(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about the massive $61 billion planned acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And I'm here with Phil Brotherton of NetApp to discuss the implications for customers, for the industry, and NetApp's particular point of view. Phil, welcome. Good to see you again. >> It's great to see you, Dave. >> So this topic has garnered a lot of conversation. What's your take on this epic event? What does it mean for the industry generally, and customers specifically? >> You know, I think time will tell a little bit, Dave. We're in the early days. We've, you know, so we heard the original announcements and then it's evolved a little bit, as we're going now. I think overall it'll be good for the ecosystem in the end. There's a lot you can do when you start combining what VMware can do with compute and some of the hardware assets of Broadcom. There's a lot of security things that can be brought, for example, to the infrastructure, that are very high-end and cool, and then integrated, so it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of upside for it. There's obviously a lot of concern about what it means for vendor consolidation and pricing and things like that. So time will tell. >> You know, when this announcement first came out, I wrote a piece, you know, how "Broadcom will tame the VMware beast," I called it. And, you know, looked at Broadcom's history and said they're going to cut, they're going to raise prices, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen a different tone, certainly, as Broadcom has got into the details. And I'm sure I and others maybe scared a lot of customers, but I think everybody's kind of calming down now. What are you hearing from customers about this acquisition? How are they thinking about it? >> You know, I think it varies. There's, I'd say generally we have like half our installed base, Dave, runs ESX Server, so the bulk of our customers use VMware, and generally they love VMware. And I'm talking mainly on-prem. We're just extending to the cloud now, really, at scale. And there's a lot of interest in continuing to do that, and that's really strong. The piece that's careful is this vendor, the cost issues that have come up. The things that were in your piece, actually. And what does that mean to me, and how do I balance that out? Those are the questions people are dealing with right now. >> Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of talk about the macro, the macro headwinds. Everybody's being a little cautious. The CIOs are tapping the brakes. We all sort of know that story. But we have some data from our partner ETR that ask, they go out every quarter and they survey, you know, 1500 or so IT practitioners, and they ask the ones that are planning to spend less, that are cutting, "How are you going to approach that? What's your primary methodology in terms of achieving, you know, cost optimization?" The number one, by far, answer was to consolidate redundant vendors. It was like, it's now up to about 40%. The second, distant second, was, "We're going to, you know, optimize cloud costs." You know, still significant, but it was really that consolidating the redundant vendors. Do you see that? How does NetApp fit into that? >> Yeah, that is an interesting, that's a very interesting bit of research, Dave. I think it's very right. One thing I would say is, because I've been in the infrastructure business in Silicon Valley now for 30 years. So these ups and downs are, that's a consistent thing in our industry, and I always think people should think of their infrastructure and cost management. That's always an issue, with infrastructure as cost management. What I've told customers forever is that when you look at cost management, our best customers at cost management are typically service providers. There's another aspect to cost management, is you want to automate as much as possible. And automation goes along with vendor consolidation, because how you automate different products, you don't want to have too many vendors in your layers. And what I mean by the layers of ecosystem, there's a storage layer, the network layer, the compute layer, like, the security layer, database layer, et cetera. When you think like that, everybody should pick their partners very carefully, per layer. And one last thought on this is, it's not like people are dumb, and not trying to do this. It's, when you look at what happens in the real world, acquisitions happen, things change as you go. And in these big customers, that's just normal, that things change. But you always have to have this push towards consolidating and picking your vendors very carefully. >> Also, just to follow up on that, I mean, you know, when you think about multi-cloud, and you mentioned, you know, you've got some big customers, they do a lot of M & A, it's kind of been multi-cloud by accident. "Oh, we got all these other tools and storage platforms and whatever it is." So where does NetApp fit in that whole consolidation equation? I'm thinking about, you know, cross-cloud services, which is a big VMware theme, thinking about a consistent experience, on-prem, hybrid, across the three big clouds, out to the edge. Where do you fit? >> So our view has been, and it was this view, and we extend it to the cloud, is that the data layer, so in our software, is called ONTAP, the data layer is a really important layer that provides a lot of efficiency. It only gets bigger, how you do compliance, how you do backup, DR, blah blah blah. All that data layer services needs to operate on-prem and on the clouds. So when you look at what we've done over the years, we've extended to all the clouds, our data layer. We've put controls, management tools, over the top, so that you can manage the entire data layer, on-prem and cloud, as one layer. And we're continuing to head down that path, 'cause we think that data layer is obviously the path to maximum ability to do compliance, maximum cost advantages, et cetera. So we've really been the company that set our sights on managing the data layer. Now, if you look at VMware, go up into the network layer, the compute layer, VMware is a great partner, and that's why we work with them so closely, is they're so perfect a fit for us, and they've been a great partner for 20 years for us, connecting those infrastructural data layers: compute, network, and storage. >> Well, just to stay on that for a second. I've seen recently, you kind of doubled down on your VMware alliance. You've got stuff at re:Invent I saw, with AWS, you're close to Azure, and I'm really talking about ONTAP, which is sort of an extension of what you were just talking about, Phil, which is, you know, it's kind of NetApp's storage operating system, if you will. It's a world class. But so, maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, and how you see it evolving. >> Well, so what we've been seeing consistently is, customers want to use the advantages of the cloud. So, point one. And when you have to completely refactor apps and all this stuff, it limits, it's friction. It limits what you can do, it raises costs. And what we did with VMware, VMware is this great platform for being able to run basically client-server apps on-prem and cloud, the exact same way. The problem is, when you have large data sets in the VMs, there's some cost issues and things, especially on the cloud. That drove us to work together, and do what we did. We GA-ed, we're the, so NetApp is the only independent storage, independent storage, say this right, independent storage platform certified to run with VMware cloud on Amazon. We GA-ed that last summer. We GA-ed with Azure, the Azure VMware service, a couple months ago. And you'll see news coming with GCP soon. And so the idea was, make it easy for customers to basically run in a hybrid model. And then if you back out and go, "What does that mean for you as a customer?", it's not saying you should go to the cloud, necessarily, or stay on-prem, or whatever. But it's giving you the flexibility to cost-optimize where you want to be. And from a data management point of view, ONTAP gives you the consistent data management, whichever way you decide to go. >> Yeah, so I've been following NetApp for decades, when you were Network Appliance, and I saw you go from kind of the workstation space into the enterprise. I saw you lean into virtualization really early on, and you've been a great VMware partner ever since. And you were early in cloud, so, sort of talking about, you know, that cross-cloud, what we call supercloud. I'm interested in what you're seeing in terms of specific actions that customers are taking. Like, I think about ELAs, and I think it's a two-edged sword. You know, should customers, you know, lean into ELAs right now? You know, what are you seeing there? You talked about, you know, sort of modernizing apps with things like Kubernetes, you know, cloud migration. What are some of the techniques that you're advising customers to take in the context of this acquisition? >> You know, so the basics of this are pretty easy. One is, and I think even Raghu, the CEO of VMware, has talked about this. Extending your ELA is probably a good idea. Like I said, customers love VMware, so having a commitment for a time, consistent cost management for a time is a good strategy. And I think that's why you're hearing ELA extensions being discussed. It's a good idea. The second part, and I think it goes to your surveys, that cost optimization point on the cloud is, moving to the cloud has huge advantages, but if you just kind of lift and shift, oftentimes the costs aren't realized the way you'd want. And the term "modernization," changing your app to use more Kubernetes, more cloud-native services, is often a consideration that goes into that. But that requires time. And you know, most companies have hundreds of apps, or thousands of apps, they have to consider modernizing. So you want to then think through the journey, what apps are going to move, what gets modernized, what gets lifted-shifted, how many data centers are you compressing? There's a lot of data center, the term I've been hearing is "data center evacuations," but data center consolidation. So that there's some even energy savings advantages sometimes with that. But the whole point, I mean, back up to my whole point, the whole point is having the infrastructure that gives you the flexibility to make the journey on your cost advantages and your business requirements. Not being forced to it. Like, it's not really a philosophy, it's more of a business optimization strategy. >> When you think about application modernization and Kubernetes, how does NetApp, you know, fit into that, as a data layer? >> Well, so if you kind of think, you said, like our journey, Dave, was, when we started our life, we were doing basically virtualization of volumes and things for technical customers. And the servers were always bare metal servers that we got involved with back then. This is, like, going back 20 years. Then everyone moved to VMs, and, like, it's probably, today, I mean, getting to your question in a second, but today, loosely, 20% bare metal servers, 80% virtual machines today. And containers is growing, now a big growing piece. So, if you will, sort of another level of virtual machines in containers. And containers were historically stateless, meaning the storage didn't have anything to do. Storage is always the stateful area in the architectures. But as containers are getting used more, stateful containers have become a big deal. So we've put a lot of emphasis into a product line we call Astra that is the world's best data management for containers. And that's both a cloud service and used on-prem in a lot of my customers. It's a big growth area. So that's what, when I say, like, one partner that can do data management, just, that's what we have to do. We have to keep moving with our customers to the type of data they want to store, and how do you store it most efficiently? Hey, one last thought on this is, where I really see this happening, there's a booming business right now in artificial intelligence, and we call it modern data analytics, but people combining big data lakes with AI, and that's where some of this, a lot of the container work comes in. We've extended objects, we have a thing we call file-object duality, to make it easy to bridge the old world of files to the new world of objects. Those all go hand in hand with app modernization. >> Yeah, it's a great thing about this industry. It never sits still. And you're right, it's- >> It's why I'm in it. >> Me too. Yeah, it's so much fun. There's always something. >> It is an abstraction layer. There's always going to be another abstraction layer. Serverless is another example. It's, you know, primarily stateless, that's probably going to, you know, change over time. All right, last question. In thinking about this Broadcom acquisition of VMware, in the macro climate, put a sort of bow on where NetApp fits into this equation. What's the value you bring in this context? >> Oh yeah, well it's like I said earlier, I think it's the data layer of, it's being the data layer that gives you what you guys call the supercloud, that gives you the ability to choose which cloud. Another thing, all customers are running at least two clouds, and you want to be able to pick and choose, and do it your way. So being the data layer, VMware is going to be in our infrastructures for at least as long as I'm in the computer business, Dave. I'm getting a little old. So maybe, you know, but "decades" I think is an easy prediction, and we plan to work with VMware very closely, along with our customers, as they extend from on-prem to hybrid cloud operations. That's where I think this will go. >> Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. Look at the business case for migrating off of VMware. It just doesn't make sense. It works, it's world class, it recover... They've done so much amazing, you know, they used to be called, Moritz called it the software mainframe, right? And that's kind of what it is. I mean, it means it doesn't go down, right? And it supports virtually any application, you know, around the world, so. >> And I think getting back to your original point about your article, from the very beginning, is, I think Broadcom's really getting a sense of what they've bought, and it's going to be, hopefully, I think it'll be really a fun, another fun era in our business. >> Well, and you can drive EBIT a couple of ways. You can cut, okay, fine. And I'm sure there's some redundancies that they'll find. But there's also, you can drive top-line revenue. And you know, we've seen how, you know, EMC and then Dell used that growth from VMware to throw off free cash flow, and it was just, you know, funded so much, you know, innovation. So innovation is the key. Hock Tan has talked about that a lot. I think there's a perception that Broadcom, you know, doesn't invest in R & D. That's not true. I think they just get very focused with that investment. So, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's fun being here. >> Yeah, our pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back to The Cube's Thrilling live coverage of AWS Reinvent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm joined by my fantastic co-host, John Farer. John, things are really ramping up in here. Day one. >>Yep, it's packed already. I heard 70,000 maybe attendees really this year. I just saw that on Twitter. Again, it continues to show that over the past 10 years we've been here, you're seeing some of the players that were here from the beginning growing up and getting bigger and stronger, becoming more platforms, not just point solutions. You're seeing new entrants coming in, new startups, and the innovation you start to see happening, it's really compelling to fun to watch. And our next segment, we have multi 10 time Cube alumni coming on and a first timer, so it should be great. We'll get into some of the innovation, >>Not only as this guest went on the cube 10 times, he also spoke at the first AWS reinvent, just like you were covering it here with Cube. But without further ado, please welcome Ronan and Kevin from NetApp. Thank you gentlemen, both for being here and for matching in your dark blue. How's the show going for you? Ronan, I'm gonna ask you first, you've been here since the beginning. How does it feel in 2022? >>First, it's amazing to see so many people, right? So many humans in one place, flesh and blood. And it's also amazing to see, it's such a celebration for people in the cloud, right? Like this is our, this is our event, the people in the cloud. I'm really, really happy to be here and be in the cube as well. >>Fantastic. It, it is a party, it's a cloud party. Yes. How are you feeling being here, Kevin? I'm >>Feeling great. I mean, going all the way back to the early days of Spot T, which was the start that eventually got acquired as Spot by NetApp. I mean this was, this was our big event. This is what we lived for. We've gone, I've gone from everything, one of the smaller booths out here on the floor all the way up to the, the huge booth that we have today. So we've kind of grown along with the AWS ecosystem and it's just a lot of fun to get here, see all the customers and talk to everybody. >>That's a lot of fun. Fun. That's the theme that we've been talking about. And we wrote a story about on, on Silicon Angle, more that growth from that getting in and getting bigger, not just an ISV or part of the startup showcase or ecosystem. The progression of the investment on how cloud has changed deliverables. You've been part of that wave. What's the biggest walk away, what's, and what's the most important thing going on now cuz it's not stopping. You got new interests coming in and the folks are rising with the tide and getting platforms built around their products. >>Yeah, I would say, you know, years ago is, is cloud in my decision path and now it's cloud is in my decision path. How much is it and how am I going to use it? And I think especially coming up over the next year, macroeconomic events and everything going on is how do I make my next dollar in the cloud go further than my last dollar? Because I know I'm gonna be there, I know I'm gonna be growing in the cloud, so how do I effectively use it to run my business going forward? >>All right, take a minute to explain Spot now part of NetApp. What's the story? What take us through for the folks that aren't familiar with the journey, where it's come from, where it's today? >>Sure. So SPOT is all about cloud optimization. We help all of our customers deploy scale and optimize their applications in the cloud. And what we do is everything from VMs to containers to any type of custom application you want to deploy, we analyze those applications, we find the best price point to run them, we right size them, we do the automation so your DevOps team doesn't have to do it. And we basically make the whole cloud serverless for you at the end of the day. So whatever you're doing in the cloud, we'll manage that for you from the lowest level of the stack all the way up to the highest level financials. >>Is this what you call the evolved cloud state? >>It is in the evolve clouds a little bit more, and Ronan can touch on that a little bit too. The Evolve clouds not only the public cloud but also the cloud that you're building OnPrem, right? A lot of big companies, it's not necessarily a hundred percent one way or the other. The Evolve cloud is which cloud am I on? Am I on an OnPrem cloud and a public cloud or am I on multiple public clouds in an OnPrem cloud? And I think Ronan, you probably have an opinion on that too. >>Yeah, and and I think what we are hearing from our customers is that many of them are in a situation where a lot of their data has been built for years on premises. They're accelerating their move to the cloud, some of them are accelerating, they're moving into multiple cloud and that situation of an on-prem that is becoming cloudy and cloudy all the time. And then accelerated cloud adoption. This is what the customers are calling the Evolve cloud and that's what we're trying to support them in that journey. >>How many customers are you supporting in this Evolve cloud? You made it seem like you can just turnkey this for everyone, which I am here >>For it. Yeah, just to be clear, I mean we have thousands of customers, right? Everything from your small startups, people just getting going with a few VMs all the way to people scaling to tens and thousands of VMs in the cloud or even beyond VM services and you know, tens of millions of spend a month. You know, people are putting a lot of investment into the cloud and we have all walks of life under our, you know, customer portfolio. >>You know, multi-cloud has been a big topic in the industry. We call it super cloud. Cause we think super cloud kind of more represents the destination to multi-cloud. I mean everyone has multiple clouds, but they're best of breed defaults. They're not by design in most cases, but we're starting to see traction towards that potential common level services fix to late. See, I still think we're on the performance game now, so I have to ask, ask you guys. Performance has becoming back in VO speeds and feeds back during the data center days. Well, I wouldn't wanna talk speeds and feeds of solutions and then