring VR. The legacy approach of just being a reseller is no longer valid in our industry. Complexities and trying to have a situation where you can liberate data, try to take it from a legacy entrenched model, process, procedure and go into a new modern IT software defined ecosystem is very complex. And our objective is to make the, enablement of IT serene or simple and that's where SereneIT comes from. >> You know, I love the name but if you go back 20 years as you said, the asset that IT was focused on and took care of was the hardware. >> That's right. >> And we bought the hardware from a reseller, they just made the installations, configurations and what not. But as you said, today we're focused on the data. That's the asset. >> That's correct. >> And just as we used to have challenges uplifting and all the things we had to do with hardware, we're having similar types of challenges when you think about how to apply data to new uses, sustain that asset feature of it but apply it in new ways to create new value. As you talk to customers, what is the problem that you find they're encountering as they try to think what to do with their high value traditional data? So there's actually, I'll call it three strategic problems. Becoming to where it to be a workload optimized model structures or your data driven intelligence, trying to pull something out of the data model, trying to pull something out of the data, make it tangible to the business. And then trying to figure out a way to make it easy to enable the users, that is the employees to do something with the data the have. Making it more of a cloud-centric approach. Everybody wants that easy button now. So at a high level, trying to make that a possibility is where we spend our time today. And give you a quick example of that would be legacy block storage. We do a lot in the storage world. And we focus on software defined storage apparatus or solutions. So a lot of our clients are kind of mired down with legacy block, via Fibre Channel basics that were great for their era. But today with cost being a big factor in trying to be able to leverage an ecosystem where I can take my data, wherever my data sits and leverage it on multiple different apparatuses, be it BlueData, be in Kubernetes, be it name your favorite Docker solution. Trying to be able to use that in an ecosystem in a software defined hyper cloud, doing that on a legacy block is very problematic. And that's where we help customers transition from that legacy mindset, legacy IT infrastructure into a more of a modern software defined data program. >> So what's talk about that. Because there's a more modern technology, but really what they're doing is they're saying, look I've got this data, using these protocols like Fibre Channel with these applications and it's doing its job. >> That's right. >> But I want to create options on how I might use that data in the future, options that aren't available to me or aren't available to my business if it stays locked inside Fibre Channel for example. >> That's correct. >> So what you're really doing, is you're giving them paths to new options with their data that can be sustained whatever the technology is. Have I got that right? >> In a nutshell, Frank I would agree with your sentiment on that, your comment is spot on. We take customers data, we look at the business as a whole. And we focus on, what is the core of the business? Be it, maybe it's a High-Performance Computing Cluster Maybe it's a Oracle, Cyrus, Informant name your favorite data base structure. Maybe it's MapR, maybe it's a Dupe. We look at the business and determine, how are we using that data? How much data do we need? What's my data working set size? Understanding that and then we actually would design a solution that will be a software defined ecosystem that we can move that data in. And nine times out of 10 we can do it on the fly. Rarely, rarely ever do we have an outage to do it. Or that might be a small few minute outage window when we do a cut over, where we keep everything in mirroring Lockstep . >> Well that's one of the beauties of software defined is that you have those kinds of flexibilities. >> That's right. >> But think of, so talk to me a little bit about the you are, the customer realizes they have a problem. They find you guys. >> Sure. >> So how do they find you? >> So we do a lot with large scale Fortune 50, Fortune 100, the large scale enterprise businesses. And we do that with our, we're known in the engineering world, big accounts, because of our backdrop in HP engineering. And so HP brings us a lot into these accounts to help them solve a big business problem. So that's how a lot of our customers are finding us today. We are reaching out with media, like theCube here to talk to clients about the fact that we do exist and that we exist to help them consume a more modern IT in footprint. To help them go from that legacy model into that more modern model. >> Okay, so the customer realizes they have a problem, HPE and others, help identify you guys, matches you together. You show up, how do you work with the customer? Is it your big brains and the customer passive? Or you're working side by side to help them accelerate their journey? >> We find it best that we do it in a cohesive manner. We sit down and have a long discussion with their, usually their Chief Executive officer, their CTO, Chief Technology Officer, we'll sit down and talk about the business constraints. And then we'll go down to the directors the guys on the front lines that see the problems on a day to day basis. And we look at where their constraints are. Is it performance, IOP driven. Nine times out of 10, those problems are no longer there. They were solved years ago. Today it's more about the legacy model of, let me log a ticket to stand up a new virtual machine to a SQL database to do this application. So I've logged the ticket, a week two later I finally get a virtual machine. And now I got to get five more teams engaged, I get it online. Total business takes about a month to get some new apparatus up. Where if we go into a software defined ecosystem where we have these playbooks and this model written for the business, we can do that in 10 minutes. Be it on Nutanix do it with SimpliVity, VMware models, we don't' differentiate that. We let the customer tell us which one they use. 'Cause everybody has their liking. Be it some are VMware shop, some are Hyper-V, some are KBM. We do all of them. >> But the point is you want to help them move form an old world that was focused on executing the tasks associate with bringing the system up to a new world that's focused on the resources being able to configure themselves, being able to bring to bring themselves up test themselves in a software defined manner introducing some of those DevOps processes. Whatever the technology is, they have the people and the process to execute the technology. >> That's exactly right, because the technology in a nutshell. If you look at just technology itself that's not the hard part. Not for us anyway, 'cause we're an engineering team that's what we do well. The data driven intelligence stuff and helping customers bring more value out of their data. We can help them with that and show them exactly how we would do it. Be it a different technologies and stuff and we'll get into that discussion later. But the biggest problem we see is the people and processes which you just mentioned. Pushing the button, achieve an objective. That is where the old way of being very ticket driven Siloed approach, really slow down the economics of business. Was a huge driving force of not achieving the ROI that you actually set out to do years ago. Where we have one client that has a little over 4,000 servers and how my team and I explain it to the clients. Come out to the Golden Gate bridge. January 1 you start painting. December 30th you're done painting and January 1 you start painting again. You never get done. It's always getting painted. Patching of these large scale enterprises is the exact same way. You can't patch all the servers on a Saturday. You can't patch three thousand machines, BIOS, firmware, the list goes on. What we do for them is we actually put in an apparatus engine, basically an automation engine and instead of an army of 10 people doing firmware or BIOS and all the stuff updates, we automated 100% of that entire process. That's what SereneIT does. Help a customer take a, could be a legacy model, bare metal machine and show them how we can automate the bare metal machine. We can do the exact same thing in any hypervisor on the planet today. >> So that it's done faster, simpler. The outcome is more predictable. The result is more measurable. >> Yes. >> That's really great stuff. Let's go back to this notion of data because we kind of started with this idea of data and having to evolve the formats increasing the flexibility of it's utilization. We talked about hypervisors and all that technology is kind of sucking it forward, bringing that data forward making it possible to do things with it, but still the data itself is a major challenge. How are you working with customers to get them to envision the new data world independent of some of these other technologies? >> Sure, okay. So yeah, we have clients right now, we have (mumbled) systems these are global file systems that have enormous amount of data in it, some of it is compiled code logics for drivers and firmware and Kernel code structure that are forthcoming technologies that aren't even released yet. We have clients that have data based structure with ascii text is very common road driven. We have customers that have flat ascii files that are just flat text files. So we help the customers grab data from that existing data footprint for new lines of business. Determine what are we touching, how are we touching and how often are we touching it and why are we touching it? Case in point, when you have a large manufacturer doing chip design and your looking at a global file system you're trying to give assertation data as to what drivers are our developers working on most frequently. In the medical community, we have a client we're working on at global scale, we're doing real time data analytics to figure out if we're doing SQL injection from a hacker. So we show them exactly how we can do this in an inline driver stack and show them how to do it with the technology reducing their actual CapEx expend. There's legacy tools out there that work great. You know one of these is like, I won't give names of product and stuff, but there's a lot of cool technologies that's been around for a long time. >> That works. >> That works. >> And it just needs a smart person, or a smart team to put it together so it can be applied. >> That's what we've been doing with our clients is trying to show them that we can take the data that you have, be it flat ascii files or binary data structures. And we can show them that we can give you data analytics and pull that back. We have another client in law industry that we manage worldwide and we do e-discovery. On trying to figure out phrases and things that are maybe concerning to them in a financial world that is the global market. And we're able to give them that data structure on their own intellectual property and we give that to them in real time. We give them a dashboard so they can log in to the dashboard and they can see real time data transparency at a moments notice, so they can tell what the market is doing in Britain or they can tell what the market is doing in Singapore or U.S. by just looking at a dashboard and we're pulling data back. And we're pulling it from outside of world data points, this could be Facebook. Real time feeds, news, media and we pull it from internal data feeds. Email transactions that are going from their financial, they have like CIO's the Chief Investment Officers. Most people think of that as an information officer, right? So we're able to pull data from that and show them that they have a great deal of intellectual property at their fingertips that honestly they've never used before and that's what we're helping customers do today. >> Greg Tinker, Founder, CTO SereneIT. Thanks so much for being on theCube. >> Thank you very much Peter. >> And once again want to thank you for listening to this Cube Conversation. Until next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix dot next. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Christo du Raan, he is the COO IT Hardware and Infrastructure at Trustco Holdings. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> All right, thanks. And thanks for having me. >> Direct from Namibia. So we keep hearing there are customers from 50 countries. And you represent Namibia here. >> Yeah I come from far down in Africa. (laughs) >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Trustco, what you do down there? >> Trustco's a financial services company firstly, we look after all our Namibian customers in the insurance industry, as well as in the banking industry. We've been busy building our banking industry now for the last five years. And we're almost to that point where we can start serving people. Then we've got also educational services that we give to our customers and we've got roughly about 15,000 students, all doing distance learning, and of that 15,000 we've got about 80 to 90 percent of them that we also do finance, not just for the course material but also the technology, that we finance for them, so to give them the capabilities to do their studies through us. Then we've got also natural resources, it's quite a new business unit for us, where we dabble a little in diamond mining, we've got two mines currently, one in Namibia itself, where we produce probably one of the best diamonds in the world, clear cut diamonds, and then also in Sierra Leone we've recently acquired a mining license there as well. Then in Namibia, the other stuff that we do is in Shared Services, where we have our own radio station that we broadcast in Namibia, and then we do a little bit of in-house marketing and media and those type of things. >> Just a few things! >> Well luckily Christo, your IT staff, they have it easy, they don't have, you know, I walk through the Expo floor, it's like oh well how many verticals do you need to go to all of them, to be able to learn what you're doing. So give us if you can just, a little bit of a snapshot of your IT environment, what your team's responsible for, and if you can, kind of bring us even back before you began the journey onto Nutanix. >> So we're very centralized in Namibia, all our stuff gets run out of one data center, or one common area in our area offices, and then we expand to the six branches out in Namibia and in South Africa and now of late we'll be in Sierra Leone. IT team pretty much look after everything, we've got a saying at the office, "If it's got a plug on, it's IT's problem". (laughing) So yeah, so we do everything from the infrastructure, the networking, the servers, the storage, well, now it's Nutanix, everything is already built into one solution, so that the spurred systems have now fallen away, and we only look after it. >> Bring us back to that move to Nutanix, was there an upgrade that you were looking to do? Was there a pain point? What was the impetus to look at Nutanix? >> So our business has expanded quite quickly and the old way of doing things, with the separate SANs, separate switches, separate servers, those type of things became a little bit slumbersome, and difficult to manage because you had to have all these different kind of vendors that's got specific software solutions and specific training that you have to do and it just became a little bit too much for us and we decided that, let's step back a little bit, and see if there's any solutions out there that makes it firstly easier, that we can manage with less people and do more and at that stage hyperconvergence was just on the peak of becoming a thing, if you want to call it that, and we had done our research and found that Nutanix at that stage was the best fit for us and also the most mature in the hyperconverged space. So, that's basically where we got to the Nutanix solution, obviously like everyone else, we started with a Community Edition, dabbled our hand a little bit in there, and saw that's actually doable, it's easy and something that we can build on. >> So, you've been with them for about two years now, so still a relatively new relationship but talk about the beginning in particular and relationships are hard. Every relationship is hard. There are inevitable stumbling blocks. What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you work with Nutanix to overcome them? >> Challenges, I can say, luckily we haven't had a lot of them. Our business is not nearly as big as the Europeans and the Americans, so it is not that complex a system. We had our challenges in the beginning, hypervisor specifically, 'cause we made a huge move, we went totally 180 degrees from our Hyper-V environment, we said we going to go right over to AHV, don't want to do deal licensing, let's just jump in on AHV and go Nutanix fully. So, obviously we had a few challenges with a couple of our services and servers. But other than that, I must say, it was actually a pretty easy move for us. >> It's interesting that you say going from Hyper-V 'cause I've talked to the customers, oh there's a saving from moving from VMware, oh Microsoft, Hyper-V's all included, if you're doing Windows and you've got Hyper-V, I'm sure you've got a Windows application, so was there an application change or what was the driver to move? >> There were some of our applications that were very specific, especially on the network drivers side of things, moving from the normal Windows drivers, to the IO drivers in Linux. We had a couple of challenges with our in-house apps as well, but again, it was a reasonably painless move over to Nutanix. >> One of things we keep hearing about at this conference is how Nutanix is evolving as customer needs and demands are changing. You gave us the overview of your company, you are getting into new businesses and still continuing in established businesses, what are some of the needs that your IT is experiencing and how is Nutanix meeting those needs? >> Like I say, in the old infrastructure days, provisioning was probably the biggest hurdle, if the Dev guys wanted stuff, you first had to go and buy some more hardware, because you need to adapt to them. When we reversed over to Hyper-V eventually, it became easier, but it was still not the right fit. You still had to tweak it and play with it etc etc. So, the biggest challenge was to get our DevOp guys quicker access to what they need. And then also our customers as well. We've moved from where there's a person that needed to provision storage, needed to provision networking, needed to provision server and VMs, that's now all basically done by one person and most of those things we've already automized, so it is five, ten minutes, and then they've got what they need. I think it made us a little bit more agile because we pride ourselves on being quick thinkers, deploying stuff fast and that was always Trustco's main advantage in the Namibian market, we didn't go through all the other rigamarole that other companies have of tendering and doing things in a certain way and by the time that you get there it's not relevant anymore, now we need to do something else again. That brought us quick to market and made it so that we can deliver quicker solutions to our customers. >> So, Christo, was there any impact organizationally for rolling out Nutanix, you mentioned DevOps there, the goal of course is that they shouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure and hopefully Nutanix is delivering that, but there's some retraining or moving inside the organization, what's the impact been on your organization? >> On the customer side, none. They don't even know we've moved over. >> But from the IT side? >> From our customer side, they've not seen anything. From the IT side of things, we had a phased approach, so we started off with the Community Edition, where we basically just dabbled in it, saw what we could do on it and then also, let's call it training for the IT guys, so that they're comfortable in how the product works. So by the time that we got to deploying it in production, it was actually a very smooth transaction. We had all the kinks sorted out beforehand and made sure that everything will work, again, being in the finance industry, in the banking industry, downtime is an absolute no no, and we wanted to get to a point where we say we're not going to move over production sites, production environments, in the evenings from twelve to four in the morning because we've all got families so we'll either plan it properly ahead of time and yes we did it and actually, dare I say, in production time, we moved across almost seamlessly. We've got a lot of redundancies built in obviously so it gave us the opportunity to actually move in place if you want to call it that. >> So what does the future hold for this relationship? Where do you see your partnership with Nutanix evolving and where do you think you'll be, say, five years from now? >> So, we've got a roadmap set out with Nutanix and where we're now only in the baby phase, where we've done the infrastructure, we're happy everything is working, so now we're in the POC stage of exploring the software suite in its entirety. We've started now with Leap and Bolt ADR scenario and tested it extensively and we're now in that process, probably when I get back in Namibia, we'll have the licenses hopefully to start deploying it in our production environment. More closer to the future, in the next I would say, six to nine months, we're going to take on Frame, 'cause part of our business scenario, because we were Microsoft, was the Remote Desktop Service, and that was what kept us so lean. There are some challenges now with Remote Desktop Services where our Dev guys are moving into some Linux and there's different things coming up now where we move away from the traditional monolithic applications to more agile applications and then we'll start dabbling our hands in Frame. For us the holdback was when Frame came out, that it was only in the cloud and for us in Namibia, Africa, the internet is not as stable as we would like, so that was totally off the cards for us. Now that it moved back into on-prem and we can run Frame on-prem, that will probably be our biggest project going forward for the next year and year and a half. >> Excellent. Well thank you so much for coming on theCube Christo. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCube's live coverage of dot next. [Urgent Music]

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. Celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMWorld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Stu: Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host Justin Warren. And you are watching theCUBE. We have two sets, three days, here at VMWorld 2019. Our 10th year of the show. And happy to welcome back to our program, two of our theCUBE Alumni. We were at VeeamON earlier this year down in Miami, but sitting to my right is Ratmir Timashev, who is the co-founder and executive vice president of global sales and marketing with Veeam, and joining us also is Danny Allan, who's the vice president of product strategy also at Veeam. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Thanks for having us Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right so, Ratmir, let's start. Veeam has been very transparent as to how the company is doing. You know, there's all this talks about unicorns and crazy evaluations or anything like that? But give us the update on, you know, actual dollars and actually what's happening in your business. >> Ratmir: Absolutely, we're always transparent. So actually, there's this term, unicorn, right? So does it mean one billion in valuation, or one billion in revenue (chuckles)? >> Stu: It is valuation. >> Yeah, I know that. So, Veeam is not unicorn anymore, right? Veeam is one billion in bookings. So, yeah, the major trend in the industry, is that we're moving from perpetual to subscription, because we're moving on-prem to hybrid cloud. And Veeam is actually leading that wave. So where we've been always known to be very customer friendly to do business with, easy to do business with, from the channel, from the customer perspective, and that's the major trend. If the customers are moving to hybrid cloud, we have to move to there, from our business model to a hybrid cloud. So we're changing our business model, to make it very easy for customers. >> Ratmir, that's not an easy adjustment. We've watched some public companies go through a little bit of challenges as you work through, you know there's the financial pieces, there's the sales pieces of that, since... Give us a little bit of the, how that works? You know, you just retrain the sales force and go or-- >> That is awesome, awesome question. That that is awesome point, that it's extremely painful. Extremely painful, and for some company, like everybody says Adobe is the best example of moving from perpetual or traditional business model to a subscription, right. So annual, even monthly subscription. For us it's even ten times more difficult than Adobe, because, we're not only moving from perpetual to subscription. We're moving, we're changing our licensing unit, per socket which is VMware traditional to pure VM or pure workload or pure instance, right. What we call instance, basically means, so it's extremely painful, we have to change how we do business, how we incentivize our sales people, how we incentivize our channel, how we incentivize our customers. But that's inevitable, we're moving to a hybrid cloud where sockets don't exist. Sockets, there are no sockets in the hybrid cloud. There are workloads and data. Data and applications. So we have to change our business model, but we also have to keep our current business model. And it's very difficult in terms of the bookings and revenue, when we give a customer an option to buy this way or that way. Of course they will choose the way that is the less expensive for them, and we're ready to do that. We can absorb that, because we're a private company, and we're approachable and we're fast growing. So we can afford that, unlike some of the public companies or companies that, venture capital finance. >> So how do you make that kind of substantial change to the... I mean changing half your company, really. To change that many structures. How do do you do that without losing the soul of the company? And like Veeam, Veeam is famous for being extremely Veeamy. How do you make all those sorts of changes and still not lose the soul of the company like that? How do you keep that there? >> That's an awesome question, because that's 50% of executive management discussions, are about that questions, right. What made Veeam successful? Core value, what we call, core values, there are family values, there are company core values every company has. So that's the most important. And one of them is, be extremely customer friendly, right. So easy to do business with. That's the number one priority. Revenue, projects, number two, number three, being doing the right things for the customer is number one. That's how we're discussing, and we're introducing a major change on October 1st. >> Ah yes. >> Another major change. We've done this major changes in the last two years, moving to subscription. So we started that move, two, two-and-a-half years ago, by introducing our product for Office 365, backup, when that was available only for, on subscription basis, not perpetual. So we're moving in subscription, to the subscription business model in the the last three years. On October 1st, 2019, in one month, we introducing another major change. We are extremely simplifying our subscription licensing and introducing, what we will call Veeam Universal License. Where you can buy once and move or close everywhere. From physical to VMware to Hyper-V to a double SS, ash or back to VMware and back to physical. I'm joking. (lauging) >> All right, Danny, bring us inside the product. We've watched the maturity, ten years of theCUBE here, Veeam was one of the early big ecosystems success stories, of course it went into Multi-Hypervisor, went into Multicloud. You know Ratmir, just went through all of the changes there. Exciting the VUL I guess we'll call it. >> Ratmir: VUL >> VUL, absolutely. So on the product piece, how's the product keeping in line with all these things. >> So our vision is to be the most trusted provider, backup solutions that enable high data management. So backup is still a core of it and it's the start of everything that we do. But if you look what we've done over the course of this year, it's very much about the cloud. So we added the ability, for example, to tier things into object storage in the hyperscale public cloud and that has been taking off, gang busters into S3 and into Azure Blob storage. And so that's a big part of it. Second part of it, in cloud data management is the ability to recover, if you're sending your data into the cloud, why not recover there? So we've added the ability to recover workloads in Azure, recover workloads in EC2. And lastly of course, once your workloads are in the cloud, then you want to protect it, using cloud-native technology. So we've addressed all of these solutions, and we've been announcing all these exciting things over the course of 2019. >> The product started off as being VM-centrical, VM Only back in the day. And then you've gradually added different capabilities to it as customers demanded, and it was on a pretty regular cadence as well. And you've recently added, added cloud functionality and backups there. What's the next thing, customers are asking for? 