>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCube! Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, here in New York City for the AWS Summit. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Corey Quinn. And I'm happy to welcome two guests from NetApp. First to my right, welcome back to the program from another cloud show earlier this year. Jonsi Stefansson, who's the CCO and Vice President for Cloud Services. And to his right, well it's a first time on the program. I actually was on one of his earlier podcasts, Jeff Dickey, who's joining NetApp as the chief technologist inside that same cloud and data services group. Jeff, welcome and Jonsi welcome back. >> Thank you, Stuart. >> Thank you. >> Okay so Jonsi, let's start with you. So we've watched the cloud and data services. From my words it's like almost, I want a new brand. It's like this is not the ONTAP, everywhere, you know, best NFS, you know the number one thing there, it's about multi cloud, it's about getting the value out of my data that transformation we've seen overall in what was known as the storage industry. There are a lot of new people, a lot of new products, and it's the you know the and is I think there was one NetApp term is all of the history and the things you could trust, but a lot of new things. So give us the updates on what's exciting in your world. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean of course we are still relying on that old trusted ONTAP and WAFL storage operating system in the back end, but we have extracted a lot of that into a more automation or you're consuming it in a more autonomous way. We are actually taking all the the storage norms that the traditional storage admin is really used to, you know tweaking and all of that. That's all done and managed by us. It's fully as a service and we are more focused on the data management capabilities of ONTAP than the actual storage system or the performance of that storage operating system. I mean we are in a very unique position as NetApp. I mean we have a very strong foothold in the enterprise. And now we have integrated services with all the public clouds. I mean fully native integrated services either going through their own console or at their own APIs or with our own UI. So the data management capabilities that we are actually bringing to the table is you can seamlessly migrate from the core to the edge and to the cloud, depending on where you want your data to reside. So our goal is actually to do something very similar as Kubernetes has done to the application layer. They have made it completely mobile, there is no longer that VM format issues that you had in the old days. It's basically just a kernel module, I can move it wherever on top of a hypervisor of choice or a public cloud of choice. But that has always been sort of left behind on some propriety box sitting there. But NetApp like I said, NetApp is in this very unique position of being able to move, migrate, replicate and split the data according to your strategy whether it's on-premise or the public cloud. >> All right, Jeff, would love to hear your viewpoint as what you're hearing from customers. I've known you for many years. Talk about that journey towards cloud and what is cloud and how does it fit into their customer environment. Give us what brought you into NetApp and some of the conversations you're having if you've been digging in with the NetApp team. >> Well the coming to NetApp is actually a long story. I've known the Green Cloud folks for a long time. I think was the first kind of US partner of theirs and had been a big fan of first their cloud and then their software so I was really excited when the data acquisition happened and you know for about a year I was learning like the stuff they're working on and that was blowing my mind and again, I've worked with almost every storage company out there so it was exciting to, like the future of what was happening and then after the acquisition of Stackpoint which I was currently working with, so it's like NetApp kind of took my two favorite companies in a short time so I said, hey, I want to be working on, you guys are doing the coolest stuff that I've seen right now and the roadmap is blowing my mind, I want to join. So it's been a great time here. I think what's most unique, what I've found is that the typical, when you're doing cloud consulting, you go after the low-hanging fruit. It's very simple strategy. You know, if you were to go to a customer and say, "Let's take your highest demanding, "most revenue generating systems "and we're going to migrate those to AWS first." Well they're going to look at the $10 billion contract and you know the two year engagement and say no, we're not going to do that. You go for the low-hanging fruit. But because of the products that have come out and what we're doing in the public clouds, we're for the first time we have NFS, you know like basically SLA performant file system in the cloud that can handle the biggest, baddest on-prem apps. So now that we're able to do that, what customers are doing, they are now we're taking those big ones and it's accelerating the whole journey of the cloud because instead of creating more of a chasm between your public cloud infrastructure and your on-prem, there's a lot of people, you know face it, if you've got a $50 million budget, you're