>>10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called Infinidat. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai, who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability, and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now, as Infinidat evolved, landed on a fourth vector, that has been a key differentiator and its value proposition, and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone. And welcome to this Qube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two longtime friends of theCube. Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of Infinidat and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of Marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents, welcome. >>Great to be here. Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary mark. Congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >>You know I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and, and enjoying many of the opportunities, you know, through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the Infinidat opportunity and it immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happened to be customers of Infinidat, , they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from, from the sidelines, I've always had a lot of respect for the Infinidat platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along, it really captured my interest in of course behind a great product is almost always a great team. >>And as I got to know the company and the board, and, you know, some of the leaders, and learned about the momentum and the business, it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just, you know, 60 days into the job. Everything I hoped for is here, not only a warm welcome to the company, but an exciting opportunity with respect to where Infinidat is at today with the growth of the business. The company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020, cashflow positive, EBITDA positive. And now it's a matter of scaling, scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with several times in my career and really, really enjoying the opportunity here at Infinidat to do that. >>That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course, Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem, but the data center's evolving the cloud is evolving, and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >>No, I think Satya recently said, right, that, that we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right. You know, we believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and you know, the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in, in the real thinking about it, because we're going to have distributed environments and, you know, one of the things that we're doing with Infinidat here today, right, is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that, uh, an interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element, but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale, you know, because storage is going to exist... We have very powerful storage value propositions, and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing Infinidat lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and vVols actually as a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >>These trends, I mean, building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work, especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, you know, that's a, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >>Yeah. You know, we're, we're in the middle of this every day as, as you know, Dave, uh, and certainly Lee, uh, data center architectures ebb and flow from centralized to decentralized, but clearly data locality, I think, is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers, but core is still very significant for, for most enterprise. Uh, and it's, it's, it has, it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud. You know, when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud, they don't want to talk about, you know, the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud. And almost always, these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. >>Uh, the reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal, uh, among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control of the security, the, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These, these are the things that are just fundamentally important, uh, to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic. It has to be a transparent, seamless scalability. I think the days of, of CIO's  you know, even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with, with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is, is over. Um, they want to seamlessly add capacity. They want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar. >>Now it has to be a consolidation. Massive consolidation is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. You know, the, the very characteristics that you talked about upfront, Dave, that make Infinidat unique, I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. Uh, I, I think our architecture also really does provide a, a set it and forget it, uh, kind of experience. Um, when we install a new Infinidat frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're, we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back, uh, to, to help fiddle with the bits or, uh, you know, tweak the configuration as applications and, and multitenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted, but you really, really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the CapEx rail and the OpEx rail and every, uh, every step in between. And importantly, when a customer, when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity, they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right. They're already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >>Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer, that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. Right. Let's talk about the VMware and Infinidat relationship. I mean, every, every year at VMworld, up until last year, thank you COVID, Infinidat would host this awesome dinner. You'd have the top customers there. Very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I, of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years, Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, but, you know, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to Infinidat? And I guess the question there is, is, is petabyte scale that really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >>It's a, it's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing Alliance partner of Infinidat. It goes back to really, almost the foundation of the company, certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of Infinidat VMware and a very tight integration with the VMware was a core part of that. Uh, we, we have a capability. We call the Host PowerTools, which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our, our VMware, uh, integration and, and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration. And, um, our customers typically are, are at scale petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up, um, and over 90% of our customers use VMware. So you would say, I, I think I can safely say we're we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints, uh, in the market. >>I know it's like children, you got, you love all your partners, but is there anything about Infinidat that, that stands out to you a particular area where, where they shine that from your perspective? >>Yeah, I think so. You know, the, the best partnerships, one are ones that are customer driven. It turns out right. And the idea that we have joint customers at large scale and listen storage is a tough business to get, right, right. It takes time to go and mature to harden a code base. Right. And particularly when you're talking about petabyte scale, right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements, makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right. It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications, this is one of the things we're seeing, right. Is new applications, which could be container-based Kubernetes orchestrated our Tanzu portfolio helps with that. >>Right. If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example, we announced some AI work, right. Uh, this week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers save us. And I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing. And particularly with the vVols integration at scale, that we just haven't seen before, uh, and Infinidat has set the bar and is really setting a new, a new record for that. >>Yeah. Let me, let me comment on that a little bit, Dave, we've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very, very exciting engaging, investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry, but in the, in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, we recently demonstrated on a single Infinidat frame over 200,000 vVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar, I think it completely redefines what, what scale means when you're talking about a vVols implementation. >>So not to geek out here, but vVols, they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins, having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers. An array, that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware, or actually vStorage API for, for storage awareness, VASA, anyway, with vVols, you can dynamically provision storage that matches the way I say it as a match as device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil,  it seems like so much in VMware land hearkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way. Right. And vVols is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of storage. So, so how do you guys see it? I, I presume you're, you're sort of vVols certified based on what you just said in the lab. >>Yeah. We recently announced our vVols release and we're not the first to market with the vVols, but from, from the start of the engineering project, we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do, and our customers were very prescriptive about the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in vVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. Uh, as I said, we, we redefined the bar for vVols scalability. We support on a single array now, um, a thousand storage containers. Uh, and I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So, uh, our customers are, again at scale, they said, if you're going to do vVols, we want it... We want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your, of your platform. We really liked vVols because it, it helps, it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the VI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put a majority of your most critical bits on Infinidat in your data center, you're going to want to, you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, but yet the vVols mplementation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration, give the VI, the VI administrator, all of the flexibility they need to manage applications. And vVols of course gives the VI administrator the native use of our snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure, but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's, it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >>Yeah. Storage has come a long way. Hasn't it, Lee? I'm wondering if you could add some color here, it seems in talking to ... Uh, so that's interesting. You've had, you had a hand in the growth of vSAN and it was very successful product, but he chose Infinidat for that higher end application. It seems like vVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the vVols uptake going from your perspective. >>Yeah, I think we you know, we're in the second phase of vVols adoption, right? First phase was, Hey, technically interesting, intriguing. Um, but adoption was relatively low, I think because, you know, up until five years ago, um, applications, weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business, when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now, it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors? Right? Can you go and get your labs? Right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years, and then the past 40 years of computing combined. >>And so when you think about that, what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure today. That's the application. So what vVols has helped you do is it allows the vSphere administrator, who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace, and be able to basically select storage attributes, including QoS, capacity, IOPS, and do that from the vCenter console, and then be able to rectify things and manage them right from the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction, like what we're talking about today, or, you know, integration, um, that the Infinidat has provided now, you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And, you know, consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs yes. VMs across HCI. Sure. Plus now, plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers. It's that consolidated management, which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >>Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago, you launched this, this via the VMware. I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. What, explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go into more detail about what your participation is, but Lee, why don't you explain it? >>Yeah. You know, we don't take just any products that, because listen, there's a mixing. What we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with Infinidat was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many, many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right. To go and bring in, not just vVols support, of course, all the things we do for just a normal interaction with vSphere. But, uh, bringing vVols in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly, as we expanded the VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, to include storagee systems for a customer, for example, right, who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important. Now, as we expand a multicloud experience, that's different from the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect or from some right around the ongoing, underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI, and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >>Yeah. To Lee's point of, it's not like there's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like, you know, 10 or 12 from what I saw and Infinidat is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's I, we liked the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything eye candy it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore, you know, some of the most contemporary, workloads in that environment, as well as solutions to what I considered some of the most contemporary industry problems. We're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the Cloud Solutions Lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform.  That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on at Infinidat. And we're also a core part of, of what VMware is driving from a data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in, in the cloud solutions lab with, the VMware cloud foundation layers, as well as, their Tanzu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >>Yeah. So, yeah, it was just the other day I was on the VMware analyst meeting virtually of course in Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were giving the update. And, and just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here, this expansion of on-prem the cloud experience, the data from, especially from our survey data, we have a partner UTR that did great surveys on a regular quarterly basis, the VMware cloud on AWS, doing great for sure, but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together >>Well on the VMware Cloud Foundation right now with, uh, you know, over a thousand customers, but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, it's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and Infinidat right, you know, this large scale, actually the, you know, interesting crossover, right. And, you know, listen for customers to go and take on a new store system. We always know that it's a high bar, right. So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help? Right. And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together. Right. And how vVols fits into that, you know, with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's the hype that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing right. And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >>Right. Well, let's close with a, kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you see as the future of the data center specifically, and also your, your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >>I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, you know, if you've looked at the, you know, what's happening in the cloud, not everything is migrating in the cloud, but the public cloud, for example, and I'm talking about public cloud there. The public cloud offers some really interesting, unique value and VMware is doing really interesting things about like DR as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time. Right. We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations. Right. And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so, you know, partnering with  leaders on, in storage, right, is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more right with Infinidat, as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications, including container based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right. As the pace of application change, you know, doesn't slow down. >>So what do you see for the next 10 years for Infinidat? >>Yeah, well, um, we, I appreciated your introduction because of this speak to sort of the core characteristics of Infinidat. And I think a company like us and at our, at our juncture of evolution, it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. And, uh, the partnership with VMware, uh, we talked about the Venn diagram. I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential Alliance partner for our business going forward. Um, I'm excited about, about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth in distributed architectures. We'll see growth at the edge in the core data center. >>I think the, the old, the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, um, those days are over, it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that, you have to be really good at, uh, at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our, our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves, but never stray far from what has made Infinidat unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing and in Kubernetes >>Is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about, um, uh, you know, not only staying relevant, but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, you know, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal, but predominantly as I said, 90% or above is VMware infrastructure. Uh, but we also see, uh, Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. Uh, so that, that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as, as the application environment evolves. Great, thank you. You know, many years ago when I attended my first, uh, VMworld, the practitioners that were there, you talked to them, half the conversations, they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And, you know, VMware really has done a great job, publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in how vVols and Infinidat and VMware were kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale, there's some good blogs out there. Check out the Virtual Blocks blog for more information, guys. Thanks so much great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much. Thank you for watching this Cube conversation, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> 10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called INFINIDAT. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now as INFINIDAT evolved it landed on a fourth vector that has been a key differentiator in its value proposition and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two long time friends of the cube, Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of INFINIDAT and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents welcome. >> Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to be here Dave. >> Yeah. Great to be here Dave. Thanks. >> Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary, Mark, congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >> Yeah that's a great question Dave. I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and enjoyed many of the opportunities through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the INFINIDAT opportunity and immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product. Through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happen to be customers of INFINIDAT they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from the sidelines I have always had a lot of respect for the INFINIDAT platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along it really captured my interest and of course behind a great product is almost always a great team and as I got to know the company and the board and some of the leaders and learned about the momentum and the business it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just 60 days into the job everything I hoped for is here not only a warm welcome to the company but an exciting opportunity with respect to where INFINIDAT is at today with growth of the business, the company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020 cashflow, positive, even thought positive and now it's a matter of scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with at several times in my career and I'm really, really enjoying the opportunity here at INFINIDAT to do that. >> That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem but the data centers evolving, the cloud is evolving and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >> I think Satya recently said, right? That we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right? We believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in the real thinking about it because we're going to have distributed environments. And one of the things that we're doing with INFINIDAT here today, right? Is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that... And interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale. Because storage is going to exist we have very powerful storage value propositions and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing INFINIDAT lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and VVol has actually a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >> Yes, so Phil you see these trends, I mean building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >> We're in the middle of this every day and as you know Dave and certainly Lee, data center architecture is urban flow from centralized to decentralized but clearly data locality I think is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers but core is still very significant for most enterprise. And it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or a Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud they don't want to talk about the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud and almost always these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. The reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control, the security, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These are the things that are just fundamentally important to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on-prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic, it has to be a transparent seamless scalability. I think the days of CIOs even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is over. They want to seamlessly add capacity, they want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar now it has to be a consolidation, massive consolidation, is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. The very characteristics that you talked about upfront Dave, that make INFINIDAT unique I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. I think our architecture also really does provide a set it and forget it kind of experience when we install a new INFINIDAT frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back to help fiddle with the bits or tweak the configuration and as applications and multi tenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted but you really really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the cap X rail and the objects