'Cause we've got lots of workloads being deployed in edge, we've got lots of people doing things with NoSQL backups, we've got Kubernetes, is mentioned every second breath at this show. So where are you seeing demand for customers that you need to take the product next? So we've heard a lot about Kubernetes obviously, the shows, the containers it's obviously a focus point. But one of the things we demoed yesterday. We actually had a breakout session, is leveraging an API from VMR called the VCR API for IO filtering. So it basically enables you to fork the rights when you're writing down to the storage level, so that you have continuous replication in two environments. And that just highlights the relationship we have with VMware. 80% of our customers are running on VMware. But that's the exciting things that we're innovating on. Things like making availability better. Making the agility and movement between clouds better. Making sure that people can take copies of their data to accelerate their business. These all areas that we are focusing on. >> Yeah, a lot of companies have tried to, multiple times have tried to go away from backup and go into data management. I like that you don't shy away from, ah, yeah we do backup and it's an important workload, and you're not afraid to mention that. Where's some other companies seem to be quite scared of saying, we do backup, 'cause it's not very cool or sexy. Although well, it doesn't have to be cool and sexy to be important. So I like that you actually say that yes we do backup. But we are also able to do some of these other bits and pieces. And it's enabled by that backup. So you know, copy, data management, so we can take copies of things and do this. Where is some of the demand coming around what to do with that data management side of things. I know there's, people are interested in things like, for example, data masking, where you want to take a copy of some data and use it for testing. There's a whole bunch of issue and risks around in doing that. So companies look for assistance from companies like Veeam to do that sort of thing. Is that where you're heading with some of that product? >> It is, there's four big use cases, DevOps is certainly one of them, and we've been talking about Kubernetes, right, which is all about developers and DevOps type development, so that's a big one. And one of the interesting things about that use case is, when you make copies of data, compliance comes into play. If you need to give a copy of the data to the developer, you don't want to give them credit card numbers or health information, so you probably want to mask that out. We have the capability today in Veeam, we call it, Staged Restore, that you could actually open the data in the sandbox to manipulate it, before you give it to the developer. But that's certainly one big use case, and it's highlighted at conferences like this. Another one is security, I spent a decade in security. I get passionate about it, but pentesting or forensics. If you do an invasive test on a production system, you'll bring the system down. And so another use case of the data is, take a copy, give it to the security team to do that test without impacting the production workload. A third one would be, IT operations, patching and updating all the systems. One of the interesting things about Veeam customers. They're far more likely to be on the most recent versions of software, because you can test it easily, by taking a copy. Test the patch, test the update and then roll it forward. And then a forth huge use case that we can not ignore is the GDPR in analytics and compliance. There's just this huge demand right now. And I think there's going to be market places opened in the public cloud, around delegating access to the data, so that they can analyze it and give you more intelligence about it. So GDPR is just a start, right. Were is my personally identifiable information? But I can imagine workload where a market place or an offering, where someone comes in and says, hey, I'll pay you some money and I'll classify your data for you, or I'll archive it smartly for you. And the business doesn't have to that. All they have to do is delegate access to the data, so that they can run some kind of machine learning algorithm on that data. So these are all interesting use cases. I go back, DevOps, security IT operations and analytics, all of those. >> So Ratmir, when I go to the keynote, it did feel like it was Kubernetes world? When I went down the show floor it definitely felt like data protection world. So it's definitely been one of the buzzier conversations the last couple of years at this show. But you look, walk through the floor, whether it be some of the big traditional vendors, lots of brand new start ups, some of the cloud-native players in this space. How do you make sure that Veeam gets the customers, keeps the customers that they have and can keep growing on the momentum that you've been building on? >> That's a great question, Stu. Like Pat Gelsinger mention that, number of applications has grown in the last five years, from 50 million to something like 330 million, and will grow to another almost 800 million in the next five years, by 2024. Veeam is in the right business, Veeam is the leader, Veeam is driving the vision and the strategy, right. Yeah, we have good competition in the form of legacy vendors and emerging vendors, but we have very good position because we own the major part of your hybrid cloud, which is the private cloud. And we're providing a good vision for how the hybrid cloud data management, not just data protection, which just Danny explained, should be done, right. I think we're in a good position and I feel very comfortable for the next five, ten years for Veeam. >> It's a good place to be. I mean feeling confident about the future is... I don't know five to ten years, that's a long way out. I don't know. >> Yeah I agree, I agree, it used to be like that, now you cannot predict more than six moths ahead, right. >> Justin I'm not going to ask him about Simon now, it's-- >> Six months is good yeah, six months maximum, what we can predict-- >> We were asking Michael Dell about the impact of China these days, so there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these day. >> Ratmir: Totally. >> Anything macro economic, you know that, you look at your global footprint. >> No we're traditional global technology company that generates most of the revenue between Europe and North America and we have emerging markets like Asia-Pac and Latin. We're no different than any other global technology company, in terms of the revenue and our investment. The fastest growing region of course is Asia-Pac, but our traditional markets is North America and Europe. >> Hailing from Asia-Pac, I do know the region reasonably well and Veeam is, yeah Veeam is definitely, has a very strong presence there and growing. Australia used to be there, one of our claims to fame, was one of the highest virtualized workload-- >> And Mohai is the cloud adapter. >> Cloud adoption. >> Yes, we like new shiny toys, so adopt it very, very quickly. Do you see any innovation coming out of Asia-Pac, because we use these things so much, and we tend to be on that leading edge. Do you see things coming out of the Asia-Pac teams that notice how customers are using these systems and is that placing demand on Veeam. >> Absolutely, but Danny knows better because he just came back from the Asia-Pacific trip. >> Justin: That's right, you did. >> Yeah, I did, I always say you live in the future, because you're so many hours ahead. But the reality is actually, the adoption of things like Hyper-convergence infrastructure, was far faster in areas like NZ, the adoption of the cloud. And it's because of New Zealand is part of the DAid, Australia is very much associated with taking that. One of the things that we're seeing there is consumption based model. I was just there a few weeks ago and the move to a consumption and subscription based model is far further advanced in other parts of the world. So I go there regularly, mostly because it gives me a good perspective on what the US is going to do two years later, And maybe AMEA three years later. It gives us a good perspective of where the industry is going-- >> It's not to the US it comes to California first then it spreads from there. (lauging) >> Are you saying he's literally using the technology of tomorrow in his today, is what we're saying. >> Maybe me I can make predictions a little bit further ahead there. >> Well you live in the future. >> All right I want to give you the both, just a final word here, VMWorld 2019. >> It's always the best show for us. VMWorld is the, I mean like Danny said, 80% of our customers is VMware, so it's always the best. We've been here for the last 12 years, since 2007. I have so many friends, buddies, love to come here, like to spend three, four days with my best friends, in the industry and just in life. >> I love the perspective here of the Multicloud worlds, so we saw some really interesting things, the moving things across clouds and leveraging Kubernetes and containers. And I think the focus on where the industry is going is very much aligned with Veeam. We also believe that, while it starts with backup up, the exciting thing is what's coming in two, three years. And so we have a close alignment, close relationship. It's been a great conference. >> Danny, Ratmir, thank you so much for the updates as always and yeah, have some fun with some of your friends, in the remaining time that we have. >> We have a party tonight Stu, so Justin too. >> Yeah, I think most people that have been to VMWorld are familiar with the Veeam party, it is famous, definitely. >> For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more coverage here, from VMWorld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is special On the Ground of theCUBE here at the VTUG Summer Slam 2019. We've had the pleasure of knowing the VTUG team for quite awhile back actually, when it was the New England VMUG was when I started attending. When it switched to the VTUG at Gillette Stadium's when we started doing theCUBE there. And happy to bring back to the program first, Chris Harney, who is the one who created this as a true user event. And joining him is his wife Dawn Harney, who we know is behind the scenes organizing all of this event. So, Dawn and Chris, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for sharing this community and educational process with all of us. >> Thanks Stu, it's been a pleasure. >> All right, so, Chris, we really want this, it's a celebration. Sixteen years; back in 2003 the number one movie of the year was actually Finding Nemo. Of course we waited a long time for there. It goes without saying that all of us were a little bit younger. And boy, in those days, I started working with VMR in 2002, so that journey of virtualization was real early. There was no cloud talking we had kind of the XSP's and some of the earlier things. But so much has changed, and what I have loved is this journey that the users that are attending here. We're actually here in the Expo hall, and if you look, why are there no people in here right now? Because they are all in the break out sessions understanding what are the skill sets that they need today and tomorrow to help them in their journey; virtualization, cloud, DevOps, all of these changes there. Chris, you started this as a user to help share with your peers, so, we've had you on the program many times, bring us back. >> Yeah, so think back to 2003. There was no way to share information. There's no Google, no YouTube, no Facebook groups, Meetups, no Game of Thrones. >> We had to go to books and stuff like that. >> Exactly. >> Read the paper. >> So white papers, those were the big deal. You had the Microsoft books that were two inches thick and glossy. >> Yeah, I wonder how many of our younger audience would know the acronym RTFM? Read The Fine Manual please, is what we're doing. Dawn, this event, as I said, we've been at the winter event at Gillette Stadium, you brought in some of the Patriot players we've had the pleasure of interviewing. This Summer event is epic. I know people that come from very long distances to swim in the community, get the information. There's a little bit of lobster at the end of the day. >> There's a lot of lobster at the end of the day. >> So give us the community that you look to help build and foster, and what this event has meant to you over the years. >> For me it's really a place for everybody in the community to come together and share their knowledge with their peers. Something may work for me maybe it will work for you. Let's get together and talk about it. The best way to learn something is from somebody that may have done it, or done it, messed it up, learned something, like to share it with you. So, it really is about working with your peers, learning something from your sponsors and all these companies that you work with everyday. What's new, what's going on. So this is the place to go to get all that. >> Wait, Dawn, I thought you weren't a tech person. >> I'm not a tech person. >> That answer was spot on because one of the things I loved about the virtualization community, is we were all learning in the early days. And it required a little bit of work. There's this theory known as the IKEA effect. Sometimes if you actually help build it a little bit, you actually like it a little bit more. And this community really epitomizes that in the virtualization community and cloud. We've been talking