putting it mostly into cloud and some of your on-prem, which again is still generating a lot of revenue, is not getting the love it needs and it's not becoming cloud either and you have this kind of chasm. So it think it's great that with the customers we're working with, they're very excited to be moving what they thought they were never going to be able to move because it just wasn't there. And now they have native connections to all the services they love, like you know, here at AWS. So it's just great 'cause you know, yes they're consolidating their data and you're having less silos, that's exciting. But what excites me most is what are they going to do next and after that what're they going to do next with that? Like as they learn how to use their data and connect more to cloud services and our cloud services and the public cloud services, they're going to be able to do way more than they ever thought they would. >> Something that I think would resonate with a number of folks has been that, I go a little bit back, I'm a little older than I look, although I wear it super well. And I cut my teeth on WAFL and working with SnapMirror and doing all kinds of interesting things with that, it's easy to glance, walk around the expo hall and glance at it and figure huh, I see there's a NetApp booth. You must still be trying to convince AWS to let you shove a filer into us-east-1. That's not really what your company does anymore in the traditional sense but I think a lot of people may have lost that message. From a cloud perspective, what is NetApp doing in 2019? >> So I mean we are really, really software focused. So I mean we are doing a lot of work. We are containerizing that WAFL operating system, we are really excited about launching that as alpha today. That basically means launching as an alpha in October. That basically means that you could get all the ONTAP data management goodies on top of any storage operating system on top of any physical or persistent discs in any of these different public clouds. EPS, Volumes, Google PDs or Azure, we wanted to make it so anybody can actually deploy ONTAP. We've always have that story with ONTAP Select but being able to containerize it, I don't know if we can actually. So we can actually reap the benefits of Kubernetes when it comes to high availability, rapication, auto-scaling and self-healing capabilities to make it a much more robust scale out as well as scale up solution. So that's truly our focus. And our focus for 2019 is of course, we've been really, really busy with our heads down coding for a long, long time or for a long time. Very short time in NetApp terms, but in cloud terms, very, very long. Like for the last 18 months. But now we're really sort of integrating our entire portfolio where we have monitoring, deep analytics, compliancy, Kubernetes, storage providers, schedulers. So everything is sort of gelling together now. >> So I think back a couple of years ago, if you talked to Amazon, the answer to everything was move everything to the public cloud. Today, Amazon at least admitted that hybrid cloud is a thing. They won't say hybrid necessarily but you know with the outposts and what they're doing with their partnership with VMware and the like, they're doing that. When I look at customers, most of them have multi cloud. Now when we say multi cloud it means they have lots of clouds and whether or not they're tied together, they're not doing that and while Amazon won't admit to it and isn't looking to manage in that environment, they're playing in that because if I have lots of clouds, one of them is likely AWS. NetApp sits at the intersection of a lot of this. You have your huge install base inside the data center, you're working very much with Amazon, and the other cloud providers. What I'm hoping to get from you is your insight on customers, you know, where are they today, what are they struggling with in that hybrid or multi cloud world and where do you see things maturing as we go the next couple of years? >> Well I mean, the fact of the matter is, 83% of all workloads still recite on-premise. Whether it stays like that or doesn't, I mean AWS is doing Outpost, Google is doing Anthos, Azure is doing Azure Stack. And the good thing is we are actually playing with all of them we are collaborating on all these different projects, both on the storage layer as well as on the application life cycle management. From our point of view, it is really important that we start tying all the infrastructure related stuff into the application layer so you're actually managing everything from that layer and down. So for a developer like me, it's actually really simple to actually do all the tasks and completely manage my own solution. Of course I need operations to be managing the infrastructure but I should be oblivious to it as a developer and what we are actually seeing customers doing now more and more and it's actually really impressing coming here to New York and meeting all these financial companies, they have always been like probably the slowest movers to the public cloud because of compliancy reasons and other stuff, but they are actually really adopting it. They have segmented out their workloads and really know what teams are allowed to provision and are supposed to be running in the public cloud in order to tap into the innovation that's happening