cloud comes in. Now we're at the era of cloud where people are moving their workloads there. There's a lot more automation going on, A lot more, as you said, part of the decision. It is the path. Yeah. So they say, now I wanna run my workloads on the better, faster infrastructure. No developer wants to run their apps on the slower hardware. >>I think that's a tall up for you. Ronan go. >>I mean, I put out my story, no developer ever said, give me the slower software performance and and pay more fast, >>Fastest find too fastest. >>Speed feeds your back, >>Right? And and performance comes in different, in different parameters, right? They think it is come throughput, it comes through latency. And I think even a stronger word today is price performance, right? How much am I paying for the performance that that I need? NetApp is actually offering a very, very big advantage for customers on both the high end performance as well as in the dollar per performance. That is, that is needed. This is actually one of the key differentiator that Fsx for NetApp on top is an AWS storage based on the NetApp on top storage operating system. This is one of the biggest advantages it is offering. It is SAP certified, for example, where latency is the key, is the key item. It is offering new and fastest throughput available, but also leveraging some advanced features like tiering and so on, is offering unique competitive advantage in the dollar for performance specifically. >>And why, why is performance important now, in your opinion? Obviously besides the obvious of no one wants to run their stuff on the slower infrastructure, but why are some people so into it now? >>I think performance as a single parameter is, is definitely a key influencer of the user experience. None, none of us will, will compromise our our experience. The second part is performance is critical when scale is happening, right? And especially with the scale of data performance to handle massive amounts of data is is becoming more and more critical. The last thing that I'll emphasize is again is the dollar for performance. The more data you have, the more you need to handle, the more critical for you is to handle it in a cost effective way. This is kind of, that's kind of in the, in the, in the secret sauce of the success of every workload. >>There isn't a company or person here who's not thinking about doing more faster for cheaper. So you're certainly got your finger on the pulse With that, I wanna talk about a, a customer case study. A little birdie told me that a major US airline recently just had a mass of when we're where according to my notes response time and customer experience was improved by 17 x. Now that's the type of thing that cuts cost big time. Can one of you tell me a little bit more about that? >>Yeah, so I think we all flew here somehow, right? >>Exactly. It's airlines matter. Probably most folks listening, they're >>Doing very well right now. Yes, the >>Airlines and I think we all also needed to deal with changes in the flights with, with really enormous amount of complexity in managing a business like that. We actually rank and choose what, what airline to use among other things based on the level of service that they give us. And especially at the time of crunch, a lot of users are looking through a lot of data to try to optimize, >>Plus all of them who just work this holiday weekend sidebar >>E Exactly right. Can't even, and Thanksgiving is one of these crunch times that are in the middle of this. So 70 x improvement in performance means a loss seven >>Zero or >>17 1 7 1 7 x Right? >>Well, and especially when we're talking about it looks like 50,000, 50,000 messages per minute that this customer was processing. Yes. That that's a lot. That's almost a thousand messages a second. Wow. I think my math tees up there. Yeah. >>It does allow them to operate in the next level of scale and really increase their support for the customer. It also allows them to be more efficient when it comes to cost. Now they need less infrastructure to give better service across the board. The nice thing is that it didn't require them for a lot of work. Sometimes when the customers are doing their journey to the cloud, one of the things that kind of hold them back is like, is either the fear or, or maybe is the, the concern of how much effort will it take me to achieve the same performance or even a better performance in the cloud? They are a live example that not only can you achieve, you can actually exceed the performance that I have on premises and really give customer a better service >>Customer a better service. And reliability is extremely important there. 99.9%. 99% >>99. Yes. >>Yes. That second nine obviously being very important, especially when we're talking about the order of magnitude of, of data and, and actions being taken place. How much of a priority is, is reliability and security for y'all as a team? >>So reliability is a key item for, for everybody, especially in crunch times. But reliability goes beyond the nines. Specifically reliability goes into how simple it is for you to enable backup n dr, how protected are you against ransomware? This is where netup and, and including the fsx for NETUP on top richness of data management makes a huge difference. If you are able to make your copy undeletable, that is actually a game changer when it comes to, to data protection. And this is, this is something that in the past requires a lot of work, opening vaults and other things. Yeah. Now it becomes a very simple configuration that is attached to every net up on top storage, no matter where it is. >>We heard some news at VMware explorer this past fall. Early fall. You guys were there. We saw the Broadcom acquisition. Looks like it's gonna get finalized maybe sooner than later. Lot of, so a lot of speculation around VMware. Someone called the VMware like where is VMware as in where they now, nice pun it was, it was actually Nutanix people, they go at each other all the time. But Broadcom's gonna keep vse and that's where the bread and butter, that's the, that's the goose that lays the Golden eggs. Customers are there. How do you guys see your piece there with VMware cloud on AWS that integrates solution? You guys have a big part of that ecosystem. We've covered it for years. I mean we've been to every VM world now called explorer. You guys have a huge customer base with VMware customers. What's the, what's the outlook? >>Yeah, and, and I think the important part is that a big part of the enterprise workloads are running on VMware and they will continue to run on VMware in, in, in the future. And most of them will try to run in a hybrid mode if not moving completely to the cloud. The cloud give them unparallel scale, it give them DR and backup opportunities. It does a lot of goodness to that. The partnership that NetApp brings with both VMware as well ass as well as other cloud vendors is actually a game changer. Because the minute that you go to the cloud, things like DR and backup have a different economics connected to them. Suddenly you can do compute less dr definitely on backup you can actually achieve massive savings. NetApp is the only data store that is certified to run with VMware cloud. And that actually opens to the customer's huge opportunity for unparalleled data protection as well as real, real savings, hard savings. And customers that look today and they say, I'm gonna shrink my data center, I'm gonna focus on, on moving certain things to the cloud, DR and backup and especially DR and backup VMware might be one of the easiest, fastest things to take into the cloud. And the partnership betweens VMware and NetApp might actually give you >>And the ONAP is great solution. Fsx there? Yes. I think you guys got a real advantage here and I want to get into something that's kind of a gloom and doom. I don't have to go negative on this one, Savannah, but they me nervous John. But you know, if you look at the economic realities you got a lot of companies like that are in the back of a Druva, Netta, Druva, cohesive rub. Others, you know, they, you know, there's a, their generational cloud who breaks through. What's the unique thing? Because you know there's gonna be challenges in the economy and customers are gonna vote with their wallets and they start to see as they make these architectural decisions, you guys are in the middle of it. There's not, there may not be enough to go around and the musical chairs might stop or, or not, I'm not sure. But I feel like if there's gonna be a consolidation, what does that look like? What are customers thinking? Backup recovery, cloud. That's a unique thing. You mentioned economics, it's not, you can't take the old strategy and put it there from five, 10 years ago. What's different now? >>Yeah, I think when it comes to data protection, there is a real change in, in the technology landscape that opened the door for a lot of new vendors to come and offer. Should we expect consolidation? I think microeconomic outside and other things will probably drive some of that to happen. I think there is one more parameter, John, that I wanna mention in this context, which is simplicity. Many of the storage vendors, including us, including aws, you wanna make as much of the backup NDR at basically a simple checkbox that you choose together with your main workload. This is another key capabilities that is, that is being, bringing and changing the market, >>But it also needs to move up. So it's not only simplicity, it's also about moving to the applications that you use, use, and just having it baked in. It's not about you going out and finding a replication. It's like what Ronan said, we gotta make it simple and then we gotta bake it into what they use. So one of our most recent acquisitions of Insta Cluster allows us to provide our customers with open source databases and data streaming services. When those sit on top of on tap and they sit on top of spots, infrastructure optimization, you get all that for free through the database that you use. So you don't worry about it. Your database is replicated, it's highly available, and it's running at the best cost. That's where it's going. >>Awesome. >>You also recently purchased Cloud Checker as well. Yes. Do you just purchase wonderful things all the time? We >>Do. We do. We, >>I'm not >>The, if he walk and act around and then we find the best thing and then we, we break out the checkbook, no, but more seriously, it, it rounds out what customers need for the cloud. So a lot of our customers come from storage, but they need to operate the entire cloud around the storage that they have. Cloud Checker gives us that financial visibility across every single dollar that you spend in the cloud and also gives us a better go to market motion with our MSPs and our distributors than we had in the past. So we're really excited about what cloud checker can unlock for us in >>The future. Makes a lot of sense and congratulations on all the extremely exciting things going on. Our final and closing question for our guests on this year's show is we would love your, your Instagram hot take your 32nd hot take on the most important stories, messages, themes of AWS reinvent 2022. Ronan, I'm gonna start with you cause you have a smirk >>And you do it one day ahead of the keynotes, one day ahead with you. >>You can give us a little tease a little from you. >>I think that pandemic or no pandemic face to face or no face to face, the innovation in the cloud is, is actually breaking all records. And I think this year specifically, you will see a lot of focus on data and scale. I think that's, these are two amazing things that you'll see, I think doubling down. But I'm also anxious to see tomorrow, so I'll learn more about it. >>All right. We might have to chat with you a little bit after tomorrow. Is keynotes and whatnot coming up? What >>About you? I think you're gonna hear a lot about cost. How much are you spending? How far are your dollars going? How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities? How, how efficient are you being with your dollars in the cloud? I think that's gonna be a huge topic. It's on everybody's mind. It's the macro economics situation right now. I think it's gonna be in every session of the keynote tomorrow. All >>Right, so every >>Session. Every session, >>A bulk thing. John, we're gonna have >>That. >>I'm with him. You know, all S in general, you >>Guys have, and go look up what I said. >>Yeah, >>We'll go back and look at, >>I'm gonna check on you >>On that. The record now states. There you go, Kevin. Thank both. Put it down so much. We hope that it's a stellar show for Spotify, my NetApp. Thank you. And that we have you 10 more times and more than just this once and yeah, I, I can't wait to see, well, I can't wait to hear when your predictions are accurate tomorrow and we get to learn a lot more. >>No, you gotta go to all the sessions down just to check his >>Math on that. Yeah, no, exactly. Now we have to do our homework just to call him out. Not that we're competitive or those types of people at all. John. No. On that note, thank you both for being here with us. John, thank you so much. Thank you all for tuning in from home. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada here at AWS Reinvent with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John Forer host of the cube with Dave Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, two sets for three days. We're on three days, we're here breaking down all the action of what's going on around VMware is our 12th year covering VMware's user conference. Formerly known as world. Now explore as it explores new territory, its future multi-cloud vSphere eight and a variety of new next generation cloud. We're here on day three, breaking out. This is day three more, more intimate, much more deeper conversations. And we have coming back on the Q Keith Norby with NetApp, the worldwide product partner solutions executive at NetApp Keith. Great to see you industry to veteran cube alumni. Thanks for coming back. It's >>Good to see you >>Again. Yeah. I wanted to bring you back for a couple reasons. One is I want to talk about the NetApp story and also where that's going with DM VMware as that's evolving and, and is changing and, and with Broadcom and, and the new next generation, but also analyzing kind of the customer impact piece of it. You're like an analyst who've been in the industry for a long time. Been commentating on the cube. VMware's in an interesting spot right now because I, I mean, I love the story. I mean, we can debate the messaging. Some people are very critical of it a little bit too multicloud, not enough cloud native, but I see the waves, right? I get it. Virtualization kicked ass tech names. Now it moves to hybrid cloud. And now this next gen is a, you know, clear cloud native multi-cloud environment. I, I get that. I can see, I can, I can get there, but is it ready? And the timing. Right. And do they have all the peace parts? What's the role of the ecosystem? These are all open questions. >>Yeah. And, and the reality is no one has a single answer. And that's part of the fun of this, is that not just a NetApp, but the rest of the ecosystem and videos here, as an example, who, who is thinking, you know, the Kings of AI are gonna be sitting at a V VMware show and yet it's absolutely relevant. So you have a very complex set of things that emerge, but yet also it's, it's, that's not overcomplicated. There is a set of primary principles that, you know, organizations I think are all looking to get to. And I think the reality is that this is maturing in different spurts. So whether it's ecosystem or it's, you know, operations modes and several other factors that kind of come into it, you know, that's part of the landscape, >>You know, I gotta ask you, you know, you and I are both kind of historians. We always talk about what's happened and happening and gonna happen. You know, it's interesting 12 years covering world and now explore NetApp has always been such a great company. We've been, I've been following that company, you know, since, you know, 1997, you know, days. And, and certainly with the past decade of the cloud or so the moves you guys may have been really good, but NetApp's never really had the kind of positioning in the VMware story going back in the past 12 years. And this keynote, you guys were mentioned in the keynote. Yeah. Has there ever been a time where NetApp was actually mentioned in a keynote at world or now explore? >>Well, you know, when we started this relationship back when I was a partner, I really monetized and took advantage of some of the advantages that NetApp had with VMware back in the early days, we're talking to ESX three days and they were dominant to the point where the rest of, you know, the ecosystem was trying to catch up. And of course, you know, a lot of competition from there, but yeah, it, it, it was great seeing a day, one VMware keynote with NetApp mentioned in the same relevance as AWS and VMware, which is exactly where we've been. You know, one thing that NetApp has done really well is not just being AWS, but be in all the hyperscalers as first party services and having a, a portfolio of other ways that we deal with things like, you know, data governance and cloud data management and cloud cloud backup, and overall dealing with cyber resiliency and, and ransomware protection and list goes on and on. So we've done our job to really make ourself both relevant and easy for people to consume. And it was great to see VMware and AWS come together. And the funny part was that, you know, we had on, on the previous cube session, you have VMware and AWS in between NetApp, all talking about, we have this whole thing running at all three of our booths. And that's fantastic. You >>Know, I, I can say because I actually was there and documented it and actually wrote about it in the early 20 11, 20 12, the then CEO Georgian's and I had an interview. He actually was the first storage company to actually engage with AWS back then. Yeah. I mean, that's a long time ago. That's that's 10 years ago. And then everyone else kind of followed EMC kind of was deer in the headlights at that point. They were poo pooing, AWS. Oh yeah, no, it'll never work either of which will never work. It's just a, a fluke. Yeah. For developers. NetApp was on the Amazon web services partnership train for a long time. >>Yeah. It, it, it's really amazing how early we got on this thing, which you can see the reason why that matters now is because it's not only in first party service, but that's also very robust and scalable. And this is one of the reasons why we think this opens it up. And, you know, as much as you wanna talk about the technology capabilities in, in this offering, the funny part is, is the intro conversation is how much money you save. So it unlocks all the, the use cases that you weren't able to do before. And when you, when you look at use case after use case on these workloads, they were hell held back. The number one conversation we had at this show was partner after partner, organization, after organization that came into our booth and talked to us about, yeah, I've got a bunch of these scenarios that I've been holding back on because I heard whispers about this. Now we're gonna go in >>Unleash those. All right. So what are, what's the top stories for you guys now at NetApp? What's the update it's been a while, since we had a cube update with you guys, what are you guys showing of the show? What's your agenda? What are your talking points? What's the main story? >>Well, for us, it's, it's, it's, it's always, you know, a cloud and on-prem combination of priorities within our partner ecosystem. The way we kind of communicate that out is really through three lenses. You know, one is on the hybrid cloud opportunity, people taking data center and modernizing the data center with the apps and getting the cloud, just like we're delivering here at this VMware world show. Also the AI and modern data analytics opportunity, and then public cloud, because really in a lot of these situations at apps, you know, the, the buyer, the consumer, the people that are interested in transforming are looking at it from different lenses. And these all start with really the customer journeys, the data ops buyer is different than the data center ops buyer. And, and that's exactly who we target this in is, is NetApp. I think, focuses relentlessly on how we reach them. And by the way, not just on storage products, if you look at like our instant cluster acquisition and all these other things, we're trying to be as relevant, we, as we can in data management and you know, whether that's pipelining data management or storing data management, that's >>Where we're there. You know, I, I was talking with David Nicholson, cuz we have, you know, we joked together. I say the holy Trinity, he goes with the devil's triangle. I'm Catholic, gotta know what his, his denomination is, but storage, networking, and compute. Obviously the, the three majors, it never changes. And I think it was interesting now, and I wanna get your reaction to this and what NetApp's doing around it is that if look at the DevOps movement, it's clearly cloud native, but the it ops is not it anymore. It's basically security and data I'm I'm oversimplifying, but DevOps, the developers now do a lot of that. I call it work in, in