rail and every step in between. And importantly when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right there already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >> Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. >> Right? >> Let's talk about VMware and INFINIDAT their relationship, I mean, every year at VMworld up until last year, thank you COVID, INFINIDAT would host this awesome dinner, you'd have his top customers there, very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to INFINIDAT? And I guess the question there is, is petabyte scale really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >> It's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing alliance partner of INFINIDAT. It goes back to really almost the foundation of the company certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of INFINIDAT, VMware and a very tight integration where VMware was a core part of that. We have a capability we call the host power tools which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our VMware integration and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration and our customers typically are at scale, petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up and over 90% of our customers use VMware. I think I can safely say we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints in the market. >> So Lee It's like children, you love all your partners but is there anything about INFINIDAT that stands out to you, a particular area where they shine from your perspective? >> Yeah, I think so. The best partnerships won are ones that are customer driven it turns out, right? And the idea that we have joint customers at large-scale, I must say storage is a tough business to go, right? Right, it takes time to go and mature to harden a code base, right? And particularly when you talk about petabyte scale right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements. Makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right? It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications and this is one of the things we're seeing, right? Is new applications which could be container-based, Kubernetes orchestrated, our Tansu portfolio helps with that, right? If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example we announced some AI work, right? This week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers say, listen I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing and particularly with the VVol'sintegration at scale that we just haven't seen before, INFINIDAT is setting the bar and really setting a new record for that. >> Yeah. Let me comment on that a little bit, Dave. We've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very very exciting engaging investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry but in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab we recently demonstrated on a single INFINIDAT frame over 200,000 VVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar I think it completely redefines what scale means when you're talking about a VVol implementation >> So lets talk about both those things. Not to geek out here but VVols they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers, an array that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware or actually the storage API for storage awareness, VASA, anyway with VVols you can dynamically provision storage that matches, the way I say it as matches device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil, it seems like so much in VMware land harkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way, right? And VVol is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of simplifying storage. So how do you guys see it? I presume you're sort of VVol certified based on what you just said in the lab. >> Yeah. We recently announced our VVols release and we're not the first to market with VVols but from the start of the engineering project we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do and our customers were very prescriptive and the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in VVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. As I said, we redefined the bar for VVol scalability. We support on a single array now a thousand storage containers. And I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So our customers are again at scale, they said if you're going to do VVols we want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your platform. We really liked VVols because it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the BI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put the majority of your most critical bits on INFINIDAT in your data center you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, the at the VVols in rotation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration give the BI administrator all of the flexibility they need to manage applications and VVols of course gives the BI administrator the native use of our in minute snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >> Yeah. Storage has come a long way hasn't it Lee? If you could add some color here it seems in talking needs so VASA that's interesting you had a hand in the growth of VASA and very successful product but he chose INFINIDAT for that higher end application. It seemed like VVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the VVol uptake going from your perspective. >> Yeah, I think we're in the second phase of VVol adoption, right? First phase was, hey, it technically interesting, intriguing but adoption was relatively low I think because you know up until five years ago applications weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors, right? Can you go and get your labs, right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years and then the past 40 years of computing combined. And so when you think about that what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure, today that's the application. So what VVOls helps you do is it allows the vSphere administrator who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace and be able to basically select storage attributes including QoS, capacity, IOPS and do that from the V center console and then be able to rectify things and manage them, right? From the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction like what we're talking about today or integration that the INFINIDAT has provided now you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs, yes, VMs across HI sure put now plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers, it's that consolidated management which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >> Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago you launched this, the VMware, I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. Explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go in more detail about what your participation has been but Lee why don't you explain it? >> Yeah. We don't take just any products that because listen there's a mixing, what we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with INFINIDAT was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right? To go and bring in not just VVol support, of course all the things we do for just normal interaction with vSphere but bringing VVOls in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly as we expanded the vSphere or cloud foundation to include store systems, fair customer for example, right? Who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important now as we expand a multi-cloud experience that's different from the hyperscalers, right? Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect from some right around the ongoing underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >> Yeah. Phil to Lee's point, it's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like 10 or 12 from what I saw and INFINIDAT is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's, we like the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything I can do it, it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore some of the most contemporary workloads in that environment as well as solutions to what I centered as some of the most contemporary industry problems we're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the cloud solutions lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform. That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on with INFINIDAT. And we're also a core part of what VMware is driving from at but we call it data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in the cloud solutions lab with the VMware Cloud Foundation layers as well as the Tansu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >> Yeah. So Lee, I was just the other day I was under VMware analyst meeting virtually of course and Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were given the update. And just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here this expansion of on-prem, the cloud experience, the data especially from our survey data we have a partner at ETR they do great surveys on quarterly basis. The VMware cloud on AWS do great for sure but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together. >> Well, VMware Cloud Foundation right now with over a thousand customers but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, right? It's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and INFINIDAT, right? This large scale actually the interesting crossover, right? And listen for customers to go and take on a new storage system we always know that it's a high bar, right? So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help, right? And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together, right? And how VVols fits into that with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing, right? And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >> Right. Well, let's close with a kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you two see as the future of the data center specifically and also your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >> So I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, if you've looked at what's happening in the cloud not everything is migrating in the cloud but the public cloud for example and I'm talking about public cloud there, the public cloud offers some really interesting unique value. And VMware is doing really interesting things about like Dr as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time, right? We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations, right? And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so partnering with leaders in storage, right? Is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more, right? With INFINIDAT as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications including container-based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right? As the pace of application change doesn't slow down. >> So Phil, what do you see for the next 10 years for INFINIDAT? >> Yeah, well, I appreciated your introduction because it does speak to sort of the core characteristics of INFINIDAT. And I think a company like us and at our juncture of evolution it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. The partnership with VMware we talked about the Venn diagram, I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential alliance partner for our business going forward. I'm excited about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth and distributed architectures, we'll see growth at the edge. In the core data center I think the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, those days are over it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that you have to be really good at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves but never stray far from what has made INFINIDAT unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing in Kubernetes is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about not only staying relevant but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal but predominantly as I said 90% or above is a VMware infrastructure. But we also see Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. So that that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as the application environment evolves. >> It's great. Thank you. Many years ago when I attended my first VMworld the practitioners that were there you talked to them, half the conversations they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And VMware really has done a great job publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in in how VVols and INFINIDAT and VMware, we're kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale there's some good blogs out there. Check out the virtual blocks blog for more information. Guys thanks so much. Great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much, Dave. >> All right. Thank you for watching this cute conversation, Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies Everyone welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience I'm John for your host of the Cube Cube. Virtual. We're not in person this year were remote We're doing The interviews were not face to face. So thanks for watching two great guests to talk about the Dell Technology Storage and data protection for the VM Ware environments got Caitlin Gordon, vice President, product management, Dale Technologies and Leak as well. Vice president of Cloud Platform Business Unit, also known as CPB. You for VM where Lee and Cable in Great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me >>s So what? What a crazy year. We're not in person. Usually the the events Awesome. VM world recently went on and then you guys have the same situation role online now and it's >>really kind >>of highlighted the customer environments of cloud needed. But I've been saying this on all my reports and all the Cube interviews that the executives who are in charge and now saying, Look at our modern APS have to be cloud native because the obvious benefits are there and container ization has become mainstream. But yet I d c still forecast about 15% of enterprises are still fully containing rise, with a huge amount of growth coming around the corner. So you're seeing this mature market where containers are validated, they're being put into production. People are now moving hard core with containers. And you have the kubernetes. I gotta ask you, Li, I'm Caitlin. What does this mean for the customers? Are they getting harder pressure points to do things faster? What does it all mean for the customer? >>Yeah, I'll start. Only you can add to it. I mean, I think what we see is the trends that were already happening of now. Accelerated and modern APs were kind of the top of the priority list, but now it has is really expedited. But at the same time, traditional applications haven't gone anywhere. So there's this dichotomy that a lot of I t is dealing with of head Oh, accelerate those modern APs while also streamlining and simplifying my environment for my traditional laps. And not only do I need to the right infrastructure to have that for production workloads, modern, traditional, but also form a data protection standpoint. How to ensure that those are all secure and do all of that in a way that simplifies life for whether it's the data protection admin, the BM admin or even the developer right, all of the different folks involved and needing to make all of their lives simpler has just really exacerbated a challenge and really given us a lot of opportunity to try to solve that for customers together. >>Lee, What's your take on the landscape out there? >>Yeah, I'd emphasized that speed really matters today, right? That we're really looking at. How do you go and deploy new applications faster, right? New ways to get engaged with customers. I mean, it's not happening physically anymore. So how is it happening while it's happening largely through applications? And so as you now basically develop new applications more quickly, containers are a way to speed the pace of applications, and the theme that you know we continue to drive home is that that means infrastructure has to respond more quickly, and it means that for the teams that are managing infrastructure, it really helps if you have a consistent model where you can get mawr done with the same teams and leverage all the experience you have, as well as the security and infrastructure resiliency model that we're bringing together to our customers. >>This brings up the real question, and if this comes up, kind of you see more of the executive level like we need to have a modern application direction. They'll go. Everyone goes, Yeah, of course. Thumbs up. Then they go Try to make that a reality because even though Dev ops and Infrastructures Code is still the viable path, it's hard. It's like Caitlin, we're talking about EJ to core Data center hybrid the multi cloud. There's a lot going on under the hood there. So you guys are doing a lot of stuff together. VM Ware and Dell Technologies. What's the solution for customers? They gotta move faster. As lead pointed out, Caitlin, how are you guys working together to make that infrastructure more modern, faster, programmable and reliable, >>and make it simpler for the customers right? I think it really comes down to one of the most powerful things about the partnership is that from the dull technology standpoint, we have really a plethora of different solutions to support your VM or environment. Whether it's a three tier architecture with Power Edge power store or leveraging the X rail. Or very commonly, it's gonna be both of those. You have the right infrastructure to support the production workloads and have a consistent operating model between them leveraging devils and primary storage side and all the integrations we have with the ex rail. And then we have with power, protect data manager Great integrations in some recent enhancements that make that even better and are now able to protect Tan Xue, protect the VCF management domain and not only have the storage, but also the protection for that environment. But do it in a way that supports what the V A madman needs and also gives that consistent protection, consistent storage, consistent operating model for the rest of I T. And at the same time you're enabling the developers to move faster. >>Lee, You guys have been doing a lot of joint development, and we've been covering a lot of the news VM world. Ah, lot of joint engineering, a lot of joint integrations. You guys have been collaborating with Dell Technologies for a long time. Also, the relationship. Where is that Today? Can you expand on that a little bit and take a minute to explain the joint >>collaboration? I'll start with the fact that you know, good marketing is really easy when you have great engineering. And so the work that we're doing together, like between our companies. Now we have a lot to talk about, right? E mean the work scaling mentioned right around Devil's integration, for example, on power Max right on da npower store, right? I mean, you start looking at the integration work that we're doing together. It means that customers are getting the benefits of the joint integration work and testing right that comes and so you're guaranteed out of the box toe work. Also, you know, don't forget that contain owners and all of the things we're doing around containers. It's basically designed thio accommodate the fact that containers air spun up more quickly or destroyed more quickly, their shared across the hybrid cloud more frequently and without an inherent security model and built in data protection. It's really hard to go and see how you can deploy these with the enterprise resilience that's demanded at enterprise scale. And so that's what we're doing together, right? And, you know, we build great software, Uh, but without great hardware partnerships, it's one hand clapping, right. It's about getting our teams together, right? That really makes it sing at the customer level. >>You know, I think that's a really example of the business. Performance results have come in Vienna, where you guys were doing a great job. Go way back to the years ago when Pat and Raghu we're talking with from Amazon and all. Since then, it's been joint development, join integrations, and that's a great business model for you. And so, Caitlyn, I wanna get back to you. Because at VMRO we covered Project Monterey, the new initiative for the anywhere but a year before they had Project Pacific that came toe life with product results. Tan Xue specifically, you guys have the power protect data manager that we talked about in the summer, but now for Tan Xue supported and Tan Xue environments that super relevant, can you share any updates on your end on the power protect Data Manager and Tan Xue? >>Yeah, I li I couldn't agree more that great engineering mix our jobs a lot more fun and a whole lot easier. So we've been really lucky. And the partnership we've had has really never been stronger. So yeah, but the most recent release of power protect Data Manager introduces the support for that tan xue protection. It also introduces really important things like storage, storage based policy management. So in in biosphere, when you set up a storage policy, you have data protection as part of that and you have the integration with power protect data Manager. So you're able to automatically protect new VM that are created by that storage policy of being applied. >>But >>at the same time, it's also being tracked in power. Protect Data Manager. So you have that consistency across enabling your vitamins and enabling your data protection your i t. Team. To keep track of that, we also have ah tech preview that we did at VM World about how we're working as from Dell technology standpoint to innovate around. How do you protect some of these VMS that are so large and so mission critical that you need to be able to protect them in a new and innovative way that doesn't disrupt the business. And we did a tech preview of that, and it's something you'll hear more about from us, too. But it's PM traditionally would be in this category of unprotected ble because of the impact it could have on the environment and how we're really looking to do that in a more efficient and intelligent way. So we can actually protect those be EMS. And there's there's really a whole lot more. When you talk about objects, scale and everything else that we've done, it's really exciting. And you don't think Lee and I have ever talked as much as we do now. Ah, and it's been a lot of a lot of fun. >>It's been great following both of you guys on the keep interviews over the years. The success in the vision We had early conversations about what the plans where it's kind of all playing out. So I want to congratulate both of you of VM Ware Adele Technology. So good job going forward. The collaboration. I want to get to that in a second, you'll into it. But Caitlin Lee, I want to get your thoughts because one of the big themes this year besides covert and all the issues that that's highlighting. But in the cloud world, automation has been the number one conversation we've been hearing, and with that you got machine learning all the tech around that as you abstract away. The complexity of the infrastructure to make the modern APS automation has been great. The business cross connect is everything is a service we're seeing. This is the big wave coming. Could you guys share your vision on how all this stuff you mentioned V balls and all objects scale all these things? There's a >>lot of >>plumbing underneath and a lot of tooling, a lot of part piece parts. If that gets programmable, >>automation >>kicks in, which then enables everything is the service because you guys both share your vision of what that means in terms of what's going to change and what would it impact the customer? >>Yeah, and it's very relevant for this week, right? Dell Technologies world. That's a big part of what we've announced this week in our commitment to really bringing our portfolio as a service, and it's really interesting, especially for folks like Lee and I, who have been doing kind of mawr product marking and talking about speeds and feeds and thinking about how you make the product life simpler. And how do you automate that? Have the intelligence built in things like Biaro have been such an important part of that, especially with power store coming to market. But if you think about where that leads us, actually changes everything, which is when you have everything as a service and we're really delivering outcomes to our customers and no longer products. That automation is actually just a important and maybe even more important. But it's not the end user that cares about it directly is actually us, because as Dell Technologies, we become the ones managing that infrastructure, owning that infrastructure and the more automation we can bring in, the more intelligence we can build them for ourselves. The more insights we can give to our customers, the better that service can become. And it's really a flip from how we've always been thinking about and really rolling out automation. It's not actually about enabling our end users to do anything. It's actually