>> From around the globe it's theCUBE with coverage of the GLOBAL.NEXT DIGITAL EXPERIENCE brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi and welcome back, we're wrapping up our coverage of the Nutanix .Next Global Digital Experience, I'm Stu Miniman and I'm happy to welcome to the program, help us as I said wrap things up. We're going to be talking about running better, running faster and running anywhere. A theme that we've heard in the keynotes and throughout the two day event of the show. We have three VPs to help go through all the pieces coming up on the screen with first of all we have Greg Smith who's the vice president of product technical marketing right next to him is Madhukar Kumar, who is the vice president of product and solutions marketing and on the far end, the senior vice president Thomas Cornely, he is the senior vice president, as I said for product portfolio management. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Good to be here Stu. >> Alright, so done next to show we really enjoy, of course this the global event so not just the US and the European and Asia but what really gets to see across the globe and a lot going on. I've had the pleasure of watching Nutanix since the early days, been to most of the events and the portfolio is quite a bit bigger than just the original HCI solution. Thomas since you've got to portfolio management is under your purview, before we get into summarizing all of the new pieces and the expansion of the cloud and software and everything just give us if you could that overview of the portfolio as it's coming into the show. >> Yeah absolutely Stu. I mean as you said we've been doing this now for 10 plus years and we've grown the portfolio we developed products over the years and so what we rolled out at this conference is a new way and to talk about what we do at Nutanix and what we deliver in terms of set of offerings and we talk about the 4 D's. We start with our digital hyper converged infrastructure cartridges, dual core HCI stack that you can run on any server and that stack these two boards are data center services which combines our storage solutions, our business computing and data recovery solution and security solutions on DevOps services, which is our database automation services, our application delivery automation services and now our new common and that's one of the service offerings and then our desktop services catridges which is our core VDI offering and offering our discipline and service offerings. So put all these together this is what we talk about in the 4 D's, which is on Nutanix cloud platform that you can run on premises and now on any job. >> Well thank you Thomas for laying the ground work for us, Greg we're going to come to you first that run better theme as Thomas said and as we know HCI is at the core a lot of discussions this year of course, the ripple effect of the global pandemic has more people working remotely that's been a tailwind for many of the core offerings, but help us understand, how's that building out some of the new things that we should look at in the HCI. >> Yeah ,thanks too for Nutanix and our customers a lot of it begins with HCI, right. And what we've seen in the past year is really aggressive adoption for HCI, particularly in core data center and private cloud operations and customers are moving to HCI in our not only for greater simplicity, but to get faster provisioning and scaling. And I think from a workload perspective, we see two things, that ACI is being called upon to deliver even more demanding apps those with a really very low latency such as large scale database deployments. And we also see that HCI is expected to improve the economics of IT and the data center and specifically by increasing workload density. So we have a long history, a storied history of continually improving HCI performance. In fact every significant software release we've optimized the core data path and we've done it again. We've done it again with our latest HCI software release that we announced just this week as our next. The first enhancement we made was in 518, was to reduce the CPU overhead and latency for accessing storage devices such as SSD and NBME and we've done this by managing storage space on physical devices in the HCI software. So rather than rely on slower internal file systems and this new technology is called block store and our customers can take advantage of block store simply by upgrading to the new software released and we're seeing immediate performance gains of 20 to 25% for IOPS and latency. And then we built on top of that, we've added software support for Intel Optane by leveraging user space library, specifically SPDK or storage performance development kit. And SPDK allows Nutanix to access devices from user space and avoid expensive interrupts and systems calls. So with this support along with block store we're seeing application performance gains about this 56% or more. So we're just building our own a legacy of pushing performance and software and that's the real benefit of moving to HCI. >> And just to add to that too when it comes to run better I think one of the things that we think of running better is automation and operation then when it comes to automation and operation there are a couple of ways I would say significant announcements that we also did to. One is around Comm as a service. Comm is one of those products that our customers absolutely love and now with Comm as a service you have a SaaS plane, so you can just without installing anything or configuring anything you could just take advantage of that. And the other thing we also announced is something called Nutanix central and Nutanix central gives you the way to manage all your applications on Nutanix across all of your different clusters and infrastructure from a single place as well. So two big parts of a run better as well. >> Well, that's great and I've really, is that foundational layer, Madhukar if we talk about expanding out, running faster the other piece we've talked about for a few years is step one is you modernize the platform and then step two is really you