about cloud now for a decade but it's still relatively early days on how this multi-hybrid cloud fits together, how operations are changing, so, Chris, bring us through a little bit of that arc. >> Well, I'll think about it, back in 2003, there was only VMwire. There was only one virtualization platform, if you didn't use VMwire, you were doing bare metal Windows install or Unix install on physical servers. Well, back when we changed, there was Hyper-V, that was coming out, AWS was just coming out, so that's when we kind of made the jump from just being a VMwire user to a virtual technology. So we could talk about the cloud, we could share those experiences and have that same journey together, and hopefully learn and lead, get smarter together as a group, you can learn faster as a group than you can by yourself. >> Yeah, and as we know, Chris, and we've talked about this, the IT industry is never "Hey, give me a clean "sheet of paper and we'll start everything." We know it is additive and all of these things go together, so cloud did not obviate the need for virtualization, so all of these things go together, and how do I make sure as my job doesn't get completely eliminated or, I was talking to somebody who said "If I've been doing the same thing for 10 years, "will I be out of a job?" They said, "Well hopefully you really really like "what you're doing cause if you think "you can keep doing what you're doing, "that is all you will ever be able to do." And I thought that was a very poignant comment. >> Yeah, Matt Broberg's talk this morning about what's your next job going to be, what skillsets do you need to be relevant in 10 years, and it's the same thing, I mean we said the same thing 10, 15 years ago. You can't be a Windows admin anymore, you can't be a VMwire admin anymore, you can't be a cloud admin anymore in five years. >> Yeah, so Dawn, give our audience a little bit of the scope of this event, as I said, I know people that have flown in from the Carolinas, from Colorado, from all over, from California and the like, 16 years of this event, this community is not just New England, it really has had a broad impact. >> Right, and it's huge, people plan their vacations around this, I've had people come from Europe, they fly over here, stay in the state of Maine, they go to L.L. Bean, they do all those things because they plan their vacation, they know they need to be here for the VTUG event, so it's meant a lot, because you do get so many different variety of people, you have the sponsors, you have the end users, you have media, you have bloggers, you have pretty much just everybody comes together to really be that community, so it's meant a lot to me, it's been a long 16 years but it's meant a lot. >> All right, so the question people are asking, this is the final VTUG, so no more winter event at Gillette, this is the final event tonight at Gritty's, so explain to us how that happened. >> It is the final event, 16 years, we're all getting older, it's bittersweet, but we've just realized that it takes a lot of time to put these together, it takes a lot of sponsors, it takes a lot of users, the users continue to come, but unfortunately the sponsors pay for it, and really don't have that following with the sponsors that we used to have, unfortunately. >> There are a lot more events, there are a lot more ways to find customers, so they're going to the meetups and they're doing their own events. >> Yeah, to your opening point Chris, 16 years ago it was much tougher to find sources. Now the challenge we have is there's too many options out there, there are too many events, trust me, I go to too many events, but this one has always been one that we've always looked forward, so please from the community, want to say thank you so much, it has always been one of our favorite things to kick off the year with when we do the winter one, and the summer one, I've made this trip a couple of times, it is a little warm in here, I think brings back to the roots of this event, remember it was four or five years ago it was 110 degrees out, and then you switched to this facility, so of course the air conditioning decides to go out, because we know in IT, sometimes things break. >> Start in the heat, end in the heat. >> So Chris, want to give you the final word for the final VTUG. >> You know, I'm just very proud and happy with this community, it truly is a community, it wasn't us, it wasn't theCUBE, it wasn't the vendors, it was everyone working together to make a community that helped each other out, so thanks to everyone. >> Chris and Dawn, thank you so much, we're happy to be a small piece of this community, and look forward to staying in touch with you in your future endeavors. Thanks so much, I'm Stu Miniman, we have a full day of coverage here, keynote speaker, some of the users that have traveled around, really focusing on the community here at the VTUG Summer Slam, as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida it's the CUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Miami everybody, you're watching the CUBE the leader in live tech coverage as we go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise, this is day one of VeeamON 2019 the CUBE's third year covering Veeam first year we were in New Orleans, last year Chicago, very cool and hip location here at the Fontainebleau Hotel, I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Peter Boroughs. Colin Chatelier is here, he's the manager of storage and compute for Europe at Rabobank, Colin thanks for coming on the CUBE it's good to see you. >> Yeah glad to be here. >> So tell us about Rabobank, what are you guys all about? >> Okay, so Rabobank is obviously a bank we have two main focuses, first of all we're trying to be the biggest high street bank in the Netherlands, biggest retail bank in the Netherlands and we've got 7.3 million customers there, in an adult population of 14 million so that's not bad. And secondly the Netherlands is only of certain size and we're not going to grow it that much so the biggest part of our new business is international. And that's the bank is all focused on providing food and agriculture expertise loans, FX, spot work, anything that can help people or help businesses improve their efficiencies and get more food from spade to plate. >> So what are some of your, the drivers in your business that are affecting your technology strategy? >> Drivers in a business I guess again we've got two different parts of the bank I should probably explain, so two years ago we brought the IT of those two different parts of the bank together. >> [Dave} That's the Retail And The International? >> The retail and the international and if you think about it the international is all wholesale work, the retail is all high street banking so the retail those people really want to see their data, they want to see it on the, on the web, their check and balances, transferring pocket money to their kids and if that doesn't happen, that's a tragedy and embarrassing. So we can't be responsible for that as a result one of our watch words is always on, so we need to make sure that data is always available and we need to make sure that systems are always up for them. Part of that really is, occasionally it won't always be on so you need to be able to recover very quickly and getting a product that's simple to use for recovery and fast to recover was really part of that strategy, that's where Veeam came in. >> So when you had to merge those two IT operations, obviously it was more than the data protection side of things, but talk generally about what the challenges were but then specifically about the data protection piece. >> Okay, so bringing two IT departments together of course gives you a choice, "am I going to use product A or product B?" "Or sometimes product A and product B and not C." That gave us an opportunity to really do something that's not that common in the backup world and introduce a bit of churn, especially in retail environments, we have monthly backups, sorry especially in wholesale we have monthly backups. And those monthly backups go for anything from one year to ten years. So trying to get away from a backup product where there's ten years worth of legacy there, to recover, it's very tricky. But bringing the two banks together gave us that opportunity to say, okay well we'll invest in in a move and we really put a whole series of criteria together to try and figure out which one we were going to use. We moved from vmware and Hyper-V we're moving everything to vmware and from, we have a number of other backup products which I won't name because we're moving away from them. And Veeam was the winner there. Now, why? We needed something that would recover quickly we needed something that would scale to the enterprise, we have 13 thousand VMs being backed up today. We needed something that we could deploy reasonably quickly and without too much effort and actually when we deployed Veeam, we started off in November last year and by the end of January we were finished. Now there were a couple of thousand VMs on Veeam at that point >> Hold on, I'm sorry so it took you two months to effectively move out an old backup infrastructure and move in a new one? >> Sort of correct yes, for dailies. For monthly's we haven't touched that yet so we decide to just bite off one chunk at a time. >> Because you've got ten years of legacies with your monthly's... >> We have at least ten years, yeah >> All right but still >> That's pretty quick >> Yeah, yeah yeah >> Now what about cloud, every conference you go to you see the sign, cloud data management everything is cloud, cloud, cloud it used to be in your business, the financial services business, that cloud was an evil word >> Yeah >> Is it still? What's your clod strategy and how does data protection fit in? >> Well we have a strategy of public cloud first, that's a lot easier to do for new applications than it is for existing applications of course. So it tends to be that the existing applications are waiting for a technical refresh or are waiting for a an application re-write and new applications are going straight into the cloud. How we are protecting that, at the moment most of our data is held on prem where as a lot of our applications which can easily be refreshed and re-published is held on the cloud so we, those guys, the dev ops teams are performing their own backup, their own recovery. >> So are you able to sort of, for the on prem stuff are you trying to sort of make that cloud-like so it'll substantially mimic the cloud are you able to do that? You know, Peter you're always talking about bringing the cloud experience to your data, is that something that you're able to do or is that just sort of good marketing tagline? >> It's something that we are just starting to do again, so a year ago we had a private cloud that was just on the verge of being deployed, but we decided then that strategically we'd mothball that and encourage everybody to go to public cloud, and not confuse them with two different choices. That's proving a little difficult so one of the things that we find is development teams who are currently in the cloud can develop things with software defined infrastructure but when they try and interface with the data or with some of the systems that are on prem, then they come to a dramatic holt and they have to wait for the normal on prem processes to kick through. So what we're looking at doing now is we just started a new process or a new project an on prem, proof of concept, on prem cloud that will interact with the off prem cloud and give the cloud-like experience. So we'll see. >> So you have that challenge of agile meets waterfall and now you're trying to create some kind of equilibrium or really trying to modernize the on prem, what's the strategy there? >> Well I don't think it's agile meets waterfall I think its dev ops meets traditional process. It's and, yeah... (laughter) But how are we going to do it you say? >> Yeah, well I guess what I'm getting to is are you gong to find sort of a common ground or are you really going to try to drive that sort of dev ops mentality into the legacy process? >> We'll, continue to have a traditional or legacy, depending on what you want to call it, environment there, but we'll also have a software to find infrastructure environment on prem, if this proof of concept works, it's being built at the moment or being designed at the moment based on a vmware stack. >> What role will containers and microservices play in terms of facilitating that transformation? >> At the moment we have containers on prem which are coming with applications but we don't have a specific container platform which we're offering as a service on prem That's just where, there's containers off prem of course you know as Euro Cloud. >> Right, right, so for the on prem stuff what does that do for you and where do you see that going? >> For containers? >> Yeah >> At the moment we have a policy of not providing a container service on prem >> Oh, oh, oh, sorry, I heard wrong, sorry. Okay so that's not a direction that you're going currently? >> No but it maybe, because we're feeling our way forward I think. >> As you think about, for example banks or financial services companies have been at the Vanguard of a lot of digital business practices because you're core offering is data and how it gets used so is your overall business starting to rethink this notion of backup and restore from something that's just there to you know, make sure the data's available to becoming an essential strategic capability that can span between the two modes that you're describing but a common approach to making sure the data assets aren't compromised by vendor relationships, by application development style, by locations, is that, are you thinking in those terms of a federated approach to ensure the services on the data that you need? >> Okay well that was a very long question >> Yes >> But it's quite a short answer, yes we're thinking about it, no we haven't done it yet. So, but I think you're absolutely right, one of the problems could be for example we deploy in I don't know as your AWS, Google, and we fall out with one of those cloud providers and we try and move our backup data from provider A to provider B, is it transportable? You know, is, have we got the same policy that's been deployed in each of them so that whole thing needs to be... >> You don't want to recreate that problem that you got with those ten years of