there and what teams are only allowed to work on on-premise environments. So it sort of relates into the true cloud concept. The true cloud concept being everything is a cloud and there is no lock in, have the freedom of choice where to provision, where to spin up your workloads. So we're seeing that more and more from our customers. Wouldn't you agree? >> Yeah, totally agree. >> Yeah, Jeff I wonder if you could give a little bit more as you said, NetApp's done quite a few acquisitions in the last couple of years. What sort of things should people be thinking about NetApp that they might not have a couple years ago? >> Well I know, I'll tell a quick story. My first day as a NetApp employee was at KubeCon in Seattle and I remember I was wearing the Net badge and I had a friend that I was partnered with and he looked at my badge and says, "NetApp? "Like the box in the closet people?" And I just like well I mean not anymore. You know and I think that's the biggest thing. You mean Network Appliance? >> Those of us that have know NetApp long enough. >> Now it's internet application, right? Now it's a little bit different. I think the big thing is you know, it's not just a storage. I mean storage is a key component, and it's very important, but that's not the only thing and I think that on the cloud side it's very important because we're still maintaining this relationship with our storage appliances and everything but we have more buyers now so we can go across the company and say, "What are you doing? "Are you an SRE? "Are you a developer lead? "Are you a VP of operations?" We have all these products that work for them yet in the end, it's a single vision to the deep insights of everything they're doing with us. >> Just quick followup on that, I think when NetApp bought a Kubernetes company, it was like okay, I'm trying to understand how that fits when I look at NetApp's biggest partners, I think VMware, Cisco, Red Hat, all going heavily after software solutions including the kubernetes piece so how does NetApp do differently because you still have strong partnerships there. >> I think we're in a strong place because now we're doing two things, we're bringing the apps to the data and the data to the apps. So it's, where do you want to be? There's the right place for your app. There's a lot of choice now and now we have, you know, now you can choose. Where is this going to live best? Where is this going to operate? Where is this going to serve our customers best? What's going to be the most cost effective? You know, being able to deploy and manage. You know, type in a couple characters and your entire production of Kubernetes deployment is backed up into where you want. Like there's just you know, the apps are nothing without data, the data is nothing without the app right? So it's bringing those two together. I think it's very important to kind of get out there. My job is getting that out that it's not storage silos, this is about your apps. What are you doing with it? Where do you want your apps, and what is that data, how is the data helping your apps grow? You know, we're helping people move forward and innovate faster with these products. >> I mean both companies, my company Green Cloud and the Stackpoint company, we were really, really early adopters of Kubernetes and we've always taken both companies very application-centric point of view on Kubernetes while most everybody else have taken a very infrastructure-centric approach. We were two staffed of companies just developers and we always sort of felt like, because it's a very common misunderstanding that Kubernetes was actually built for developers. It wasn't. It is an infrastructure play, built and developed by the Google SREs to run code. So everything that we are adding on top of it and beneath it, it ties it all together. So I mean for a developer working on our Kubernetes offerings, he's basically working in his own element, he's just doing commands and magic happens in the packet. We tie the development branch to a specific Node Pole. We apply the staging branch to another one and the production environment, once you commit that, then it actually goes through like an SRE process where they are basically the gate keepers, where they actually either allow or say hey we found the bug or we are not able to deploy this according to our standards. So tying it all together, all the way from the storage layer all the way up to the application layer is what we are all about. And I got the same question when we were acquired. When we were Green Cloud, we were in a really, really, good situation where we had term sheets from three different companies. I'm not allowed to say which ones, but everybody, once I sold it to NetApp they were like, "Why NetApp?" But if you go to KubeCon, and you are always there, there is a very live matrix on what the biggest problems are with Kubernetes and persistent volume clearance and storage and data management hasn't been sold yet. And that's where we believe that we have a unique way of offering those data management capabilities all the way up the stack. >> All right well Jonsi and Jeff, thank you for giving us the update there, absolutely. Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be at KubeCon later this year in San Diego we're at Amazon re:Invent. 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