have to modernize your application. So maybe help us understand that changing workload cloud native is that discussion that we've been having a few years now, what are you hearing from your customers and what new pieces do you have to expand and enable that piece of the overall stack? >> Yeah, so I think what you mentioned which is around cloud data the big piece over there is around Cybernetics's and they already had a carbon, so with carbon a lot of the things of complexities around managing cybernetics is all taken care of, but there are higher level aspects on it like you have to have observability, you have to have log, you have to have managed the ingress ,outgress which has a lot of complexity involved with, so if you're really just looking for building of applications what we found is that a lot of our customers are looking for a way to be able to manage that on their own. So what we announced which is carbon platform service enables you to do exactly that. So if you're really concerned about creating cloud native applications without really worrying too much about how do I configure the cybernetics clusters? How do I manage Histio? How do I manage all of that carbon platform service that actually encapsulates all of that to a sass plate So you can go in and create your cloud native application as quickly and as fast as possible, but just in a typical Nutanix style we wanted to give that freedom of choice to our customers as well. So if you do end up utilizing this what you can also choose is the end point where you want these application to run and you could choose any of the public clouds or the hyper scaler or you could use a Nutanix or an IOT as an endpoint as well. So that was one of the big announcements we've made. >> Great, Greg and Madhukar before we go on, it's one of the things that I think is a thread throughout but maybe doesn't get highlighted as much but security of course is been front and center for a while, but here in 2020 is even more emphasized things like ransomware, of course even more so today than it has been for a couple of years. So maybe could it just address where we are with security and any new pieces along there that we should understand? >> Yeah, I can start with that if I could. So we've long had security in our platform specifically micro-segmentation, fire walling individual workloads to provide least privilege access and what we've announced this week at .Next is we've extended that capability, specifically we've leveraged some of the capabilities in Xi beam and this is our SAS based service to really build a single dashboard for security operators. So with security central, again a cloud based SAS app, Nutanix customers can get a single pane from which they can monitor the entire security posture of their infrastructure and applications, it gives you asset reporting, asset inventory reporting, you can get automated compliance checks or HIPAA or PCI and others. So we've made security really easy in keeping with the Nutanix theme and it's a security central is a great tool for that security operations team so it's a big step for Nutanix and security. >> Yeah. >> To actually add on this one, one bit piece of security central is to make it easier, right. To see your various network bills and leverage the flow micro segmentation services and configure them on your different virtual machines, right? So it's really a key enabler here to kind of get a sense of what's going on in your environment and best configure and best protect and secure infrastructure. >> Thomas is exactly right. In fact, one of the things I wanted to chime into and maybe Greg you could speak a little bit more about it. One of my favorite announcements that we heard or at least I heard was the virtualized networking and coming from a cloud native world, I think that's a big deal. The ability to go create your virtual private cloud or VPCs and subnets and then be able to do it across multiple clouds. That's, something I think has been long time coming, so I was personally very, very pleased to hear that as well. Greg, do you want to add a little bit more? >> Yeah, that's a good point I'm glad you brought that up, when we talk about micro-segmentation that's one form of isolation, but what we've announced is virtual networking. So we really adopted some cloud principles, specifically virtual private clouds constructs that we can now bring into private cloud data centers. So this gives our customers the ability to define and deploy virtual networks or overlays this sort of sit on top of broadcast domains and VLANs and it provides isolation for different environments. So a number of great use cases, we see HCI specifically being relied upon for fast provisioning in a new environment. But today the network has always been sort of an impediment to that we're sort of stuck with physical network plants, switches and routers. So what virtual networking allows us to do is through APIs, is to create an isolated network a virtual private cloud on a self service basis. This is great for organizations that increasing operating as service providers and they need that tenant level segmentation. It's also good for developers who need isolated workspace and they want to spin it up quickly. So we see a lot of great use cases for virtual networks and it just sort of adds to our full stack so we've software defined compute, we've software defined storage, now we're completing that with software defining networking. >> And if I have it right in my notes the virtual networking that's in preview today correct? >> Yes, we announce it this week and we are announcing upcoming availability, so we have number of customers who are already working with us to help define it and ready to put it into their environments. The virtual private network is upcoming from Nutanix. >> Yeah, so I absolutely I've got, Mudhakar, I've got a special place in my heart for the networking piece that's where a lot of my background is, but there was a different announcement that got a little bit more of my attention and Thomas we're going to turn to you to talk a little bit more about clusters. I got to speak with