monthly backups with the new stuff too? >> Exactly, yeah yeah, we've already made that mistake. >> What are the other challenges, well but you made it for good reason, that was the state of the technology at the time and you had to have hardened processes and that was how you did it you know, ten or fifteen years ago. What are the other problems or challenges that you hear from when we talk to financial services organizations is if their data exists, they're data companies as Peter said but their data exits in hardened silos, again for good reason, you had to protect that data it was mission critical family jewels type of stuff >> Regulatory reasons >> Now as you transform into the so-called digital business everybody wants access to that data and so you've got that tough balancing act so, is that obviously a challenge for you, how are you dealing with that challenge and data protection generally was unique to each of those silos, so how are you thinking about data protection going forward in terms of busting those silos? >> Well, I don't think we've eve had silos in data protection, I think we've, our data protection has been uniform across the two banks of course >> Yeah, right. >> So now we've brought them together again, we have what, different retention characteristics, different ways of using the product. But over the last year and a half, two years we've pretty much brought in the same processes. But I don't think that any application on prem or any that will be on the private cloud or on the prem cloud will have anything different. It will use the same product, the same processes and perhaps have more access by the development teams, dev ops teams to be able to fire off their own backups at the right time. >> You're talking from a data protection perspective >> Perspective, yeah >> And then potentially other things like microservices or containers over time? >> Yeah >> Yeah, okay what's happening at the show here? Things you've learned, anything you've seen that's exciting you? Any announcements? >> Well, it's early days isn't it? It's early days so I think the, the best thing for the show so far was last night when it, going on the boat, meeting some of the other execs and sharing some experiences with them. I think, you know one of the things I always think is the best practice comes from worst experience and I don't want to have all that worst experience myself I wouldn't mind it from everybody else. (laughter) So I think you can learn more in an hour in a social situation then you can perhaps in two hours in the conference room there. >> So what are yo hearing from your peers, what are they doing, some of the challenges they're facing this digital business stuff is it real? How are they dealing with it? >> Okay, my peers, I think what they're feeling is that the traditional backup solution, the traditional backup providers are just not quick enough on their feet, agile in a real sense rather than a >> Quotes >> Quotes and marketing sense yeah, and I think the traditional providers tend to be, less grateful for the business perhaps. You know I heard about the number of new customers that Veeam are getting today but they seem to give a lot of attention to those new customers. Now deploying 13 thousand vms in a relatively short period of time we needed a lot of help from Veeam to overcome the obstacles as we hear them and they were there when we needed them and you know that makes a difference I think especially when you're protecting your data and you need to be ale to restore that data you need a partner not a vendor. >> So it's as much the relationship as the technology is what I'm hearing? >> I don't think we would get into bed with a vendor who wasn't a partner as well. >> Or in manner respects it's almost like Veeam understands how to solve the problem and their technology is a way of doing it easily, and simply, and reliably? >> Exactly yeah. >> I want to follow up on that because some of the large companies that can infer what you're talking about, they might have big established direct sales forces, meat eating guys that are in the field that just go belly to belly. You know Veeam all channel, all indirect how are they successfully partnering with you in ways that the other guys may not be with that type of go to market model? >> So we used a company called Pro*Act a reseller to buy into Veeam, I guess Veeam trained them up well because they had all the information at their finger tips and they represented us in the negotiation with Veeam, so it took away perhaps some of the conflict that you would get in an early situation. And then when we needed the direct help from Veeam, Veeam stepped up to the board and started giving that direct help and not cut out the reseller but the reseller wasn't needed anymore at that point. >> And that was help from a technology stand point or a business terms stand point or both? >> Technology, just over coming the problems, you know a big organization has got a lot of networks a lot of lans, v-lans, and we need to be able to punch holes through those v-lans so it's quite interesting to be able to be told up front where we need to punch. >> Make this work >> Yeah >> Great, all right Colin, well thanks very much for coming to the CUBE, it was great having you, give your final thoughts on Miami, you're coming in from out of town and you got the tour last night on the boat, and what'd you think and impressions of the conference? >> Well Miami first of all, it looks like a nice place to live as we cruised past all of those gigantic homes, I didn't notice anyone in them so, perhaps one's going cheap. The conference it looks good, I am always surprised by how big it is, it's my second event and yeah, they've got a hell of a lot of customers and seem to be loyal customers as well, nobody has a bad thing to say. >> Were you here in Chicago last year? >> I wasn't I was here in New Orleans >> New Orleans, yeah, two years ago, all right great well thanks very much of coming to the CUBE we appreciate it >> Thank you >> All right keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest you're watching the CUBE live from VeeamON 2019, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Ferrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have PJ Farmer, she is the Director, Cloud Product Management at TierPoint. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, I'm very excited. >> Rebecca: And we have David Hines, VP, Architecture and Engineering at TierPoint. Thanks, David. >> Yes, thank you. >> So, for our viewers that maybe unfamiliar with TierPoint, can you tell us all about this St. Louis based company, what you do, give us an introduction. >> Oh, absolutely. So, TierPoint is a managed services, data services, and colocation provider. We have a broad footprint. We have over 40 data centers in the United States, and we have a broad portfolio of services we offer because we're really interested in meeting customers where they are in their digital transfortation, or transformation, excuse me. So everything from colo to cloud and beyond, we offer because customers come to us for a consultative approach. They have a problem, they needed solutions, and we can offer them those solutions, right. So we manage all of that. >> So you're helping them with their digital transformations and everything. >> Absolutely. >> And where does Nutanix come into play here? >> So, Nutanix is a part of that cloud services really that we're offering our customers, but also giving them a dedicated environment really that they can manage their workloads, but also have some more control, security, compliance, so that overall, the customers end up with a solution that helps them drive their business forward. And of course, TierPoint, our goal is to make sure that we're taking care of all that underlying infrastructure and systems and components, so again, the customer can focus on driving their business forward, and taking that burden off of IT and Nutanix is a great platform that really helps enable us and enable our customers, at the end of the day. >> Talk about the technical challenges you guys had before Nutanix, after Nutanix. What changed, what was the journey like, how did the door open up for them? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think overall, we as technologists, work very hard to piece together solutions, varied solutions, to provide a platform for our customers that they can consume, but that is challenging, right, as a company, technology changes quickly. There are a lot of different vendors in the marketplace offering a lot of different technologies, and I think one of the things that we see as a huge value for Nutanix, is they've got a very complete platform, across the spectrum. It's not just a box with compute and storage. It is so much more than that, and so for us, that's very exciting, it's very intriguing, and something that really helps us be efficient, and also our customers, be efficient. >> So, digital transformation is something that we're talking about so much, on theCUBE in general, here at this show. What are you hearing from customers and what is sort of their bugaboos and their pain points? >> So, we recently had a customer who, their hypervisor of choice is something they're super familiar with, right. They have a great amount of comfort, but over time they can see, there could be some cost savings in Nutanix, with going with the Acropolis hypervisor that's included. So our customer came to us and said, hey, can you help us with this? Said, absolutely. So they are in our data center, we're taking care of them, we are consulting through their transformation and they are starting out with what they're comfortable with and as time changes and as they mature and transition, we're gonna help them get there, right. We're gonna help them change, if it's a hypervisor, if it's a different service, if it's a different way to set it up and present it out to their innovative IT developers, right. We're gonna help them do that. >> Talk about, can you guys share your insight into how you're operating the business? I mean obviously, you've got customers, a lot of customers. What's it like, operating this? 'Cause you got developers out there who want applications to be supported. I'm sure you got latency challenges around. We went to the cloud, a lot of multi-cloud conversations. People still gotta store stuff in their data centers or colos. So the edge, the network change, all these things are evolving. What's going on inside your company, in terms of how you operate? >> So, that's a great question. So, it is challenging to keep up with that landscape as it evolves but we are investing heavily in that. So the great thing about TierPoint, is we are in these edge markets. That is one of our real value adds, and so we're investing very heavily in our network. We also have some really strong partnerships with carriers that give us that on-ramp into the hyperscale. So it really helps complete that multi-cloud story that customers need. So yeah, they can come to us, colocate that equipment that they really have to hold on to, mainframes, mid-range servers, other legacy systems, while gaining that connectivity to those hyperscale environments. And then there's the middle, the middle where we provide a layer, like Nutanix, that gives them that enterprise type cloud. But again, it's dedicated to them, it's in our data center, it's local to their other systems, while also getting that reach to the hyperscale. So it's a really, really powerful story for us. >> On the hypervisor challenge question, this is interesting, we hear people saying, I got Hyper-Vi, I got Hyper-V, I got VMware, I wanna just use, Nutanix' got their own hypervisor. AVH has been an interesting product for Nutanix. The full stack is compelling for a lot of customers, but you guys probably have a lot of customers who wanna parole their own, or bring their own hypervisor. How do you deal with that, does that fit in to the value proposition? >> Well, I think there is some talk about the hypervisor, maybe being irrelevant, like it's obsolete, it's not something to be concerned about, and I think Dave said it earlier, best today, he said that-- >> John: You could be nice when you say that, by the way. >> I'm sorry, what? >> John: A lot of people are saying that. >> Well, yeah, a lot of people are saying that. I just think it's less of a focus, right, because TierPoint helps people focus on what is innovative, what is your business outcome, what are you really doing for your business? So I feel like the hypervisor is just less of a focus, right, than it is necessarily, not important. >> It's more commodity now. >> Yeah. >> It is, and we don't want the customers to have to focus on that, because again, IT really needs to drive business, not be a drag on business and so the less that they have to focus, as an IT organization, on the maintenance and management of infrastructure, and even up the stack towards operating systems, where we can take that burden off of them, then again, they can be a leader for their business and driving the business as a whole, not be held back. >> Okay, what's the playbook for doing that, not being a drag on the business? Because that's what everyone wants to do but they might have legacy stuff. What's the playbook? >> The playbook, is being a part of that business discussion and when the business itself is making decisions about how to drive forward, IT has that seat at the table, and again, is thinking about, how can we drive savings or cost cutting, how can we enable transactions, how can we enable the customer base? And not thinking about, oh, do I have my storage system updated, am I dealing with the old boxes that I have to replace, and do I have power and cooling problems in a data center. They don't need to be dealing with that. They need to be up front with the business, making business decisions. >> What you're talking about, really represents a complete shift in the role of the technologist. Do they have the skills to be thinking about, they obviously, can think about more than just the maintenance, and do I have the storage, and things like that. But does there need to be much more education around these business strategy questions that they should be thinking about? As you said, this is their role, to really help the business transform. >> David: Yeah. >> So, I think that often times I see people feel like they are just technology, oh, I'm just hands on keyboard, I'm doing this, but what their exposure