about enabling them to not worry about any of it, but enable our own organization to support their outcomes better. So it really changes everything. >>Lee, what's your thoughts on this? Everything you've got, V Sphere V Center. You've got all the storage you got all the back up. All this stuff has to be automated. Makes sense. But as a service, how does that impact your world? >>You know, it really does. When you think about the VMRO Cloud Foundation, right, which is the integration of all of our V sphere with Visa. And with these, you know, our NSX products that will be realized. Management suite. Tom Zoo now, right, All of this pulled together. One of things that's interesting is when you go to the public cloud, we have some experience now where we always deliver that full stack together. And what that does is it frees up customers. Thio, go on, focus on the applications, I think and stop looking down the infrastructure. Start looking up at the APS. And so we're offering and bringing that same level of experience to the on premises data centers. And now bridging that across the hybrid cloud that all of a sudden gives you this sense that Hey, I'm future ready. No, matter where I am today. If I'm thinking about the hybrid cloud, I could go on move there, right. And with our partnership with Dell Technologies, there's such a great opportunity to bridge that uniquely, by the way across all of my on premises infrastructure, including common policy based management, back into storage through RV Valls efforts, right and then back in through objects scale right into objects based, uh, applications and through our DP efforts to data protection efforts, then back into, like, date full data protection. And so what you get now is we're helping customers realize that I got this. I could take new Cooper navies orchestrated applications and I could make them work and do it with the same operational model that I have today. Start spending more time on the applications, less time, basically configuring and managing underlying infrastructure. >>Caitlin you mentioned that earlier at the top of the segment, ease of use, making it easier, simpler, great stuff on the on on the future. Lee, I gotta ask you about Project Monterey. We did a lot of coverage on VM World on silicon angle in the Cube. I love how this comes out. It's always, You know, the brain trust that VM Ware lays out the future, they fill it in throughout the year, expect to see some meat on the bone there. But what is that gonna do from for new capabilities and how with Dell Technologies? Because, um, it's end to end, right this Michael Dell and I talked, I think, two years ago, a Dell Tech world. And then last year, he hit the point home hard and to end with Dell Technologies. It kind of feels like it's gonna be a good fit. Could you share how that Monterey project fits in with Dell Technologies? >>Yeah. We're so pleased to be showing this together with Dell Technologies at the VM World to showcase this new idea that you could basically go on, start offloading CPUs and using smart knicks as a way to basically now provide, um or let's call it a, You know, a architecture that allows you to, uh, be responsive to new application needs. So let me talk a little bit about that. So when we opened up Tansu, right, we got this complete inflow pouring of new container base kubernetes orchestrated APS. So what? We found was, Hey, they're driving a lot of CPU needs their driving a lot of scale out security needs for things like distributed firewalls. And so we started looking at this, and what's clear is we need to basically use the CPU very judiciously, So it's basically reserved for the APS. And so what we're doing now is we're basically saying there's an opportunity for us to go in, offload the CPU for things that look more like infrastructure, including S X, I and other things. And at the same time, then we could go and work together with Dell Technologies to be the deployment vehicle. And so, just like Project Pacific, which was going broad, if you will, this project moderate, which is going deep like the canyon, John not far from here, um is, you know, a source of all new discovery right where we'll be working together and over time, just like the Project Pacific name faded to black and became product Tan Xue vcf with Tom juvie sphere. With Hangzhou, we'll see that Project Monterey will evolve into new products coming together with Dell Technologies. >>Caitlin, can you elaborate on Take a min, explain the product how this renders into products because I can also imagine just the benefits just from a security standpoint. Efficiency. If the platform, um, there's a range of things, could you take a minute to >>explain the >>impact on products? >>Yeah, I think you'll hear a lot more about it, but we're obviously excited to be partners on this is Well, and I think it's It's just another example of the more intelligent the infrastructure can become than the rest of the entire I T organization can run more efficiently and that that can come in the form of the A. I built into power, Max, that can come in the form of the evils that we have both in Power Max and Power Store that can come in the form of even just the fact that we have now built a fully containerized S three compatible objects or platform called objects scale which we have no in early access. Um, that can run on the V sand data persistence platform, and it just gives you the ability to leverage this all of the right technology. And we can continue to really partner on that. I think Project Monterey really opens up even more opportunities to do that, and you'll certainly hear more from us on that in the future. >>I >>mean, you got compression, you got encryption. A lot of benefits across the board. Great to have you guys both on and your graduation. The great event. Final question for both of you, talk about this has been a crazy year. We're not face to face, so everything will be online. What should customers and partners and people watching know about the relationship between VM Ware and Dell Technologies this year? What's the big message to take away? What should people walk away with and and think about? >>I think it's It's never been stronger than ever, uh, than it's been than it is right now. We have never had >>more >>breath and more depth of integration. I think that the partnership on the engineering level, on the product management level on the marketing level, we have really never been in a better place. And you know what? What? My team is really enjoyed with VM world season and you're coming up on Deltek. World season is we've really enjoyed the fact that we've had so much richness >>of >>that integration to talk >>about, and >>we also know there's even more coming. So I, you know, from from my standpoint, if we really feel it and probably the best and most rewarding time we hear about that, is when we bring new things into market, we hear that back. And when Power Store came into the market and over the past few right kind of first months in market, one of the most resounding feedback that has come out as one of the most differentiated parts is that it? It's so incredibly integrated with VM ware. But we've even gotten questions from analysts asking, you know, did you purposely make it feel like you are really working similarly to a B M or environment? And you know what? That just shows how closely we have been working as organizations is that it comes a very seamless experience for our customers. >>Lee Final Word. >>What >>should people walk away with this year on the relationship between Be and we're in Dell Technologies? >>Well, I think the best partnerships right are ones that are customer driven. And what you're finding here is customers. They're actually encouraging us, right? We're doing a lot of three way meetings now, right where customers like, Hey, tell me how you're going to go involved this. How do I How do I basically modernized right and preserve my existing investment, perhaps Or, you know, update here, Or how do I grow like customers have really complex individual situations. And what you confined right is that we're helping jointly not, you know, just simply with the engineering side, which is awesome, but also with the idea that we're helping customers go on deploy responsibly in a time where it's very difficult to plan. And so if you come to us, we can help you jointly plan for the future in uncertain times and make sure that you're gonna be successful. And that's just a great feeling when you're a customer looking at, How do you deploy going forward in this? You know, with the amount of pace of change that we've got, >>I want to congratulate. Both of you have been following you guys. Success has been proven out on the business results and also the products and the enablement that you guys are providing customers been great. Thanks for coming on. Great to see both of you have a great event. Thanks for. Come on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>Okay, I'm John for your here with the Cube. Covering Del Technology Worlds Digital experience 2020 The Cube Virtual. >>Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: 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 Stuart Miniman and this is theCube's 11th year of VMworld. Here we are in 2020 of course, rather than being together at the moscone or at the sand. We're coming to you in your place of work or home when you're watching video, happy to welcome back. We have two of our long time guests on the program. First we have Travis Vigil. He is the Senior Vice President of Product Management with Dell Technologies and joining him is Lee Caswell who's the Vice President of Product Storage and Availability Business unit at VMware, Lee and Travis, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Steve, it's good to see you again. >> All right, so we love kind of the maturation of what's happened. I mentioned 11 years, I get to usually sit down and talk with both of you, we talk about strategy we talk about how customers, and at the end of the day, we know things are changing. Like 2020 things are changing more every day, but one of the big transitions here is talking about that, how applications are changing. In the old days it was hey, I have an application, let me just stick it in a VM and it's going to be good there forever. We know that today I need to be able to react fast, I need to move things forward. And that impacts what VMware and Dell are doing together. So hey Lee, if maybe we come with you give the VMware perspective on that application changing and what that means to there and Travis feel free to chime in when Lee's done. >> Sure. >> Yeah thanks so much Steve and great to have to be back here on theCube. And VMworld is always a great opportunity to talk about how the industry is changing. What's really happening here and so one of the things that we're all finding is that the pace of application change is speeding up. And you know what, I mean you think about infrastructure. We want to think about how you can organize around the fastest changing element. This is one of the things we kicked off with project Pacific and our Tanzu portfolio a year ago. And you're starting to see all the products come roaring through right now as we're integrating Kubernetes. So that container based applications can be managed, secured, protected, just the same way with all the same tools that we have with our traditional VM applications. >> Yeah it's an excellent point. I mean, we are seeing the adoption of the modern applications in VMware environments, just accelerate beyond belief. And we're getting increasing requests from our customers to protect, to manage production workloads in Kubernetes environments and with our power protect data manager. Yeah we're actually announcing that we have all support for the Tanzu portfolio. So that includes TKG TKGI, Kubernetes Clusters, Kubernetes Clusters, and vSphere. So we're really excited to be able to offer this capability to our joint customers. And I think one thing that we're seeing is that the roles in IT are oftentimes blending together. So one of the things we're excited about with our solution is that with our direct data protection integration and vSphere environments. It's actually the be admin that can provision, monitor, manage, and protect the Kubernetes workloads, give unified experience and provide that peace of mind in this next generation world. >> Yeah Travis I'm glad you brought up some of those changing roles. I mean, that was such a big theme for so many years as the Virtualization Admin taking on more responsibility. And Lee teed up the changing application, you've got other roles coming together. You've got the application development team, which often times is disconnected from the infrastructure team. So, from either of you just what are you seeing from your customers? How are they sorting through that? I need to move agile, I need to move faster and that's not traditionally how the infrastructure team has worked. >> Things that we've been working on for example is how we've integrated SRM with vVols and PowerMax. And when you think about that, and we've talked for years right about the vVols for example. What we're responding to now is that customers are coming back and saying, listen, I have HCI, but I also have storage system and I need your help to go and be able to manage these with a consistent operating model and the same team. And that career path for the Virtualization Administrator just continues to grow. They're adding now five native applications, Kubernetes Orchestrated Applications, and being able to manage those across traditional storage and newer HCI systems. This is a really interesting blend of where the companies are working together to make sure that customer responses are being addressed really quickly. >> Yeah, it's a great example Lee. I mean, if you think about Three-tier architecture and PowerMax being the flagship of the heart of a lot of data centers that have been in operation for decades, the fact that we're seeing from our customers, hey, can you take a SRM and vVols, Can you integrate it with PowerMax and SRDF and be able to provide me a step along the way on my modernization journey? Such that I can utilize what I've built up my IT operations about around over the last couple of decades along with the newer deployment models like Hyper-converged infrastructure. And we're seeing that kind of that step forward and a blurring of the lines in terms of roles all over the place. I think another good example Lee is Cloud Native App Dev, right? And customers looking object, S3 object storage capability to provide a simple dev apps friendly way of, developing applications and hybrid cloud environments. And that's why we're really happy that we're able to provide early access for what we refer to as object scale, which works in conjunction with the vSAN Data persistence Platform to allow our customers to deliver modern applications. But at the same time use infrastructure that the IT organization is deploying, for other standard applications. I think that's another good example. >> It's a good point we had blocks through VSand of course right? And added files, what was missing well objects. (laughing) And so... >> Exactly >> We're already together with this persistent storage platform. We've got a way to go on basically supply object scale, object scale storage that can be used for Cloud Native Development. And I think this is a good example, right? This isn't just one hand clapping, right? This is both companies working together to make sure that customers have a seamless experience. That's really important. It doesn't come for granted, right? I mean it really takes co-engineering, joint testing and developing and go-to market together between our companies. I've never seen it working better. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Go ahead Stuart. >> I know Travis I was just saying, we saw how fast VMware went from announcing project Pacific to the GA of the base solution where you needed the cloud foundation to update one already allowing everything to move open. That's going to be a little bit challenging to keep up with that pace of innovation. We've been talking for years on the queue, but we went from the 18 month release cycle to now, most things are like a six week release cycle. So, give us through any other pieces that were portfolio we need to understand the fitting with Tanzu and yeah. How do you move things along and where are the customers with their adoption? Are they sitting there waiting for it, or is this something that is going to be a more traditional enterprise slow roll? >> No I think you hit it spot on Stu the adoption and the deployments of these new architectures are coming very, very quickly, right? Traditional IT is trying to and in many cases successfully moving to a more cloud-like delivery CI/CD approach to how they run their shops and the speed of innovation and the speed and the dynamics of new technologies within the data centers are just, accelerating at a really fast pace. And in order to continue to keep up with these changes, it's I'll reflect back on a little bit on what Lee was talking about. It's understanding where customers are going and jointly working together to target those pain points. And I'll give a very specific example. And then I think maybe Lee, we should start to talk a little bit about Monterey as well, but I'll say a very specific example on joint innovation is, as customers have deployed VMware more broadly and they put more mission, critical large applications on VM, there's been sort of this persistent issue that some of those VMs just were so large or required such high availability, that they were what some IT professionals would refer to as unprotectable. And so we're actually demonstrating with VMware innovation that allows those VMs, those large mission critical Vms that can take zero downtime or even a pause in availability or performance, the ability to take backups without impacting the performance on those VMs. So, that's a very specific thing we're doing, a very specific pin point, but I think it's an example of us working together to target customer customer needs. And then I think more broadly, there's a big trend in composability that part talked a little bit about this morning Project Monterey I'll let Lee kick it off and then kind of talk a little bit about what we're doing to partner with VMware on this initiative. >> Yeah, well great. I definitely want to hear Monterey obviously, edge computing has everybody excited. Travis we've been hearing from the Dell team the last couple of years is that strategy's muttering some of the investment pieces that Dell's doing. So Lee, we hear edge computing. What does that mean? VMware has got a strong telco play that we've watched, for many years. So, just as you said Project Pacific rolled out pretty fast, help us understand a bit more of this Monterey and how fast will this turn into that cascade of products that you talked about for that we sell the last year. >> Yeah thanks, and it's exciting at VMware, right? We're willing to go and share a projects. Overtime project to become products, it's the way it works. And so the project is really a directional vision that says, if you think about what we did with Project Pacific a year ago, and Pacific being like going broad. The idea was applications are changing, we needed to go and basically make Kubernetes integrated with these sphere, with our full VMware Cloud Foundation, and then basically simplify it for customer consumption, and we did that together with the Tanzu brand. Now, Project Monterey, if you think of the Monterey Canyon is now going deep. And what it says is that not only the software architecture has to change, but also hardware, new hardware capabilities, particularly through the use of Smart NICs are a new way for us to think about re-architecting, how compute is basically optimized within a server and then across clusters and even across the hybrid cloud. And so Monterey will be a new way to look at how we go in efficiently offload CPUs and use these new Smart NIC offload engines as a way to think about where hypervisors run, where let's call it software defined, whether it's storage or compute. And most importantly and probably is security. 'Cause one of the things we're finding that applications new applications are demanding is encryption for example or distributed firewalls thinking about like how do we do that secure boot or how do we think about air gapping applications from the infrastructure? And so we're really thinking about how to re-architect the world of security. So the security is integrally distributed throughout an architecture. And so you'll be seeing with Project Monterey our ability to go and drive new products out of that and we're working very closely on an engineering to engineering level with Dell Technologies to make sure this new technology becomes available for customers and fully integrated in the VMware Cloud Foundation. So we have an easy way for customers to digest it which I think that's the thing Stuart right now is there's a lot of new technologies coming so fast, really their partnership means that we're able to consume those more quick. >> Wonderful, yeah Monterey so we're going to go deeper than the grand canyon is deep, but I guess we need to all a breathe under water too. So Travis, as I mentioned, Dell's had for a couple of years, some of these analysts sessions that I've had the opportunity to go through, been watching out that growth of the edge strategy, obviously Dell has everything from some of the hardened pieces on the consumer side, through tying into broad ecosystems. So the software obviously is going to be a huge component of what edges we saw in the keynote stage and video, a big partnership they're obviously a huge important partner for both Dell and VMware. So Travis, from the Dell side, what does this vision of Monterey mean? >> It's extremely important, I'd say transformational potentially for IT going forward and Lee did a really good job of describing the trends, whether that be cloud native Telco 5G, machine learning and data-centric applications, multicloud, and hybrid cloud and that security concern that Lee was talking about. Those are our real trends, and if we can offer infrastructure that is more composable into these dis-aggregated resources, across the edge, across the cloud, across the core, all software defined and seamlessly managed. I mean, that's a powerful vision. And we're just really excited to be partnering with VMware, jointly engineering this future focusing first on those Smartnecks that Lee was talking about because you need that higher compute, you need that increased bandwidth. You need easier manageability of a distributed infrastructure, and you need that ability to provide easier and more distributed security. So lots more to come, we will be incorporating these technologies specifically in the form of Smartnecks into our HCI and our server portfolio. But this like Lee said, this is a trend that will move from initiative to project to products very quickly. >> Wonderful, well we covered that breadth in that depth as you said Lee. Want to give you both just final takeaways, what you want people to take from Vmworld 2020 Lee we'll start with you and then Travis you get the final word. >> Yeah, we're really looking at a changing world in terms of applications. And so for customers around the globe, look for the partnerships that will bring those new capabilities and make it easy to go and deploy as fast as possible. We started off making sure that people weren't looking down at the infrastructure and started looking up at the apps. We're continuing that process with what we're doing around Tanzu, around our Kubernetes portfolio and stay tuned there'll be more to come, much more as we work together on Project Monterey, lots of exciting news and glad that you were here from VMworld to go and see it all of the light. >> Yeah, I think I obviously agree with everything that Lee just said. I think for me the this VMworld is just, another step forward in a great partnership across Dell technologies and VMware. And I mentioned several things, all of the things that we're doing together I forgot to mention actually that we're the first company to be, to offer a certified solution to protect VMworld Cloud Foundations which I use that specific example again expect more first, expect more joint in engineering and integrations. And I think the power of these two organizations coming together is what's going to be needed to help drive forward into this next generation of modern applications and dynamic workloads and dis-aggregated resources. And so we're just really excited about the innovation, the ability to address customer issues and the strong partnership that we have across Dell technologies and VMworld. >> Well, one of the measurements six that we have today is how fast everyone can respond and move fast. Congratulations on all the progress you've both made in your teams in the last year. And absolutely look forward to hearing more about Project Monterey as that matures. Travis and Lee, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks to you. >> Thanks to you. >> All right, and stay tuned for more coverage