Monica and Tarkin, ahead of the conference when you had the announcement with AWS, for releasing Nutanix clusters and this is something we've been watching for a bit, when you talk about the multicloud messaging and how you're taking the Nutanix software and extending it even further that run anywhere that you have talk about in the conference. So Thomas if you could just walk us through the announcements as I said something we've been excited, I've been watching this closely for the last couple of years with Nutanix and great to see some of the pieces really starting to accelerate. >> Well absolutely and as you said this is something that's been core to the strategy in terms of getting and enabling customers to go and do more with hybrid cloud and public cloud and if you go back a few weeks when we announced clusters on AWS this was a few weeks back now, we talked of HCI is a prerequisite to getting the most of your hybrid cloud infrastructure, which is the new HCI in our mind and what we covered at .Next was this great announcement with Microsoft Azure, right, and just leveraging their technologies bringing some of their control plan onto our cloud platform but also now adding clusters on Azure and announcing that we'll be doing this in a few months. Enabling the customers to go and take the same internet cloud platform the same consistent set of operations and technology services from data center services, DevOps services and desktop services and deploying those anywhere on premises, on AWS or on Microsoft Azure and again for us cloud is not a destination. This is not a now we just accomplished something. This is a new way of operating, right? And so it's touching, giving customers options in terms of where they want to go to count so we keep on adding new counts as we go but also it's a new form of consuming infrastructure, right? From an economist perspective you probably know, you don't extend it you're pressing into the moving to is fiction based offering on all of our solutions and our entire portfolio and as we go and enable these clusters offering, we're not making consumptions more granular to non customers do not consume our software on an hourly basis or a monthly basis. So again this is kind of that next step of cloud is not just technology, it's not a destination it's a new way of operating and consuming technology. >> Why think about the flexibility that this brings to existing new techs customers it gives them enormous choices in terms of new infrastructure and whether they set up new clusters. So think about in text a customer today. They may have data centers throughout the US or in Europe and in Asia Pacific, but now they have a choice rather than employ their Nutanix environment, in an existing data center or Colo, they can put it into AWS and they can manage it exactly the same. So it just provides near infinite choice for our customers of how they deploy HCI and our full software stack. In addition to the consumption that Thomas talked about, consumption choices. >> Yeah, just to add to that again I should have said this is also one of my favorite announcements as well, yesterday. We Greg, myself, Thomas, we were talking to some industry analysts and they were talking about, Hey, you know how there is a need for pods where you have compute, you have network and you have storage altogether, and now people want to run it across multiple different destination but they have to have the freedom of choice. Today using one different kind of hardware tomorrow you want to use something else. They should be portability for that, so with clusters, I think what we have been able to do is to take that concept and apply it across public cloud. So the same whether you want to call it a pod or whatever but compute, storage, networking. Now you have the freedom of choice of choosing a public cloud as an end point where you want to run it. So absolutely one of those I would say game-changing announcements that we have made more recently. >> Yeah-- >> To close that loop actually and talk about portability as enabling quality of occupations. But also one thing that's really unique in terms of how we're delivering this to customers is probability of licenses. The fact that you have a subscription term license for on premises you can very easily now repay the license if you decide to move a workload and move a cluster from one premises to your count of choice, that distance is also affordable. But so again, full flexibility for these customers, freedom of choice from a technology perspective but also a business perspective. >> Well, one of the things I think that really brings home how real this solution is, it's not just about location, Thomas as you said, it's not about a destination, but it's about what you can do with those workloads. So one of the use cases I saw during the conference was talking about a very long partner of a Nutanix Citrix and how that plays out in this clusters type of environment so maybe if you could just illustrate that as one of those proof points is how customers can leverage the variety of choice. >> Yeah, we're very excited about this one, right? Because given what we're currently going through as a humanity right now, across the world with COVID situation, and the fact that we all have now to start looking at working from home, enabling scaling of existing infrastructure and doing it without having to go and rethink your design enabling this clusters in our Citrix solution is just paramount. Because what it will ask you to do is if you say you started and you had an existing VDI solution on premises using Citrix, extending that now and you putting new capacity in every location where you can go and spin this up in any AWS region or Azure region, no one has to go and the same images, the same processes, the same operations of your original desktop infrastructure would apply regardless of where you're moving now your workforce to work remotely. And this is again it's about making this very easy and keeping that consistency operations, from managing the desktops to managing that core infrastructure that is now enabled by using different