and their natural interests, lead them to have a broad picture of how things can work, what is expected, and how do these things operate, what have I had experience with, and when they have a seat at the table and they're making, with the business decisions, they have value to add there. Right. That value is in that perspective, what they've seen, because that may not be forefront for some of the other business leaders at the table, right? And it is a collaborative discussion, that generates quality output, that generates innovation, that generates thinking outside of the box, and unique solutions that really lead the market. >> But I do think it really does, to your point, mean new education, new skills for these IT technologists and so that's part of, we've gone through this at TierPoint, transforming the engineers and the technologists that we have working on our staff and really teaching them new ways to work, new ways to think, new ways to collaborate, so that they're helping us move the business forward and not sitting behind a keyboard, isolated from the business itself. >> I was gonna ask you about the skill gap 'cause one of the things that comes up as the shift at DevOps is happening, with more development going on to make the infrastructure programmable so it's not a drag on the business, changing roles are a huge thing 'cause Nutanix essentially, the values, they enable new things to happen, the result is consolidation, so it's not consolidation as the primary. You get consolidation as a benefit of what they do. So people be like, whoa, what do I do now? But the benefit is people shift. So the IT Ops role has changed, it's best probably to get it before the operations. Where do you guys see that trend evolving? Because if this continues with AI and automation, you can almost imagine it's completely programmable infrastructure. >> Yeah, we do see a consolidation of Siloed Technologists, right, so this idea of I'm only a network engineer, I'm only a storage engineer, I'm only a cloud engineer, that is definitely going away and again, we've done this at TierPoint. We've kind of mixed those roles, right, educate the staff, but from additional education programmability, somebody'd be able to do the automation and the development in an engineering role verses having a separate development team working on that. It's gonna be really important as companies evolve their groups. >> I think you've had a lot of infrastructure engineers that 20 years ago, 15 years ago, knew Pearl, they knew scripting, they knew these things, and as time has gone on, now they know APIs, now they know RESTful APIs, now they're interacting, but we all know, in IT, it's always change and it's always learning, I mean, you got into this, right. So I think a lot of the infrastructure engineers, over time, are finding they were already automating things in some ways and they're becoming more mature in the ways that they automate things, right? I think it's a great transition as they go on, yeah. >> So, talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's it like, partnering with them? They got a lot of momentum in enabling a partner strategy. We saw news with Hewlett Packard enterprise, potential channel opportunity there. They're a partner centric, they're partner friendly. What's it like, working with them? >> Fantastic, I mean absolutely fantastic, from go, see our customers were coming to us wanting to, they brought Nutanix to us, honestly, they came up. A lot of people that use Nutanix are like fans of Nutanix, right, you've seen some of those, and so our customers brought Nutanix to us, and as we began to see this trend, and we decided to make a private cloud product out of it, we engage with Nutanix. They've provided so many resources, they've been there for us, been very responsive. It's really been a natural and easy collaboration with them. And like you said, they do everything through partners so that has made it easy. We are another partner, right? They enable us, they know that part of their success is our success and vice versa, so it's almost like an extension of the team, which is fantastic. >> So what do you say to the new Nutanix customer that comes in, 'cause I agree with you, they're very hardcore loyal fans because they took a chance and they see benefits, so they took a chance and it paid off. It's like gambling, you put a number on the roulette wheel and it comes up black or red, whatever. They've had great success there and their promoter score is 90. But what about new people, are like, hey, I heard this Nutanix thing is out there, or software. How are you guys looking at these new opportunities, when is Nutanix a good fit? 'Cause you gotta balance it all for all your customers. >> Yeah. >> Depending on what they wanna do. >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Honestly, for us it's really about enabling the higher order applications and workloads for our customers, so I don't know, unless the customer themselves is really bringing Nutanix to us, that we're having that conversation. It's really like, look, this is a solution that's gonna provide you the capabilities, and again, trying to not have the customer really worry too much about that and let us own that relationship, and as PJ mentioned, Nutanix has invested very heavily, not only in the partnership but also developing this platform and solution for us so it's been-- >> So you guys could provide it, if no one asks, just provide the best solution. >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And that's the key, right? >> I want to ask you a question about geographics. So, I'm based in Boston, John's based in the Valley, you're a technology company based in St. Louis. I'm interested, we may just come to this with our east coast, west coast biases and I'm just, what's it like to be a technology company in St. Louis, in the heartland, do you feel part of the community? >> Oh absolutely, in fact, St. Louis really has been, you see several articles about all the startup tech in St. Louis because it is an affordable place to live. You have access to all the cities, usually direct flights, right, so from a community perspective, there's a lot more technology startups than you might think in St. Louis, but they do have access to-- >> Rebecca: And great barbecue too. >> Great barbecue, absolutely. And it really is a beautiful place. You also have lots of parks, lots of rivers, lots of outdoor, I mean, it's kinda surprising, honestly. We have a main technology center also, in Raleigh, North Carolina, so we are split between the two. >> David: Yeah. >> We do a lot of flights back and forth. >> WWT is out there too. >> RTP, yeah, the research truck will park in North Carolina, as a very big tech hub, so that split really provides a balance. There's a very big business hub in St. Louis and a lot of collaborational partnerships there from the business side, but also that Raleigh Tech Hub on the east coast is really a huge benefit to us. And a lot of our partners are there, >> PJ: And like a lot of-- >> Nutanix actually, is right there, down the street. >> We'll have to come down and visit you in North Carolina. My daughter's going to UNC >> Oh, okay. >> So I gotta find some excuses to get down there. >> That'd be great. >> Anytime. >> Maybe see your business. >> Some TierPoint shows. >> Oh, that's right. >> Exactly. >> And do a little, couple interviews. >> Anytime. >> Anytime. >> Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Yeah, we really enjoyed it. >> Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Ferrier, you are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto California, theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Dheeraj Pandey CEO and Founder of Nutanix. Great guest, been with us for 10 years. Was on the cube in 2010 when we first started doing theCUBE coverage of events was at VMworld, Dheeraj, great to see you. >> Pleasure. >> Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you. >> You've had such a great journey. I've been so impressed with you as an entrepreneur, the hustle, the early days when you were misunderstood to the growth and going public and continuing to compete. Congratulations to you and your team. It's been great. >> Thank you, no, it's been a journey and it's going to continue to be a journey. >> A lot of competitive pressure. A lot of cloud happening, a lot of server dynamics in the marketplace with On-Premise now getting validated as a part of this multi-cloud hybrid equation, certainly not going away, but still growth of the cloud has been huge. What's the big focus, 'cause you have your Nutanix Next conference coming up in May. I'll be there with theCUBE, what's the focus, what is the theme of the event? What's the big focus? >> Yeah, no, in fact we complete 10 years this September, so it's a decade since the beginning of time for Nutanix. And we are focusing on the things that we're good at. We are good at what I call the three D's. So it's a three D view of the company. The first D's data, we are really good at data. And we're doubling down on data. We're very good at design, we've done a very good job of simplification making elegant consumer grade and taking clicks away rather than things taking months, how can it be done in seconds and hours, and we're very good at delivery, you know, the third D being delivery, you know, it's not just delivery of our software through all different form factors and our appliance and software and subscription and other servers, but also customer support, customer success, which has really endeared us to our customers. So if you think about what this conference is all about, obviously it's about the customers and as the power of social proof, the fact that they learn from each other and we learn from them. But it's really about reinforcing the three D's. Data, design, and delivery. >> And the theme is invisible clouds. Period, visible IT, invisible cloud, so I'm assuming that's, make that, abstract that away, multi-cloud in there, probably a theme. Visible IT, that's supposed to be invisible too, but what does that mean? I get the invisible cloud 'cause you want to make it seamless, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. But what's visible IT, how do those words play? What's the play on words there? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, we, first of all the word invisible is really powerful and we use it a lot and it's very unique to Nutanix, you know, not everybody uses the word invisible as much as we do, but the idea is that machines should become invisible. Software and systems and tools and those things should become invisible. And then humans should become visible and by the way, there's this really good antithesis, sort of the polar opposites of machines versus humans that goes on in many other walks of life, I mean zero trust when it comes to security. Machines should not trust each other. But full trust, when people need to trust people. So when it's an organization of people you need to be the opposite of zero trust. Same thing is true for invisible machines invisible clouds with visible people visible careers and I think what's happening is that as the cloud hype cycle actually matures, CIOs are talking about cloud cloud cloud, but the grassroots is basically saying like do you even know the legacy apps of the last 20 years? Do you understand the challenges of what we call the laws of the land? Data compliance and regulations, laws of physics which is the gravity of data and the gravity of people and operations and laws of economics, owning and renting. So I think what's happening is that the cloud revolution is really being dug like a Eurotunnel, from two sides. Top down from C-level people are saying let's go transform ourselves to the cloud. And we are helping the grassroots really go and translate that, say look, this is only possible by doing these things because we have to be respectful of data sovereignty, data gravity, and applications and the economics of that. So, in really helping the CIOs build trust with the grassroots. As opposed to-- So essentially, you're operational as a cloud 'cause I can hear. We've interviewed a lot of CXOs on theCUBE as you know, take that hill, go to the cloud, move everything to the cloud. Wait a minute, we got, we're closing a pin. So to make sense of that vision, it's got to be operationalized, that's kind of what you're getting at. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And then finally there's a, I mean look what happens in computing, we make things smaller all the time, you know, we started with mainframes and we ended up with serverless. And along the way we had obviously Unix and x86 and container, VMs and containers and so on. Same thing with personal computing. We started with desktops and we ended up with wearables. So the fact that there's a billion dollar data center is the new mainframe. The fact that there's going to be a big cloud data center only two places in a big country is actually quite the antithesis of computing, we have to make cloud be everywhere and make it about software. To operationalizing the cloud and making it into a half a trillion dollar market will be about software. >> This whole mainframe is in the cloud or mainframe distributing computing. Software industry kind of come back in vogue. It doesn't go away, it's all the same game. It's just distributed out around in different formats, that's kind of what's going on here. >> Absolutely, I mean go back in time to distribution. Apple was a vertically integrated stack. So how does Microsoft come and really compete against Apple, they said look PC is about software, they said look PC's not about hardware, it's about software and the market becomes 10 times larger because they really bring in other partners who make money with the Windows Operating System. >> That's just more enabling. There's more demand, there's more growth. >> Absolutely, and the same thing happens again 15 years later with iOS versus Android. So Apple says smartphone is about vertically integrated stack, and Google comes and says no, to make the market 10 times larger, Android is about software. And then other handset manufacturers come and make money, so cloud is at this juncture where to take it beyond, 50, 60 billion dollars to half a trillion dollars, it has to be about software. >> Dheeraj, one of the things that I'm impressed with with you as an entrepreneur and your team is you fit the profile of the classic big idea. Be different, have good product leadership and pick a way that's going to have a big, totally adjustable market. You did that and you didn't waver, so I reviewed your analyst meeting from Wikibon and involved third party analysts. A hundred billion dollar addressable market. So big market, check, private cloud trend which you called early and Stu Miniman also called that on Wikibon is not going away, you have a stack for that. Large customer base, you have what 12 thousand customers plus and growing. Great revenue, strong revenue, and you got refreshes coming because the technology continues to shift in the wave that you're on. So, congratulations, that's good health meters. But there's now competitive pressure. The genie's out of the bottle. People know what you're doing. They figured it out and they're going to try to compete with you. This economy of scale that you have there's economy of scales others have specifically Dell, Dell EMC, VMware have been highly competitive with you. How are you responding to that and what's the landscape look like? >> Yeah, look, we've always been about disrupting ourselves, and that's the way we've actually grown our company. Very contrarian way of thinking about it but if we go back in time four, five years ago we're an appliance company, and we said we're going to do an OEM relationship with Dell and then Lenovo and others. All of a sudden people started competing with yourself, and for us it was like the more we compete with ourselves the better it is, today I think if you think about where the company's real response to any competition is to really compete with ourselves. I typically don't get wavered or changed by what's out there, we don't compete with anybody else, if we can keep competing with ourselves and get better in solving our customers and those three D's I talked about being even deeper in data, that VMware can't even touch us on simply because they have to compete with EMC on that and I don't know whether they actually have the gumption to do that, we do actually. We have to be better at design. Make the control plane even simpler. Understand what it means to virtualize the cloud. And get better at delivery, so if we can keep getting better in the three D's and we can keep competing with ourselves. We just did a really good announcement at HPE where we're going to compete with ourselves one more time because-- >> Talk about that announcement 'cause I think this is different. So HPE bought Nimble Storage so they already got the storage piece. They've got tons of servers, they also compete with Dell, what's your position with HPE, what's the announcement? What's the partnership? >> Yeah, so we're going to do a two-way relationship where we're going to be able to our sellers can quote HP servers and their sellers can actually quote our operating system. We have this rainbow which we call core essentials enterprise, Nutanix Core which is about hyper-convergence. Modernize your infrastructure. Nutanix Essential which is how we build a private cloud, and then Nutanix Enterprise which is really about navigating and simplifying the multi-cloud journey of the customer. And HP's going to take this stack to its customers. Again, we started to compete with ourselves because our appliance business was not based on HP, but now it will. Similarly, they will compete with themselves. And that's how companies transform themselves. When they compete with themselves rather than somebody else. >> And it's always the old expression, eat your own before your competition does. That's a cannibalization, kind of MBA concept. You guys are aggressive on that. You don't mind doing that and taking that risk. >> No, in fact if you don't do it, someone else will. It's better to do it in the controlled way ourselves. >> Got great, great management styles. So let's talk about, you mentioned control plane earlier, you have a quote on your deck that says, that I reviewed, it says control plane matters, this speaks to some of the product leadership. What does that actually mean, the control plane message, 'cause we hear this a lot come up in multi-cloud hybrid, and certainly within the data conversation around data control planes, control planes. For you guys, what does that mean? Control plane matters? >> Well if you take back like 10 years ago. We were very bold and audacious. We were the only company to say look we will not be building a tab in vCenter. Contrarian, highly contrarian. Most people said you'll lose a lot of deals because you are not adjunct to vCenter. You're not a tab in vCenter, every hardware renderer was really bending over backwards to please VMware because that was the only way to the heart of the virtualization administrator. We took a very different stance. Prism was the control plane, they said if you do a really good job at Prism make it a distributed scale out platform. Make it consumer grade one click delight. Then customers will actually look at this as a very powerful thing, and then we virtualized the hypervisor. So Prism was a multi hypervisor platform. It worked for Vmware, it worked for Hyper-V and it worked for Nutanix AHV. So over time, we just kept doing more of it. So now we have a control plane for multi-cloud. We were saying look, the world does need an automation orchestration engine. That is multi-cloud come is that thing for us. We've taken Prism to the next level with Prism Pro which is about ML and AI and what does it mean to really do operations management and capacity planning and security and analytics. So, we've doubled down on design which is the second D that I talked about with these control planes and going forward and as you see us getting to multi-cloud desktop delivery, we acquired a company almost a year ago, which is really about a cloud native desktop delivery solution where, now the control plane of desktops could belong in the cloud but the desktop itself could be running on prem. And that's a very powerful concept that you can have these cloud enabled cloud holstered cloud serviced control planes but the data place could actually be anywhere. It could be running-- This is the invisible cloud concept you're talking about. Absolutely, yeah. In fact the fact that the controller could be running anywhere, and the thing it controls could be running someplace else. >> The question, that's great stuff and that's great product leadership and again, invisible cloud, people don't want to deal with multiple code bases They want to have seamless operations. So with that I got to ask you your cloud positioning because every enterprise now because it's from the top end. Now it's top comparative, what's the cloud positioning because we now see on premise, super important a-du-is-ca outpost. The data's going to reside on premise in the cloud, it's all going to move around. What is the cloud positioning that you talk to your customers about when they say hey, we like Nutanix but we got to go to cloud, what's the positioning? >> Well our positioning is that cloud has to be about software. It has to seep everywhere, it has to be injected everywhere, our software should run no just on prim but in an AWS bare metal. There's a bare metal service and our software should run there. There will be an Azure bare metal. We already run in GCP metal so our software can run on top of GCP as well. Of course it is on prem and we are already working on our own disaster recovery as a service, desktop as a service where we become the service provider for many of these hybrid services that customers actually need from us. So cloud is about ubiquity, it's about portability, I mean the strength of any software company is portability. If we can make ourselves available in every server, every hypervisor, and every cloud, I think we've done a very good job. >> My final question I want to ask you is when you go to your event coming up invisible clouds, visible IT, you got to give the customer the 20 mile stare. You got to show 'em the 20 mile vision and the bridge to the future that they want to cross with you, that's the main value every company has to do as CEO. What is that story, what's the pitch to the customer saying we've got you covered today as you're organically building that operational cloud path, but I really want to know that I have a partner for the next generation, what's that story that you tell them? >> Yeah, I mean, even as I said before. Any big project, whether it's Panama Canal Suez Canal, Eurotunnel, you have to dig it from both sides and then you eventually shake hands and it becomes a historic picture, which is what we've known about the way the English side and the French side met. I think the way CIOs are talking about the cloud, the way grassroots is perceiving more of the cloud as you called it operationalizing. I think we really have to do it from both sides. And we really don't talk about the three D's. Data, we've done so well in data. We've done so well in design, we've done so well in delivery, and then at times we've actually screwed up like in the last two, three, four years, we might have gotten more complicated, we might have gotten more complex, so we go and even ask for forgiveness and open ourselves up, talk about the evaluability of the company and people like that, they didn't want to connect to an auto machine, but they wanted to connect to humans on this other side. As a business, we are not machines. We're actually humans, and that's what resonates in the conference. >> Dheeraj, thanks for coming in and sharing your insight, great to see you again, congratulations on the business performance, we'll see you at Nutanix Next in May, May 7th, thanks for coming in. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (jazz music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Dave Vellante as well, Stu Miniman, who's been doing interviews with us all week, our next guest is Roland Acra, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Data Center Group. He's in charge of that core business of data center now, at the center of cloud and the edge. Roland, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So a lot of announcements, a lot of the big guns are out there for Cisco, you got the data center, you got the networking group, and you got IoT, and then cloud center suite was part of the big announcement, your team had a big piece of the keynote yesterday and continues to make waves. Give us a quick update on the news, the key points, what was the announcements? >> Yeah, the two big announcements for my group were ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex Anywhere, and we captured them under a common moniker of There's Nothing Centered About the Data Center Anymore, because both of these speak to things going outside the data center. ACI Anywhere is the integration of ACI, our software-defined networking solution, into two of the most prominent public cloud providers out there, Amazon and Azure, and for HyperFlex Anywhere, the exciting news is the expansion of HyperFlex, which is our hyper-converged solution, also outside the data center, to the edge of the enterprise, specifically branch offices and remote locations. >> And the other thing that came out of our conversation here on theCUBE and also on the keynote, is that the center of the value is the data center, as you guys pointed out with the slides, big circle in the middle, ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, but the network and the data and the security foundation has been a critical part of this new growth. >> Yes. >> Take a minute to explain the journey of ACI, how it started, where are we? It's been a progression for you guys, certainly inside the enterprise, but now it's extended. What's the journey, take us through that. >> When ACI came into the market five years ago now, we have a five year anniversary, ACI brought a software-defined networking solution into the market. It brought an automated network fabric capability, which said you can no longer screw yourself up by having incoherence between one part of the network and another, it's all managed coherently as one thing, and it brought, to your point about security, what's called segmentation of applications. Today, applications have data, they have databases, they have different sensitive pieces, and it's important to be able to tell the network not only get the traffic from one place to the other, but also selectively get the traffic that I tell you to get there, and not the one, and don't get the traffic that has no business getting there, and that's known as segmentation, which is a security concern, particularly when you have sensitive data like consumer data or things that have regulatory things around them. ACI has brought that to the market. That was the value proposition of ACI. We worked on then expanding ACI in the direction of scale. Customers have two or more data centers for disaster recovery, for resiliency, we made that possible. We got to bigger and bigger footprints. Then we took ACI to the edge of the enterprise. What if somebody wanted to put some computing capability in a store, or in a logistics center. ACI then was expanded with that. Step N minus one, was we took ACI to bare metal clouds. Customers now want to deploy also things in co-locations or bare metal clouds. We decoupled ACI software from the Cisco switches, which is the ACI hardware, and ACI became completely virtualized, and still able to be doing everything it does in hardware on premise, in software instead, in somebody's else's capability. And yesterday we announced the full combination of this, which is what if you don't want the ACI soft switching or hard switching, can you use the native switching of a public cloud, like Azure or AWS, and you tell the other APIs, please let those packets go from A to B because they're part of the whitelisted paths,, and don't let packets from C to D go because they're part of the blacklisted paths. And that was the full integration with these clouds-- >> Can you abstract that complexity? >> Completely, completely. One orchestrator, which is the multi-site orchestrator, the same one people have used on premise, that they've developed their policies around, so that we have invested a lot of sweat equity in that controller, it's where also they put their compliance, verification, and audit and assurance, and they use that thing even when something goes to Azure or it goes to AWS. >> So you mentioned the progression. So it's now your full progression, from core to the cloud, including edge-- >> Going through