the CSD pipeline, but the real challenge is data and ops. That's a storage conversation. Compute is beautiful. You got containers, Kubernetes, all kinds of stuff going on with compute, move, compute around, move the data to compute. But storage is where the action is for cyber and data ops. Yeah. And AI. So like storage is back. They never left, but it's, it's transformed to even be more important because the role of hyper-convergence shows that compute and storage go well together. What's your take on this and how is NetApp modernized to, to solve the data ops and take that to the next level and of obviously enable and, and enable in great security and or defense ability. >>Yeah. And that's why no one architecture is gonna solve every problem. That's why, when we look at the data ops buyer, there's adjacencies to the apps buyer, to the other cloud ops buyer. And there's also the fin ops buyer because all of 'em have to work together. What we're, what we're focusing on. Isn't just storing data. But it's also things around how you discover govern data. You know, how you protect data, even things like in the ed workspace, the chip manufacturers, how we use cloud bursting to be able to accelerate performance on chip design. So whether you're translating this for the industry vernacular about how we help say in the financial sector for AI and what we do within Invidia, or it's something translated to this VMware opportunity on AWS, you know, what we've put together is, is something that has as much meaningful relevance for storing data, but also for all the other adjacencies that kind of extend off there. >>Talk about what you're doing with your partner. I saw last night I did, I did a fly by a NetApp event. It was Nvidia insight, which is a partner, an integrator partner. So you got a lot of the frontline on the front lines, you got partners and you got, you know, big solutions with NetApp and now vendors like Nvidia, what are you actually selling? What's what's getting, I guess what's being put together, not selling, I'm obviously selling gear and what, but like solutions, but what's being packaged to the customer. Where does, what does and video fit in? What are you guys? And what's the winning formula. Take us through the highlights. >>Yeah. And so the VMware highlights here are obviously that we're trying to get infrastructure foundations to just not have, be, be trapped in one cloud or anyone OnPrem. So having a little more E elasticity, but if you extend that out, like you, like you mentioned with a partner that's trying to, to go drive AI within Nvidia, you know, NetApp doesn't create any AI deals cuz no one starts an AI journey with storage. They always start it with the, a with the data model. So the data scientists will actually start these things in cloud and they'll bring 'em on prem. Once the data sets get to a, a big enough scenario and then they wanna build it into a multi-cloud over time. And that's where Nvidia has really led the charge. So someone like an insight or other partners could be Kindra or, or Accenture, or even small boutique partners that are in the data analytics space. They'll go drive that. And we provide not just data storage, but are really complimentary infrastructure. In fact, I always say it like on the AI story alone, we have an integration for the data scientists. So when they go pull the data sets in, you can either do that as a manual copy that takes hours sometimes days, or you can do it instantaneously with our integration to their Jupyter notebook. So I say for AI, as an example, NetApp creates time for data scientists. Got >>It. And where's the, the cloud transformation with you guys right now? How is the hybrid working? Obviously you got the public and hybrids, a steady state right now multi-cloud is still a little fantasy in terms of actual multi-cloud that's coming next, but hybrid and cloud, what's the key key configuration for NetApp what's the hot products? >>Well, I think the key is that you can't just be trapped in one location. So we started this whole thing back with data fabric, as you know, and it's built from there up into, into more of the ops layer and some of the technology layers that have to compliment to come with it. In fact, one of the things that we do that isn't always seen as adjacency to us is our spot product on cloud, which allows you to play in the finops space to be able to look at the analyzed spend and sort of optimized environments for a DevOps environment cloud, to be able to give back a big percentage of what you probably misallocate in those operating models. Once you're working with NetApp and allow it to re re redeploy it in the place that you wanna spend it, you know, so it's, it's both the upper and lower stories coming together. >>Yeah. I was on the walking around the hallway yesterday and I was kind of going through the main event last night, overheard people talking about ransomware. I mean, still ransomware is such a big problem. Security's huge. How are you guys doing there? What's the story with security? Obviously ransomware is a big storage aspect and, and backup recovery and whatnot. All that's kind of tied together. How does NetApp enable better security? What's the story >>There? Yeah, it's funny because that's, that's where a lot of the headlines are at this show at every other show is security for us. It's really about cyber resilience. It is one of the key foundational parts of our hybrid cloud offerings. So as we go out to the partners, you mentioned, you know, insight and there's others, you know, CDW ahead here, and the GSI hosting providers, they're all trying to figure out the security opportunity because that is live. So we have a cyber resiliency solution that isn't just our snapshot technologies, but it's also some of the discovery data governance. But also, you know, you gotta work this with ecosystem, as we said, you know, you have all the other ISVs out there that have several solutions, not just the traditional data protection ones, but also the security players. Because if you look at the full perimeter and you look at how you have to secure that and be able to both block remediate and bring back a site, you know, those are complex sets of things that no one person owns. But what we've tried to do is really be as, as meaningful and pervasive and integrated to that package as possible. That's why it's a lead story in the hybrid clouds. >>Can you share for a minute, just give the NetApp commercial plug cuz you guys have continued to stay relevant. What's the story this year for the folks watching that our customers or potential customers, what's the NetApp story for this year? >>Well, the net, the nets right for this year is kind of what I mentioned, which is, you know, we're in this multi-cloud world. So whether you're coming at this from any perspective, we have relevancy for, for the, the on-prem place that you've always enjoyed us, but at the opposite of the spectrum, if you're coming at us from an AWS show or the cloud op the cloud ops buyer, we have a complete portfolio that if you never knew net from the on-prem, you're gonna see us massively relevant in that, in that environment. And you just go to an AWS show or a Microsoft Azure, so, or a Google show, you'll see us there. You'll see exactly why we were relevant there. You'll see them mention why we're relevant there. So our message is really that we have a full portfolio across the hybrid multi-cloud from anyone buyer perspective, to be able to solve those problems, but by the way, do it with partners cuz the partners are the ones that complete all this. None of us on our own, AWS, Microsoft, VMware, NetApp, none of us have the singular solution ourselves. And we can't deliver ourselves. You have to have those partners that have those skills, those competencies. And that's why we, we leverage it that way. >>Great, great stuff. Now I gotta ask you what what's going on in your world with partners. How's it going? What's the vibe what's that just share some insight into what's happening inside the partners? Are they happy with the margins? Are they shifting behavior? What are some of the, the high order bit news items or, or trends going on at the, on the front lines with your partners? >>Well, I think listen, the, the, the challenges pitfalls, the, the objections, the, all the problems that have been there in the past are even more multiplied with today's economy and all the situations we've gone through with COVID. But the reality is what's emerged is an interesting kind of tapestry of a lot of different partner types. So for us, we recognize that across the traditional GSIs, you see these cloud native partners emerging, which is an exciting realm, you know, to look at folks that really built their business in the cloud with no on-prem and being relevant with them, just consulting partners alone. Like the SAP ecosystem has a very condensed set of partners that really drive a lot of the transformation of SAP. And a lot of them don't, you know, don't do product business. So how does someone like NetApp be relevant with them? You gotta put together an offering that says we do X, Y, and Z for SAP. And so it's, it's a combination of these partners across the, the different >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And I, and I, I'm gonna, I wanna get your reaction to something and you probably don't, you don't have to go out, out in the limb and, and put NetApp in a, in a position on official position. But I've been saying on the cube that no matter what happens with VMware's situation with Broadcom, this is not a dying market, right? I mean like you you'd think when someone gets bought out or, or intention bought out, that'd be like this, this dark cloud that would hang over the, the company and this condition is their user conference. So this is a good barometer to get a feel for it. And I gotta tell you, Sunday night here at VMware Explorer, the expo floor was not dead. It was buzzing. It was packed the ecosystem and even the conversations and the positionings, it's all, all growth. So, so I think VMware's in a really interesting spot here with the Broadcom, because no matter what happens that ecosystem's going to settle somewhere. Yeah. It's not going away cuz they have such great customer base. So, you know, assume that broad Tom is gonna do the right thing and they keep most of the jewels they'll keep all the customers. So, but still that wave is coming. Yeah. It's independent of VMware. Yeah. That's the whole point. So what happens next? >>Well, I think, you know, we, >>We, you guys are gonna get mop up in business. Amazon's gonna get some business, Microsoft, HPE, you name it all gonna, >>Yeah. I think, you know, we've, we've been in business with Broadcom for a long time, whether it be the switch business, the chip business, everything in between. And so we've got a very mature relationship with them and we have a great relationship with VMware. It's it's best. It's almost ever been now and together. I think that will all just rationalize and, and settle over time as this kind of goes through both the next Barcelona show and when it comes back here next year, and I think, you know, what you'll see is probably, you know, some of the stuff settle into the new things they announced here at the show and the things that maybe you haven't heard from, but ultimately the, these, these, these solutions that they have to come forward with, you know, have to land on things that go forward. And so today you just saw that with VMware trying to do VMware cloud and AWS, they realized that there was a gap in terms of people adopting and wanting to do a storage expansion without adding compute. So they made a move with us that made total sense. I think you're gonna see more of those things that are very common sense, ways to solve the, the barriers to, you know, modernization, adoption and maturity. That's just gonna be a natural part of the vetting. And I think they'll probably come a lot more. >>It's gonna be very interesting. We interviewed AJ Patel yesterday. He heads up he's SVP G of the modern app side. He's a middleware guy. So you can almost connect the dots kind of where we're going with this. Yeah. So I assume there's a nice middleware layer of developing everybody wins yeah. In this, if done properly. So it's clearly that VMware, no matter what happens at Broadcom from this show, my assessment's all steam all steam ahead. No, one's holding back at this point. >>Yeah. It's funny. The, the most mature partners we talk to have this interesting sort of upper and lower story and the upper story is all about that, that application data and middleware kind of layer. What are you doing there to be relevant about the different issues they run into versus some of the stuff that we've grown up with on the infrastructure side, they wanna make that as, as nascent as possible, like infrastructure's code and all this stuff that the automation platforms do. But you're right. If you don't get up into that application, middleware space, you know, and work on that, on that side of the house, you know, you're not gonna be >>Relevant. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, you know, most people, people take it literally. It doesn't mean middleware. We don't mean middleware. We mean that what middleware was yeah. In the old metaphor just still has to happen. That's where complexity solved. You got hardware, essentially cloud and you got applications, right. So it's all, all kind of the same, but not >>Yeah. In a lot of cases, it could be conceived as even like pipelining, you know, it's it's, you have data and apps going through a transformation from the old style and the old application structures to cloud native apps and a, a much different architecture. The, the whole deal is how you're relevant there. How you solving real problems about simplifying, improving performance, improving securities, you mentioned all those things are relevant and that's where, that's where you have to place >>Your bets. I love that storage is continuing to be at the center of the value proposition. Again, storage compute, networking never goes away. It's just being kind of flexed in new ways just to continue to say, deliver better value. Keith, thanks for coming on the queue. Great to see you for the, see you again, man, day three for coming back on and give us some commentary. Really appreciate it. And congratulations on all the success with the partners and having the cloud story. Right. Thanks. Cheers. Okay. More cube coverage. After this short break day three, Walter Wall coverage. I'm John furier host Dave ante, Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all here covering VMware. We'll be back with more after this short break.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm basically sitting with the cloud. I got a power panel here with me. You are not gonna wanna miss the segment, please. Welcome, nor Barage I probably did. I do. Okay on that. Great, thank you. VP and GM of cloud solutions at VMware. Thanks for joining us. Field brother tune is back our alumni VP solutions and alliances at NetApp bill. Great to see you in person. Thank you. And Steve Jones, GM SAP, and VMware cloud at Amazon. Welcome guys. Thank you. Pleasure. So we got VMware, NetApp and Amazon. I was telling Phil before we went live, I was snooping around on the NetApp website the other day. And I saw a tagline that said two is the company three is a cloud, but I get to sit with the cloud. This is fantastic. Nora, talk to us about the big news that came out just about 24 hours ago. These three powerhouse, we >>Were super excited. We are celebrating five years of VMware cloud this week. And with three powerhouses here, we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud and AWS with NetApp on tap. We have AWS FSX. And so this solution is now generally available across all global regions. We are super excited with all our joint customers and partners to bring this to the market. >>So Steve, give us your perspective as AWS as the biggest hyperscaler. Talk about the importance of the partnership and the longstanding partnerships that you've had with both NetApp and VMware. >>Yeah, you bet. So first all, maybe I'll start with Ryan and VMware. So we've had a very long standing partnership with VMware for over five years now. One thing that we've heard consistently from customers is they, they want help in reducing the heavy lifting or the, the friction that typically comes with cloud adoption. And VMware's been right in the trenches with us and helping with that over the years with the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And, and now that we've got NetApp, right, the FSX on tap solution, a managed storage solution that is, is been known and trusted in the on-premises world. Now available since September on AWS, but now available for use with VMware cloud is just amazing for customers who are looking for that agility, >>Right? Phil talk about NetApp has done a phenomenal job in its own digital transformation journey. Talk about that as an enabler for what you announced yesterday and the, and the capabilities that NetApp is able to bring to its customers with VMware and with AWS. >>Yeah. You know, it started, it's interesting because we NetApp's always been a company that works very closely with our partners. VMware has been a huge partner of ours since gosh, 2005 probably, or sometime like that. I started working with Amazon back in about 20 13, 20 14, when we first took on tap and brought it to the Amazon platform in the marketplace ahead of what's. Now FSX ends like a dream to bring a fully managed ONAP onto the world's biggest cloud. So that work you you're really looking at about. I mean, it depends how you look at it, 15 years of work. And then as Ryan was saying that VMware was working in parallel with us on being a first party service on Amazon, we came together and, or Ryan and I came together and VMware and NetApp came together about probably about two years ago now with this vision of what we're announcing today and to have so to have GA of this combination for meaning global availability, anybody can try it today. It's just an amazing day. It's really a great day. >>Yeah. It's unbelievable how we have sort of partnered together and hard engineering problems to create a very simple outcome for customers and partners. One of the things, you know, VMware cloud is a very successful service offering with a lot of great consumption and different verticals. Things like cloud migration, you know, transforming your entire, you know, data center and moving to the cloud. Things like, you know, modernizing our apps, disaster recovery now ransomware this week. So really, really exciting uptake and innovation in that whole service. One thing customers always told us that they want more options for storage decouple from compute. And so that really helped customers to lower their total cost of ownership and get to, you know, get even more workloads into VMware cloud. And this partnership really creates that opportunity for us to provide customers with those options. >>Let me give you an example, just I was walking over here just before I walked over here. We were with a customer talking about exactly what Orion's talking about. We were modeling using a TCO calculator that we all put together as well on what we call data intensive workloads, which is in this case, it was a 500 gigabytes per VM. So not a huge amount of data per VM. The, the case study modeled out of 38% cost savings or reduction in total cost, which in the case was like 1.2 million per year of total cost down to 700 million. And just, you could do the, just depends on how many VMs you have and how big odes you have, but that's the kind of cost savings we're talking about. So the, this is a really easy value to talk about. You save a lot of money in it's exactly as nor Ryan said, because we can separate the compute and the storage. Yep. >>Yep. I was just gonna say the reason for that is it used to be with VMware cloud on AWS. If you wanted more storage for your workload, you would have to add another node. So with another node, you would get another compute node. You would get the compute, you'd get the memory and the storage, but now we've actually decoupled the ability to expand the storage footprint from the compute, allowing customers to really expand as their needs grow. And so it's, it's just a lot more flexibility. Yep. That customers had. Yeah. >>Flexibility is key. Every customer needs that they need to be agile. There's always a competitor waiting in the rear view mirror behind any business, waiting to take over. If, if they can't innovate fast enough, if they can't partner with the best of the best to deliver the infrastructure that's needed to enable those business outcomes, I wanna get your perspective, Steve, what are some of the outcomes that when you're talking to customers, you talked about fill the TCO. Those are huge numbers, very compelling. What are some of the other outcomes that customers can expect to achieve from this solution? >>That's a great question. I think customers want the flexibility. We talked about customers absolutely wanna be able to move fast. They're also very demanding customers who have had an experience with solutions like NetApp on tap on premises, right? So they've come to expect enterprise features like thin provisioning, snapshoting