clusters on Azure or AWS. >> Well, Thomas back in a previous answer, I thought you were teeing something up when you said we will be entering a new era. So when you talk about workloads that are going to the cloud, you talk about modernization probably the hottest area that we have conversations with practitioners on is what's happening in the database world. Of course, there's migrations, there's lots of new databases on there, and Nutanix era is helping in that piece. So maybe if we could as kind of a final workload talk about how that's expanding and what updates you have for the database. >> Absolutely and so I mean Eras is one of our key offerings when it comes to a database automation and really enabling teams to start delivering database as a service to their own and users. We just announced Era 2.0 which is now taking Era to a whole other level, allowing you to go and manage your devices on cross clusters. And this is very topical in this current use case, because we're talking of now I can use era to go in as your database that might be running on premises for production and using Era to spin up clones for test drive for any team anywhere potentially in cloud then using clusters on the all kind of environments. So those use cases of being which more leverage the power of the core is same structure of Nutanix for storage management for efficiency but also performance and scaling doing that on premises and in unique cloud region that you may want to leverage, using Era for all the automation and ensuring that you keep on with your best practices in terms of deploying and hacking your databases is really critical. So Era 2.0 great use cases here to go and just streamline how you onboard databases on top of HCI whether you're doing HCI on premises or HCI in public town, and getting automation of those operations at any scale. >> Yeah, hey Tom has mentioned a performance and Era has been a great extension to the portfolio sitting on top of our HCI. As you know Stu database has long been a popular workload to run it all HCI, particularly Nutanix and it extends from scalability performance. A lot of I talked about earlier in terms of providing that really low latency to support the I-Ops, to support the transactions per second, that are needed these very demanding databases. Our customers have had great success running SAP, HANA, Oracle SQL server. So I think it's a combination of Era and what we're doing as Thomas described as well as just getting a rock solid foundational HCI platform to run it on and so that's what we're very excited about to go forward in the database world. >> Wonderful, well look, we covered a lot of ground here. I know we probably didn't hit everything there but it's been amazing to watch Nutanix really going from simplicity at its core and software driving it to now that really spiders out and touches a lot of pieces. So I'll give you each just kind of final word as you having conversations with your customers, how do they think of Nutanix today and expect that we have a little bit of diversity and the answers but it's one of those questions I think the last couple of years you've asked when people register for .Next. So it's, I'm curious to hear what you think on that. Maybe Greg if we start with you and kind of go down the line. >> Yeah, for me what sums it up is Nutanix makes IT simple, It makes IT invisible and it allows professionals to move away from the care and feeding structure and really spend more time with the applications and services that power their business. >> And I agree with Greg I think the two things that always come up, one is the freedom of choice, the ability for our customers to be able to do so many different things, have so many more choices and we continue to do that every time we add something new or we announce something new and then just to add onto what Greg said is to try and make the complexities invisible, so if there are multiple layers, abstract them out so that our customers are really focused on doing things that really matter versus trying to manage all the other underlying layers, which adds more complexity. >> Yeah You could just kind of send me to it up right. In the end, internet is becoming much more than HCI, as hyper converged infrastructure this is not taking it to another level with the hybrid cloud infrastructure and when you look at what's been built over the last few years from the portfolio points that we now have, I think it was just growing recognition that internet actually delivers this cloud platform that you can all average to go and get to a consistency of services, operations and business operations in any location, on premises through our network constant providers through our Nutanix cloud offerings and hyper scaler with Nutanix clusters. So I think things are really changing, the company is getting to a whole other level and I couldn't be more excited about what's coming out now the next few years as we keep on building and scaling our cloud platform. >> And I'll just add my perspective as a long time watcher of Nutanix. For so long IT was the organization where you typically got an answer of no, or they were very slow to be able to react on it. It was actually a quote from Alan Cohen at the first .Next down in Miami he said, "we take need to take those nos "and those slows and get them to say go." So the ultimate, what we need is of course reacting to the business, taking those people, eliminating some of the things that were burdensome or took up too much time and you're freeing them up to be able to really create value for the business. Want to thank Greg, Madhukar, Thomas, thank you so much for helping us wrap up, theCUBE is always thrilled to be able to participate in .Next great community customers really engaged and great to talk with all three of you. >> Thank you. >> Alright so that's a rack for theCUBES coverage of the Nutanix Global.Next digital experience. Go to thecube.com. thecube.net is the website where you can go see all of the previous interviews we've done with the executives, the partners, the customers. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE.