live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world here live in Las Vegas I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host Stu minimun we have Jay Crone he is the senior consultant portfolio marketing at Dell EMC and Allison Langham consultant product marketing Dell EMC thank you so much for coming on the cube thanks for returning on so ricktum are we gonna talk today about cloud storage and data protection but I want to start with cloud and I'm gonna start with you Jay talk a little bit about what your customers what they want to do with the cloud well and so what one of the things we found is as cloud has been out there for a while and people have learned about what they can do with it it's not not the panacea that people thought there are about it about four or five use cases the big one is disaster recovery so a lot of people who can't won't don't care two don't have the money to set up a second data center will rent the cloud you know rent rent both capacity and computer in the cloud so disaster recovery is the big one we'll talk about that more in terms of some specific announcements the other ones make make sense it's really sort of the rent instead of buy test and development you know you want you want to spit up a test environment and run it for three hours find out what it what it tells you and then tear it down and not have to pay for it back up an archive is kind of a related to the disaster recovery but it's a little bit different use case because often people want to put the clout you two put the data some place to store it regular regulatory requirements that's an example which is different than disaster recovery analytics a big again it's this like what we used to call high performance computing where you need a lot of compute and a lot of storage for a short period of time and you don't want to you have a data center full of stuff that you're paying for or not using and then the last one there's lots of words for this the polite marketing term is workload migration also known as lift and shift which is these are the people that actually do want to take a workload from on-premises and pick it up and move it to the cloud wholesale so those are those are the ones disaster recovery is still far and away the most popular so Allison you know our observation coming in this week is there's a lot of discussion about that hybrid and multi cloud a lot of that focus gets put on you know the public clouds I mean you bring Satya Nadella to the show we're gonna talk a lot about Microsoft Azure and even when we get into the data center you know we we've seen the ascendancy of VX rail and that's an underlying component for many of the solutions that were all doubt but I know you're gonna help bring to us is help fill out some of the rest of the portfolio is you know from the EMC side and as Dell EMC comes in there's a large storage portfolio does that get left behind when we talk about cloud or pulled into the entire discussion yeah and a great question so you know when we think about our you know cloud strategy as a whole for Dell Dell technologies you know there's really there's two there's two pieces to that and so a lot of what you heard about yesterday and the big announcements around the Dell technologies cloud that's really helping customers really just completely transform to a cloud operating model and a lot of like the people processes technology implications of doing so the other piece of that is around our cloud enabled infrastructure which is really complementary to a lot of what we talked about yesterday and our cloud enabled infrastructure you know that's more of what we heard about today and what we're doing across both our storage and data protection portfolios to help customers modernize their existing infrastructure to be able to extend their data centers to the cloud so and it's you know these are there's our complementary pieces it's not really um it's not an aura conversation it's really an an conversation both pieces are really important when thinking about your cloud strategy just depending on you know workload and transformational readiness and where you're at to be able to do that so that's where a lot of our storage cloud capabilities come come into play all right okay maybe we could bring us down a little a little bit of level as to you know how I explain how cloud cloud enabled isn't cloud watching you know something like power Mac's you know well and that is that's interesting in fact I had that we just walked out of the booth was talking one of the product managers who had presiding to a customer that had one of some gear from a distinguished competitor shall we say was interested in PowerMax partly because of the cloud story so and PowerMax is is is just joining the cloud family and one of the things that we are have announced here that was talked about in the keynote is cloud storage services which is an offering that we have through a cloud service provider that allows you for example is an existing PowerMax customer to use s rdf to use native replication to replicate into the cloud and then in a VMware environment here's that disaster recovery use case coming in a VMware environment use Site Recovery Manager to perform a failover and then this service provider well you will read will spin up those VMs and VM works out on AWS so what you basically get is an automatic failover for VMware environments with power max so it's an extreme and unity by the way so both are a nice launch so we get we get that disaster recovery use case enabling you know our bread-and-butter our industry-leading storage platform so that's that's that's a big piece of the news and that wasn't that was announced here the other thing I do want to point out with that announcement is there's a multi cloud capability the the one I just discussed is that the automatic VMware use case but there's also the ability through our service provider to connect to regular AWS in addition to vm worked on an AWS Google and Azure which we might have heard a little about yesterday and we're excited about that as well Alison this is a very competitive market and customers really expect a lot they want new capabilities they want the latest and greatest what is the strategy and the messaging behind why Dell is the is the choice right so no I talked a little bit about they are speaking specifically around our cloud enable the infrastructure you know we had a lot of great announcements today but really we've been having we've been incorporating these cloud capabilities and functionality with on our storage and data protection portfolio for a long time and it's been around and we just we haven't really been talking about it but we have a lot of you know comprehensive cloud features and you know we sort of look at that in you know there's three specific areas where we really look for it to innovate with the cloud in our in our storage and data protection portfolio so that's areas like our cloud connected system so that's like data mobility our ability to tear data from on-prem to the cloud then we also have as Jay was just talking about Platte Lake we have our Cloud Data Services which includes our new cloud storage services offerings but it's also things like being able to deploy in the cloud and as opposed to extending to the cloud so things like cloud edition or data domain virtualization where you're deploying a software-defined version in the cloud and then spanning across the top of that from on-prem in the core to the cloud we have our cloud data insights so that's things like cloud IQ or clarity now that really enable you to proactively monitor and manage not just your infrastructure but also your data and really use that the artificial intelligence built into those to you know get you know good insights to manage manage and monitor your data from on-prem to the cloud so really that but those three areas we really bring together you know a comprehensive set of features to cloud enable your your infrastructure ok wondering if you can bring us inside some of the conversations you're having with customers you're wearing the shirt I see around a lot of the booths yeah you know you know what what are some of the you know top kind of business challenges and you know how are things different now than they might have been back when we called this EMC world well so the there's the disaster recovery use case which is which as I said is new the other thing that's happening is there's that five years of learning that people have had around the public cloud I was talking with a reseller yesterday and one of the value propositions that we have for this particular offering especially the cloud storage services is because the storage is at a service provider that is not the cloud provider shall we say they can offer a different economic model so what we're finding is people are finding new ways to go to the cloud for less money so and that's and that works out really really well because it makes the cloud more affordable for everybody it makes it gives them it gives us some additional business opportunity and most importantly it gives customers the ability to use the cloud consumption model the effects model and the outsourcing of the resources that they couldn't do before so that's the big thing is we were basically enabling the public cloud in ways that we couldn't have done to your point five years ago in addition to the cost benefits of that just building on the multi cloud piece with our cloud storage service is offering it's also about you know some concerns that like big concerns around public clouds like security and having control of your data their cloud storage services offering your data is actually sitting on external storage so it's directly connected to the cloud you have like a high-speed connection into the public cloud to be able to run your applications but and you can connect to multiple clouds move data between clouds you know as as it suits the business needs there's different workloads but at the same time you're still maintaining control of that data on you know durable persistent Dell EMC storage right it's on the gear you know and love and as I said all of our native replication this is this is wonderful because if you're a customer with gear on site you don't perceive any change your your s RDF pipe if you will it leaves the building like it used to it just goes to a cloud provider instead of a data center across the Hudson River so to speak well data protection and data security are it's a big theme this year for good and for good reason where do you think cuz the customer mindset is right now our customers appropriately concerned about the the threats that they face and the requirements that are that are bearing down or are they are they head in the sand I mean how would you describe where customers are right now in terms of thinking through these things everybody is concerned about security so the answer is it's right up there you know and we look at you know the the security is some of it is off site but it's it's things like Allison said we offer a model where your data is it it's in the lockbox that you know of as a unity or a nice loan or a Max and it's not in some amorphous place you know up there in the in the cloud as it were and that that gives people a lot of a lot of a warm warm fuzzy feeling and things like data at rest encryption at work on the storage arrays still work on the storage arrays when it's in the cloud so those features are still available to customers that they already know and love all right Alison one of the other things we've been talking a lot about this week is the VMware and Dell EMC pieces have come together more than ever before you know I think back you know when we used to rank how does EMC storage do with VMware well how many integrations does it have now many of the solutions you know VX rail it's got VCF sitting on it can you talk about how they did the VMware and the LMC storage pieces have been coming together even more yeah absolutely so specifically what one of the solutions that Jay was talking about earlier that automated disaster recovery feature from for our cloud storage services that's all about that's all about VMs it's all about VMware integration and it it really offers that if you get this disaster recovery as a service model for VMware environments who are running VMware cloud on AWS and they get you get that complete operational consistency so it's that's a huge benefit to our customers so there's that where it's you're leveraging for the automated disaster recovery it's either power max or unity including the new unity XT which was recently announced being able to completely have operational consistency within your VMware environment from on-prem to the cloud addition to that in addition to that we talked a lot about yesterday about the Dell tech cloud which VX rail is a key component of that we also have our storage our key storage platforms are also validated with VMware Cloud foundation for you know some more like high-performance workloads so we really have so things like power max and unity are also validated with VMware Cloud foundation to be able to get that Best of Breed storage as part of that stack as well it's something that you asked what's changed something that's kind of interesting so we're in the storage division we're in the storage business unit and we have weekly meetings bi-weekly meetings with the VMware cloud folks so that just tells you what's important there's VMware and cloud you know in that word and here we are as you know some of your prime your primary and unstructured storage people working on a regular basis with it with the VMware folks and that is an example of how the companies are coming together and doing doing things differently than we did before how are you finding this show this is the 10th year that the cube has been at at Dell Dell technologies world but back then Dell EMC world what are you how are you finding the vibe this year what's what is the tone of things very cloud focused on which has been a huge huge tip this year that's everything that we're hearing about is very cloud centered which is well it's nice to see you I wouldn't that wouldn't say it's so much of a victory lap bike but there's a lot of excitement certainly in our area on the floor there's a lot of work that has been done over the last couple of years to to get things aligned and put some new processes in place and get some new products out so you let you listen to the you know the Jeff Clark portions of the keynote in particularly yesterday and today he just goes this this this this and this and that's where customers want to see you know we have folks coming up they want to see the new power max they what they want to see the new unity XT of course you know that was it was fun last night it was just kind of sitting there on a pedestal and nobody pointed it out today people want to pull a cult that covers off and say show me the nvme slots so so there's that kind of vibe and excitement the partner vibe is there as well we've we have VMware and some other partners that we're working with so is there it's it's very exciting this year yeah that's great well Allison and Jay thank you both so much for coming on the cube it was great how are you I'm Rebecca night force 2 minimun and we will have so much more of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world live from Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit [Music]

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage. We had Michael Dell on this morning. We had Pat Gelsinger on this afternoon. And happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Keith Moran, who's the vice president with Nutanix. Keith, I've talked to you lots about theCUBE, you've watched theCUBE, first time on theCUBE. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a great show. >> Alright, so let's set the stage here. We're here in Vegas. It's my ninth year doing VMworld. How many of these have you done? >> So this is my fourth. >> Yeah? How's the energy of the show? The expo hall's hopping. You guys have a nice booth. What are you hearing from the customers here? >> I think that we're seeing just a lot of discussion around where the market's going with hybrid cloud. I think that it's a massive opportunity. I think people are trying to connect the dots on where it's going in the next five years. The vibe's extremely strong right now. >> I've met you at some of the Nutanix shows in the past and seen you at some of these, but tell us a little bit about your role, how long you've been there, where you came from before. >> I run the Central US for Nutanix, and I spent a long time in the converged, whether it was that app at EMC, through a few start-ups, and then I've been at Nutanix for four years. It's been a great ride, seeing how the market's adopting to hyperconverged. The core problem and vision that Dheeraj saw nine years ago is playing out. He's five chess moves ahead of everyone. I think there's, again, a massive opportunity as we move forward. >> Keith, I love your to share. I love people in the field. You're talking to customers every day. You hear their mindset. I think back over the last 15 years in my career, and when Blade Server first came out, or when we started building converged solutions. It was like, "Oh, wait." Getting the organization together, sorting out the budgets. There were so many hurdles because this was the way we did things, and this is the way we're organized, and this is the way the budgets go. I think we've worked through a number of those, but I'd love to hear from you where we are with most customers, how many of them are on board, and doing more things, modernizing, and making changes, and