cloning, rapid cloning, right? And even replication of data given that customers now can leverage this type of functionality as well through the NetApp solution with VMC, they're getting all those enterprise class features from, from the storage in combination with what they already had with vs a and, and VMC. >>Steve earlier mentioned the word we used, we kind of took it from VMware or from Amazon was friction is so many workloads run in VMware VMs today to be able to just simply pick them up as is move them to Amazon makes cloud adoption. Just, I mean, frictionless is an extreme word, but it's really lowers the friction to cloud adoption. And as Steve said, then you've get all these enterprise features wherever you need to run. >>Just brings speed. >>I was just about to say, it's gotta be the speed. It has to be a huge factor here. Yep, >>Yep. Yeah. >>Sure. One of the things that we've seen with VMware cloud is operational consistency as, as a customer value because when customers are thinking about, you know, complex enterprise apps, moving that to the cloud, they need that operational consistency, which drives down their costs. They don't have to relearn new skills. They're used to VMware, they're used to NetApp. And so this partnership really fosters that operational consistency as a big customer value, and they can reuse those skills and really reapply them in this cloud model. The other thing is the cloud model here is super completely managed. If you think about that, right, customers have to do less VMware, AWS and NetApp is doing more for them. That's true in this model. >>So you're able to really deliver a lot of workforce efficiency, workforce productivity across the stack. >>Absolutely. >>And that's definitely true that it just, as it gets more complex, how do you manage it? Just continue, hear everybody talking about this, right. So when a completely managed service by VMware and Amazon is such a savings in com in management complexity, which then gets back to speed. How do I grow my plant faster? >>I mean, and really at the end of the day, customers are actually able to focus on what differentiate differentiates them, obviously versus the management of the underlying infrastructure and storage and all those, those things that are still critical, but exactly, but >>For, for the customer to be able to have to abstract the underlying underlying technology layer and focus on what differentiates them from the competition. That's like I said, right back here, right. That's especially if there's anything we've learned in the last couple of years, it's that it, that is critical for businesses across every industry, no industry exempt from this. >>None. One other thing, just an example of what you're talking about is we all work a lot on modernization techniques like using Kubernetes and container technologies. So with this, if you think about this, you, this solution, you can move an app as is modernize on the cloud. You can modernize, you can modernize and then move. You can, the flexibility that this enables like. So it's sort of like move to the cloud at your rate is a really big benefit. >>And we've seen so many customer examples of migrating modernize is how we like to summarize it, where customers are, you know, migrating, modernizing at their own pace. Yep. And the good, good thing about the platform and the service is that it is the home for all applications, virtual machines containers with Kubernetes backed by local storage, external storage options. The level of flexibility for all applications is really immense. And that drives down your TCO even more. >>What, from a target customer perspective, Noran, talk about that. Who, who is the target? Obviously I imagine VMware customers, it's NetApp customers, it's AWS, but is there, are there any targets kind of within that, that are really prime candidates for this solution? >>Yeah. A great question. First of all, the, the easy sort of overlap between all of us is our shared customer pool. And so VMware and NetApp have been partners for what, 20 years, something like that. And we have thousands of customers using our joint solutions in the data center. And so that's a very clear target for this solution, as they're considering use cases such as, you know, cloud migration, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, application modernization. So that's a very clear target and we see this day in and day out, obviously there are many other customers that would be interested in this solution, as well as they're considering, you know, AWS and we provide a whole range of consumption options for them. Right. And I think that's one of the, sort of the, the good things about our partnership, including with AWS, where customers can purchase this from VMware can purchase this from AWS and all of these different options, including from our partners really makes it very, very compelling. >>Talk a little bit about from each of your perspectives about the what's in it. For me as a partner of these companies, Steve, we'll start with you. >>I mean, what's in it for me is that it's what my customers have been asking for. And we, we have a long history, I think of providing managed services again, to remove that heavy lifting that customers often just don't want to have to do. Having seen the, the adoption of managed storage offerings, including the, the NetApp solution here and now being able to bring that into the VMware space where they're already using it in an on-premises world, and now they're moving those, those workloads being able to satisfy that need that a customer's asking for is awesome. >>We, every time we're at an AWS event, we are always talking about it's absolute customer obsession, and I know NetApp and VMware well, and know that that is a shared obsession across the three companies. >>Hey, Lisa, let me add one more thing. It's interesting, not everybody sees this, but it's really obvious that the NetApp on-prem installed base with VMware, which is tens of thousands of customers. This is an awesome solution. Not quite as obvious is that every on-prem VMware customer gets that TCO benefit. I mentioned that's not limited to the NetApp on-prem installed base. So we're really excited to be able to expose all the market that hasn't used our products on-prem to this cloud solution. And, and it's really clear customers are adopting the cloud, right? So we're, that's one of the reasons we're so excited about this is it opens up a huge new opportunity to work with new customers for us. Talk >>About those customer conversations, Phil, how, where are they happening at? What level are you talking with customers about migration to cloud? Has it changed in the last couple >>Of years? Oh yeah. You know, I've been working on this for years and a lot of the on-prem conversation, it's been a little bifurcated that on-prem is on-prem and cloud developers or cloud developers. And Amazon's done a huge amount to break that down. VMware getting in the game, a lot of it's networking complexities, those have gone down. A lot of people are cross connected and set up today, which that wasn't so true five years ago. So now it's a lot of conversations about, I hear carbon footprint reduction. I hear data all in around data center reduction. The cloud guys are super efficient operators of data center infrastructure. We were talking about different use cases like disaster recovery. It's it's everybody though. It's small companies, it's big companies. They're all sort of moving into this, it call it at least hybrid world. And that's why when I say we're get really excited about this, because it does get rid of a lot of friction for moving loads in those directions, at the rate, the customer wants to do it. >>And that one last really quick thing is I was using NetApp as an example, we have about 300 enterprise workloads. We wanna move to the cloud two, right? And so they're all running VMware, like most, most of the world. And so this solution is, looks really good to us and we're gonna do the exact, I was just out with our CIO. We're going, looking at those 300, which do we just lift and move? Which do we refactor? And how do we do that? In fact, that Ryan was out to dinner with us last night, talking about >>This it's more and more it's being driven top down. So in the early days, and I've been with Amazon for 10 years now. Yep. Early days, it was kind of developer oriented, often initiated projects. Now it's top level CIOs. Exactly. I >>Are two mandates today talking to customers. >>I think of reinvent as an it conference. Now in the way, some of these top down mandates are driven, but listen, I mean, we got great customer interest. We have been in preview for three to six months now, and we've seen a lot of customers were not able to drag their entire data center workloads because of different reasons of PCO data, intensive workloads, et cetera. And we've seen tremendous amounts of interest from them. And we're also seeing a lot of new customers in the pipeline that want to consider VMware cloud now that we have these great storage options. >>So there's a pretty healthy Tam I'm hearing. >>Absolutely. >>I think so. Yeah. It's interesting. Another, just both like WWT and Presidio, channel partners, big, huge channel partners. It takes no selling to explain. We, we just say, Hey, we're doing this. And they start building services. Presidio is here with us talking about a customer win that they got. So this is it. It's easy for people to see why this is a cool, a cool solution. >>The value prop is there >>Definitely >>There's no having appeal the onion to >>Find it. No, the money savings. It's just in what or Ryan said, a lot of people have seen the, the seen an obstacle of cost. Yeah. So the TCO benefit, I mentioned removes that obstacle. And then that opens the door to all the features Steve was talking about of the advanced storage features and things on the platform. >>So is there a customer that's been in beta on this solution that you can talk about in, in terms of what they were looking for, the challenges that you helped them erase and the outcomes they're achieving? >>Yeah, sure. I can. I can provide one example. A large financial customer was looking at this during the preview phase and you know, for, for, for reasons before that were already a customer, but they were not able to attract a lot of their other workloads from other business units. And with this solution, now the service is a much better candidate for those workloads and those business units that had not considered VMware cloud. So we're really excited to see new workloads coming from that particular customer, given this particular solution and the whole TCO math for them was very, very straightforward and simple. And this became a more attractive option for that particular customer. >>Is there a shadow it elimination factor here in this technology and who you're selling to? >>Not real, I, don't not intent. Wouldn't intentionally. I wouldn't say yeah, not intentionally. I, it was funny with the customers I was thinking is yes. The question, the customers that are in the preview are seeing the benefits that we're talking about. The, one of the reasons we started the project on our side a number of years ago was this very large cement company was looking for carbon CO2 reduction. Part of that was moving disaster recovery to the cloud. There was a lot of friction in the solution prior to this, the, the customers have done some of the things we're talking about, but there's a, it takes a lot of skill. And we were looking at working with that customer going, how could we simplify this? And that was from our point of NetApp's point of view, it, it drove us to VMware and to AWS saying, can't we pull some of the friction of this out. And I think that that's what we've seen in the, in the previews. And it's, that's what I meant. It's so exciting to go from having say, I know we have about 20 previews right now, going to the globe today is the, is the exciting news today. >>And is the solution here in booze that it can be demoed and folks can kind of get their hands on it. >>Yeah. Yeah. They can go to the VMware cloud booth at the expo and they can get their hands on their demo and they can take it for a test drive. >>Excellent. >>You can run TCO calculators and do your own math and see what you're gonna all this, the all that's integrated today. We >>Also have pilots where we can help walk customers through a scenario of their own. >>Yep. Excellent. Is there, is there a, a joint website that you guys have, we should drive folks to? >>Yeah, it's >>Actually talk about the press release. It's >>It's yours. So >>It's it's prominently on our website. Okay. VMware cloud. It is onc.vmware.com where we also have the other, you know, our corporate marketing websites that have this vmware.com is a great starting point. Yeah. And we feature the solution. Prominently customers can get started today and they can even participate in the hands on labs here and take the solution for a test drive. >>All right. Last question, nor Ryan, we'll start with you on this. Here we are. I love the theme of this event, the center of the multicloud universe. Does it not sound like a Marvel movie? I feel like there should be some, is there any superheroes running around? Cause I really feel like there should be, how is this solution an enabler of allowing customers to really extract the most of value from their multi-cloud world that they're living in? >>Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, our mission is to build, run, managed, secure applications in any cloud, right. And regu has been talking about this with the keynote this morning as well. You know, at least with NetApp, we share a very good joint vision of enabling customers to, you know, place applications with really good TCO across clouds. And so it's really good story I feel. And I think this is a really good step in that direction where customers have choice and flexibility in terms of where they put their applications in the TCO value that they get. >>Awesome. Guys, you gotta come back next with a customer would love to dig. Maybe at reinvent sounds, we can dig into more and to see a great story of how a customer came together and is really leveraging that the power that is sitting next to me here. Thank you all so much for joining me and having this great conversation. Congratulations on the announcement and it being GA. >>Thank you. Awesome. >>Thank you. Thanks Lisa. All right. Fun conversation. I told you power panel for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, keep it right here for more live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 from downtown San Francisco. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco, VMware Explorer 2022, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've been having some great conversations today. Lots of news coming out about VMware and its partner ecosystem. We're going to have another conversation about that next. Please welcome two guests to the program, Chance Bingen, technical marketing engineer at NetApp and Jason Massae, staff technical marketing architect, storage and vVols at VMware. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thanks. >> Glad to be here. >> It's nice to be back in person. >> It is. It's very nice. Oh my gosh. >> And we're hearing there about 7,000 to 10,000 people here, when I was in the Keynote, this morning it was definitely standing room only. >> Yeah, yeah. You've definitely seen the numbers ticked up at the last minute. It was good to see that. It's good, I think a lot of people have really wanted to get back, get that one on one that face to face. There's nothing like being able to, you know, talk to, the experts, talk to the vendors, you know, see your comrades. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, we've seen people that I haven't seen for years, even on my own team, so really good to be back into it. >> It is and it was lots of news coming out this morning during the Keynote. My goodness. But Jason, talk to me, the NetApp and VMware folks had been in tight partnership for a long time. Talk to me about, get both of your perspective from a technical perspective about the depth of the partnership. >> Yeah, so actually NetApp was one of the original design partners for vVols. And with that, now with some of the stuff we're doing with more current stuff with virtual volumes is, NetApp is back and we've got some pretty neat stuff that we've been working on with vVols. And NetApp's got some pretty neat stuff that they've been working on to enable the customers with more features, more functionality with the virtual volume functionality. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Give us a quick primer on what is a vVol? What is a virtual volume? How does it fit into the, into this stack of stuff that we do in IT? >> Yeah. So the easiest way to kind of think of what a vVol is or a virtual volume is you can think of it kind of like an RDM, those row device map, which is kind of a four letter word. We don't really like those, but the idea is that object, that virtual volume is native on the array and presented directly to the VM. But now what we do is we're presenting all of the storage array features up to vSphere and we're managing those storage features via policy based management. But instead of applying storage capabilities at a data store level, we're now applying them at a VM or an application level. So you can have one data store and multiple VMs, and every VM can have a different storage capability managed by a policy that the VI admin gets to manage now. So he doesn't have to go to the storage admin to say, I need a new line, or I need a new volume. He can just go in and create a policy or change a policy. And now that storage capability is applied to the VM or the application. >> Yeah. One thing I'd like to add to that is you can mentioned the word capabilities. >> So we look at the actual data protocols, whether they're file based or block based, you know, I-scuzzy, fiber channel, whatever the case might be. Those protocols have defined sets of capabilities and attributes and things they can expose. What vVols along with the VASA protocol brings to the table is the ability to expose things that are just impossible to expose via the data protocols themselves. So that the, actual nature of the array, what kind of array is it? What's it capable of doing? What is the nature of, you know, encryption? You know, is this going to be a secure, encrypted data store? Is it going to be something else? It just allows you to do so much more with the advanced capabilities that modern storage arrays have than you could ever do if you were just using the data protocols by themselves. >> Right? Yeah. Kind of under that same context. If you think about before with traditional storage, the vSphere or the array really doesn't understand what's going on underlying storage, but with vVols the array and vSphere completely understand at a disc level even, how that VM should be treated. So that helps the storage admin. Storage admin can now go in and see a specific disc of a VM and see the performance on the array. They can go in the array and see, oh, this disc on this VM has got performance issues or needs to be encrypted, or here's the size of that disc. And you couldn't easily see that with your traditional storage. So there's really a lot of benefits and it frees up a lot of time for the storage administrator and enables the VI admin to be able to do a lot of the storage management. >> So there have been, there been a lot of movements over the last decade in the realm of software defined storage. Where essentially all of the things that you are talking about are completely abstracted from the underlying hardware. In this case, you're leveraging the horsepower, if you will and the intelligence of a storage array that has a lot of horsepower and intelligence, and you're accessing those features. You mentioned encryption, whether if you're doing a snapshot or something like that, what's interesting here is it kind of maps to what we're looking at now, which is the trend in the direction of things like DPUs. >> If you go back in history long enough, we had the, you know, the TOE, NIC, TCP offload, you know, the idea of, hey, you know what, what if we had a smart device with its own brain power and we leveraged it. Well, you guys have been doing that from a vVols all perspective with NetApp filers, for lack of better term. For how long now, when did, when were they originally? >> 6.0 it was so it's been what? 11, 12 years. Something like that. >> It's been a while. So yeah, but it's been a decade or so. >> Mm-hmm >> So what's on the frontier. What's the latest there in terms of, in terms of cool stuff that's coming out. >> So actually today, in one of the things that we worked with NetApp that was part of the design partnership was, you know, the NVMe over Fabric protocol has become very popular to extend that functionality of all flash to the, an external array. And now we announce today, in including with that NVMe over Fabrics, you can now do vVols with NVMe over Fabrics. And again, that was something that we worked with NetApp to be a design partner for them. >> That's right. We're very excited about it. We've always been, you know, NVMe been something we've been very proud of for a while. Delivering the first end to end NVMe stack from inside the host, through the fabric, to the array, with the arrays front ports, all the way to the disc on the backend. So we're very excited about that. >> So target market joint NetApp, VMware customers, I presume. >> Really it's, the key here that I like to make sure customers understand is to see that vVols are on the leading edge of VMware's storage design. Some tend to think that maybe vVols wasn't the primary focus, but actually now it is the primary focus. Now I always like to give the caveat that VMFS and NFS are not going away. Those are still very much stuff that we work on. It's just that most of the engineering focus is on virtual volumes or vVols. >> Yeah. Similarly, when you talk about and you're sort of alluding to vSAN when we start talking about VMFS and things like that. >> Yeah. >> Architecturally, we've been talking to folks about the recent announcements with capabilities within AWS. You know, NetApp in AWS for VMware environments. Breaking out of the stranglehold that the, oh, you want more storage, you must buy more CPU and memory, building block process entails. The reality is no matter what you do with vSAN, you're going to have certain constraints that go away when now you have the option to leverage storage from the NetApp filers. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So how does, how do vVols play in the cloud strategy moving forward? >> Well, so one of the things that we do with, vVols currently is mostly On-prem. But when you have the storage architecture, that vVols gives you as far as individual objects, it makes it much easier to migrate up into the cloud because you're not trying to migrate individual VMs that are on another type of system, whatever it might be, those objects are already their own entity. Right, so cloud, Tanzu, those type of things, those vVol objects are already their own entity. So it makes it very easy to migrate them on and off prem. >> So Chance talk to us a little bit about this from NetApp's perspective. You're in customer conversations, who are you talking to? Is this primarily an engineering conversation? Has this gone up the stack in terms of customers are finding themselves in this default multi-cloud environment? >> Yeah, so interestingly, when I talk to customers these days they are almost all either on a journey to a hybrid multi-cloud or they're in some kind of phase of transforming themselves into their own hyperscaler, right? They're be adopting a cloud service provider model and vVols is a perfect fit for that kind of model, because you have the ability to offer different tiers of service, different qualities of service with VM granular controls or VMDK granular controls, even. And even if you look at First Class Disc, right? Which is something that came out largely to support Tanzu, I think which fantastic use case for vVols as well there, but that gives you the ability to offer something like Amazon EBS, right? You can offer Amazon EBS in a native VMware stack using First Class Discs and vVols. And you're able to apply things like quality of service with that granular control that allows you to guarantee that customer the disc that they bought and paid for. They're going to get the IOPS that they're paying for because you're applying those QoS policies directly to that object on the array. And instead of having to worry about is the array going to be able to handle it? Are you going to have one VM that consumes all your IO, you know? You don't have to worry about that with vVols because you've got that integration with the array's native quality controls. >> And Chance what's in this for me as a customer? I'm hearing productivity, I'm hearing cost savings, control efficiency. Talk to me about the benefits in it for the folks that you're talking to. >> Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times it comes down to, you know I mentioned like the cloud service provider model, right? When you're looking to build a robust service catalog and you're able, you want to be able to meet all these like, we mentioned Tanzu, right? Containers as a service, you're able to provide the persistent volumes for your Kubernetes containers that are again, these native objects on the array and you have these fine grain controls, but it's handled at massive scale because it's all handled by storage policies, Kubernetes storage classes, which are natively mapped to VM storage policies through Tanzu. So it just, it gives you the ability to offer all of these services in a, again a rich and robust contents catalog. >> So what are you doing? So you mentioned a couple of things in terms of using array based quality of service. So give me an example of how you're avoiding issues of contention and over subscription in an environment where I'm an administrator and I've got this virtual volume that's servicing this VM or this app on this VM. What kind of visibility do I have down into the actual resources because look at the end of that chain there's a physical resource. And that physical resource represents, what? IOPS and bandwidth and latency and throughput and all of this bundle of things. So how do you avoid colliding with others who are trying to carve vVols out of this world? >> You mean like a noisy neighbor type of thing? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So that's actually one of the big benefits that you get with vVols is that because those vial objects are native on the array, they're not sharing a loan or a volume. They're not sharing a resource. The only resource they're actually sharing is the array itself. So you don't get that typical noisy neighbor where this one's using all the resources of that volume because really you're looking out at the all encompassing array. And so a storage administrator and the VI admin have a lot more insight. The VI admin can now go to the storage admin if there's say a debugging issue, they want to find a problem. The storage admin now can see those individual objects and say, oh, well this VM, it's not really this, it's not all the discs. It's just disc number two or disc number three or they can actually see at a single disc level on the array, the performance, the latency, you know, the QS, all that stuff. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And that really is what, it frees up at the storage admin's time because the debugging is so much more simple. And it also allows the storage admin a lot more insight. Right? They know those, what's the problem. If you were typically looking at a loaner volume, they don't really know what's going on inside that and neither does the array. But with vVols, the array knows what each disc and how it's supposed to be treated based on the policies that the customer defines. So if one VM is supposed to have a certain QS and another VM isn't. The array knows that that VM, if it goes above it, it's going to be like, nope, you can't have those resources. You weren't granted those resources, but this one was. So you have much more control. And again, it's at an application or a VM level. >> And it's still, it's fairly dynamically configurable. I spoke to a customer just the other day. They are a cloud service provider. And what they do is their customers are able to go in and change their quality of service. So they go into that service portal and they say, okay, I'm paying for gold and I want platinum and they'll go in. They know that they've got a certain time where they need more IO capacity. So they'll go in, they'll pay the fee, increase that capability. And then when they don't need it anymore, they'll downgrade again. >> Okay, so that assumes some ability at the array level to do some sort of resource sharing and balancing to be able to go out and get, say more IO. Because again, fundamentally, if you have a virtual volume, that's drawing its resources from five storage devices, whether those are SSD based or NVMe or spinning disc that represents a finite it amount of resource. The assumption is if you're saying that the array is the pool that you need to worry about, that assumes the array has the ability to go beyond here, based on a policy. >> So that's how it works. It does... >> Well, essentially. I mean, you can't outrun physics. So if the array can't go faster, but the idea is that you understand the performance profile of your array and then you create your service tiers appropriately. >> Okay. >> Yeah. And one of the big benefits is like Chance was saying, if you want to change a profile that used to be a Storage vMotion to a different data store. Now it's just a policy change. The storage admin doesn't have to do anything. The VI admin just changes the policy. And then the array understands, oh, I now need to treat that different. And that's exactly what Chance was talking about in that cloud provider situation, where today I'm using a 100,000 IOPS. I need to use 200,000 tomorrow for special, whatever it is, but I only need to use it for tomorrow. So they don't have to move anything. They just change the policy for that time. And then they change it back. They don't have to do anything on the array itself. They don't have to change anything physically on the VM. It's just a policy change. And that's really where you get that dynamic control of the storage capability. >> So as business dynamics are changing and I'm thinking of like black Friday or Prime day, being able to dial things up and dial it down, they have the ability to do that with a policy. >> Yes. >> Exactly. >> So huge time savings there. >> Oh, it's huge. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And it simplifies because now, I don't have to have multiple data stores. You can have one data store, all your VMs in there. You can limit test and dev and you can maximize business critical applications. Again, all via policy. So you've simplified your infrastructure. You've gone to more of a programmatic approach of managing your storage capabilities. But you're now managing at the VM level. >> So we mentioned that the cloud chaos (indistinct) that was mentioned this morning during the Keynote and we're saying a lot of customers are still in this cloud chaos phase. They want to get to Cloud Smart. How is this going to be one of those tools that helps customers pull the levers, dial the knobs, to be able to get to eventually, Cloud Smart. >> I could go on for this for hours. (Lisa Laughs) (Chance chuckles) This is really what simplifies storage. Because typically when you use traditional storage, you're going to have to figure out that this data store has this capability or another example, as you mentioned was Tanzu. If you're managing persistent volumes and you're not using something like vVols, if you want to get a certain storage capability, you have to either tag it or you have to create that data store with that capability. All of that goes away when you use vVols. So now that chaos of multiple data stores, multiple lines or multiple volumes, all that stuff goes away. So now you're simplifying your infrastructure, you have a programmatic approach to managing your storage and you can use it for all of your different types of workloads. So cloud, Kubernetes, persistent volumes, all that type of stuff. And again, all being managed via a simple and again, programmatic approach. So you could automate this. You know today, like you said, black Friday. Okay, Black, Friday's coming up. I want to change the policy. You could automate that. So you don't even have to go in and physically make the change of the policy now. You just say on Fridays, change it to this policy on Sunday night, change it back. >> Yep. >> Again, that's not something you can do with traditional storage. >> Okay. >> And I think from a simplification standpoint as well, you know, I was telling you about that other customer a couple days ago, they were running into the inability to grow beyond the bounds of VMFS file systems for very, very large VMs. And so what I talked to them about was look, if you go to vVols, you're not bound by file systems anymore. You have the capacity of the array and you can have VM discs up to 62 terabytes, you know, as many as you want. And it doesn't matter what they fit in because we can fit them all. So it's, to be able to, and that's some of our largest customers, the reason they go with vVols is to be able to grow beyond the bounds of traditional storage, anything like path limits, you know. That's something you have to contend with. >> Path limits, line limits, all that stuff. Typically just disappears with vVols. >> All those limits go away. Guys- >> They go away. >> Amazing. Congratulations on the work that you guys have done. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE talking about the value in it for customers and obviously the technical depths of the NetApp, VMware relationship. Guys, we appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having us on. >> Our pleasure. For my guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So stick around. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. We're really excited to have Anthony Lye here. He's the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Cloud at NetApp. And Jonsi Stefansson as the CTO and VP of cloud at NetApp. Guys, good to see you. >> Same to you. >> Likewise. >> It's great to be back. >> You know, Anthony. Well so, we saw each other virtually at the AWS Storage Day, the big announcement, we're going to talk about that. But I go back and I said this to you several years ago, we were sitting, you know, some after party and you said "We are going to transform NetApp. We are going all in on cloud." We've seen NetApp transform many, many times. This is probably the biggest in history. >> No, I think you're absolutely right. I think, you know, I can't believe it, but you know, it will be five years for me in February. And in those five years, I think we really have done things that nobody expected. And I think we've proven to our existing customers, to our competitors, and now with Amazon, to a whole new set of customers that our intellectual property that we build and the acquisitions that we've done have made a lot of sense. I think we've demonstrated this wonderful concept of symmetry. Customers now understand and believe that a dollar invested in an App, wherever it is on premise or in the cloud is a dollar that moves wherever they want it to move and progresses as their own businesses progress. >> So Jonsi, for the latest announcement that you guys made to integrate ONTAP into the AWS cloud, you had to do some deeper integration, right? It wasn't just wrap your stack and Kubernetes and shove it into the cloud. But can you just talk about what you had to do? What the collaboration was like? >> The collaboration with AWS has been fantastic. It literally took two and a half years, you know, from the point where we decided to agree on the design principles, how we were actually going to deliver this as a service, the integration into every single aspect of AWS, you know, whether it's the console, the FSx, API, the integrations, to all the additional services that AWS has, like RDS, like Aurora, like the SageMaker, like EKS and ECS. And I mean, we are just getting started with the integration points and the collaboration and the teamwork. I would call it teamwork more than a collaboration. The teamwork with all these teams and maybe especially at name who was the leader of the storage sort of a unit in AWS has been fantastic. >> Dave: Yeah. Well so, this is the 10th re:Invent. This is the 9th year we've been here. We've seen a dramatically different cloud than 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and a different storage business. I'm not even sure. I mean, I don't know. I didn't even think about it as the old storage business anymore. Essentially, you're building a cloud on top of clouds. A super cloud if you will. >> Anthony: Yeah, I mean. I think, look, the strategy was, as I said, very, very simple to us, which was, you know, fundamentally companies, you know, run their applications on the basic primitives of compute storage and networking. And the gold standard for file was always ONTAP. And I think what we did, which I think was unique was we didn't just, as you said, throw it onto a cloud, stick it in a virtual machine and tell you, the customer "There. It's ONTAP just as you remember it." We reimagined it. And we architected it to be a cloud service. So it's elastic, it goes up and down. You can change the performance at runtime. And what we really did with Amazon was we wanted to make it a fully managed service. We didn't want people to think about versioning and patching. We wanted to remove all of that and we wanted people to take as much or as little as they needed. And we, and Amazon, we chose that we should own the responsibility for the availability of the service. And we should maintain the service ourselves so that customers of ONTAP can benefit from the solution. But in many ways, customers who've never been ONTAP customers can now take advantage of an enterprise grade file system and all the great things that it does without having to understand how it works. >> And explain why that's important for customers because people, they go, "Wow, you got S3." but it's very simple. Get, put, right? You don't have the full stack of a mature ONTAP. Please explain what that means to customers a little bit. >> You know, file systems are very important things. You know, we basically use them in our work environments every single day, you know. Within your sort of, you know, your Mac book, you have a home directory and sub-directories and files, very elegantly layout applications and layout infrastructures in ways that object repositories cannot. You know, aside from block and file. Sorry, from file and object, you of course, have block storage. And so, file plays a very important role. IDC has file growing at almost twice the pace of object now on the public cloud systems and, you know, file has about 13% of the overall storage market and it's growing. And I don't see any reason why file won't be as big on the Amazon cloud as the S3 has been. >> Dave: So you guys, go ahead, please. >> Yeah. I mean, you also have to take into account that the S3 object storage offerings of AWS is an integrated PaaS in our solution. So that's how we are actually doing automatic tiering. So you actually reap the best of both worlds, where you get the cost management of putting it in object storage, but you get the performance and the data management capabilities that is pretty unprecedented. You know, we are the first store that's offering that can actually do cross-region replication seamlessly by retaining deduplication and compression. But we also play a lot with, you know, block and object storage. So when Anthony was talking about how we've actually delivered this as a service, and this is sort of from our design principles, we are basically delivering this as a software, as a service, because more than an infrastructure as a service, because the stock that we are actually deploying, or the secret sauce of ONTAP, it's a very vast software stack that we are delivering, on top of AWS infrastructure. So I would always call it or categorize it a little bit more than software as a service, rather than infrastructure as a service. >> But it's even more than that, if I'm right, because it's cloud pricing, right? >> Jonsi: Yes. >> So it's not, you're not preying. I mean, when I buy Salesforce, I got to sign up for three-year deal. That's not a consumption-based model. >> Yeah. >> Oh, I think Amazon, you know what Amazon did uniquely and brilliantly was, it retailed technology and it's what makes Amazon so good, is that they choose to sort of simplify things. And when they find benefits as a retailer, they pass them on to the customer and, you know, there's this sort of pay-as-you-go business model, it's really good for the customer. It makes us work harder because, you know, you have to retain your customer sort of every 10 minutes. And that's something that, you know, as you said, with enterprise software and even some of the early SaaS vendors, that's not how it works. And so Amazon has forced us all to be very, very attentive to our customers. >> Dave: And I'd love to talk about what that means for the on-prem business, but if we have time. But you guys won Design Partner of the Year, what's that all about? First of all, congratulations. >> Anthony: Thank you. There's a lot of ISV design partners. You guys came out number one so congratulations on that. What's that all about? Explain what that entailed and how you got that. >> Yeah, I'll say a few words. Maybe Jonsi can add. I mean, the first thing of course is, you know, I S V stands for Independent Software Vendor. So, you know, it's always great because most people would say, "Well, NetApp is on-premise storage hardware." >> Dave: Of course, yeah. >> Which really, we've not really ever been an increasingly with demonstrating that we are a software company and we operate at cloud speed. You know, I can't really take the credit. I would give it to Jonsi and the engineering team. Maybe Jonsi, you can explain, you know, what moral about the award and why I think we were selected. >> So, I mean, I think it says a lot that this is the first time AWS has ever allowed a third party company to be this integrated into their console, into a support ability systems. You know, we make