of VMworld 2020, I'm Stuart Miniman and as always. Thank you for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual Experience Brought to You by HP >>I Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover. 2020. The virtual experience I'm Stew Minimum course This year we're getting to talk to HP, their customers and their partners where they are around the globe. We said many times these were, you know, together, even while we're art happy to dig into a really important partnership with HP and VM Ware. Welcome to the program. First time guest on the program Christmas Satterthwaite. She is the vice president of product management for Compute with Packard Enterprise and welcome back to the program Lee Caswell. He is the vice president, product marketing for hyper converged infrastructure, her at VM Ware talking about V sphere and how that gets bundled into everything else. Chris Stanley, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks for having us. >>Alright, So, Chris, let's start with you. So you know, like a little bit about your background? The HP and HP relationship with VM Ware, you know, goes back to you know, the earliest days, but, you know, give us a little bit about you know where in the portfolio you focus on and and how VM Ware fit, then >>Oh, sure, sure. So I've been with H P E for 23 years now, and I'm leading the business for Alliance and Synergy and talking a little bit about the relationship with VM Ware. So we've been partnering for 19 years and we have over 200,000 joint customers together. And I'm actually often asked about the partnership and how we partner and we really partner across all fronts. So it's from the innovation for the co engineering, the working with specific customers on what solutions are good for them to servicing our customers. So we're really working across the board, and a lot of customers we work with closely are really impressed with how closely we're working together, because that's what they look for. >>Yeah, and we it's it's It's an interesting relationship to watch. Obviously, you know, long history Chris talked about on the it side, but the VM partnership is more than just the compute. Maybe gives a little bit of a view inside. You know, the joint engineering go to market efforts that you do. >>Yeah. I mean, customers always sit up straight when we talk together, because both hard companies or just raw engines of innovation and they look forward to not just the capabilities or bringing, but also the seamless way that we integrate that and make that seamless and easy for customers to digest. So certainly on the server front through V sphere, that's been a longstanding, uh, participation the VM Ware Cloud Foundation. Then this fully software defined stack became a really interesting way for us to go in partner and show joint value to customers who are trying to basically get more speed the speed. We're gonna talk about a lot that today and then finally, the confirmation that we've opened up into storage systems, right? So there's certainly a hyper converged element of it. But now what we do with Nimble three Par and now I'm Era is a really interesting way for us to take the vehicle technology that we have and extend the common operating model. So really just interesting innovation for customers that take advantage of as they look to innovate themselves. >>Krista, from from a research standpoint, you know, we were really early in watching, you know, new models of building out storage. And we said, You know, the pendulum has swung back to pull it much closer to the compute you talked about. You've got a broad portfolio and compute. You know, synergy has some really interesting, you know, ways to be able to compose things and leverage software capabilities. So maybe give >>us a >>little bit of how HP differentiates in the market cause, you know, VM Ware does partner with lots of people. But you know what separates the's point solution? Everything else out in the market? >>Sure, and synergy is a great example, because what we're seeing is really, really high interest on on synergy with VCF. And the reason for that is because customers want a software to find infrastructure that they can compose, compute storage and networking as they need to to address any workload they have. And they want to do that with a partner like VM Ware and VCF. So what we see is customers choosing those two things together and building their hybrid cloud environments on those two. When I think of some of the customers that we have, I'll give you a specific example. So Banco Santander's one of the largest banking groups in the world. And they are really trying to drive innovation across all of their, um, locations there in North America, South America, Europe, Asia. They're trying to drive innovation across. They have a big project, and they selected Synergy and VCF and as a service green lake bottle to help them transform their business. And they're really excited because what they think this is providing to them is a reduced a data center space, reduced power consumption and reduce costs. And all of that with automation, more automation than they've had in the past. More flexibility than they've had in the past. >>Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the Green Lake because you know, those as a service models. You know, Cloud obviously has been a big discussion for the last two years, Lee, Um, you know, VM Ware is no stranger to, you know, working in multi and hybrid environments. It gives a little bit about you know what you're hearing from your customers. You know, if you meant Green Lake, how does that fit in the overall? You know, VM Ware multi cloud offering. >>Well, you know, we all know these air uncertain times, right? and customers and uncertain times. We're looking for flexibility. How do they go? And basically, you know, invest smartly, right? Look to come out of uncertain times stronger. And what we're finding is that the flexibility, you know, starting it. You know, we're really impressed with this energy platform, by the way, the idea of being able to flexibly, configure, compute and storage to tie into external arrays from that end, to have the VM Ware Cloud Foundation is a unifying, software defined data center concept that's available on Prem and then extends into the hybrid cloud. This basic gives investment protection to customers who are looking for how to invest in. You know, you mentioned Green Lake as well, and I just mentioned that innovation on Green Lake is about true consumption based purchasing miles, if you will. And that's different than just a financial engineering aspect. I mean, that's real innovation and real technical innovation in terms of how customers can go in a why infrastructure at the time that they needed relative to that compelling business models, >>and I'll chime in their Teoh, I'll tell you a little story about when I first presented the green like model. At that time, it wasn't called Green Lake, but I presented it to a bunch of customers, about 100 customers in an advisory council. And I have never had so many people come up to me afterwards trying to figure out how they can get that for themselves as I did when I had that presentation. What really resonated with people is that they wanted to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies, but they didn't have big budgets. And when they did take advantage of those technologies, one of the challenges has been growth. So when they need to expand, that's another procurement cycle. You have a way to have the standard all love with Green Lake. You actually have that added capacity on sites and then also painful what you use s so they were attracted to all of those things. And I feel like right now and the environment were in many people had big, big projects, things they want to do, and they may have planned those ah, a capital expenditure for that. But that money may not be there, So Green Lake is one of those things that can help overcome that challenge. And what we found is when people use green like we don't see many people. Um, go back. So what? I was talking to the green like team, and I said, You know what happens if they decide not to do Green Lake and they're kind of pause, and they're like, Well, we really haven't run into that very often. So it's very, very popular, and customers were really happy with it. >>Yeah. Talking about innovation and helping customers take advantage of new technologies. You know, maybe we'll start with you and Krista. Definitely want your but been a lot of feedback about V. Sphere seven. Of course, One of the big pieces of that is how, you know, cloud native container ization kubernetes It can be pulled into the, you know, the virtualization platform. So we're talking a lot about vcf Lee. That's the you know. Wait. Get it. The community's piece today. Tell us a little bit about that and what you hear from customers. And then Chris, I'd like to understand how that fits into the HP offering. >>Yeah, you know, the data we have shows that 95% of new applications are being developed on containers. Why? Because it's the speed of ill. And so at VM Ware, we've re architected V sphere for the first time that, you know in the last five years. And you look carefully at what the EMR integrates into the hyper visor because that's what we believe is going to be really benefiting from performance efficiency and management. And so we've integrated kubernetes directly into the hyper visor itself and then to our Tom's, a portfolio. Introduce an upstream compatible kubernetes development environment so that we have developer ready infrastructure. And that's really important because at the speed of new applications, basically you need to be able to respond quickly to those and what VM Ware has always offered right, which is a resilient underlying infrastructure with an intrinsic security model built in conceptually important when containers are being spun up more quickly. All right, mark quickly. They're being portable and portable across the hybrid cloud. Those models right mean that you need and convince you get value right from this integrated model that leverages all of the experience and knowledge that people have around how to run V Center and V Sphere so really exciting, and it's available in VCF for with >>I actually see the interest. I see customers asking about an enquiring about it. Vikan, you know, definitely second everything that we just said. I think you're really you're going to see a really fast transition over because there's so much value. Add it in. >>Excellent. Okay, Crystal, while I've got you on the compute piece, you know, legally said that 95% of application new applications are being built on container ization. How has that impacted architecture, er and how you're working with? >>Yeah. So what I find is that customers are very interested in containers. What we're doing is we're helping them from a services standpoint. A consulting standpoint of many of these customers are adopting for the first time trying to figure out how they could they could leverage containers in their environment. From our standpoint, it's making sure that we have the right platforms and we're advising and consulting and helping customers get there. >>Excellent, Lee. You know, Kristen talked about a sense and under one wondering if you've got any customer examples you like to share? >>Yeah. Great. One is ah, portion. I love the portion example. Just because portion, just the epitome of speed. And so the idea of this flexibility well, you're finding rate is the flexibility, right? Starting from, let's say, from a synergy, I'm flexible on the part of their allocation, right? And then, with VCF right now being able to be flexible across the hybrid cloud and now with VCF or with ponzu, the flexibility of introducing new modern applications support on Finally Layer and Green Lake On top of that which which is also using it, gives you this idea that you know, especially in uncertain times. But, you know, regardless, the changing business environment where everyone's responding, toe app, development rushers, timelines and innovation. We've got a really interesting model now for customers to invest responsibly and be able to respond quickly. >>Hm. Excellent. Crystal, I guess. Said the other pieces were at discover any updates on the portfolio expanding the VM solution. That >>Yeah. Yeah. So I'd like to talk a little bit about our pre validated synergy vcf solution stack with built in automation. So we literally got rid of hundreds of that's pre and post employment so we could speed deployment by five times. We were talking to point in hours instead of weeks. So we're really, really excited about that. We're working together to make sure we're making things easier for customers making that journey to a hybrid cloud very, very simple. So we're really happy to have, you know, offer that to customers. >>Great Lee, Any any final words you can share on the partnership? You >>know what I might say? It's right that the pace of innovation from our companies right is so great, Right? That really v vm Ware Cloud Foundation is a way, you know, in our joint effort and joint delivery rate is a way for customers to assimilate all of this innovation. So that day zero, it's guaranteed the work. And that day two, you can lifecycle manage all the individual components from a common sec manager interface. That's the value that we're bringing together today. Is that Listen, you know, putting all this in place conceived, daunting until the VM Ware Cloud Foundation, with synergy with all of the joint value we have basically makes it manageable so that you can go and basically stop looking down it infrastructure. Look up the ass. >>All right. Christine will let you have the final word and final takeaways from HP Discover. >>Okay, sure. Thanks. Together. What we're trying to do is simplify that journey to hybrid cloud. Make sure that customers can innovate faster, provide stable operations and reduce their costs. >>Well, Chris Stanley, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the progress. Looking forward. Toa watching down the road. >>All right, thanks. >>Alright, Stay tuned for lots more coverage from the Cube, HP Discover 2020. Virtual experience on stew Minimum. Thanks for watching. Yeah, >>yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to theCUBE We continue our coverage here live. We are in the Sands at Dell Technologies World 2018. Big show, 14,000 plus they're expecting here. 4,000 just in the business partners summit alone. So a very impressive turnout here in day one, as I said, of three days of coverage on theCUBE. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Lee Caswell who's a VP of Products at VMWare. Lee, good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here, yes. >> John: Every year we get together like this, right? >> Well, you know, there's always something new to talk about, right? >> John: Absolutely, and we're also joined by Chris Stanley here, who's the IT Manager at the Celtic Manor Resorts in Newport, Wales. Chris, the first person from Wales I think I've ever met, as a matter of fact. >> Chris: (laughs) A privilege; thank you. >> For me it is, but thank you for being here. We appreciate the time. So we're talking about your migration, and, really, it wasn't a migration, it was like your head-first dive into the hyper-converged environment. You didn't tiptoe around it, you didn't wade into the water, You guys just dove right in. >> Chris: We're fearless, yes. >> What was the driver of that decision to be so fearless? >> Chris: As an organization, we've grown very quickly the last few years, and we've got significant growth in new hotels and a new conference center coming on board. And we're bursting at the seams in our existing environment, so we needed a platform that we could grow into this new environment very quickly and with predictive costs as best as we could. >> And so, Lee, walking them through this, >> Yeah, >> I mean, there's no convincing to be done here, but you do have to inspire some confidence, right? So somebody who's making a pretty bold move like this how did you approach that, and what did you do as far as assigning? >> Lee: You know, our partnership with Dell EMC is just a great testament here, right? I mean, you've taken the latest of 14G servers, for example, as part of VxRail. So you've got the best in hardware combined with VMWare underlying VCN software packaged up together, right, in a single point of support in a way that really makes us able to drop in and get started. Right, when you think about this, this is also interesting, in that here's a customer you know, in this case, you were using converged infrastructure in the past. >> It really is. Yeah. >> That's very common, right? So people who are looking for the advantage of like, how did I get the operational efficiencies? And now what you find is hyper-converge changes the operational model, and so it's around speed and agility, right? More than cost, right? And so, together, that's kind of the, our partnership is so powerful for customers looking to go and basically drive that kind of efficiency. >> Chris: Definitely, yeah. >> Keith: So, Chris, talk to us about that decision process. In typical organizations, this is Wired U, You're on theCUBE and it's so special. It's easy to talk about use cases on the edge VDI, specific, non-mission critical applications. But when it comes to stuff that runs the business, if it's down, the CIO, the CFO is at someone's desk asking when it's going to be back up. How did this discussion start? Was it from the bottom up, or was it from the top down? Exactly which teams said, "You know what? We need more agility, HCI, go!" >> Chris: Definitely from a bottom up perspective, but supported from top down when we came for it. We could see it in our environment, in our growing environment. We're a 24 hour business in a resort hotel, and we have little downtime Or, sorry, little time to do any upgrades, etc. So resilience within that environment was key to us for our uptime, so failing over with VMWare we use, with the VxWare we get now DRS and the Enterprise version which it comes with which we hadn't in our converged. So there is that automation of balancing your workloads, not having someone there watching it all the time so that has freed up a lot of time for my guys. Going forward there will be a lot more free time as well so we've got more time to concentrate on the guests and how we can make their experience better. >> So the story behind Converged systems, you know you have SAP, Oracle, BASSP, all these mission critical apps mission critical runs on CI and then everything else to run on, even from a vendor support, you know you talk to all the major software vendors, they say you all CI is the best opportunity. How did that conversation go with vendors when you said you know what, we're going to run mission critical on, I'm assuming vSAN? >> Lee: This is on vSAN in VxRail. >> vSAN, you know, we can't see your TR1 software providers and you know what, we're all vSAN, global size and scope, global? >> What, as an environment? >> Yes. >> It's a global environment really of over four hotels at the moment but growing into a bigger environment. We're going for an international conference center so kind of this sort of size, not quite as big as this but we're definitely not support from the hyper converged. And all our core systems are written on it, yes. Big Oracle databases, SQL, and our exchange service and there was a split between two clusters now in VxRail so we can, we can fail over to a node in VxRail, we can fail over to a cluster as well so as an SLE for up time we're business critical and the guys at the top of Celtic Manor have seen how that is for business you know. If we're not serving people or taking money then we're giving money back in a case for disruption. >> All right so you've been into this for a little bit less than a year now, correct? >> Correct, yes. >> I know Lee's sitting right next to you but let's just for a moment. I'm sure there has been at least a troubling moment of that transition or at least a hiccup somewhere that you had to settle, you had a problem, right? Something came up, if someone's watching this, thinking I wonder what they got hit with and how they handled it, how did you work around that, how did you adapt that, what would that be? What was the, maybe the one little hiccup right now that you've successfully- >> With deployment? >> Yeah. >> Nothing much but when we were migrating from a Converged infrastructure to a hyperconverged we added on the SANs to the hyperconverged so we could see them migrate over. A couple of servers didn't take too well to that one being motioned over. Nothing of the critical ones thankfully. But they, it was either a Windows update or once they restarted, it was only two of the servers but, we used the recover point then within VxRail and literally go back five, 10 minutes, which we did and up and running again, switched over, and we were you know, back up and running, but it was we had the decision there of, how long do we troubleshoot it for or do we just, that was our first instance of using recover point so we hadn't done it in a live environment so it was kind of, okay and pretty much out but it worked and it filled us with a lot of confidence now that we could do, we have that resilience going forward in an environment. >> Well let's talk about day two. >> I was just going to comment Ray, that this is part of the partnership that's so powerful for us right, is, you know I think VMWare learn that supporting storage systems, as we know, it's a little different than just computing. You know this, right, I mean, you know the idea of like, hey listen, a purple screen isn't the worst that can happen, 'cause you can reboot, right? It's really about, like, my data. And so when you start thinking about that, the ability for us to partner with Dell AMC who understands what it means to be supporting in a datacentric world, like that element, right is so powerful for us, right, because we've got a partner here who really understands the ability and that's part of the powerful concept of VxRail. >> So we had Tom Burns earlier and we were talking about VI and the importance of CI and there's still a great, I think, desire and temptation, and valid that CI gets you on the ground, running quickly, complex systems, easily deployed relative to traditional architectures. Talk to me about the practical of HCI, Day 2 Operations, CI, relatively easy to deploy but you still have some traditional operations concerns. What specifically did you guys see as the advantage Day two once you went to ACI? What's saving you all this time? >> Purely I think the time saver is the management of the system or the lack of management that we now need to do. There's, you've got one pane of glass to see everything which is very nice, you haven't got something separate for your SANs, your SX hosts, your networking and that support that you have, you know, there's one of them to call. You're not fighting between different entities saying it's your fault, it's your fault, there you go, sort it, so again that has freed up a lot of time, you know not knowing who to call or where to call but, you know, having one person who's going to sort it out and take ahold of that and fix it for you. And the remote support then, which is very good you know, you've got someone else monitoring your systems if you enable it, so you've got Dell support there and they can potentially see something before you do so I kind of gained another IT person for in this solution which is very nice. >> Yeah, we kind of joke you know, that a lot of people talk about hyperconvergence as if it's about us, but hyperconvergence is about you. When you think about it, right, it's about hyperconverging the IT staff. If you can hyperconverge the staff, right, that's when hyperconvergence does well, when we have one team, it's a converged team and people are like, hey listen, I'm going to go to a VMcentric management model. Now I can go and debug things right from a single console which is V center. That model works really fast, right? And where Converged still does a good job, right, is where I've got storage scaling at big scale but separate from compute separate. Hyperconvergence is about, it's about the organizational environment right? >> Very much so, bringing it all together, yeah. And it's simplistic in VMWare being so tightly integrated with VxRail was our main call against the other vendors, as a big call to, while they, you know, it's the best chef with the best ingredients, let's use that, not a dessert chef with the best ingredients >> Yeah, we have 500,000 customers who are familiar with V Center, right, and if you know V Center you know V SAN, you know VxRail, right? >> You can get simplistic again, so you already know it. >> Yeah, right. >> Well we could talk about this til we're blue in the face. I think we need to go see it in operation, don't you Keith? >> We'll set you up with some golf >> Now we're talking, be careful Chris, what you offer. Lee, Chris, good to see you guys. Thanks for being with us, we appreciate you sharing the story. Thank you very much. Back with more, here from Dell Technologies World we are live on theCUBE in Las Vegas.