being more flexible. >> Yeah, so I think you're spot on in the sense that the silos was the enemy in the sense that people were doing business as usual and that there was process, and they didn't want to take risks. But I think that the wave of disruption has been so strong and that we're in this period of mass extinction where customers, They don't have a choice anymore. That they have to protect against the competitive threat or exploit opportunity, and I think that the speed and the agility with hyperconverged is, And what the market disruption is forcing them to make those changes and forcing them to innovate. At the end of the day, that's their core revenue stream is how they experiment, how they innovate. Again, you're seeing the disruptions coming so fast that people are changing to survive. >> Yeah, we have some interesting paradoxes in the industry. We're talking about things like hyperconverged, yet really what we're trying to do is build distributed architectures. >> Correct. >> We're talking about, "Oh, well I want simplicity, and I want to get rid of the silos, but now I've got multicloud environment where I've got lots of different SaaS pieces, I've got multiple public clouds, I often have multiple vendors in my public cloud, and I've like recreated silos and certifications and expertise." How do customers deal with that? How do you help, and your team help to educate and get them up so that hopefully the new modern era is a little bit better than what they were dealing with? >> Yeah, and I think that's part of where the opportunity is. I think that the private cloud people don't do public well, and I don't think that the public cloud vendors do private well. So that's why the opportunity's so big. And I think for us, we're going to continue to harden the IaaS stack of what we built, and then our vision is how do we build a control plane for the next generation. If you look at our acquisition strategy, and where we're putting in it, how do you have a single operating system that spans the user experience from the public to private, making an exact replica. Again, I think customers are struggling with this problem and that as apps scale up, and scale down, and the demand for them, that they want this ability to course correct and be able to move VMs and containers in a very seamless fashion from one app to the next and adjust for the business market conditions. >> Yeah, I had a comment actually by one of my guests this week. We now have pervasive multicloud. We spent a few years sorting out who are the public clouds going to be. And there's still moves and changes, but we know there's a handful of the real big guys, then there's the next tier of all of the server providers, and the software players, like Nutanix. Look, you're not trying to become a competitor at Amazon or Google. You're partners. I see Nutanix at those shows. So maybe explain what's the long-term strategy. How does Nutanix, as you've been talking about enterprise cloud for a number of years, but what's that long-term vision as to how Nutanix plays in this ecosystem? >> Yeah. So for us I think part of it is our own cloud, which is Xi, and it's living in this multicloud world where our customer can do DRs of service with that single operating system, moving it from a Nutanix on-prem solution, moving it to a Nutanix cloud, moving it to Azure, moving it up to TCP, or moving it to AWS. And they have to do with it with thought because clearly there are so many interdependencies with these apps. There's governance, there's laws of the land, there's physics. There's so many things that are going to make this a complex equation for customers. But again, they're demanding, and that's forcing the issue where customers have to make these decisions. >> Keith, I want to hear, when you talk to your customers, where are they with their cloud strategy? I heard a one conference, 85% of customers have a cloud strategy, and I kind of put tongue in cheek. I said, "Well 15% of the people got to figure something out, and the other 85, when you talk to them next quarter, the strategy probably has changed quite a bit." Because things are changing fast, and you need to be agile and be able to change and adjust with what's going on. So where do your customers, I'm sure it's a big spectrum but? >> It is. The interesting thing for me for cloud is on average, we're seeing that the utilization rate, specifically in AWS, is somewhere in the 25% rate for reserved entrance, which was very surprising to me because the whole point of cloud is to test it, to deploy it, and to scale up, and if you're running in an environment where the utilization rate that the economics aren't working. So I think that people are starting to look at, alright, what are the economics behind the app? Does it make sense in the cloud? Does it make sense on-prem? Again, what are the interdependencies of it? The classic problems they're having are still around. They're spending 80% of their time just managing firmware and drivers and spending thousands of hours per quarter just troubleshooting and not impacting the business. So I think, fundamentally, that's what the customers are trying to solve is how do we get out of this business of spending all our time keeping the lights on and how do we drive innovation. And that ratio has been historically for 20 years. And I think, again, Nutanix helps drive that in the sense that we're helping customers shift that ratio and that pain. I always say, "Put your smartest people on your hardest problems," and when you've got these high-end SAN administrators spending a lot of time, they should be working on automation, orchestration, repeatable process that gives scale and again, impacts the business. >> Yeah. A line that I used at your most recent Nutanix show is talking to customers. Step one was modernize the platform, and step two, they could modernize the application. >> Absolutely. >> Speak a