fun of this, me and Anthony all the time, because when we started this, down this path, everybody at NetApp said, "Guys, you're wasting your time." This is why AWS has the marketplace, but we didn't want to go. We already had the marketplace and we wanted to be able to connect to all these associated services and do it in the manner that, you know, this was a true collaboration of engineering teams for a long time to actually deliver the service on both sides so the credit, of course, will always go to the engineers on both sides, even though I designed it, I didn't code it. So, I think that, that alone, being the first to do it in AWS ever. I think we deserve that award. >> So just for our audience, to be clear, we're talking about FSx, ONTAP in the cloud, in the AWS cloud and kind of dance around that. But so that was announced, I guess, in September? >> Anthony: Yes. >> Right? >> Anthony: September, 2nd. >> What's the uptake been like? What's the reaction? >> Unbelievable. >> I'll bet. (laughing) >> No, no, I mean. >> No, I believe it. >> Better than we ever dreamed of. >> Yeah. >> The number of customers, I'm sure I'm not allowed to say the number of customers, but we asked and the fact that, you know, 60% of those customers have never been NetApp customers before, but they see the value in the data management capabilities that we are bringing to the market. >> Dave: So it exceeded expectations and your expectations were probably pretty enthusiastic. >> They were high. >> Yeah. >> I mean, Amazon is on the record. I was with Ed earlier on today, recording a piece and Ed, you know, was very clear that it's one of the fastest growing services now on AWS. You know, it turns out that, you know, the customer base, I think recognizes the, not just the need for a file system, but the uniqueness and capabilities that ONTAP provides, you know, to those customers in how they manage their business and transformations. And so, you know, to be sort of behind the console, to be sort of behind the Amazon CLI and the Amazon API, you see the world very, very differently, you know. I think the Amazon marketplace is a fantastic capability, but I'll tell you, you know, being a core part of the AWS service itself that they sell, that they support, that they bill for. It's a nice place to be. >> So, SaaS company. You're talking to the language of application development, Kubernetes, right? What do you think this means for the future of NetApp specifically, but also generally the on-prem storage business and the storage business in general? >> Well, we just announced our second quarter earnings today and what's happening is our cloud business is growing like crazy. We generated $388 million of ARR and the growth rates are, you know, astronomically high. That is increasingly helping our on-premise business to grow. You know, the nice thing about being in primarily, in the storage and data business is people aren't deleting many things. And the rate at which they're generating information is just accelerating. So, actually the confidence that we give the customer by demonstrating a sort of a cloud first, a sort of principles of all the cloud is actually giving customers to buy more on premise. So, we really don't mind. We are, our job much like Amazon's, is to have this customer obsession and you can't really go wrong, if you just keep asking them what they want. >> Yeah, if you can do so profitably, you're going to be reinvest in your business. Guys, we've got to go. >> Yeah. >> Love to have you back. >> Thank you. >> And you been quite a transformation. You said you're going to do it. You're doing it. So, well done to you. Five years in the making. Okay. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. Keep it right there. We'll be right back from AWS re:Invent 21. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. We're really excited to have Anthony Lye here. He's the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Cloud at NetApp. And Jonsi Stefansson as the CTO and VP of cloud at NetApp. Guys, good to see you. >> Same to you. >> Likewise. >> It's great to be back. >> You know, Anthony. Well so, we saw each other virtually at the AWS Storage Day, the big announcement, we're going to talk about that. But I go back and I said this to you several years ago, we were sitting, you know, some after party and you said "We are going to transform NetApp. We are going all in on cloud." We've seen NetApp transform many, many times. This is probably the biggest in history. >> No, I think you're absolutely right. I think, you know, I can't believe it, but you know, it will be five years for me in February. And in those five years, I think we really have done things that nobody expected. And I think we've proven to our existing customers, to our competitors, and now with Amazon, to a whole new set of customers that our intellectual property that we build and the acquisitions that we've done have made a lot of sense. I think we've demonstrated this wonderful concept of symmetry. Customers now understand and believe that a dollar invested in an App, wherever it is on premise or in the cloud is a dollar that moves wherever they want it to move and progresses as their own businesses progress. >> So Jonsi, for the latest announcement that you guys made to integrate ONTAP into the AWS cloud, you had to do some deeper integration, right? It wasn't just wrap your stack and Kubernetes and shove it into the cloud. But can you just talk about what you had to do? What the collaboration was like? >> The collaboration with AWS has been fantastic. It literally took two and a half years, you know, from the point where we decided to agree on the design principles, how we were actually going to deliver this as a service, the integration into every single aspect of AWS, you know, whether it's the console, the FSx, API, the integrations, to all the additional services that AWS has, like RDS, like Aurora, like the SageMaker, like EKS and ECS. And I mean, we are just getting started with the integration points and the collaboration and the teamwork. I would call it teamwork more than a collaboration. The teamwork with all these teams and maybe especially at name who was the leader of the storage sort of a unit in AWS has been fantastic. >> Dave: Yeah. Well so, this is the 10th re:Invent. This is the 9th year we've been here. We've seen a dramatically different cloud than 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and a different storage business. I'm not even sure. I mean, I don't know. I didn't even think about it as the old storage business anymore. Essentially, you're building a cloud on top of clouds. A super cloud if you will. >> Anthony: Yeah, I mean. I think, look, the strategy was, as I said, very, very simple to us, which was, you know, fundamentally companies, you know, run their applications on the basic primitives of compute storage and networking. And the gold standard for file was always ONTAP. And I think what we did, which I think was unique was we didn't just, as you said, throw it onto a cloud, stick it in a virtual machine and tell you, the customer "There. It's ONTAP just as you remember it." We reimagined it. And we architected it to be a cloud service. So it's elastic, it goes up and down. You can change the performance at runtime. And what we really did with Amazon was we wanted to make it a fully managed service. We didn't want people to think about versioning and patching. We wanted to remove all of that and we wanted people to take as much or as little as they needed. And we, and Amazon, we chose that we should own the responsibility for the availability of the service. And we should maintain the service ourselves so that customers of ONTAP can benefit from the solution. But in many ways, customers who've never been ONTAP customers can now take advantage of an enterprise grade file system and all the great things that it does without having to understand how it works. >> And explain why that's important for customers because people, they go, "Wow, you got S3." but it's very simple. Get, put, right? You don't have the full stack of a mature ONTAP. Please explain what that means to customers a little bit. >> You know, file systems are very important things. You know, we basically use them in our work environments every single day, you know. Within your sort of, you know, your Mac book, you have a home directory and sub-directories and files, very elegantly layout applications and layout infrastructures in ways that object repositories cannot. You know, aside from block and file. Sorry, from file and object, you of course, have block storage. And so, file plays a very important role. IDC has file growing at almost twice the pace of object now on the public cloud systems and, you know, file has about 13% of the overall storage market and it's growing. And I don't see any reason why file won't be as big on the Amazon cloud as the S3 has been. >> Dave: So you guys, go ahead, please. >> Yeah. I mean, you also have to take into account that the S3 object storage offerings of AWS is an integrated PaaS in our solution. So that's how we are actually doing automatic tiering. So you actually reap the best of both worlds, where you get the cost management of putting it in object storage, but you get the performance and the data management capabilities that is pretty unprecedented. You know, we are the first store that's offering that can actually do cross-region replication seamlessly by retaining deduplication and compression. But we also play a lot with, you know, block and object storage. So when Anthony was talking about how we've actually delivered this as a service, and this is sort of from our design principles, we are basically delivering this as a software, as a service, because more than an infrastructure as a service, because the stock that we are actually deploying, or the secret sauce of ONTAP, it's a very vast software stack that we are delivering, on top of AWS infrastructure. So I would always call it or categorize it a little bit more than software as a service, rather than infrastructure as a service. >> But it's even more than that, if I'm right, because it's cloud pricing, right? >> Jonsi: Yes. >> So it's not, you're not preying. I mean, when I buy Salesforce, I got to sign up for three-year deal. That's not a consumption-based model. >> Yeah. >> Oh, I think Amazon, you know what Amazon did uniquely and brilliantly was, it retailed technology and it's what makes Amazon so good, is that they choose to sort of simplify things. And when they find benefits as a retailer, they pass them on to the customer and, you know, there's this sort of pay-as-you-go business model, it's really good for the customer. It makes us work harder because, you know, you have to retain your customer sort of every 10 minutes. And that's something that, you know, as you said, with enterprise software and even some of the early SaaS vendors, that's not how it works. And so Amazon has forced us all to be very, very attentive to our customers. >> Dave: And I'd love to talk about what that means for the on-prem business, but if we have time. But you guys won Design Partner of the Year, what's that all about? First of all, congratulations. >> Anthony: Thank you. There's a lot of ISV design partners. You guys came out number one so congratulations on that. What's that all about? Explain what that entailed and how you got that. >> Yeah, I'll say a few words. Maybe Jonsi can add. I mean, the first thing of course is, you know, I S V stands for Independent Software Vendor. So, you know, it's always great because most people would say, "Well, NetApp is on-premise storage hardware." >> Dave: Of course, yeah. >> Which really, we've not really ever been an increasingly with demonstrating that we are a software company and we operate at cloud speed. You know, I can't really take the credit. I would give it to Jonsi and the engineering team. Maybe Jonsi, you can explain, you know, what moral about the award and why I think we were selected. >> So, I mean, I think it says a lot that this is the first time AWS has ever allowed a third party company to be this integrated into their console, into a support ability systems. You know, we make fun of this, me and Anthony all the time, because when we started this, down this path, everybody at NetApp said, "Guys, you're wasting your time." This is why AWS has the marketplace, but we didn't want to go. We already had the marketplace and we wanted to be able to connect to all these associated services and do within the manner that, you know, this was a true collaboration of engineering teams for a long time to actually deliver the service on both sides so the credit, of course, will always go to the engineers on both sides, even though I designed it, I didn't coat it. So, I think that, that alone, being the first to do it in AWS ever. I think we deserve that award. >> So just for our audience, to be clear, we're talking about FSx, ONTAP in the cloud, in the AWS cloud and kind of dance around that. But so that was announced, I guess, in September? >> Anthony: Yes. >> Right? >> Anthony: September, 2nd. >> What's the uptake been like? What's the reaction? >> Unbelievable. >> I'll bet. (laughing) >> No, no, I mean. >> No, I believe it. >> Better than we ever dreamed of. >> Yeah. >> The number of customers, I'm sure I'm not allowed to say the number of customers, but we asked and the fact that, you know, 60% of those customers have never been NetApp customers before, but they see the value in the data management capabilities that we are bringing to the market. >> Dave: So it exceeded expectations and your expectations were probably pretty enthusiastic. >> They were high. >> Yeah. >> I mean, Amazon is on the record. I was with Ed earlier on today, recording a piece and Ed, you know, was very clear that it's one of the fastest growing services now on AWS. You know, it turns out that, you know, the customer base, I think recognizes the, not just the need for a file system, but the uniqueness and capabilities that ONTAP provides, you know, to those customers in how they manage their business and transformations. And so, you know, to be sort of behind the console, to be sort of behind the Amazon CLI and the Amazon API, you see the world very, very differently, you know. I think the Amazon marketplace is a fantastic capability, but I'll tell you, you know, being a core part of the AWS service itself that they sell, that they support, that they bill for. It's a nice place to be. >> So, SaaS company. You're talking to the language of application development, Kubernetes, right? What do you think this means for the future of NetApp specifically, but also generally the on-prem storage business and the storage business in general? >> Well, we just announced our second quarter earnings today and what's happening is our cloud business is growing like crazy. We generated $388 million of ARR and the growth rates are, you know, astronomically high. That is increasingly helping our on-premise business to grow. You know, the nice thing about being in primarily, in the storage and data business is people aren't deleting many things. And the rate at which they're generating information is just accelerating. So, actually the confidence that we give the customer by demonstrating a sort of a cloud first, a sort of principles of all the cloud is actually giving customers to buy more on premise. So, we really don't mind. We are, our job much like Amazon's, is to have this customer obsession and you can't really go wrong, if you just keep asking them what they want. >> Yeah, if you can do so profitably, you're going to be reinvest in your business. Guys, we've got to go. >> Yeah. >> Love to have you back. >> Thank you. >> And you been quite a transformation. You said you're going to do it. You're doing it. So, well done to you. Five years in the making. Okay. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. Keep it right there. We'll be right back from AWS re:Invent 21. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021 live from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. We are doing one of the most important industry events, hybrid events this year with Amazon and its massive ecosystem of partners, some of which are joining me next. We've got two live sets, two remote sets, over 100 guests on the program, I'm going to be talking about the next decade in Cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome back Anthony Lye to the program, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Cloud at NetApp. Anthony good to see you. >> Nice to see you again thanks for... >> Nice to see you in person. >> I know... >> It's been a couple of years. And Amiram Shachar is here, the VP and GM of Spot by NetApp, Amiram it's great to have you on the program, welcome. >> Likewise, thank you. >> So the acquisition, the Spot acquisition was during the pandemic mid 2020, Amiram talk to me about that why NetApp, how's it going? Give us the lay of the land. >> I think that's the, it's one of the greatest things that NetApp has done, and I think it's one of the most amazing outcomes we could have as a company. And if you think about it in a first sight, when you look at storage company and compute company, what's the connection? But the thing is that NetApp is a company that is going through a huge transformation into Cloud. And by doing this acquisition, it's really like signaling where it's going. It's going way beyond, and honestly I just wanted to be part of it. >> And what's the customer sentiment been the 18 months or so, post acquisition? >> I think NetApp has done specifically with Anthony leading that acquisition, NetApp has done a phenomenal job of keeping Spot as a business unit, independent business unit. So our customers didn't really feel that something had happened, like the only thing we told them is we're going to have more funding, so. >> I'm sure they like that. Anthony talk to us about NetApp's transformation, transition, Spot as part of that. And then of course, CloudCheckr which acquisition was just announced I believe yesterday? >> We closed on actually November 7th. >> Lisa: Okay. >> So it's almost been a month now since we closed, but I've been at NetApp my gosh, it'll be five years in February. And you know, I think that the company had a real desire to sort of, to re-imagine itself and to sort of to embrace the public Clouds and to give its customers you know, what I think it's done incredibly well is this idea of symmetry. That we wanted to build something on Amazon that was as good or maybe a little bit better than on-premise. And customers really I think appreciated, they appreciate that sort of, that desire for us to do those kinds of things. Now of course, CloudCheckr was my ninth acquisition in four years. Just to sort of, to build on what Amiram said I mean, CloudCheckr we acquired four Spot and we acquired what? Four companies in the last 12 months for Spot. So we really believe that as a company now we can address all of their potential opportunities, whether it's in a legacy application, whether it's a virtual desktop, whether it's a Cloud native application, or we just went and announced Ocean for Apache Spark. So Spot now has an optimization and automation solution for Spark on AWS which we announced, I think just yesterday. >> Correct. >> But I'd like to get both of your perspectives on keeping Spot as a brand, Anthony we'll start with you and then Amiram we'll go to you. >> Amiram is the founder, and he was the CEO of the company and built a fantastic company. And we, NetApp I think has a phenomenal brand, but a brand that's that's associated with the sort of the traditional IT organization. And as you note in the Cloud the buyers are slightly different. They're sort of the application owners, or they operate in a sort of a construct that most people call CloudOps or DevOps. And we felt that Spot represented that new buyer in ways that NetApp didn't and probably couldn't. And so we really liked the idea of having the structure of the big N supported by a little pink and a little blue and a more sort of Cloud native brand. >> And that's key, especially the dynamics in the market that we've seen the last 22 months with the rapid changes, the pivot to Cloud customers that weren't that digital needing to go in that direction to survive in the very beginning, I imagine this was really kind of core to NetApp's strategy, but also helping both of your customers to survive initially and then to be able to thrive and identify some of those key areas where they can cut costs would be a far more efficient. >> Okay I think you are in here, if you were born physical you're now digital, and if you weren't born physical you were born digital. And you know, digital is a very effective medium accelerated by the pandemic because as you said, we couldn't really get close to each other and you just look at the innovation around us here at Amazon, it's just amazing to watch. And we've just been really, really good partners with Amazon now for many, many years. And we continue to see just huge, huge opportunities. >> Well Adam Selipsky this morning in his keynote, one of the partners he called out was NetApp. >> Yeah I know I mean, I'll talk a little bit later on maybe with Yancey and I but you know, Amazon now sells our product. They haven't done that with anybody. So ONTAP is now a product that