edge. >> What has been some of the results? You mentioned that segmentation's one of 'em, I get that. How has ACI been used, what are some highlights that show the value, because people start looking at ACI, saying, hmm, I like this, I like scale, I have a scale challenge with the new cloud world and edge, and complexity's abstracted away with software, okay, check, so far, so good. Where has been the success of ACI and how do you see that unfolding specifically in the cloud? >> Yeah, the biggest value our customers have gotten, cloud or no cloud, has been with ACI, they've been able to shorten the speed of change, shorten the time for change, therefore increase the speed of change of their network, because now the network needs to operate at the speed of the applications. Applications reconfigure themselves sometimes on hourly or daily basis, and it used to be that changing something in the network, you sent a ticket to somebody who took weeks to reconfigure things. Now that software-defined capability means the network reconfigures and people can change generations of compute on the fly, and the network is in lockstep with that. The agility and speed has been great. The other value has been the value of automation, which is people can run a bigger and bigger and bigger network with a small number of people. You don't have to scale your people the more switches you have. Again, because programming and automation comes to the rescue with that. >> Well I'll tell you, people who are watching right now can look behind Roland and see that it's a packed house. We're in the dev net zone, which has been the massively growing organization within Cisco. Community's been growing very fast, people are developing on top of the networks, and these are network folks, and as well there's new talent coming in. So skill gap is shortening, so you're getting a different makeup for a Cisco user, your customers are changing and changing, growing, existing base plus new people. Talk about that dynamic about how that impacts this intent-based networking, this notion of policy software is defined. >> Yes, you it's you know what many people have been calling infrastructure as code, which is you go from scripting to actually coding and composing very sophisticated automation capabilities and change management capabilities, for an automatable system, which is what ACI is. It's made for people drawing on the strengths that they were doing in the application domain or in the server domain, and bringing that into the network. And that's a new and exciting thing, it brought the network within the purview of coders, people who know how to do Python and know how to do Go language and things which are modern and exciting for the younger generation. It's made also for bringing the analytical capabilities, you know, a lot of what those young coders are used to is a lot of logs, a lot of visibility, a lot of analytics running on, because they've done that on web servers, they've done that on applications that run in the cloud, and we now offer the network, which is very rich in data. If you think about, we see every packet, we see every flow, we see every pattern of how the traffic is changing, and that becomes a data set that is subject to programming because then from there you can extract anomaly detection, you can extract security signatures of malware, you can extract prediction of where the traffic is going to be going in six months. There's a lot of exciting potential from the telemetry and the visibility that we bring into that framework. >> And as you point out, devs love that. I mean Cisco, we've talked about this, is one of the few large established companies that has, in our view, figured out developers, right? There's a lot of examples of those companies that haven't and continue to struggle, we've just witnessed here the dev crowd. I want to ask you about ACI and how it's different from, for example, VMware NSX. What's the differentiation there? >> The biggest differentiation is ACI is one system through which you manage the entire network, the overlay which is the virtual view of the network that the applications care about, as well as the underlay, which is the actual real delivery system that makes the packets get from A to B with quality of service and so forth. So that's first thing. It actually does a lot more, it has much more scope than NSX does. The other thing that's very unique about ACI is we have integrated it with every hypervisor on the planet and every container management framework on the planet, and ever bare metal system on the planet, which means that any workload, something sitting on a mainframe, something sitting on a Sun Oracle server, something on OpenStack on OpenShift, on VMware or on Hyper-V, and now on the EC2 APIs of AWS or on Azure, all of those are integrated with ACI. We're not wedded to one hypervisor, and our cloud implementation that we announced yesterday is a true integrated cloud capability, it's not a bring your own license and go put it on bare metal at AWS, which has been VMware's cloud strategy is to team up with AWS and let customers bring their software licenses into AWS bare metal. That's not EC2. And of course that's not Azure and that's not the other clouds we're going to be doing. So the openness to being multi-cloud on premise, which means every hypervisor and every container framework, and bare metal, with one system. We're extending that into the cloud to give customers choice and openness, that's really a very fundamental philosophy in networks. >> So much wider scope. That's kind of always been Cisco's philosophy in partnership. When you think about HyperFlex going back 10 years when you guys sort of created that with partners and then multiple partners now, maybe talk about that journey a little bit. >> HyperFlex? >> Yes. >> Yeah, 'cause hyperconvergence is another very exciting and fast growing trend in our industry. And really, HyperFlex started off with the hyperconverged infrastructure, started of being the notion of putting a mini-cloud in a box on-premise for application developers to rapidly deploy their applications, as if it was in the cloud. So speed and simplicity were really at a premium, and that's really what defines hyperconvergence. And we've done a tremendous amount of work at Cisco to make speed and simplicity there, because we've integrated network compute storage and a cloud management system called Intersight to give that whole capability to customers. We then hardened it. We took it from being able to do VDI kind of workloads and rather benign workloads, to mission-critical workloads. So databases are now running on HyperFlex. ERP systems are running on HyperFlex, the real crown jewels of the enterprise are now running on HyperFlex. Then we made it multi-cloud. We opened it to all hypervisors and to all container frameworks. We announced OpenShift yesterday, we have already done Hyper-V, we had done OpenStack and DSX, so again, same spirit of openness. And yesterday's announcement was, what if I want to take hyperconvergence outside of the data center in hundreds or thousands of remote locations? Think a retailer. In a retail environment, some of the most interesting data is born outside the data center, it's born in a store. The data is center that follows the customer who's interested in a plasma TV, and that data has a perishable lifetime. You act on it on location and on time or you lose the value. So sending it over, taking two hours to do a machine learning job on it and come back, the customer's already back home watching a movie. And so the window of opportunity for the data is often right there and then, and that's why our customers are taking their computing environment off into where the data is, to act on it fast and on location. >> It sounds easy but I want to just get your thoughts on this, because this is a critical data challenge. If data's stored in classic old ways, data warehouses and fenced off area, it's kind of in the internet, you're not going to have the latency to get that data in real time. Talking about real time data that's addressable for part of the application value. So this is a new notion that's emerged with dev ops and infrastructure as code. >> That's right. >> That's hard. How do you guys see that progressing, how should customers prepare to have that data centered properly for app addressability, discovery, whatever the uses of the data contextually is, time series data or whatever data it is, this is a critical thing. >> It's a critical thing, and there's no one answer, because depending on what the data is, sometimes you only see the value when you concentrate it and consolidate it, because the patterns emerge from rolling out a thousand stores worth of data and seeing that people who buy this toothbrush tend to buy that toothpaste. There may be that value where you want to concentrate the data, but there are also many things where acting on the data in the moment and on location quickly without referring to the other thousand stores extracts 90% of the value of that data. So that's why you want to do forward deploy computing on that data. >> So this highlights network programmability, this means the applications driving the queries or the network for that data, if it's available... So there's two things, network programmability from the app, and availability of the data. >> Yeah, and the ability for the entire infrastructure, network, compute, and storage, and hyperconvergence is the automation of all three to be able to deliver its value equally in remote locations or in a cloud, as it would have in a data center, because that's where, the application's going to want to go where the value is, and if the infrastructure can't follow it there, then you get a degraded ability to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Right, real time decisions happen at the edge, but then as you describe, you got to bring data back, certain data, back to the cloud, do the modeling there and then push the models back down. So you're going to have-- >> And you're going to have decision making distributed. >> And you've got to have low latency to be able to enable that. >> Yeah, and the same goes for other considerations. For example, why is it important to do, allow people to put data both on their premises and in the cloud? For disaster recovery, for data replication, for resiliency. Sometimes for governance reasons. GTPR in Europe says the data of European citizens that's personally identifying has to stay in Europe. Somebody may not have a data center in Europe. Could they take advantage of a co-location ability or somebody else's cloud? >> This is the theme we're seeing at this show this year, and certainly at the center of the news is, complexity is increasing 'cause it's just evolution, more devices are connected, diverse environments, scale for cloud and connectivity, but software driving that. So I got to ask you the question. Go back to the old days, you know, the 1990s, multi-vendor was a big word. Now multi-cloud feels the same way. This is the openness thing. How would you describe multi-cloud strategy for Cisco in context of this notion of being open? >> It is really the new dimension of openness, right? We've been open in the past to multiple forms of physical networks. Customers to use wireless or fiber or copper or what have you, we need to give them an IP network that operate equally well over all media. That was one dimension of openness. Another dimension of openness was, does a product from vendor A work with a product from vendor B? My router, your router, my switch, your firewall, those are other dimensions. Hardware and software coupling. Can I buy the hardware from Peter and the software from Mary, will it work well? The new dimension of openness is, can a customer avail themselves of any form of cloud, either because they like the tooling and how well their developers are more efficient on a given cloud, or because the pricing of the other guy, or the third guy has a point of presence in Tokyo, which this one doesn't. All of those are business choices that if we make our technology, let them take advantage of them with no technical restriction, they will, because now they can shop on the merit of what they want to do, and not on, oh well, sorry, if you want to go to Azure, I can't help you, but if you're willing to settle for your own premise or for Amazon, then I have a story for you. So that's-- >> Roland, you're leading the team on the core crown jewels for Cisco, as you guys, the rising tide's floating all boats here within the company. What's your plan for the year, what's your goals, you'll be out there pounding the pavement with customers, what's your objective, what do you hope to accomplish this year in 2019? >> Well 2019 is the year of many things for us, it's a very exciting year. It's the year of, on the physical infrastructure side, we're taking our switches to 400 gigabit per second. We have our new silicon capability, our new optics, so we're going to be able to scale for the cloud providers who are heading the next frontier of speed and density and scale. So performance will always, always be there, and when we're done with 400, we're already going to be asking about 800. So that's an exciting new generation of switches. ACI Anywhere getting deployed now and adopted across multiple clouds, is another exciting thing. HyperFlex Anywhere, we're really looking forward to the potential in financial services, in logistics, in retail, where's there's a lot of deployed data at the edge. And then, security is a never finished journey, right? Everything with give our customers in the way of security, because there, there's an active actor who's trying to make you fail, right? It's not that you're only fighting physics to get to 400 gigabit, then you win. There we have a guy who's trying to foil your schemes and trying to foil their schemes. Security is a great-- >> Constant attacks are on the network. You guys have seen this movie before, so you know how critical, Roland thanks so much for spending the time, congratulations on ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, intent-based networking at the core. It's theCUBE bringing you all the data, we have an intent here to bring you the best content from Cisco Live in Barcelona. I'm John, Dave Vellante, stay with us for live coverage, day two of three days of coverage here in the dev net zone, packed with developers learning new skills. We'll back with more after this short break.