>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Dave Vellante. Dave, it's been an exciting almost two full days, and we're very excited to be joined by Joel Reich, the EVP of products and operations at NetApp. And none of us can believe you haven't been on the Cube before! >> I haven't been. I'm sure I've sure I've watched a lot of the episodes, but I've never been a guest. >> I apologize for that. I'm shocked, given our past history and relationship, but welcome. >> Thank you. >> And we like to hear that- >> We'll see how I do before you invite me back again. (laughing) >> As a former NetApp-ian, I have high hopes. So Joel, NetApp is positioning itself as a storage software company for multi-cloud world. What does that really mean? >> So what it means is that, you know, when I think about it, when I talk to customers, the problem space about how do I manage my data has gotten so wide and so broad in the last three years because, you know, it used to include to walls, just the space between the four walls of the data centers that you owned. And now the problem space is that plus other data sources you might need to take to grow your business. It might be infrastructure as a service that you built in the cloud. It might be a software as a service application that you're running that's still your data, but it's in some other person's data center. So what it means is that we've really focused on the fact that the world is going to be hybrid cloud and that it's going to be multi-cloud. And the problems that, a high-class problem to solve is how to allow people to manage their data in that world. >> And we've been talking all week on the Cube, and you see it now at VMware's results, there's a lot of tailwinds, but part of that is the customer reality that they can't bring their business into the cloud and reformulate it to force fit it into the cloud. Rather, they have to bring the cloud to the data. >> Joel: Yep, exactly. >> That's sort of your wheelhouse. When you think about multi-cloud, are you talking about being the data store that multiple clouds can access? And do you see it going beyond that, where people are, you know, cross-clouding, if you will, inter-clouding? >> Sure, yeah, I mean, and the mechanisms vary by which people will do that. You know, we see people wanting to still own their data, in other words still have it behind their firewall. So one of the ways they can cross connect to multiple clouds is they can put a storage system, you know, NetApp storage system, in a cold location facility, let's say an Equinix facility, and there they have access to all of the fastest, broadest pipes that you could find anywhere on the network. And you can do a direct connect to Azure. You can do an express connect, or direct connect to Amazon or express connect to Azure, and make a decision about, you know, who has the best pricing plan or who has the best contractual terms or legal terms for you to go to the cloud. So you know, there's that way to do it when you're trying to manage, really just physically own your data when you're concerned about the privacy or sovereignty of it. There's other ways of doing it also, where our storage management software can sit in the cloud. We have a product called Cloud ONTAP, and you can buy it as a service in Amazon, or you can buy it as a service in Azure. And you could store your data in their infrastructure, and because it has a built-in capability of moving from one, you know, from one vendor to another, you don't have to worry about format differences between the cloud vendors. So you can migrate, you know, across, you could SnapMirror, which is a replication capability that we've had for 20 years, and you could be multi-cloud in that sense also. >> You know what's interesting about that, Joel, is when I first started looking at NetApp, and there was no such thing as cloud, but it struck me that you guys were early on with the concept of storage as a service. You had many, many services within your solutions, whether it was copy services or even data reduction services, well ahead of its time, that were bundled in to the platform. And you would invoke those as necessary. Very sort of cloud-like or, you know, we all talk about serverless today, and that's sort of the model, is invoking services as I need them. >> Yes. >> Kind of composable, if you will. So very compatible, in concept anyway, with cloud. So take us through kind of where you are today, with the architecture, you know, used to be so simple. EMC block, NetApp file, right? And that's changed dramatically. And of course I'm oversimplifying. Where are we today with the portfolio and the company strategy? Maybe you could talk to things like all-flash arrays, hyper-converged, bring us up to date. >> So I mean, I think there's, we look at, you're right, we do take a services perspective of what we're building. And what I do, we look at that there's a consumption continuum that people actually want to buy those services in different shapes or forms. So when we think about it, it's not, we don't have a separate clustered data ONTAP roadmap for, you know, our next high-end FAS system that has different features than the roadmap for the version of ONTAP that's going to run in the cloud. It's actually one product, right, that we build to be able to be consumed in different ways. And that, you know, when you think about it, that's kind of like a microcosm of our strategy, which is that what we're trying to do is make those data services available no matter where the data happens to be. And so to give you an example of a new service that we've implemented as part of cluster data ONTAP, it was in a new release that we did this past spring called 9.2. So it has a feature in it called Fabric Pools. And what Fabric Pools allow you to do is, you know, we have this idea that over time, storage becomes a service-level based thing and you have a capacity tier and you have a performance tier. And over time whatever that performance tier is going to be built of is going to be, you know, as flash progresses to Optane and things like that, that capacity tier is going to get faster and faster and faster, and it's always going to be a little bit more expensive than the, I mean, the performance tier is going to get, you know, it's going to get bigger, it's going to get faster, it's always going to be more expensive than the capacity tier. So Fabric Pools is essentially designed, if you forward think a bunch of years, when what you've got in the data center is all flash, you know, where's your capacity tier going to be? Well so in essence what we're doing is we're doing tiering between all flash and any S3 target. So that S3 target could be Glacier. The S3 target could be S3, I mean the S3 target could be, you know, it could be any S3 target. It could anybody's object store. And essentially what happens is, the system will manage secondary data and snapshot data into that capacity tier, but it'll manage it all together so that you're getting the most efficient use you can of flash. So you look at that and say, okay, that's the consumption model. That's a traditional consumption model, where you're buying controller-based functionality. Well it turns out that cloud ONTAP can use Fabric Pools also. So what that means is I can deploy, I could go to Amazon's Marketplace, I can buy Cloud ONTAP for I think it's $1.45 an hour, and I can run an instance, I can set up a cluster in the cloud, and I could use EC2 storage. And I could use Amazon storage and I could run ONTAP on it, and then if I want to I could implement Fabric Pools and I could tier to S3 or Glacier, right, within the cloud. >> The point is, the value of that is single point of control. >> Joel: Yeah. >> And customers will pay for that value. >> My point is actually, the point is was trying to make is that it's a consumption model choice. I'm not going to force someone, I view the cloud as our friend, right, what we're trying to do is find ways for people to leverage either the infrastructure of the public cloud or their on prem infrastructure to be able to manage their data in ways that they can't. >> And discretely selling that software as a service. >> Joel: Yes. >> Yeah. >> Exactly, or as a feature of our standard appliance product. >> But a much different model than taking a Seagate disk drive, packaging it into a controller, and selling it for 10X what you paid for it. >> Right, exactly. So you know, that's really the exciting thing is trying to find ways of making what we have portable into the different ways that people want to consume data management services these days. >> A couple questions for you, Joel. You mentioned the word "friends." You've been, NetApp, long-time friends with VMware. >> Yes. >> Since we're one year post combination of Dell EMC, how has the NetApp VMware relationship evolved? One of the things we heard Michael Dell say this morning was it's very important to maintain the independence of the VMware ecosystem. Talk to us about how in the last year that relationship has progressed and how that's helping NetApp continue its history of being very innovative. >> Yah, so there's always been coopetition, there's always been places where, you know, our products overlapped and where you could do similar things with VMware at the server level that we could do at the storage level. But from the beginning, you know, the integrations that we did with them I think were, you know, really helped move the market and really helped move both of our businesses. I think there's like three things that we're doing right now that are new, you know, in the last year with them. One of them is we built another version of ONTAP, which we call vNAS, which can run on top of VSAN. And you know, in an ESX environment and provide, you know, NFS and CIFS file services on top of VSAN, right? So that's a really interesting combination of both of our software-defined products that solve a customer problem. Another thing we've done is, you know, we've announced our HCI product, NetApp HCI, and we have a really close partnership with VMware. We decided that that was the way to go, that we didn't want to build our own hypervisor, and that they did a really good job on the management side, and you know, that our integration of those three things would build something, you know, with our strength being at the storage management layer and their strength being at the hypervisor and management layer, that that would help us build a really effective, competitive product. So you know, I think those are two really good examples of that the partnership is moving forward. Lots of interesting integrations, we're working on figuring out how to bring value to what VMware is now doing with AWS. Cause we have a very large install base. I came to the show and I asked, well how many combined customers do we have with VMware? And it's 50,000 combined customers over the years we've been doing this. So you know, our customers want to know how to get access to that capability, how to move into AWS in a way that provides them an interim step. So there's some really good cooperative work going on between our developers in that area. >> And a couple of strong GTM routes, right, through, you mentioned a new version of ONTAP for VSAN. Yesterday Pat Gellsinger mentioned there's now 10,000 customers on VSAN, talked about obviously with AWS as another GTM opportunity for you. >> Yeah, I mean, our teams work together great. There's no question about it. >> Yeah, I mean you guys have always been right there, in the inner circle of integration with VMware. I mean, in the days where, you know, EMC was trying to control the chessboard, NetApp was always able to have products like, same day, you know, as integrated as anybody. And that was important for VMware to show its independence. >> Well you know, Mountain View is much closer to Sunnyvale than Hopkinton. (laughing) >> It's true. >> So you talked about, you chose not to develop your own hypervisor. Others have. So maybe talk about that a little more, how you differentiate from some of the other hyper converged players. >> I mean, I don't, you know, there