little bit to that because in this environment, we know the journey we went through to virtualize a lot of applications. I talked to a Nutanix customer this morning and talked about deploying Oracle, and I said, "Tell me how that was," because how many years did we spend fighting as customers? "You want to virtualize Oracle?" And Oracle would be like, "No, no, no. You have to use OVM. You have to use Oracle this. You have to use Oracle that." We've gone through that. And is it certified on Nutanix? It's good to go. It's ready to go. He's like, "It was pretty easy." And I'm like, it's so refreshing to see that. But when you talk about new modern applications and customers have this whole journey to embrace things like Agile, LMC ICD, and the like. Where does Nutanix play in this, and how are you helping? >> Yeah, so I think on the first. When you look at the classic database, so things like Sequel were automating so that you can extract it in a very simple manner. You look at the mode 2 apps like Kubernetes, we're taking a 37 page deployment guide and automating it down into three clicks because customers want the speed, they want the deployment cycles, they want the automation associated with that. And it's having a big impact in the sense that these customers are trying to figure out, "Where am I going here in the next three years?" For us, we're seeing massive workloads, whether it's Oracle, Sequel, people deploying on it. And again, there's so much pressure for people to change and constantly disrupt themselves, and that's what we're seeing. And layer that all on top of a lot of legacy apps. So we've got oil and gas customers, and big retailers, and when they show us the dependency maps of their applications, it's incredible. How complex these are, and they want simplicity and speed, and how do they get out of that business of the tangled mess. >> Yeah. Keith, I wonder if you have an example, and you might not be able to use an exact customer, but you mentioned some industries, so here's something I hear at a show like this. Alright, I understand my virtualized environment. I've deployed HCI. I really need to start extending and using public cloud. What are some first steps that you've seen customers as to how they're making that successful? What are some of those important patterns, what works, and where's good places for them to start? >> I look at it almost, when I see some of the automation deployment cycles they have of how they get a VM through the full lifecycle, and behind the scenes they have such massive complexities that it's hindering their ability to create automations. So the first layer is how do you simplify the infrastructure underneath, and it goes back to that dependency map. So again, oil and gas, that's big retailers. When they show us what their infrastructure is, they want to simplify that layer first, and then from there they can build incredible automation that gives them a multiple in the return that is much greater than what they're seeing in today's infrastructure. >> Keith, what's exciting you in the marketplace today? You get to meet with a lot of customers. Just kind of an open-ended. >> So for me, it's I've worked in a lot of big legacy companies, and I've never seen customers that have the passion towards Nutanix. And I think that it's the problems that we're solving for them, the impacts we're having on the business is driving that loyal following. But again, how fast people are either trying to exploit a competitive advantage or protect against a threat, that it's interesting to be right in this, in the epicenter of this big shift that's happening, right? Tectonic plates are shifting in that you've got a massive cloud provider like AWS. You've got a big player like VMware. What's the next generation going to look like? For me it's fascinating to see how these businesses are competing. I look at a customer. I've got a Fortune 500, The CTO's comment to me was, "I'm one app away from disruption." So they're a massive commercial real estate organization, and he's terrified of what could happen next, and he's got to stay way ahead of the curve, and I think that the innovation rate that we're bringing, the support, the infrastructure. I think it's a great place because of how we're serving what we call the underserved customer and having a big impact. >> Yeah. It's interesting. We always poke at the how much are customers just dreading that potential disruption and how much are they excited about what they can do different. You talk about working with traditional vendors in IT for the last decade or so, it's like IT and the business were kind of fighting over it. There's a line one of our hosts here, Alan Cohen, used to use. Actually, the first time I heard it was at the Nutanix show in Miami when we had it on. And he said there's this triangle, and where you want to get people is away from the no and the slow, and get them to go. Do you feel more people are fearful, or more people are excited. Is it a mix of-- >> It is. >> Those for your customers? >> And again, I think that the marketforce is really helping because people there they have to shift to stay competitive, and they're pushing every day to the level of change and how people are embracing change is much faster than it was. Because again, these disruption cycles are much faster and they're coming at customers in a totally different way that they weren't prepared for. >> Alright, Keith, final word from you is how many of theCUBE interviews have you watched in the last bunch of years? >> The content, I mean, it's off the charts. Hundreds and hundreds of hours, I would say. >> Well, hey. Really appreciate you joining us. Keith Moran, not only a long-time watcher, but now a CUBE alumni with the thousands that we've done. So pleasure to talk with ya on-camera, as well as always off-camera. >> Yeah, great stuff, Stu. >> We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)