(upbeat electronic. music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Keith Townsend and you're watching theCUBE's broadcast of VMworld 2017. One of our guests earlier this week called this set the punk rock set and one of my guests here in a preview said that this is going to be the battle of the baldies (laughter) so I'm really happy to bring two leaders of two of the hottest topics being discussed this week, welcoming back to the program Dom Delfino of course representing NSX and Security at NSBU and Lee Caswell from the vSAN Team. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, how are you, buddy? >> I'm doing phenomenal. Dom, are you making network great again, yet? >> It's fantastic again now. We're making network fantastic again. >> Yeah and I expected you to show up a little more bling because we were talking Silicon Valley. Your group is reaching the three commas of a billion dollars. >> Dom: That's right. >> So let's start there, NSE when it was bought a few years back, over a million dollars. SDN was something that we all in the networking world was talking about and things have changed. I don't hear SDN talked at this show, it's real customers, real deployments, pretty good scale. The interconnected fabric if you will for VM's cloud strategy. >> Yep, absolutely. So Stu, these major transformational shifts in the industry take time, right? You know, you're not going to undo what you've done for the last 25, 30 years in a month or a quarter or a year and I think what you saw initially was adoption of NSX or automation of network provisioning. Then what you saw second to that was microsegmentation as a defense in depth strategy for our customers and now you see the multi data center moving into the hybrid cloud. vRNI is a service, NSX is a service, App Defense, layering additional security capabilities on top of that and as our production customers sort of adopted it in the beachhead methodology operationalized it, you see additional follow on adoptions. We've got one customer running 18 data centers on NSX today so this is becoming more and more mainstream and as you look at our approach moving forward in terms of where we are and the software defines us in our journey, how that connects to our strategy for VMC on AWS or VMC on Blue Mix. You saw Agredo Apenzeller yesterday demonstrate crossed into Microsoft Azure. When was the last time you thought you'd see that at VMworld, huh? >> Hey Lee, I got to bring you in here. (laughter) It's funny, I've lived in the storage world. >> I thought this was a storage show. >> And now we're tech people throwing all these acronyms. >> I know, they're so excited. >> And you know because come on, NSX is not simple. Who's the one that's saving customers money so that they can buy all of these? >> NSX is a great value, but vSAN pays for the ride, right? >> Here we go, right? >> They do. We'll happily accept it. >> I mean, we're consolidating storage in a way that basically brings back the magic of consolidation, right? The first time you consolidated, people called it magic because you consolidated servers, bought shared storage and had money left over, right? Now we're doing the same thing again, right, with now storage, right? What's interesting is is this is a huge career path gain for the virtualization administrator. >> Wow, so talking about being disruptive, vSAN. You know, I've got to rib you guys a little bit at the dodge ball tournament benefiting Unoria, the vSAN team lost to the Dell EMC team, so. >> Can you imagine? And did you see how valiant we were? >> Dom: You guys fall hard. >> You fall hard. (laughter) >> You looked like you could have used a little youth on that team, by the way, Lee. >> So a lot of competition, you walked the show floor. >> Lee: Yeah. >> This, we usually call this storage world. I think it's fair to say it's HCI world now. >> Lee: It's amazing, right? >> How is vSAN fitting into the larger ecosystem? >> You know, we announced, Pat said we have over 10,000 customers now, right? And yet VMware has hundreds of thousands of customers right? So we're just getting started here and what you're finding is the two assets to bring to this party are a hypervisor or a server. >> Keith: Right. >> Right, you don't have either one of those, it's going to be very difficult because if you go back and you'll appreciate this, right? You remember a Type 2 hypervisor? >> Yep, vaguely. I almost wrote about it, like wait, they don't even exist anymore, do they? >> Well, Workstation still, right? If you start thinking, right, that was a hypervisor on a guest, right? And so what happened though, as soon as these XI came out, right, integrated the compelling performance advantages, the resource utilization and then the idea that hey, I got a common management through vCenter, right? That's what's playing right now is users are trying to find leverage and scale, how do I do that and that's where we've just seen a massive adoption of ECM. >> Alright, one of the reasons we brought the two of you together though is because while peanut butter and chocolate are great on their own, the cloud foundation. >> Dom: I have the whole sandwich now, Stu. >> Yes, yes, so you know Cloud Foundation, NSX might be the interconnective fabric between all of them. Cloud Foundation is that solution, there's a whole business unit, put that together and drive that, so talk about how you feed that solution, how that changes the way you think about it. >> Probably the most interesting thing and I've only had the vSAN team for six months but I think the most interesting thing for me and vSAN is it scales downmarket very well as well, so we have massive enterprise customers, right, who have large global deployments of vSAN but you can take vSAN, put it on three nodes and see value out of that, right? And I think when you look at, you know, this is the year of cloud reality I'm calling it now, Stu, right? That's what's happened here this weekend at VMworld. When you look at that I think the most fundamental thing the customers are taking out of this week is my private cloud has to be as good as the public cloud offering, okay? Now if you're a Fortune 1,000 customer you certainly have a lot of resources, a lot of talent, a lot of expertise, a lot of history, and potentially a lot of budget to throw at that problem. But if you're a mid-market customer, right? And you look at I need to build a private cloud that's fast and easy, right? Which was the two primary reasons to adopt public cloud, you have a good place to start with Cloud Foundation and I think it's just the beginning so you get vSphere, you get NSX, you get vSAN, and you get SDDC Manager to do life cycle management, certainly you could layer vRealize on top of that for automation, orchestration, provisioning and self service as well and it really allows everybody to start to take advantage of the capabilities that only existed in the major cloud providers before on-prem and their own data center so I think as you look at Cloud Foundation and I'm working very closely with John Gilmartin on this, moving forward, it is going to become the basic foundational element, pun intended, right, for many of the VMware offerings moving forward as we turn into next year, that we'd look at this very closely and we have a lot of plans as that being the base to build off of in terms of how we help our customers get to this private cloud. >> Lee, I need to hear your perspective because some of this Cloud Foundation, there's got to be some differences when you talk about some of the deployment models whether where I'm doing it, how I'm doing it, VMC, the VMware managed cloud I guess on AWS, VMware on AWS something getting a lot of buzz. You know, everybody's digging into to it. What's it do today, what's it going to do in the future? >> Well, you know I thought it was really impressive when Andy Jassy got up and basically said, "We've been faced with a minor choice." Customers want these to be integrated, right? And the second day was Google, right? Talking about how we're taking developer tools, right, and making them common, so that element. Now storage people think that the strategic engagement with the cloud is about data, right? >> Stu: Right. >> Putting a VM in the cloud, I mean that's a credit card transaction, but once you put your first byte of data into the cloud, now you take on sovereignty issues, you think about performance and where you're going to get guaranteed ihovs out of it. You start thinking about how am I going to move that data? It's not fast or free or as anyone who has emailed a video knows, right, so you start thinking that it's the data elements and now what's really powerful and we saw some of this in the demos in general session. Once you have a common data structure, we call it dSAN, right, all the way from the edge into the data center of virtual private cloud then into the public cloud, now I've got the opportunity to have this really flexible fluid system, right? All virtualized, it's so powerful, right? About how I can manage that and we think, it'll be interesting, does the virtualization administrator then become the cloud administrator, right? >> So then, let's expand that one, vSAN everywhere. vSAN in the AWS, vSAN in vCAN, vSAN in my own data center. How do I protect that data? That seems just, is this where NSX comes in? How do I protect that data? >> Can we let Lee talk the security first? >> Where's the security, is the security in vSAN? >> Cause I know Dom >> We'll let Lee go first and then I'll correct him, okay? (laughter) >> Well, I mean you start with a security like encryption on the data, right? I mean one of the things why vSAN's so portable is because there is no hardware dependency. I mean, we're using like all, we support all different servers, there's no proprietary cards or anything, right, to stick in these servers so we can go run that software wherever. Now, we're also then as a result doing software encryption with our latest release on 6.6 software encryption allows us to use common key management partners, right, and so we use those partners including iTrust, Vales, FlowMetric, and others and now you can have key management regardless of where your data resides, so we start there but then what customers say really quickly, right, is if I start moving something, they say, "NSX help me out, right?" >> So I think Lee took to a very critical part of it, the ability to encrypt that data at rest and you know, as it transits, there's really three elements to this, it's the data itself, which we say that 6.6 introduced, right, the ability to encrypt that data, microsegmentation and upcoming DNE to both protect and encrypt that data while it's in flight and now if you look at that App Defense strategy, right, it's to secure that data while it's being processed as well at the host level up at the application layer, so I think Stu this just continues to be a huge challenge for our customers. Particularly with the breeches, we saw what happened with Wannacry, with Pedia, with non-Pedia, the different versions of that, Electric Blue and all. >> Stop, you know, your boss who's on theCUBE on the other set right now said, "As an industry, we have failed you." Pat Gelson gave the keynote, so when we're solving it, you know we're going to have like next year I expect both of you to have this all fixed. >> One of these, you asked like with all the HCI enthusiasts that are out there in many companies, you know, how do we differentiate? Well, part of it is this is not just a drop in a little box, right, someplace, right? This is how do you go and modernize your data center, basically tie into the complete software stack and regardless of the timing in which you're going to go and deploy that, right, if you're going to deploy the full stack today, that's a VMware cloud foundation, awesome, if you want to go start with vSAN, great, and then add in other pieces, or you can start with NSX. In any event, the common management is the piece that we really think is going to go and set us apart, right, as a part of it's an infrastructure play, not just a point component. >> So? >> Hold on I want to let Don finish. >> Stu, I think three years ago if we sat down here and told you you're going to encrypt your software defined storage, in software, no hardware requirements, I probably would have said I was nuts for saying that and you definitely would have said I was nuts for saying that so this is critical and we are hyper-focused on solving this problem and what customers have to recognize is that you have to make some foundational architectural changes in order to fix this problem and if you don't it's not going away, it's only going to get worse. >> So, I took a peep in at FUTURE:NET. First off, VMware does an awesome job of this conference within a conference. >> Isn't it fun? >> It is fun, a little bit over my head at times, which we have to be getting that same reaction from the CIOs that this stuff even when we're taking stuff that we know very well, Vmware or vSphere, starting with that, adding on vSAN, again the conversation, Dom, we can encrypt at both network and compute and storage? That's a little deep, but now we're talking about this crosscloud conversation that FUTURE:NET is most definitely addressing. How is that conversation going with customers? Are they finally starting to get their arms around the complexity of the situation? >> Absolutely Keith, because when you look at our multi-data center functions of NSX that we introduced back in NSX 6.2 at VMworld two years ago, three years ago, I'm getting long in the tooth here, so I can't remember times anymore. Those were the foundational elements for the components of crosscloud today so many customers who started the NSX journey with one use case and one data center and expanded it horizontally and then down through a number of use cases and then across to another data center are already taking advantage of those crosscloud functionalities from private data center to private data center. Now we've just taken them and extended them into Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS as well. So the customers who've been on this journey with us from the beginning have seen this step by step and it doesn't really seem like a big leap to them already. Now obviously if you haven't been on that journey it seems like you know, hey can you guys really do this and yeah, we've been doing it from private data center to private data center, now we're just bringing that capability to public data center and certainly the partnership with Amazon is a tremendous help to that as well. >> Yeah, when customers are buying into these solutions, and I know you like to look at it as a platform, so let's look out a little bit. I want you to talk a little bit about what we should expect from the future, if it makes edge computing kind of IoT is a big one, I have to expect that both of you have a play there, so? >> I guess I'll touch on that in two pieces so you sort of see us extending this up a little bit initially with PKS with pivotal container services, with Kubernetes on BOSH and the ability to do rolling upgrades and NSX is embedded in that solution, right, it's not a built-on offering, it's natively part of that for all the reasons that we talked about earlier and we see a lot of opportunities as it relates to edge computing, right, and I think this is something that, wasn't it file computing like seven years ago, Stu? >> Your former employer was one that was pushing that. >> Dom: Oh okay, yeah what happened to that? >> Yeah I have heard it come back from data center to cloud. >> I'm just needling you Stu, we didn't need to get into that. >> But you know, terminology does matter, but I hear your point. >> So I think A. IoT is the biggest security challenge that we face, right? >> Stu: Yep. >> That's number one. If you think it's bad now it's about to get a lot worse with the wholesale adoption of IoT. I think that when you look at the remote office, the branch office, what's going on with the transition with wide area networking right now, I think there's a tremendous opportunity there. Clearly we have a play where you can provide sort of a branch in a box with our technology but I think there's a lot of things you'll see coming from us in the near term as far as innovation that we can do there to really enhance edge computing as it relates to IoT and certainly our user computing platform with Horizon Air of the Legacy AirWatch venture, is an important part of securing those edge devices as well. >> Lee? >> On the vSAN side, this week we announced the HDI Acceleration Kit and that's basically a way to take advantage of single socket servers, right? And one of the things we're seeing for bandwidth reasons and economics you don't want to have everything centralized so the ability, particularly in an IoT environment, but also in retail or robo, if you've got hundreds of stores there's no way to put a sandbox and a fiber channel switch in separate storage and scale that, right? So what we're doing is we've got a very cost-effective license, right, incredible where you can get with hardware now, you can go and drop in a three node fully configured vSAN plus vSphere for under 25K. Drop it in, now you've got a virtualized environment, unlimited VMs, this sort of thing where we're helping basically bring the accelerating the adoption using HDI of enterprise modern infrastructure outside the data center. >> So last question around customer adoption and again, assessments of this model. The push, I think 816Z said that the edge is going to eat loud computing. Where do you guys see in the real world, the ground, is it a push towards the cloud or is it this combination of doing? >> In my experience, right and this is like an accordion, right, it goes in, it goes out it goes in, it goes out, why? Well it goes in and out based on economics and bandwidth. Right, so you start looking and saying, now until HDI came out, it just wasn't really feasible to put enterprise infrastructure at the edge, right? >> Keith: Right. >> So things were centralized, right? Well now, right, now we start distributing again, right? The cloud is an example of more centralized, right? But I think we're going to see both, right? And you're going to see this what's particularly interesting right now is right, the new advances in media, CPUS, low-latency networks makes it possible to use these I call it the serverization of storage, but really it's a serverization of the modern data center, right, and which by the way is common to how clouds are built. >> But does that mean the overall IT management or complex, as I build it out that control plane. >> I'll give you an example from this morning. I was meeting with one of the largest banks, right? And they were looking at HDI, they've used a lot of stance ORKS in the past and do you know what he asked at the end? "Could you give me the ORK charts of customers "in my scale who are using HDI?" >> Stu: Yeah. >> Because I want to go figure out how I hyper-converge my team. We'll never be fast until we go and get teams that are working more closely together where they start from the VM level and then they look at the network attributes and the storage attributes and the compute attributes. That's going to speed up everything. >> And I think Lee is 100% spot on there and every customer I've talked to this week, you have to make the transition to an infrastructure team, not a network team, a storage team, a security team, you're an infrastructure team, and this is why the app developers have been going around you, right? And this is why you have Shadow IT, it's because they want fast and simple and they don't want to have to deal with four different people, right? They don't want to have to deal with a serialization of a deployment that they're left waiting for the lag for and I think in terms of the edge computing, I think you related it to one of the conversations by Andreessen Horowitz. I think that might differ a little bit in the consumer space and in the enterprise space as well so it may be the case in the consumer space that it erodes some functionality from the cloud, particularly on the IoT side of things as well, driverless cars and things of that nature where it makes sense that if you get disconnected that you still need to have some computing capacity so you don't crash, right Lee? Crashing is not good. But I think the behavioral change, the people change, the mindset change is much more challenging than the technological change. Everything you haven't done before seems complicated until you actually do it, right? >> Alright well, we talked a lot to customers. Actually some of that organizational change is helping them to tackle things like those new architectures. Security is one that is I've been leaving it for too long and now absolutely front of the table. Don Delfino, Lee Caswell, always a pleasure to catch up with both you. >> Always a pleasure. >> Hope it lived up to your expectations that we brought the heat. Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. Thank you for watching the CUBE. (light electronic music)

live from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you buy vmware and its ecosystem sponsors well welcome back inside mandalay bay as we continue our coverage at vmworld here on the cube along with peter burrows i'm john walls are now joined by David Cabrera Solutions Architect CDW and leek as well vice president product storage for the VMware storage and availability business unit gentlemen thanks for being here good to see you great to hear house show going so far for you oh it's on fire man did we give a tiger by the tail here that's been great don't let go don't let go even though this for a long time and we were just talking about your history your back i said yeah i first got into virtualization back at y2k wow I remember that how far we've come huh and yeah yeah again I did it why i use it for y2k testing and then from there i worked for a disaster recovery services company and we have these customers katrina rita in 911 they just came in with their stuff and i didn't have enough physical servers to you know in their contract to recover their businesses and they were taking out vmware evaluation licenses to get their businesses up and running and vmware was super supportive of that and they knew you know the licenses would come and wow yeah it was it was like rust in the esxi or ESX at the time I you know just it's actually you know easy and as we think about what's happening on hyper conversions now right yeah it's the same idea right I mean it was actually practicality you not a necessity right of using VMware because gosh I needed to do it for kind of TCO reasons and what happened was esxi started out at the fringe almost right and then came roaring into the you know into the core as people realize hey I really can run like mission-critical applications business collapse the same trajectory is happening now with VC an HCI right and our DCM writing notes we're starting off like outside startup VDI test and dev right you know all that you know to management clusters right but now what's happening the majority of applications mates business apps right yeah yeah it's it I firmly 1,000% believe that you know any application can run ova n no I say and it's we were talking about this i still have customers they they talk about running exchange or sequel on physical servers and I'm like why so now you take all those benefits of virtualization and you add v san on top of it and make everything totally portable on on just you know commodity based hardware and you know pretty soon our job as storage architects building figuring out sans and raid groups and you know how big my lund is supposed to be who cares throw some storage in the server adam as you need and keep going well to that point lee you're talking before we went on the air here about how people you know professionals company who's saying i want to get my attention from here to up here all right i want to be able to look at business and not so much about what's going on behind the scenes in the back office is this thing i was even at CDW recently right we're talking about how long it takes to train someone on enterprise storage versus you know the actually the less you know about storage that the more a hyper conversion system words to what you expect i add a note yeah of course it gets bigger right i mean why wouldn't it right so the idea that you can get people trained up not just using the product but actually selling the product I mean it's actually a very interesting dynamic one of the other interesting things we're seeing right now is just a overlap of flash right all flash right which first you know blue you know came blazing onto the scene for performance right for an application is now coming in because customers want to spend less time actually man is that looking down I want to look down anymore right and so the idea that the customer satisfy you arts because the risk of Miss configuring something actually really low right it is you know that nearly as much time and you don't worry about it right right so you have the performance you need you have the space you need you know you get the deduplication and and it just as you will you need more performance you need more space at another node and on top of that you get compute memory and everything else so their stores some challenges associated with applications and selecting the technology and there's a lot of transformation and transition there's a lot of new technologies coming online that's right even in the storage world so how is virtualization helping customers or helping protect customers for making bad choices with current products now one thing you want to look at is where do I manage this from right how many silos do I have right and so the extent that you can leverage the Center for example right as a common management domain not just for storage by the way right well we started off with compute right they get source we also have networking right so what we have today with NSX right integrating that together we've heard what we announced the show here there it is this VMware cloud foundation great way to go and integrate right all the rich functionality and now you've got it in one user interface right that simplifies the deployment and then the support right making everything easy so you know putting everything together plug it in run a wizard everything's set up for you and it and it's set up the way it should be yeah so it's not as dependent upon the underlying type or choice that you made about storage it's now more what does the application need and let's just point the application at the pool yeah so so there's still I still see you know there's going to be those needs where that super low latency super fast care that shared storage is going to be critical and is going to be needed for specific applications but all that other stuff all that normal day-to-day web servers applications email file shares all that stuff you can just throw it on there and it works you don't have to worry about all the silos and all the different management people that you need so going back to John's question the day on your point later the idea that getting people to raise up defectives Dave how much time are you now saving not doing the physical stuff actually starting to talk to developers the people are taking all of this day to all these assets and turning it into the business value are you able to spend more time and directly supporting them as you go into customers and design the it does seem like that that shadow IT or DevOps or you know the people that aren't depending or depend on IT the consumer is becoming more of the decision maker or at least the influencer and what what V San brings to the table for those kind of people especially with the automation and and and you know the whole private cloud piece of it it takes down that I call it the IT stop sign okay so you know why is DevOps going to the public cloud because it's easy so you have to be as easy as wherever they're going in order to bring them back and and keep that governance on your data and keep your IP where it belongs whether it's in that private cloud or off into a secure more secure public cloud or through a hybrid cloud or whatever v san kind of keeps everything contained for that so yeah and I think there seems to be a trend or at least a thread here that I'm hearing a different conversation here about simplicity right felicity just not keeping things simple for people letting them focus on their core competencies and the right there really what they're paid to do and not distract them away from having to learn like you said it up to speed in 15 minutes as opposed to hours or weeks of training week looks you having these three clicks yeah yes yeah I ask customers pretty routinely now you know what is your budget gonna be is it higher or lower this year the answer it's like it's lower right there like you do you have more people or less people and I call less people they're shrinking data centers right and all of a sudden and then you say well and how many projects do you have like all of every every project now as an IT component right so now it's the pace of change right and so if you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure as much now all of a sudden it just becomes easier to start worrying about hey how do I go in scale we had a customer this morning I was talking to Buddy that was talking about well you know the other thing it does is it gives me the opportunity to have kind of bite-size chunks right so the risk of making the wrong decision is actually low right up by a set of servers and as opposed to you know I buy something that's this big where I have to basically predict what's going to happen for the next five years this looks more like hey you know what I kind of have to know what's going to happen over the next six months and then we'll figure it out from there that's today's mentality so easier to change one piece instead of the whole puzzle that I died nobody the dance for that that's a great point it's it there's not that many IT shops that are refreshing their entire data set there are but that's not that many usually it's a silo so but there's always projects PDI some sort of new essay p application or you know we're migrating to a new version of exchange or whatever it is it's okay let's start there and and and and let's just slip it in try it out you'll see you like it it's like sorry it's like crack everybody needs more all right so Rach wait liberal lawyers yeah try it out and you'll see you like it and then from there it'll just roll and and and as the the old siloed equipment starts to age out they'll just easily transition it into visa it's wedding we just get emotional over at a new server shut that down we could we just finished a survey of 250 decent customers and you know one of the things that we were watching is so what about the applications right because when we started like it was hey I'm going to try this in test em I'll try it over here or dr is a good one right I try it and you know it's not i'm not running like my real stuff on it right you know now what we're finding it this year's switched right so we flipped into the majority are now business-critical applications right there an X equal exchange share with the whole Microsoft stack during Oracle databases right there make Percona right i mean of mice equal variance right it's really your singing so all of a sudden they're like that you know there's no real hesitation right and it's the economics that drive this right once you started looking to say you know here's how i can go and do this in more bite-sized chunks starts to become more you know but it's more cloud like i think from that standpoint it's also the risk because as you said you make a design decision today yeah it's not going to be the right design decision in 18 months to make a product decision today it's probably not going to be the right product decision in 18 months you make the right you know you want to your company decides to buy a new company or wants to diverse the vessel you don't want the infrastructure getting in the way of those business decisions so it's it's certainly economics but it's a lot of it has to do with the fact that as you said the pace of change is so great that the only way to ensure that you can keep up is to focus on where the change really needs to be and diminish I focus on where the change isn't as required that make sense it does make sense in you know one of the things that you know degrees of freedom that customers also want is we're finding you know they're pretty used to being able to configure servers and choose their own server all right so the idea that we give choice right running software on a server where you get to choose right i mean we have what 15 different partners right server partners building something called a vc n ready node right so you can take our software pre-configured right to strip out the integration risk if you will there's also some customers who just want like the simplest easiest fully integrated we're working with emc that VX rail product is an integrated CDW offers both of these right so for customers who want just to say I want a single point of support integrated backup I mean that's a world-class product right as an integrated appliance that's one way to buy right one way to deploy but on the other hand if I'm a ucs shop I can go and say hey here's how i get a ucs if I may HPE shop here's how I do it 100 right all works all precor oh oh ya habla del e course right exactly yeah yeah thank you for that by the way so no sway be back yeah value out of the right there we go exactly yeah you know last before your eyes therefore that's all good right right but this this choice right i mean it's interesting because certainly customers are looking at like what level of choice and flexibility do they want and this server choice right is a big one yeah yeah it there's the reason why people buy servers isn't because it's a specific brand I mean you know if you if you look at the open up servers and you look inside it's really it's Intel processors or maybe an AMD processor a bunch of ram and some disks the the software that the vendors offer to manage those or what's important and and it's funny since vcenter mm-hmm even before it was vcenter you know just I guess 20 was it being able to integrate the management of the servers into vcenter and having all those sensors and all that stuff kind of bubble up into vcenter is huge and be able to hook in and take like we realize automation or viewer orchestrator and make it to pull the physical hardware as well as a virtual it's it's big have that in with ES and it just kind of makes it easy so Dave's you working with a lot of customers every single day yep they are also starting to deploy cloud or at least procure plot proud as part of their core strategy talk a bit about about talk a little bit about the challenges associated with intercloud communication and a role that brutalization plays yeah yeah so it's it's still kind of the wild wild west out there with with that I know you know VMware with NSX trying to and that with the new announcements and I haven't fully digested all this stuff from yesterday but it was out just the idea of providing that that kind of peanut butter of policy you know for security and networking and all that from you know whatever you need to keep up button the other way that's a technical term I like that or Paula I like that I have more creative butter of policy in your private cloud and being able to kind of spark that up in in whatever public cloud you choose to use kind of brings that core via you know so vmware's message was always whatever Hardware you have your choice now it's whatever cloud you have your choice yeah it kind of makes sense now and and yet security and the networking is is the biggest piece of it and that if you look at the NIS T official version of hybrid cloud it's it's being able to move things back and forth seamlessly and that's what it brings his David a big part of this cross cloud message right and there's an obligation and it turns out I I'd argue that your most strategic engagement with the cloud is actually data alright VMS you can spin up spin down right there transitory it's on or off but you know the decision about where you place data is long-standing what do and what data sovereignty issues about you know it takes you know data is not quick to move anywhere right so it takes time and it takes you know from a cost standpoint right you all of a sudden lock yourself in on data to keeping it going right so those sort of issue didn't if you want to take it back by the way you know there's some egress fees and other things to go and manage so what we announced right in this cross cloud world about how we're running for example you know in IBM SoftLayer right and you can now spin up vcn and soft layer right and see the same policy based management right across the cloud now right I mean that extension right into the public clouds right is a really interesting way for us to go and talk about moving from just a storage you know provide into a data services data management right that becomes a key element how do you convince people to be early adopters then of that because now that they're making decisions that not that they they all matter that are those matter maybe a little more is it really early adoption though this far into the game I mean wow I mean everybody we came out a transitory element yeah you're saying ok I want you to take another step yeah I want you go a little further out and so that's what I was saying well here's here's where I'd let me out a little bit too that is what I'd say is that you said data management yes i would say data Asset Management's there that's so you know we were talking earlier digital business is about how you're going to apply data differently to retain and sustain your customers and so this point ocean of data as an asset you really elevates this conversation about what data where when all those other things and to the degree that virtualization simplifies those conversations it's going to have a major impact on business flexibility agility even designed so you guys agree so degree yes so think about that and and I have to credit a vmware se his name is Paul Rowan think of NSX as kind of a bodyguard okay and every chunk of data whatever it is as a bodyguard kind of leading them leading the way and protecting that piece of data from whatever it is that it needs to protect it wherever it goes and that's really a real simple analogy so it's not just I have to configure a firewall over here and make sure that if it goes into cloud that that firewall has the same rules it doesn't matter anymore because my bodyguards going with me and and and I'm that bodyguard is making sure that all the policies are applied no matter where I end it also opens up new areas you know when you talk about data asset management now I started thinking about well you know maybe I want to do some big data analytics I'm where my data is right where where do i locate it right and you could locate different places for sovereignty security local performance for example right back up any geolocation issues right and then I also started thinking of a policy base rate we call source policy based management and that sort now it says you know it's not just capacity right maybe want to be thinking of a performance right how do I think about allocating performance how do I think about managing performance across different assets for example right so lot I mean this is what's exciting i think is once you start where we've started from which is at the hypervisor level you're at a natural architectural injection point to go and say we could take all of these pieces in and very efficiently go and manage them provide new functionality right that's a really interesting way as customers trying an SS like my date it may not just be here anymore right may be out here may be out there how do i go and get a handle on that that's true once you hit that inflection point where in the industry starts coming to you right that's right VMware's clearly hit that point and then some yeah interesting well we've had peanut butter policy we've had bodyguards i wish made more time to do morals of wisdom okay the big IT stop sign I like that too are you good thanks for joining this guy's thank you have a great show all right our coverage on the cube vmworld continues in just a moment here from Las Vegas

hey welcome back to vmworld 2013 this is the cube our flagship program out the advanced extracted from the noise I'm John furry the founders SiliconANGLE my co-host Dave allante co-founder Wikibon or go to Wikibon org for free content go to slipping the angle for the reference point for tech innovation and go to SiliconANGLE com for all the footage also go to youtube.com slash SiliconANGLE for all the replays i'm showing with my co-host hi everybody i'm dafe a lot a leak as well as here is the vice president virtualization product group that fusion-io we welcome back to the cube thank you very much it's great to be here see you guys again this venue is terrific yeah you here in a new role actually I a new company new role is very exciting to us I'm going for you how many vm Rose have you been to oh yes it's all right yeah you Jen your veteran exactly so you have seen a lot of change and that you know since virtualization I mean flash is the next big exciting thing is 0 10 years I mean a lot to change first five years just give us your perspectives you worked at VMware right five years and second five years what's just what's a summary what's the bumper sticker you know when we started off the back in like two thousand we basically like to say well what are we going to virtualize first and it was the easy stuff right take all the applications that were running that weren't very i/o intensive it wasn't the Oracle databases we want to go put on virtualization now we've got what seventy eighty percent of workloads being virtualized what's left well all the hard stuff right and that's where flash is coming in is how do we go and take the hard applications and make those sing in a virtual environment so I've seen you're at heading up the virtualization team at fusion is that correct that's the roles that's the official title yes so what's the big news for you guys this week you know we've got some very exciting deliverables that we've shown we have a technology demonstration we're doing on a new product called I ovd i Iove I basically solves the problem of how you get performance into virtual desktops without breaking persistent storage and giving you a cost that's less than a physical desktop which is what everybody wanted from the start so you have to solve the cost problem solve the performance problem I ovd I is that that's the latest port now the latest implementation of our i/o turbine software so it's a very interesting way to go and say we'll take all the benefits of the i/o memory flash platform which you know I've been you know the basics of fusion-io success so you and I had you and I had a chance to chat on last week prior to the embargo of the new yet but one of the things we were talking about and then I was I went Dave about earlier they say was that everything at the top of the stack has always been this elusive dream right when Palmer its laid out the original vision you know 2010 it was really laid out we called the software mainframe what everyone want to call it it was a stack at the top of the stack e with apps being where I tried to her hand at that now pivotal's out outside and still there was a lot of work to do in the middle ground right so yes I would say it got stalled a little bit mainly because the hypervisor stuff a lot of the middle where big data hit the scene storage virtualization network virtualization all kind of started to happen yes so with that what's happening above the stack so stuff starting to commodify the infrastructure service platform deserves but then the apps data fabrics are there so what's your at the top of the thing you got to look up what's the view and what's the trends there well one of the aspects of virtualizing flash is that we're looking at basic hypervisor level virtualization first and this was the phase one of what I owe turbine had to develop which is how do we go and solve the i/o blender problem so any virtual virtual appliances or virtual machines have to go and look carefully at how we're going to go take what looks like now a random workload and how do we accelerate that that was phase one now we have with IO vdi a very interesting way to run in the guest and add more intelligence and so the intelligence now could be paying a desktop environment how do I take advantage of common files to speed up boot times how do I take advantage of the fact that there's a substantial amount of desktop rights that actually never matter remember your desktop even that drive goes on you're like what's it doing that's all data that doesn't ever have to go to this and we could take advantage of this now intelligently at the guest and do some very interesting work to speed up acceleration make sure desktops are working fast and that's the sort of intelligence you look at and it's all based on applications and solution knowledge one of the things that I've been working on it at fusion-io so I got to ask you leave I've been coming to vmworld now probably auto six or seven years and and my remember my first vmworld I said oh my gosh storage is good to get killed right and it was everybody's complaining about storage and and so so then we started down this path of integration you know via a I and Vasa and the Lycan right and every year Wikibon does this evaluation of the integration points and we rank oh you know who's got wat and I'm looking at the other day and I'm saying all this stuff is designed to sort of minimize the the spinning disk penalty mm-hmm and I've look at the integration points that relate to flash and it's like a handful of them mm-hmm so to the extent we get to that vision it seems to be is coming soon we're all my active data we talked about this with Gary earlier well my active data is served out of flash all those other integrations that I just spent all this time and money on kind of become irrelevant that was my take so the first time I've articulated that I wonder you know you're an expert in this area and products is that a fair characterization yet for years the disk drive has been doing a dual service it's been providing both performance which it's not very good at and capacity which is very good at right and so what's happening is it as you look at flash right now this is one of the reasons fusion-io is so successful early on is a single pci card serves the performance delivery of over 200 drives and so what's happening now is there's this radical split happening where wherever you can take the performance and disaggregate it from the capacity needs now that's changing extremely fast and so we're seeing that overall or I'm going to use a disc for a relatively cold store anywhere I can provide acceleration the software stack is how we do that yeah well if I could do that through an API call right right based on some kind of policy so so where are we in terms of being able to do that and what role does fusion-io play in that regard yeah very good question we've done some very interesting things with IO control for example this is an acquisition we had recently where we're now applying quality of service across as a policy across application environments so if you want to have a sand and basically run multiple applications how do I go make sure that I've got I've got performance now that I can allocate so that I can make sure that i'm getting the performance i need for the applications i care about allocating not just baseline performance but quality of service becomes a very important differentiator that fusion-io is driving okay and i can do that through an API call that's why I can open the API yes and you can go and actually allocate this on a policy-based by your application then I can change that pretty much on the fly on the fly yes it's one way of thinking that it's not just raw performance that users care about it turns out what users care about and you know this from your own experience waiting for that look that little life you know the hourglass to change what you care about is you care about persistent or seek consistent performance as much as you care about vegetable consistent performance right yeah the one thing that drives users nuts is if they don't know when something's gonna complete right and if it's too slow then they'll throw it out and get a new one but if it's consistent and predictable and I know what's coming one of the build processes around it here's one of the area's we've spending a lot of time on we are so early with flash we spend a lot of time on solutions so if you look at what are the key solutions at flash accelerates today well its databases server virtualization VDI big data if you take those as a group we have a set of customers that have deployed and seen successful the acceleration in the field and we're just going to show other customers here's how you can do this we've stripped out all the risk of making this work in the field so talk a little bit more about the the customers and how use cases are expanding kind of where they started and where you see them going and I know that's if there's a wide variety but I wonder if we can generalize especially as your product line has begun more more robust well we've taken a mapping right now of whether you're on a server side are you on the storage side with caching are you going to basically try and bridge the gap between these and the applications look like this so within databases databases love block storage and they love fast response times you can service more customers you can save costs you can consolidate infrastructure these are terrific benefits now for how flash can make a difference in server virtualization we've got the ability to go and run more VMs more consistently that's a huge driver of getting more virtual workloads going personal desktops got that same same concept of how do I make sure that users get that level of consistent response times and then lastly in big data big data is all about processing no data is deleted anymore the data that you have is just processed over and over and over again and that processing is all consistent with high-performance flash so big daddy talking about extending in-memory analytics potentially persisting in-memory analytics right every yeah we have some is Hannah crazy but Hannah Healy persistent data we've been doing a lot of work on Hannah lately his eats it's great I mean I love we love the concept but but you talk to Hannah users and they keep telling you what goes down a lot so well we need to persist it I know you guys are working on part on helping us ap out with that problem well there's some very interesting applications we announced Spotify as a customer for example streaming music is an ideal case of how do you have very fast performance over latency sensitive applications these types of things and how you go and manage things like playlists right become very important for businesses that want to take all of the effort they were doing on managing i/o take those developers off that work put them on developing new applications or new features that you're going to use to competing as your you know your competition that's how you've changed the game right now is I don't have to actually worry about managing io because we have thousands of I ops to work with hundreds of thousands of I ops the all of a sudden what was a scarce resource in the past now you've got a lot of it so think about riorca texting that's the that's the sort of you know cathartic change we're going through right now Lee how do you talk to guys first of all there's two there's two professions to this one first one is Silicon Valley is always a new stars coming on so like are there any seats left at the table in the i/o gain we'll get to that one to say but I watch this or the second one first which is if you're an IT guy you get all the storage laying around yes you know Nass and gas and all of its laying around usually tied to some app by going server-side talk about the dynamics that you guys get in there is it a rip and replace is an extension you guys commoditize it is it just you treat storage as a a resource that can be commoditized I mean how you view that what's the solution it's very interesting one thing we're finding is that there's so much extra capacity now because customers into buying discs to deliver performance that element right if having to buy so you know 15k SAS drive gives you a hundred and fifty I ops it costs seven dollars to get that level of performance flash is relatively inexpensive at a nickel so you can all of a sudden now you can free up all of this capacity so one of the things we're seeing first off is what drives buying decisions is how do I consolidate the infrastructure I have we're consolidating physical infrastructure we're consolidating licenses as well by having this level of performance so that's one dynamic customers are come in different shapes and sizes some customers want to buy server-side flash some customers want to buy storage side flash we're delivering both we have with our eye on products and IO control products if you want to buy storage we have some very interesting ways to deploy it that way if you want to buy servers we got the fastest in the industry on the server side so you know our metal our Metro right now is that you know however you want to consume it we're going to supply the economics is you can come in and maximize pre existing investments same time get that flash data center built out is that kind of like yeah let me describe one one way we're doing that with IO vdi which is new for virtual desktops we're coming in saying we're taking all the performance dependencies from the sand and basically moving them into the server side so by having it on the server side now you can say well I'll just tap into the sand for capacity which is really what you wanted in the first place huh I just wanted to add sand for data protection and so the sand administrators is great this is what I was hoping to do in the first place give you a few terabytes you're off and running I deploy this on server side deployments basically gets you back into that seamless increments of deployment well we saw a lot of action today in the news violin filed to go possible that so competition there was always new startups coming out so what are you back to the start of a question is always a new startup iOS hot so you have some innovation what are you seeing on the on the startup scene and are there any seats left at the table well who knew storage was going to be so sexy we did I guess you guys did right shopper come on Georgie day really yeah head Jojo Jojo G of storage a sexy I'll tell you what you know he got enough expected when he turns out he's gonna taught yeah it's funny mate if there's a lot of room for innovation left this is what you know we're we're seeing you know flash by itself is one way to go and deploy this there will be others right over time what what we're looking at is once you take any imperfect media and flash like disc is an imperfect media you have to start thinking about hey how do i how do i basically overcome some of the limitations there's reliability considerations i got to make it reliable right there's density how do i go and aggregate it together there's protection i mean all of these things and so all of that tends to lead towards software innovation right software innovation is where we're putting the bulk of our effort right now on making flash more more social so everybody wants a piece of you I mean you guys came out you had like a four-year lease on the industry and you did the side because oh wow maybe yeah the flash in the pan and so so it now all these big guys investing buying you back etc so you said software is where the innovation is is that how you keep your regiment if we could talk about that a little bit and help us understand you know what we can expect generally yeah that's that's a really good question there's no doubt and I've had experience in the past at one time my career I was selling some silicon to Intel for 69 margins and the question was so how did you get away with that rest of the day thank you me too and the answer was C 45 the value prop was not about this so yeah right listen item at what's not about the silicon itself who is how did you prove out things like compatibility software value add and in our case at fusion-io solutions what we've done and what we offer to customers is it's not so much about like raw acceleration because anybody can pull a number off a data sheet and say hey we're faster in this one case what we can show is we've made these customers this much more successful in the field and so our value right now is to show that we're going to accelerate your success with flash not just accelerate some portion of your data so what are those solutions we talked about him briefly before but so what talking about in generic terms database you know I abetik stuff it was interesting actually looking we have a luxury it from a marketing standpoint of saying they're actually fairly definable so within the database case Microsoft sequel server we've got Oracle both for rack for Oracle 11 12 X my sequel if you look there when you look into virtualization well clearly we've got VMware today and then moving to hyper-v right within VDI so it's both VMware for view and Citrix and then within big data we see some very interesting we're some work there not like to comment on that for a minute because because of our success on flash just showing the raw performance then we had application developer saying hey I'd like to rewrite the applications now and so we've had some very good success with companies like sky sequel Maria DB percona of rewriting the applications now to take advantage of the native the native benefits of flash yeah so that's two orders of magnitude performance it's a very interesting dynamic right so so okay so that's that's always been fundamental to your strategy and a big part of it has mediation and you guys are kind of unique in that area I think you got it well at some point there we're moving from the early adopters so early adopters right they like words like visionary disruptive groundbreaking this is going to be de like well to the later adopters right the CIO of a grain company in the Midwest like that sounds pretty scary so what we've done now is we've reduced the risk saying hey you get these / benefits and one of the things we have we have a theme st. same planet different world and that is designed around the aha moment that occurs when people realize are you kidding me forty percent of our customers see more than 10x performance in their applications 10x in the field from our surveys 10x performance can you imagine the moment where you go really seriously I could do that while the norm is to get that low latency you know feel like hey no disc at all but you know I think that's the key so I want to ask you two final questions we wrap up the place what's so you guys also you're doing great and we were talking earlier with Gary orenstein and some other folks the stuff under the under the hood is where all the actions in the data center so yeah so I'm gonna find data centers not just one thing it's that it's a bunch of parts yeah flashes is a big part of it yeah what is the big takeaway for folks out there shares I'll give you the last word share with them in your own words what's going on with flash this year at vmworld is 10th anniversary so flash the benefits of flash are so compelling it's going to be deployed everywhere where disk has been deployed when you think about it that way all of a sudden you look at the server side you look at the storage side and you look at how you bridge the gap in between we're going to see flash come on than everyone and what fusion-io has done is said we're going to be able to give you solutions however you want to consume it will give an offering there that you can go and say the advantages that we've developed and hardware and software take that and deploy it at low risk final question please add one more you've been at vmware veteran your industry vet been on the block you've seen at the movie a few times kids going to college our kids going to college so yeah but you've been all the vm worlds what what can you share the folks from the beginning of the first vmworld to now ten years what has happened how big has it become what's your giving the order of magnitude share some perspective or experiences sure you know in the early days the question was hey there was a customer question of virtualization is it safe right just to start off with like will my data like will my apps run and so you go through that first phase right of jumping in the pool like am I going to jump it is it okay right and then you jump in and you're like wow that was pretty good right one of my experiences early on was that the first benefit was about consolidation because that drove cost improvement and then the subsequent value was around high availability and management we're seeing the same thing in flash right now and you're seeing everyone get in the act the first element is hey is it safe is it going to work how can I consolidate infrastructure we're going through that we've gone through that phase now it's how do I manage this how do I make sure it works in the applications how do i get a che how do I support vmotion these are the questions customers are asking it's an integration question we think we're in a great position to capitalize on that the castle is fusion-io thanks for me on the cube we right back with wrap up after this short break day 1 i'm john forward day volante this is silicon angles the cube here live at vmworld in San Francisco we right back after this short break

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, and welcome to "theCUBE"'s coverage of HPE Discover, 2020, The virtqual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman. Of course this year, we're getting to talk to HPE, their customers and their partners where they are around the globe. We've said many times this, we're together even while we're apart, having to dig into a really important partnership with HPE and VMware. Welcome into the program, first time guest on the program, Krista Satterthwaite. She is the Vice President of Product Management for Compute, with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and welcome back to the program. Lee Caswell, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing for hyper converged infrastructure, at VMware. Of course, we're talking about vSphere and how that gets bundled into everything else. Krista and Lee, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so, Krista, let's start with you. So, I'd like to know a little bit about your background. And of course, the the HP and HPE relationship with VMware, goes back to, the earliest days, but give us a little bit about, where in the portfolio you focus on and how VMware fits in. >> Oh, sure, sure. So I've been with HPE for 24 years now. And I'm leading the business for Alliance and Synergy. And talking a little bit about the relationship with VMware. So we've been partnering for 19 years, and we have over 200, 000 joint customers together. And I'm actually often asked about the partnership and how we partner, and we really partner across all fronts. So it's from the innovation, to the CO engineering, to working with specific customers on what solutions are good for them to servicing our customers. So we're really working across the board and a lot of customers we work with closely, are really impressed with how closely we're working together because that's what they look for. >> And and Lee it's an interesting relationship to watch, obviously, the long history Krista talked about on the Compute side. But the VMware HPE partnership is more than just the Compute, maybe give us a little bit of a view inside, the joint engineering, joint go-to market efforts that you do. >> Yeah, you bet. I mean, customers always sit up straight when we talk together, because, both of our companies are just raw engines of innovation. And they look forward to not just the capabilities that we're bringing, but also the seamless way that we integrate that and make that seamless and easy for customers to digest. So, certainly on the server front, through vSphere, that's been a long standing participation, the VMware cloud Foundation, then this fully Software-Defined stack became a really interesting way for us to go and partner and show joint value to customers who are trying to basically get more speed, particularly speed. We're going to talk about a lot of that today, and then finally, VMware cloud foundation that we've opened up into storage systems. So there's certainly a hyper converged element of it. But now what we do with nimble three part and now primeira is a really interesting way for us to take the vVols technology that we have and extend a common operating model. So really just interesting innovation for customers to take advantage of, as they look to innovate themselves. >> Krista, from a research standpoint, we were really early in watching, new models of building out storage, and we said, the pendulum is swung back to pull it much closer to Compute. You talked about you've got a broad portfolio in Compute, Synergy has some really interesting ways to be able to compose things and leverage software capabilities, so maybe give us a little bit as to how HPE differentiates in the market. Because, VMware does partner with lots of people but what separates these point solutions from everything else out in the market. >> Sure, and Synergy is a great example because what we're seeing is a really, really high interest on, on Synergy with VCF. And the reason for that is because customers want a software-defined infrastructure, that they can compose, Compute, storage and networking, as they need to, to address any workload they have. And they want to do that with a partner like VMware and VCF. So what we see is customers choosing those two things together, and building their hybrid cloud environments on those two. When I think of some of the customers that we have, all given a specific example. So, Banco Santander is one of the largest banking groups in the world, and they are really trying to drive innovation across all of their locations that are in North America, South America, Europe, Asia. They're trying to drive innovation across, they have a big project. And they selected Synergy and VCF as a service GreenLake model to help them transform their business. And they're really excited because what they think this is providing to them is a reduced data center space, reduced power consumption, and reduced costs. And all of that with automation, more automation than they've had in the past, more flexibility than they've had in the past. >> Yeah, I'm so glad you brought up the GreenLake, because, those other service models, cloud obviously has been a big discussion for the last few years. Lee, VMware is no stranger to working in multi and hybrid cloud environments. Give us a little bit about what you're hearing from your customers, you mentioned the GreenLake solution. How does that fit in the, overall, VMware multi cloud offering? >> Well, we all know these are uncertain Time's right? And customers in uncertain times are looking for flexibility. How do they go and basically, invest smartly, look to come out of uncertain times stronger. And what we're finding is that flexibility... Starting at, we're really impressed with this Synergy platform by the way. The idea of being able to flexibly configure, Compute and storage to tie into external arrays from that and to have the VMware cloud foundation as a unifying Software-Defined data center concept that's available on-prem and then extends into the hybrid cloud. This basically gives investment protection to customers who are looking for how to invest in, you've mentioned GreenLake as well. And I just mentioned that innovation on GreenLake is about true consumption-based purchasing models, if you will. And that's different than just a financial engineering aspect. I mean, that's real innovation and real technical innovation in terms of how customers can go and apply infrastructure. At the time that they need it, relative to the compelling business models. >> I'll chime in there too, I will tell you a little story about when I first presented the GreenLake model, at that time, it wasn't called GreenLake. But I presented it to a bunch of customers about 100 customers in an advisory council. And I have never had so many people come up to me afterwards, trying to figure out how they can get that for themselves, as I did when I had that presentation. What really resonated with people is that they wanted to take advantage of the latest and greatest technologies, but they didn't have big budgets. And when they did take advantage of those technologies, one of the challenges has been growth. So when they need to expand, that's another procurement cycle. You have to wait, you have to stand it all up. With GreenLake, you actually have that added capacity on site, and then also payfor what you use. So they were attracted to All of those things. And I feel like right now, in the environment we're in, many people had big, big projects, things they wanted to do. And they may have plan those capital expenditure for that, but that money may not be there. So GreenLake is one of those things that can help overcome that challenge. And what we found is when people use GreenLake, we don't see many people go back. So, I was talking with the GreenLake light team, and I said, what happens if they decide not to do GreenLake and they kind of pause, and they're like, "Well, we really haven't run into that very often." So it's very, very popular and customers were really happy with it. >> Yeah, talking about innovation and helping customers take advantage of new technologies. Lee, maybe we'll start with you and Krista, definitely want your input. Been a lot of feedback about vSphere seven. Of course, one of the big pieces of that, is how cloud native containerization Kubernetes can be pulled into the virtualization platforms. So we're talking a lot about VCF, Lee, that's the, the way to get it, the Kubernetes piece today. Tell us a little bit about that, what you're hearing from customers and then, Krista, I'd like to understand how that fits into the HPE offerings. >> Yeah, the data we have, shows that 95% of new applications, are being developed on containers. Why? Because it's the speed of development. And so, at VMware, we've re architected vSphere for the first time that in the last five years. And look carefully at what VMware integrates into the hypervisor, because that's what we believe is going to be really benefiting from performance, efficiency and management. And so we've integrated Kubernetes directly into the hypervisor itself. And then through our Tanzu portfolio, introduce an upstream, compatible, Kubernetes development environment so that we have developer-ready infrastructure. And that's really important because at the speed of new applications, basically, you need to be able to respond quickly to those. And what VMware has always offered, which is a resilient underlying infrastructure with an intrinsic security model built in. And separately important, when containers are being spun up more quickly, destroyed more quickly. They're being portable now they're portable across the hybrid cloud, those models mean that you need, and you get the value right from this integrated model that leverages all of the experience and knowledge that people have around how to run this center and this sphere. So really exciting. And it's available in VCF 4.0 with Tanzu and Synergy. >> Yeah. And I will say that it's very exciting because I actually see the interest I see customers asking about and inquiring about it. I can, definitely second everything that Lee just said. I think Lee you're going to see a really fast transition over because there's so much value added in. >> Excellent. Okay, Krista, while I've got you on the Compute piece, Lee said that 95% of new applications are being built on containerization. How has that, impacted architecture in how you're working with customers? >> Yeah, so what I find is that customers, are very interested in containers. What we're doing is we're helping them from a services standpoint, a consulting standpoint. Many of these customers are adopting for the first time trying to figure out how they could leverage containers in their environment. From our standpoint, it's making sure that we have the right platforms and we're advising and consulting and helping customers get there. Excellent. Lee, Krista talked about Santander, wondering if you've got any customer examples you'd like to share. >> Yeah, great one is Porsche, I love the Porsche example, just because Porsche, just The epitome of speed. And so the idea of this flexibility. The way you're finding, is the flexibility starting from, let's say, from a Synergy, and flexible on hardware allocation? And then with VCF now being able to be flexible across the hybrid cloud, and now with VCF 4.0, with Tanzu, the flexibility of introducing new modern application support, and finally layering GreenLake on top of that, which Porsche is also using, it gives you this idea that, especially in uncertain times, but regardless, the changing business environment where everyone's responding to app development, pressures, timelines, and innovation, we've got a really interesting model now for customers to invest responsibly and be able to respond quickly. >> Excellent. Krista, I guess the other piece, onto Discover, any updates in the portfolio expanding the VMware solution that you can share? >> Yeah. Yeah, so I'd like to talk a little bit about our pre validated Synergy VCF solution stack with built in automation. So we've literally gotten rid of hundreds of steps, pre and post deployment. So we could speed deployment by five times. So we're talking to point in hours instead of weeks. So we're really, really excited about that. We're working together to make sure we're making things easier for customers, making that journey to a hybrid cloud. Very, very simple. So we're really happy to offer that to customers. >> Right, Lee, any final words you can share on HPE partnership? >> Yeah. what I might say is that the pace of innovation from our companies is so great. That really VMware Cloud Foundation is a way in our joint effort and joint delivery, is a way for customers to assimilate all of this innovation. So that day zero, it's guaranteed to work And then day two, you can lifecycle manage all the individual components from a common SVC manager interface. That's the value that we're bringing together today. Is that, listen, putting all this in place can seem daunting until the VMware cloud Foundation, with Synergy with all of the joint value we have basically makes it manageable, so that you can go and basically stop looking down at infrastructure. Look up at the ass. >> All right, Krista, I'll let you have the final word and final takeaways from HPE Discover. >> Okay, sure, thanks. Together, what we're trying to do is simplify that journey to Hybrid Cloud, makes sure that customers can innovate faster, provide stable operations and reduce their costs. >> Well, Krista and Lee, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations on the progress. Looking forward to watching down the road. >> All right, thank you Stu. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right, stay tuned for lots more coverage from "theCUBE", HPE Discover 2020 Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (cool music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome inside the VM Village at VMworld 2018 where we have a nice, big set. Double set of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my co-host John Troyer and wait, Keith Townsend? >> Did you mess up the intro? >> Oh my gosh. (Keith chuckling) Luckily, the great thing about VMworld is it's got a great community. Remember a couple of years ago, had a couple of my staff that weren't going to be here and I'm like oh my gosh, what do we do? So I reached out to community members. John Troyer, Keith Townsend. I said hey, guys, how'd you like to do some CUBE stuff? Keith did a whole bunch of CUBE with us for a couple of years and something happened. You decided to go and take a real job? >> Evidently, you can't live off borrowed time for too long. It catches up with you. But VMware, obviously, world-class organization. I've been on the other side interview folks on here so I've gotten a good window in to the org over the past couple of years, thanks to theCUBE. >> Yeah, well, Keith, look, first of all, thank you for all the time you did. We call you the once and future guest host of theCUBE. (both laughing) So we have not seen the end of Keith Townsend, the CTO Advisor. You're now a solutions architect, though, at VMware. If people want, go read Keith's blog. Great resource to the community as to looking at jobs. Keith didn't apply to VMware once or twice, it was one of those you keep trying and eventually you found a pretty sweet job. >> Yeah. >> Maybe give us a little insight as to what brought you, what excited you to come join VMware? You've know the community, been a vExpert. Been a watcher and a partner and a customer of VMware. What's it like being inside, wearing that logo? >> I've said on theCUBE, a couple of times, VMware moves at the speed of the CIO. You can take that one of two different ways. You can say VMware is really slow organization, or they go right where the CIO needs them to go. The thing the intrigued me about VMware all the time is that no company is better positioned to walk through digital transformation than VMware. As seen by the announcements this morning. VMware is struggling through, we're struggling through to find our way through what it is that the right combination of partnerships, technologies, people, process to help companies transition to this new digital age and that is an exciting thing to be a part of. >> Definitely interesting times. I'm sure there's a number of companies that would say hi, Microsoft, Amazon, and the like, that we think we're pretty well positioned to lead companies to where you need to go. But definitely interesting stuff in the keynote. That maturation of cloud and networking. Put your CTO Advisor hat on there. How're they doing? >> This is where I got, I tweeted it out earlier that man, I got to be careful, because some of the stuff that I want to tweet I'm like, oh, I can't say that as a VMware employee. But I can say definitely, I was surprised at the RDS announcement and people love the VMware ESXi on ARM. Two amazing announcements, but what really excited me was the RDS announcement. On theCUBE, I've pushed Chris Wolf, I've pushed Lee Caswell, all of these GMs, these BU GMs, about when is the innovation going to come out of VMware again? Let's not just get V1 updates. Why should somebody upgrade from vSphere 5.5 to 6.7? Give us a compelling reason. I think this morning we heard some really compelling stuff. RDS on vSphere is, I can't overstate how disruptive of an innovation that is. >> That could be really interesting. I like what you said in the beginning about the digital transformation. I think we also heard this morning the word digital foundation a lot, which is, again, one of my goals here for this show, Stu and Keith, is to pin down what does VMware do? What does it do? And it's not quite fair, because it has quite a wide portfolio but it seems to me, Keith, that it feels like the early days when I was there. You had to work with a whole set of OEMs in the hypervisor and some of the same things are happening with a whole bunch of clouds and working as a neutral Switzerland or partners with all them. But I was actually wanting to pivot over a little bit over to you as a communicator and as a member of the community. You were a customer. You worked for a large pharmaceutical company and ran a lot of billion dollars worth of stuff. You chose to become a communicator and an explainer and to be part of the learning process and buying process as an independent. Now back on the vendor side. Is there anything in that journey you've learned about 2018 about how people learn and how IT people figure this stuff. How do I even know where to go or what to buy or even what to consider? Any insights into that? >> So John, that's a really great question. I went on a run this morning, the vFit Run. We do it every year at VMworld and I was with VMUG CEO, Brad Tompkins. And we actually talked about this. vSphere admins want all the vSphere content that they can consume. In reality, they need to transition from just being focused on vSphere, vSphere, vSphere, and VXLAN and NSX to this broader picture. Pat on stage this morning talked through PKS, which is Kubernetes, he talked a little bit of serverless. I mean, from a CEO of a software company, that was a lot to consume just on the stage this morning. So you can be a deer in the headlights and think, what should I focus on? I think the thing to focus on, one of my peers gave a talk, well two of my peers, Craig Fletcher, who brought me into VMware, and Joseph Griffith, gave a talk today on culture. And this is about culture. The culture to learn and grow. You don't necessarily have to learn a specific technology, but you should most definitely have the attitude that if the CXO comes to me and asks me about X business process, I need to know a high level answer to that and how do I get there? Simple, simple steps is learn your business processes. I'll throw just one out there. Order to cash. Every organization has some process from when they either request money, they place an order, and how they eventually get paid. If you learn that process, the technology bits I think fall in place. >> Yeah it's an interesting point. I've talked to some of the users here, and they were a little bit overwhelmed this morning. I don't think there's anybody at this show, that if you put them in front of the CEO of their company, and said, okay tell me everything VMware's doing. (Keith laughing) Nobody can explain that. Nobody inside VMware nobody out. There's too much. Part of the answer I get all the time, is how do I keep up? Look, you're not going to keep up on everything. You need to have, I think the role you're in now Keith, is part of helping customers understand what are the things they need to understand, what are the steps they can be taking in the areas they need to learn and the things they can lean on you and your partners to get there. Is that a fair statement? >> Yeah I did a podcast with Brian Gracely maybe about a year, a year and half ago and we talked about this very topic. At the highest level, you just need, from a CIO perspective, CIO, CTO, and if you don't have a CTO, that's probably step one. But from a CIO perspective, you need someone who can just think about big picture, how the moving parts work. And then you need people to go deep and different areas. I talked to a financial services senior VP and he was talking through how he needed today a Pivotal guy But tomorrow that Pivotal guy would not need to be a Pivotal guy but a Kubernetes guy specifically. And how that guy would morph into something else so he's structured in his organization. So that he can, hey today, this guy or gal knows this technology stack but more important, they know systems and they can adjust and learn the technology that they need to learn to be effective. Because even as an analyst, near the end of the CTO Advisor as a full time opportunity, I thought about focusing all on VMware, because the company's that big now. Pat on stage said one of the things they learned from AWS, is how to add features every quarter. Stu, if I told you five years ago VMware would add a feature every quarter, the culture just isn't there, until now. >> Yeah, so, Keith, that's a really interesting point. That pace of change, because most people when you talk about vSphere upgrades, it was oh wow. It came out every year, every year and a half or so like that >> That's too fast >> I'm usually a couple generations behind. Every quarter there's no way I'm going to do that. We still have a bit of an impedance mismatch. When I go use the cloud, some of the base things happen under line. But other things I still need to choose or there's automation that will help me. How do we help CIOs, IT businesses to get to this more fluid, dynamic, upgradeable environment compared to the oh wait I need to consciously think about when do I upgrade, when do I move, how do I make those changes? >> So we have to get out of this mindset that IT is in this constant ops mode. Whether it's vSphere and the announcements that were made today or any other platform. We add no value by engineering upgrades. Putting time into designing and testing the upgrade from vSphere 6.7 to vSphere 6.7 update 1 really doesn't add value at the end of the day. VMware made critical announcements about the path to having VMware manage that. VMware cloud on AWS is a great example but the technologies are out there where we're no longer consuming our OSes. There's Linux distributions, there's Windows 10 will be the last version of Windows desktop ever and we'll get those updates directly from Microsoft. So we need to get out of the mindset that we add value as executives to managing upgrades and move our organizations where we're consuming these things as the black boxes they should be. >> Alright, so Keith, last question. What's surprised you so much, so far inside of VMware? >> You know what? I'm going to give an honest, raw answer to that, Stu. I'm not used to competing against my friends. (Stu laughing) It's one of those things, you know what, you got to make money, you got to win deals but both me and you have made a lot of friends, and John, we've made a lot of friends in this community. And you run into situations where you're pitting your technology against someone you just had dinner with last night or the week before at the last conference. And you've known for years and they're actually your friend. And keeping that competitive nature but at the same time maintaining your friendship, that's been surprisingly interesting. >> Alright, well hey, Keith, pleasure to catch up with you, as always, you're always welcome on our program in one of these seats. And yeah, absolutely, what I love about this community is that I see lots of people that are friends that are fierce competitors but they're grabbing out, hanging out at parties, taking selfies together, doing stuff like that. So, community, definitely key themes. Keith, thank you for being our community guest for today. Day one of three days live wall-to-wall coverage here in Las Vegas, VMworld 2018. For John Troyer, the CTO Advisor Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SilconANGLE's premier live streaming show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we are live day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, welcoming back a CUBE alumni, Gil Shneorson Senior Vice President of VxRail and GM at Dell EMC. Hey Gil. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Well we're excited to talk to you. So looking at some of the announcements that came out today where Dell EMC says they're the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure, and you've said that's happened really quickly. Tell us a little bit about that leadership. >> I think we found a way to take a systems approach to what is otherwise a software-defined world. So we found a way to get all of the economical benefits of hyper-converged driven by software, at the same time own the responsibility for those systems to be up and running and life cycle managed, taking away more of the responsibility then customers would have to do it on their own and I think that recipe has led us to a leadership position very, very quickly. >> So, you know we talked earlier today, can you expand upon some of that responsibility alleviating from customers, specifically around SLAs, around IO when you software-define or software-deliver storage, kind of the operating model changes. Can you expand upon that? >> Yeah, that's a very good point. So look at software-defined storage technology, for example. We happen to work with VSAN, which is the leading software-defined technology, but when customers choose to deploy software-defined solutions on their own, they're doing something that they haven't been doing in many, many years, which is take on the responsibility for up timing. It used to be that storage vendors, you know held responsibility for storage up time, for IOPs, for performance. So I think what we're doing is we found the balance. We've been getting a lot of benefits of hyper-converged and software defined, but at the same time own the responsibility from an operations standpoint to make it more like a traditional architecture and what they know. And that combination is very, very important. So for example, the ability to look at the entire system from software to driver to firmware, and always deliver a known good package because something that customers would have to do on their own, and they're all capable of doing it, but if they could choose not to do it why not offload it to somebody like us that does it for them. And so while there are two deployment models, we have a very massive growth in the systems approach, model (music drowns out voice) and I think people hand off things that they could do but they choose not to because they can focus on other things in the IT shop. For example, digital transformation and really the path to the multicloud by adding more and more layers on top of infrastructure that they can trust. >> Speaking of multicloud, I was in Jeff Clarke's opening session this morning. He was talking about, he gave a stat, I think it was 50 plus to 56% of users surveyed are using more than one cloud. So one of the things I also saw in the press release about the advancements of VxRail and VxRack, giving customers a clear path to adopt VMWare-based multiclouds. What is that clear path? How was that differentiated? So let's remember that both of those products, VxRail and VxRack SDDC are products that are built on the VMWare stack. They're optimized for VMWare users. They're not agnostic to anything. They're really VMWare on VMWare with automation and hardware and packaging that we do as a system. By delivering that robust infrastructure in one of the announcements that we made was that we created the VMWare validated design to add the rest of the VMWare stack and create an infrastructure as a service environment. That inherently comes with the ability to offload workloads to VMWare's service provider, cloud service provider, including Amazon and Google and the likes, but really a very vast network. So you take an infrastructure that's based on VMWare and harden is designing the system, you add on top of it to a prescriptive VVD exactly how to add the layered toppings like VRealize Automation, and through that inherently you get the entire VMWare value proposition going from a local solution to multicloud. And so the announcement was that validated design, which is very important, and then the announcement also included all sorts of hardware innovations or small evolutions like NVMe drives and 25 gigabyte ethernet, and higher memory CPUs. All of those are just to make sure that the infrastructure itself is ready to support that software stack that ultimately leads them to a full IO solution and offloading to the multicloud that are available to them. >> So big announcement or big set of education last year at VM World was the VCF. VMWare Cloud Foundation. It is the foundation of VMWare's infrastructure cloud play. Can you help talk through the importance in how VCF differentiates VMWare, VxRail, VxRack from competitors. >> So VCF is a software bundle. It's also an orchestrator that allows customers to manage multiple VMWare clusters within context. It's called a workload domain, and they can manage those clusters, and they can deploy them, they can life cycle management, they can microsegment them with NSX, and they can move workloads between them and to the cloud. VxRack SDDC is a system that basically lays down the VCF bits on a system premanufactured, and that's how we benefit from VCF as a differentiator. What we've done in addition we've announced 14G servers to be supported in that architecture. And we've also extended it to a, for example, a dial home on a system level. A lot of serviceability features, a physical view of the service as part of the graphic user interface. So not only does VCF differentiate VMWare by having the ability to finally leverage the entire stack, our value add is in taking that in the physical to virtual integration, if you will, life cycle management, and serviceability around servicing all of the system, which makes it a very robust infrastructure. So today customers have two choices. They can buy VxRack with VCF on top of it, or they can get to the same outcome with VxRail following a VVD prescriptive. And so what we do is we let them choose. If they're not ready for an NSX deployment they'd start with one, if they are they'll start with the other. Either way the outcome is going to be a full (music drowns out voice) from VMWare that can offload to multicloud. We just give them choices of how to get there. >> So want to kind of play off the value add for a second. We're at this event, the event theme Make It Real, making digital transformation real is a mandatory for businesses, right? They have the opportunity to take and apply data to multiple cases, use cases, within their organization to deliver differentiation. So you talked about a lot of the value out of the choices that you're giving customers from an IT perspective, what are some of the business, when you're sitting there with customers, what are some of the business outcomes they're looking for this technology to help them deliver? >> So that's a good question. So two levels of an answer. One is that by getting an automated infrastructure, IT itself can free up cycle to actually implement the (mumbles). It also frees up time for those organizations who are embarking on native cloud application development. For example, to deploy pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of (mumbles) Which is another prescriptive reference cycle actually that we have out there. And allow them to innovate. What I'm most interested in when I visit customers is what workloads are running on HCI. And I ask them and they say, is it testive, is it mission critical? And I'm happy to see that by now HCI, and specifically our products, have become mission critical, data centered, so all the way from the core to the edge running, banking applications a scale, running trading applications scale, running manufacturing application scale, running ports all over the world. I mean there's one customer that runs ports with automated trucks where the AI that runs those trucks is running on a VxRail. I mean, it's very, very exciting to see how our technology has been adopted into mainstream, into mainstream application compute. I think that's very exciting. And IT can enable more of those applications run and develop more because they have to do less in managing the physical infrastructure across multi companies. >> So Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Products over at VMWare brought in his customer from Celtic yesterday, and he validated that. They went all in from a legacy three tier architecture on Dell SE, they were Dell customer before, went with the Xrack, sorry VxRail, mission critical applications out the gate. So I'm seeing a shift. Last year around this time we were doing education and saying, you know, what is HCI versus a traditional architecture? Are you seeing that same thing at the show, as a shift that customers are no longer asking oh what is VxRail or VxRack, but that very thing is how can we accelerate digital transformation using VxRail or VxRack? >> Yeah, we have a very large percentage of the meetings, in fact almost 200 meetings that were requested to review the technology with us initial. That's a lot, that shows a lot of interest. There are a few customers that still don't know, and we've met some of those at the show. There are a few customers who are still contemplating whether HCI is right for them. And by the way, to those customers we say, don't rush into it, you have choices. If that's what you used to, what the economics were for you, there is no reason to rush into HCI. It's just depending on if you're going to get a better outcome than what you have today. But a very common question from customers is okay, then why do I need traditional storage? And for somebody from my vantage point, let's say there's a lot of bare-metal computing out there that requires traditional. But we think that traditional storage becomes more specialized, you know specific DR use cases, very large ratios between compute and storage and requires shared storage, but the HCI type of technology is definitely, and we see it with market growth, right? The market is growing at 60 to 70%. We're growing over 150% and taking share in this growing market, but we're still very, very small if you compare it to the whole IT tam. So there's a lot of way to go. Partly is that we still need to work on the last mile, being sure that our products are more mature, that we figure out how to operate them in a real life environment. So there's work to do, but the economical benefits are so strong that customers are making the choice more and more and more, and they trust us to know how to close the gaps that we still have. And it's a very collaborative effort between our and our customers. We listen, we respond very quickly, and so we can keep the machine going. >> It sounds like a momentum that we talked about with you I think at VM World back in eight or so months ago continues. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, sharing what's new with VxRack, VxRail, and how customers can be successful there. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks, Gil. >> Thank you for having me again. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in a concert at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.