are other ways of dealing with, you know, when people don't want to spend money on a license, there are other ways of dealing with that problem than building your own hypervisor. You know, for example, so in our HCI product, we can scale server and, we can scale compute and storage independently. So you don't actually get locked into buying, you don't have to buy another VMware license if all you're doing is selling combined storage, you know, combined HCI nodes. By breaking them apart and having separate HCI nodes, we don't drive people into consuming VMware licenses that they might not need, right, in order to meet the demands of, you know, what they're trying to build. So I think we've taken a much different approach to HCI. We talk about it as second generation. The core, there's a lot of value to it. The core value in differentiation is really ease of setup and use that people have grown to expect from HCI combined with an amazing amount of quality of service and workload guarantee, you know, guaranteed workload per workload performance and scaling to, you know, 100 nodes, which, you know, we think really makes HCI a data center class technology. You know, not an edge technology, not a single application technology, but by adding data management features and having that real ability to scale to very large systems, we think we really, you know, come into the market at a time when HCI is ready to move to that next step of not just being single workload, single application. So we think we're there at a good time, with the right product. >> How about all-flash arrays? Bring us up to speed on that. You guys made an acquisition of SolidFire, great acquisition, picked it up at a good time in the marketplace, got it for I think a relatively good price, really good company, true software defined, built for sort of cloud-oriented applications. So how have you integrated that asset, where do it fit in your portfolio? And maybe you can share some proof points. >> Yeah, so we've seen a lot of success with that. You know, what we were doing, when we bought SolidFire, there were a whole bunch of motivations for it. One of the motivations was we knew we needed access to the new buyers. We knew we needed access to people who were making decisions about deploying applications independent of the infrastructure that they happened to have in their data center. Right, they were trying to find new ways of doing things. So when we bought SolidFire, you know, a lot of it was, we loved the technology. A lot of it was getting access to the new buyers and bringing them to the table. And it's funny cause I was noticing today in a bunch of customer meetings that I had here, that you know, in the past I'd have meetings and it would be like sort of the same IT stack, here's the system admin, here's the server admin, here's the network admin, here's the storage person sitting around the table. And when I talk about, you know, we talk about the data fabric, which is the way we tie together, you know, our hybrid clouds. When I talk about that, you know, either people would start to yawn or they'd start to feel threatened because you know, we're talking about something that was a new world for them that they didn't quite know how they would fit in. One of the things I'm seeing now, especially this year, is that customers are coming to the table with both with a cloud architect, and you know, the person who's trying to figure out how they get to the next place, plus the person who owns the existing infrastructure, and they're trying to figure out how to modernize it. So it's something, you know, when we bought SolidFire, we had this theory, okay, we got to go, we have this new technology, it's aimed at a new buyer. And one of the things I'm seeing now is that the portfolio sale of the things that we're offering is starting to be relevant to actually, we don't have to go find the different people. We're actually starting to see them come to the table and talk to us together. So you know, all-flash for us, that's been what's driving the company. We went, we made a big investment about two and a half years ago. It started to pay off last year. We're still growing much faster than the market, much faster than companies who are a lot smaller than us, and the last, you know, market research data that I saw had us as number two in the world, after really not even, you know, being in the top single digits about three years ago. So that's been a really good thing for us, both for our install base but also winning new footprint and winning new business that we didn't have before. We're displacing legacy competitors, one a day. I think George talked about it in our last earnings call. We're replacing EMC once a day, right, at least, and accelerating past that. And it's replacing the old stuff. And a lot of it is because of what we've done with flash. A lot of it is also because it's a future proof. Okay, well, how am I going to, so let's say I decide I want to move this part of this workload that's on here, one workload that's on here to the cloud next year. Alright, NetApp, how could you help me do that? And we'll go through and talk about, this is what we do with Azure, this is what we do with Amazon, right, this is what we do with IBM Cloud. None of our competitors can do that. >> Excellent, and so, sorry to cut you off, we've got to wrap. But you've got a NetApp Insight 2017 Change the World with Data coming up in, you're going to have to come back to Vegas in October and Berlin, and I'm sure, >> Right here, I might even be sitting in the same place. (laughing) >> I hope you get some fresh air. >> Let's make that happen. Let's get the Cube to Insight. >> There we go! Thank you so much for joining. You're now a Cube alumni, which is fantastic. >> Thank you, do I get a t-shirt? >> Congratulations, a pin I think. >> Yeah, a pin. Alright, well for my cohost Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, we want to thank you for watching. Come right back. We've got more exciting coverage from day two of VMworld 2017 right now. (bright music)