Amazon sells. >> Lisa: Okay. >> Amazon supports, Amazon bills, Amazon runs. So we've really, really demonstrated I think not just to our customers, that sort of a high rate of innovation and an opportunity to sort of accelerate their businesses, but we've demonstrated it to Amazon themselves, that we can operate like them. And we can develop with them at a speed that they are comfortable with. That maybe a few years ago many people would have doubted that a legacy company could operate this way. >> Right, one of the things we know about Amazon is the speed, but also their focus on the customer it's laser-focused, that whole flywheel of Amazon everything that was being announced this morning was exciting to your point Anthony, but it's also showing how involved the customers and the partners are in the ecosystem and that flywheel. Amiram talk to me from your perspective what are some of the, from a visionary standpoint what are some of the things that you're looking forward to going forward with CloudCheckr, but also knowing how deeply connected and integrated NetApp is with a big powerhouse like AWS? >> Yeah, so a few things about that. I think the first thing is also my take from today, like listening to the keynote and looking at all the new announcements. I think the trend is that deployment to the Cloud is becoming easier, but operations is becoming messier. And I think when we look at our category and where we aspire, where we want to be and where we're going. So I think with the CloudCheckr acquisition. So we're expanding into an area that we haven't been to because there are two categories in Cloud cost, there is optimization and there is cost management. What we've done, what we've built, what we've, the business we had is in the optimization space. It's actively reducing and optimizing resources for customers. And there are very few companies in that category as I can say. But right now we're expanding into that area of cost management, so we can meet our customers sooner and you can see us doing it in multiple areas, not only here, but also if we look at a customer journey in the Cloud, it starts with bring workloads in the Cloud, deploy them, and then secure them, and then automate them and then optimize them. Nobody moves to the Cloud and optimizes. So we're typically meeting customers at the end of their journey, we're meeting customers where they need an optimization and they have everything already set up. And right now with Ocean for Apache Spark, Ocean continuous delivery, Spot security, we're meeting customers sooner in their journey so we can provide a much more holistic solution and platform to customers wherever they are in their migration to the Cloud and scaling into Cloud. And with CloudCheckr also taking us to a whole new world of cost management. So, I think we're scaling and ramping and doing all these things, and it's so amazing to realize that we haven't unleashed even 1% of what we can do. >> Really, so there's much more under the covers that we're still waiting for? >> I think the good news is you know, to comment more on what you said, our roadmaps are now largely being driven by customers. And that's just so refreshing to know that you've not only solved a problem for a particular customer, but the customer wants you to solve more problems and that they trust us to be that sort of organization that can help them. So, we're full steam ahead. You know, we're going to continue to acquire in areas where we think we can get acceleration. But our acquisition of Spot was very much about as Amiram said, bringing not just a great company into the business, but to invest significantly in it. And that's really proven I think to me, as Amiram said, one of the most if not the most successful acquisition NetApp has ever done. >> Well congratulations, that's fantastic. But it also sounds like from that customer focus there's clear, strong alignment with how AWS operates, how it values its customers from NetApp's perspective and I imagine from Spots as well. >> You know, if there's one thing I was really proud of during the acquisition, is I got a phone call from a customer, it's the largest food delivery company in South America, and they were very worried about this acquisition and I asked them why? And they told me, "Because your customer service, Spot's customer service is the best customer service I've ever gotten, and if I'm not going to continue to get this customer service, I need to look how I'm finding another vendor." And they told me that, when they want to even tell AWS like which company they can learn from, they're always pointing at Spot. So, and that was a very refreshing moment for me to realize how much also at Spot we care about our customers, but not only as a gimmick, as something that customer obsession, as something that we really live. And that was interesting to see that, that was a concern by our customers when we got acquired. >> Well that's proof in the pudding, because you're right it's one thing to say, companies can always say, "We're customer obsessed, we're customer first, we're customer focused." It's one thing to say it as a marketing term it's a whole other thing to actually live it and demonstrate it, and actually have people coming to you saying that, "We want to model that." I'm curious Anthony, what did you pull over from that? What has NetApp learned from this? >> I always tell Amiram that the idea was that they would essentially take us over. That you know, we sort of loved their culture, we loved their people and their process. And we literally changed a lot of how NetApp operated to operate along the Spot model. So we really did, as Amiram said earlier on, we let them not just sort of exist, but we let them thrive. And we encourage them to point at other areas that NetApp, that they thought we should change to be more like them. And it's raised the bar across everything we do now. And so, we now have a lot of the Spot business processes, a lot of the Spot cultures sort of seeping into the whole of the company. >> That's a very empathetic approach, and that's one of the things that we've learned in the last year and a half that's been, it's key to leadership, it's key to anything is that empathy. But the ability to recognize where there are things within an organization that can be improved and looking at leaders like Spot to go, "Let's actually make this really symbiotic and bi-directional." And I imagine with CloudCheckr it's going to be the same type of influence? >> Well as I've always said, and I say this to the employees and to the acquisitions that we make, what we are acquiring is people. You know the logo, the software, even in many ways the customer base is really very much I think a function of the people. And we work incredibly hard to retain the people, but we do so by sort of empowering them and encouraging them to lead. We really don't want to have the historical perspective of acquisitions, where big company swamps the little company. And I think we've tried very hard to make that a part of our acquisition strategy. And so CloudCheckr is very early in the process but very much, we're following those things, even Amiram and his team are learning from them. If they're doing something a little better than Spot is, then that's something we'll pick up from them. >> And that's just from a very open cultural perspective, that's a big change for NetApp but it's also a smart way to go, 'cause you're right it's, you're acquiring people. And we often talk about people, process, technology. But it's, sometimes to be honest with you it's rare that we hear companies talking about the people focus as being that's critical. It's because of our people that we have successful support, happy successful customers. So that people focus is (inaudible). >> You know, it's the company and culture is not something you can manufacture. It's something that happens and it happens I think through people. And it's an important thing is, if you can establish an organization with the right kinds of people and again, all credit goes to Amiram as the founder and CEO of the company. I think you sort of demanded a kind of person and a kind of culture that set you apart from so many other companies. >> I think the focus on culture was, I was very obsessed with it from very early on in the process that even Spot investors were very, they were questioning like, how come that you are so much obsessed with culture so early on? And I think it paid off big time. There was a book I read while being a CEO that really helped me to scale from quarter to quarter, because I really believe that as a CEO of a startup, every quarter you're basically applying again to your job because you're getting a new company every quarter. And about people, processes, technology, so at Spot it was a little bit different through the book I read, which is "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz, it's people, product, revenue, PPR. And you need to take care of the people, and if you don't take care of the people, so nothing else matter, like it's nothing else just... >> Right. >> And if the people and the product are not working well, so the revenue are not going to come. So revenue was always for us as something that is coming, it's trailing after a good product and good people. >> I love that, what a great, honest focus and vision you guys both have congratulations on the acquisition, CloudCheckr. But also just the cultural alignment that you've done that's really driven by your people and the customers, it's really refreshing to hear that and congrats on NetApp's continued partnership with AWS. We look forward to having you on again next time we can see you in person and talk more about customer successes. >> Thank you very much for hosting us. >> My pleasure guys. >> Thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in live tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. We're not yet in real life. We're doing another remote interviews with two great guests Cube Alumni. Of course, I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We've got Jason McGee, IBM fellow VP and CTO of IBM's cloud platform and Octavian the Nazis senior vice president Hybrid Cloud engineering at NetApp. Both Cube alumni, is great to see you both. Thanks for coming on theCUBE >> Yeah, great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we were just talking before we came on camera that, it feels like we've had this conversation, a long time ago we have, Hybrid Cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys in many times on theCUBE. So now it's mainstream, it's here in the real world. Everyone gets it. There's no real debate. Now multicloud that's people are debating that which means that's right around the corner. So Hybrid Cloud is here and now Jason this is really the focus. And this is also brings together the NetApp in your partnership and talk about the relationship first with Hybrid Cloud. >> Yeah, I mean, you know look we've talked a number of times together. I think in the industry, maybe a few years ago people were debating whether Hybrid Cloud was a real thing. We don't have that conversation anymore. I think, you know, enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of COVID and kind of how we work differently now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on-prem and off-prem systems probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers. And what they're looking for now is how do I do that? And how do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in? And then how do I get more and more of my workload into those environments? And it's been interesting. I think the first waves of cloud were infrastructure centric and externally application focused they were easier things. And now we're moving into more mission critical more stateful, more data oriented workloads. And that brings with a new challenges on where applications run and how we leverage the club. >> Octavian, you guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years, data centric company NetApp has always been great engineering team. You're on the cloud, Hybrid Cloud engineering. What's the current status of the relationship. Give us an update on how it's vectoring into the Hybrid Cloud since you're a senior vice president of Hybrid Cloud engineering. >> Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM. I think NetApp and IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers. And we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong joint Hybrid Cloud value proposition for customers on NetApps storage and data services compliment what IBM does in terms of products and solutions both for on-premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions, solutions that span data mobility, data governance for the new workrooms that Jason has talked about. >> And how has some of the customer challenges that you're seeing obviously software defined networking software defined storage, DevOps is now turned into DevSecOps. So you have now that programmability requirement with for dynamic applications, applications driven, infrastructure, all these buzz words point to one thing, the infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. >> Yeah, I would say infrastructure will continue to be top of mind for everybody, whether they're building a private cloud or whether they we're trying to leverage, something like IBM cloud. I think, you know, people want to consume, infrastructure is an API. I think they want to simplicity, security. I think they want to manage their costs very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM cloud to build such capabilities. >> Jason how are you guys helping some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and refactoring previous stuff during transforming, but also innovating at the same time. There's a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the Hybrid challenges? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, there's a lot of dimensions to that problem but the one that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how kind of the consumption model of public cloud, API driven, self service, capabilities operated for you how that consumption model is starting to spread because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these, more mission critical data centric kind of workloads was well, I can't always move that application to the public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network, closer to my end users. So, you know, out where data is being generated, maybe in an IOT context and when you had those requirements you had to kind of switch operating models. You, you had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model. And we have a common platform and things like open shift that can run everywhere but the missing piece was how do I consume everything as a service everywhere? And so recently we launched this thing called IBM been satellite, which we've been working with Octavian and his team on, on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center, out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption. And when you do that, you of course running a much more diverse infrastructure environment. You have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with like multi-tiered applications you know, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this complex environment. >> Here we've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade as the evolution goes. Octavian, I got to ask you this is critical path for companies. They want the storage ready infrastructure. You guys have been doing that for many decades pardon me with IBM, for sure. But now they're all getting Hybrid Cloud big time and it's not, it's attributed computing. It's what it is. It's the operating model. When someone asks you guys what your capabilities are how do you answer that in today's world? Because you have storage as well known. You got a great product people know that. But what is NetApp's capabilities? When I say I'm going all in and Hybrid Cloud complete changeover. >> So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. The software-defined has been definitely one of the key design points. The second is the Hybrid Cloud in the containerization of our operating systems. So they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do it's enabled the speed of scale. And that has been by building, you know intrinsically in the product, both support or in also using Kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility, that scale. >> So how about this data fabric vision? Because to me, this is comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners the number one problem at their, and problem that they're to solve in the conversation tends to I hear what was that control plane Kubernetes, horizontally scalable this all points to data being available., So how do you create that availability? What is data fabric mean? What does all this mean in a hybrid context? >> Well if you think about it, data fabric it's a Hybrid Cloud concept, right? This is about enabling data governance, data, mobility data security in an environment where some of the applications were run on premises or at the edge or the smart edge and many of the, perhaps data links and analytics, and services, rich services will be in a central locations or many or perhaps some large know data centers. So you need to have, the type of capabilities data services to enable that mobility that governance, that security across this continuum that spans the edge, the core and the cloud. >> Jason, you mentioned satellite before Cloud Satellite. Could you go into more detail on that? I know it's kind of a new product, what is that about and tell me what's the benefits and why is it exist and what problems does it solve? >> Yeah, so in the most simple terms, Cloud Satellite is the capability to extend IBM's, public cloud into on-prem infrastructure at the edge or in a multicloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to to build your application, OpenShift as a service database, as DevTools, AI capabilities instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's re you know, cloud regions you can now add your private data center or add your Metro provider, or add your AWS or Azure accounts and now consume those services consistently across all those environments. And that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public cloud with kind of location independence you see in hybrid and lets us solve new problems. Like, you know, it's really interesting. We're seeing like AI and data being a primary driver. You know I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like, in a Metro because all of my, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to halfway across the country to some cloud region. And so it lets you extend out in that way. And when you do that, of course, you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with NetApp on how do we then expose NetApp storage into this environment when I'm running in the data center or I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data replicate the data, secure it. Well, how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think John, at the beginning you kind of alluded to this idea of, things are becoming more application centric, right? And we're trying to run a IT architecture that's more centered around the application. Well, by combining clouds knowledge of kind of where everything's running with that common platform like OpenShift with Kubernetes aware of data fabric and storage layer, you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management that spans those environments. >> Yeah, I'm want to come back to that whole impact on IT because this has come up as a major theme here. Think at the it transformation is going to be more about cloud scale, but I want to get to Octavian on the satellite on NetApp's role and how you compliment that. How do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with Cloud Satellite. Obviously this looks like an operating model. How does NetApp fit in. >> Simply put we extend and enable the capabilities that IBM satellite platform provides. I think Jason referred to the storage aspects and you know what we are doing it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around new theory based on temperature, or replicated snapshots or capabilities around, you know, caching, high availability, encryption and so forth. So we believe that our technology integrate very well with red hat openShift and the Kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility in that translation of really distributed computing at scale, from the traditional data center to the edge and to the massive Ops that IBM is building. >> You know, I got to say, but watching you guys work together for many decades now and covering you with theCUBE for the past 10 years or 11 years now been a great partnership. I got to say one thing, that's obvious to me and our team and mainly the world is now you've got a new CEO over at IBM you have a Cloud Focus that's on unwavering. Arvind loves the cloud we all know that. Ecosystems are changing without, you already had a big ecosystem and partnerships. Now it seems to be moving to a level where you got to have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud. So I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes. If you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM NetApp relationship in the new context of this new partnership new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together. >> Yeah, I mean, I could start, I mean I think you're right, that cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment people operate in and the ecosystem is really critical. And I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean, IBM and NetApp, as we said I've been working together for a long time. We rely on them all in our public cloud, for example, in our storage tiers. But with the kind of idea of distributed cloud in the boundaries of public cloud spreading to all of these new environments, those were just new places where we can build really interesting valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with data, deal with these more complex apps, in all the places that they exist. So I think it's been actually really exciting to kind of leverage that opportunity to find, new ways to work together and deliver solutions for our clients. >> Octavian. >> I will say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there's more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center be it in the cloud or at the edge. So our mission is to enable that, Hybrid Cloud or data mobility and enabled persistence rich data, storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform, comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM's services at the edge and or a remote office and I think that's very exciting. >> You guys are both experts and solely season executives to DevOps, DevSecOps, DataOps, whatever you want to call data's here, ecosystems. Guys thanks for coming on theCUBE Really appreciate the insight. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Okay, IBM Think CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) (tranquil music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Welcome to the Cube virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and with me today is Amiram Shachar, the V P and GM of Spot by Netapp program. It's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >>So here we are in this virtual world that we're all living in great that we can still connected you. But I wanted to understand you're the founder and CEO of Spot, which was acquired by net up earlier this year. Talk to me a little bit about spot about the technology and what's going on since the Net acquisition. >>Absolutely so Spot is the company that was founded in late 2015 on was centered and concentrated about helping companies thio optimize their cloud infrastructure costs through automation off software of how customers air provisioning their compute so we could possibly help customers to choose their best price off server infrastructure in the price and the best size off server infrastructure in the cloud on, You know, since we launched the company. So we help over 1500 customers worldwide. Thio use our technology scale that revenues to tens of millions of dollars of revenue raised money from top VCs, including Intel Capital, Vertex and Highland on just recently, four months ago, we got acquired by buying it up. >>Excellent. So that's a pretty fast from launch to acquisition, You know, less than five years. Must have a neck brace collar on from the whiplash. That and covert, right with flash. So talk to me about acquisition a few months ago. What's going on with the technologies, aunt? How is the netapp, um, customer base helping to expand your market penetration? >>Yeah. So it was clear, uh, during the rationality. You know, when we did the rationale of the acquisition, So it was clear that spot is going to remain a an entity with the netapp. So, for example, we preserved our brand, so it's spot by net up. It's not gonna be just integrated, and that's it. So we're not gonna see spot disappearing. It's actually the opposite. So we're gonna leveraged a market credibility. That net up is 27 years. You know storage leading storage provider has in the market, and we're gonna use spot as a brand to lean forward and lead with cloud native applications on Do. What we're gonna do is we're gonna help to netapp transform, like, you know, net up existing customers. They're moving to the cloud so not only they can use netapp storage in the cloud. They can also use thesaurus fair and automation and optimization layers that sport provides. Actually. >>So talk to me about what's going on in the market today. We've been talking for months now about this acceleration of digital transformation, acceleration of cloud adoption given businesses now are working so differently. Talk to me about what you are seeing, what your customers just seeing how you're helping them to manage and not just keep the lights on right now. But be able to be successful in going positions Well, in the future. >>Mhm. So I'm seeing like to two main trends. The first trend is like more cloud usage, but that's very general, very vague. But what I do see in in addition to that is actually like priorities have been changed. And when I talk about priority like priority is not only moving to the cloud but doing it efficiently. So customers who already using cloud we're moving to the cloud they really need Thio, you know, planned this in the most efficient way. So I can tell you, for example, a lot of customers that actually we were talking to them to use us at the beginning of 2020. So they intended to use us in, like, you know, third quarter, fourth quarter of the year, like it all got accelerated and they started to use our platform because they put their priorities have changed and they wanna have, like, optimization of cost, right? Right now, >>yeah, That's been something that a lot of folks have been wanting and needing even to just keep the lights on, get their eyes on visibility where we spending costs. Are we using cloud efficiently? If not, how can we work with technology vendors to help us get that visibility and optimize our costs and spend so tell me about from a conversation perspective, uh, post, you know, during this interesting year, the acquisition occurred. Are your conversations with customers changing? Are we seeing now? Is cloud rising even up that the C suite stacked to the board in terms of the conversations that you're having, >>you know, and I'm seeing this like for five years. Like how our conversations are changing the year over year and year over year, we're seeing like improvement in our type of conversations because people living in, like, you know, to the Cloud Mawr people thinking about about optimization is becoming a priority. As I mentioned, like, you know, four years ago like it's not about optimizing cloud. It's about moving to the cloud. And right now I have so many things in the cloud. I just need to run it well, I need to understand why them thio bring in the cloud. So our conversation has gotten a lot better on, especially in 2020 on. Do you think about cloud expenditure like this is probably the second biggest line item off every company's expenses. So it goes directly to the cause, which is the cost of good salt of every company. So it goes directly go off the margin off cos so Cloud is definitely becoming a board discussion thing. >>So talk to me about some of the new products and capabilities that you guys have now that you're part of that. >>So first of all, is the company we really believe in, like listening to customers, seeing what they need and innovating on their behalf. I think this is like our mission, and I'm always like saying that like customers always want, like cheaper cloud and more simple cloud. This is like a strategy to build a long term business like, I don't know if customers will not need, like, cheaper cloud in 10 years from now. And I don't know if customers would want more complicated cloud in 10 years from cloud in 10 years from now. Um so in order to keep that momentum So we're doubling down like our existing technology, which helping customers to optimize their pricing purchasing. As you know, we're helping companies to purchase across the three pricing models in the cloud and the first pricing model being on demand, which is you pay by the hour the second pricing model being reserved instances or savings plans, which is you basically reserve capacity for longer time, and then you get a discount. And the third pricing model, called Spot and Spot, basically is like either the resource is idle. Compute resource is that cloud providers have and they're willing to sell you that in a low rate, but they can take it away from you at any moment. So what our technology does it actually balancing in the most economical way across these three pricing models that we basically push the savings to the maximum while we also keep the S. L. A and the SLOC over the customers. So what we're releasing now doubling down on the technology is we're introducing something called predictive re balancing, which is basically customers who are launching spot instances and they want to migrate between spot instances, two different spot instances or two reserved instances so we could do it much more proactively than ever before. We've been investing a lot of machine learning engineers on that problem. We've put a lot of brain power toe work on this, and we're gladly happy to release a new, updated version of that. It can help customers to get warnings off almost an hour before an interruption might happen. >>Predictive re balancing, You said it's called one of the things I was thinking when you were talking about the three pricing tiers and what you guys help businesses do. It sounds very dynamic and iterative in the moment. So based on what's it based on usage data volumes, how do you help customers make that? How does the technology actually help customers with that dynamic, that predictive re balancing? >>So it's a great question, because the way that it works, it really matches the technology stack of the customer. So if we understand that this is like a Web service running behind an elastic load balancer, so the predictive rebalancing will have Behavior X. And if we realize that this is a big data workload that requires, um, some other type of compute provisioning. So the predictive rebalancing will behave like why. And there is also the new wave of APS, which are cloud native containers and micro services so actually predictor of balancing notes to identify that. So, basically, if you think about that, what happens behind the scenes is that we migrate between different pricing models and we just move containers around. The customers don't really know what happened behind the scenes, but they that the output of everything is the most optimized and high available capacity they could possibly get from the cloud. >>So what sort of cost savings are we talking about? Can you share an examples of some what some of your customers has have achieved? >>Mhm. So, yeah, we're talking about like, I think the benchmark is anywhere between 70 to 90%. We have a lot of public use cases with our customers and some of our really valuable customers like check, which is an education tech technology company which are running with us. The entire fleet off containers reported like over 65% off cost reduction of the under compute also, ah, gum gum, which is computer vision company that analyzes, um ads in real time. They also reported over 70% off cost reduction of their off their cloud infrastructure a swell as the well known Ticketmaster, which is also a very large customer virus and using us and all of their production communities clusters and also saved, um, over 60 to 70% off their containers infrastructure. >>So big savings. I think the lowest number heard you say, with 60% so big impact that the technology is able to make talk to me about the existing customers that and you've got some big brand. You mentioned Ticketmaster? Um, how How have things changed for them or not changed for them with the net acquisition, you talked about maintaining the spot brand. But talk to me about kind of that transition for your existing customers. >>So, you know, it's actually a very, um, you know, e felt lucky, like going through this process of an acquisition, you know, is the founder of a company. And it's, uh it's very, uh, very pleasing. Calls to have with customers is when you call customers and you tell them about the acquisition. And I was lucky enough to tell them like, Hey, guys, nothing is gonna change Like our road map is going to continue in the same way our name is going to remain the same way. The only thing we're gonna bother you with, quote unquote as we're going to add storage capabilities into our computer capabilities, >>that must have been music to their ears. But I gotta ask you, what's it like doing an acquisition in the middle of a global pandemic? And we're completely remote, right? >>You know, this is an experience I will never forget. Uh, you know it, Z, you're just You're at home. You know, I was also I was really lucky to become a father for the first time. And I know earlier this year s Oh, it's like you're with your baby wife, family and just all day calls on going and you know it, Z it's It's a really amazing experience that I think I will never forget. >>Yeah, I think I'm with you on that unique experiences. Well, congratulations for being a new father, but that also makes it challenging, right? You're you're CEO of a startup. It's about to get acquired. And you've got a newborn as, ah coworker. So all of a sudden, all these challenges that just add, um ADM or challenges to the mix. So I'm sure it was great to be able to have the conversation with your existing customers about what little is changing, but also for them. What's the opportunity for those existing customers to really start taking advantage of all of net tax net ops capabilities? >>So that's exactly the intersection between spot and ETA, which I feel like super excited about, because if you think about that like we've built a technology of computer optimization over the last five years. That up is a big, brand, credible company. Going for 27 years, more than 27 years. The last seven years get up has has been doing like a massive shift to the cloud supporting their customers were moving from on Prem to the cloud. So net up what never actually did. And I was very amazed by that, which is the imported >>all of their own >>premise t technology and put it in the cloud in the platform that they call cloud volumes, which is you. Basically, you can get >>all the >>features that Netapp provides, like advanced snap shooting and back up and fast restored and compression D duplication, which I remember managing data centers myself from my military days. I was using a lot of netapp stuff >>on. They took all of these great things and put it in the ground. And now what we can >>actually do for our customers is that we can actually attach like the computer they're buying from us and optimizing with us with the storage, the great storage that offers in the cloud in the cloud volume platform. >>It's a lot of opportunities there. In fact, Netapp has We've been talking about this on the Cube for a while. For years, Netapp has gone, undergone a big transformation, a big evolution, and it sounds like what they're doing with spot and also the opportunities that it's providing. So not just your existing customers, but you're prospective customers. And your new customers is just kind of keeping that door wide open. Which right now in this interesting time is is essential is businesses are continuing to pivot as this time unfold, and we know something's going to remain permanent, but that got to be able to pivot quickly. Otherwise, the competition is probably in the rear view mirror, maybe smaller, more agile and ready to take over. >>That's so true and like, you know, generally speaking about, like transformation, like modernization of application. So, like huge trend that we're seeing. And this is also a huge intersection between netapp and spot. Um, is everything kubernetes and everything containers eso we're seeing organizations moving to the cloud, but they're they're not, like, no, not anymore looking at, like just lift and ship their like, lift modernized ship like people want to modernize our application for various reasons. And we see containers. Technology is just becoming like the de facto technology for shipping applications in the cloud, and we're seeing kubernetes on the rise and one of our products. That spot, called Ocean Eyes, is a product that manages compute for kubernetes. So our our tagline is basically serverless containers, which is customers deploy their containers and then we manage the infrastructure underneath. They don't need to define their infrastructure, think about their infrastructure, just like it's a really a near Vanna for for develops, people responsible for communities. And then when we actually, you know, got into Nana and we saw all of, like, the cloud volumes technology that I was telling you about, we said it like, Hey, what if we can take this service, compute off containers and we can actually make it for storage as well? And we basically you can take all the good things that you get from service, which is, you know, no infrastructure management building Mike utility building, you know, scale to zero scale to like, you know, infinite. If you need >>Andi with no infrastructure management and this is actually possible with the netapp cloud >>volumes technology. So, actually, right now we're launching with net up, something will recall storage less volumes, which is basically for containers were going to allow that directly from our ocean product that you will be able to get storage list volumes that are going to be completely Hence we management of storage. And just to set the tone like, what is storage is like, Is there no storage like, what is surveillance are their storage? Are their service there? Of course there are, but you don't manage them. So what storage is? Is there a storage underneath? Of course there is, but you don't need to manage it. And >>is that something that your customers can take advantage of? Now, is that coming in the next quarter or so? What's the timing on that? >>But this is, um this is right now already in preview. So we already opened that to some of our, you know, advanced customers that are using, like all of our latest and greatest you know, features. So it's already with customers validation working with them. They're actually actually love it and love the fact that they don't need to manage storage, because when you move to the cloud. You actually don't really care about storage anymore because it's becoming just oil for your applications. Eso and it's gonna be generally available. Hopefully, in the first half of 2021. >>Exciting. Something positive to look forward to. You'll have to come back and share with us. Some of the results. Mm. It's been great to have you on the Cube. Thanks for spending some time with me >>today. Likewise. Lisa, thank you very much. >>I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

>> [Female VoiceOver] From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with our leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier. Cloud Native News and industry coverage. There are two great guests here to break down what's going on in Cloud Native. we got Rancher Labs, Jim Sarale, Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances and Bryce Cracco Product Manager for NetApp HCI. Guys, thanks for coming on this breaking news around Cloud Native. I mean, this has been really all about Cloud Native for the past year and a half, but this year, certainly with the pandemic, the modern applications are being pushed out faster and faster. A lot of pressure. So congratulations on this announcement, Jim set us up. What is the News? I saw some articles, we've got a story get hit and SiliconANGLE. What's the news with NetApp with Rancher Labs? >> Yeah, thank you. And you're right, we are seeing a vast push with, with the crazy times that we're in right now, but the news really is, you know, Rancher formerly launching our OEM program and launching that with with our Marquee partner with NetApp, you know, when companies get to a certain juncture, you know, an OEM relationship and sometimes means just more of a marketing type relationship but as everybody knows, Rancher is, you know, one of the industry leading multicloud, multi Kubernetes cluster management solutions, open source. And you know, what that means is we're an agnostic play for, for those that are trying to leverage Kubernetes, we've talked with NetApp, we struck a deal with them for them to embed us on their HCI platform. And when you talk about our early in program and, and the things that it entails is really around, you know, how do you get contract vehicles to map go to market strategies? How do you get support, engineering, integration, development, all of those things align with partners. It's not an easy task. It's very important to the go to the kind of go to market strategy that we have. And I think, you know, not only with the market adoption around Kubernetes, Ranchers agnostic play in open source and then obviously, you know, Ranchers come a long way. Our products tried and true. We have nearly 500 customers. We're seeing those customers lean back into some of the OEMs and to the software vendors to have them do more and get them more, I guess, ready for the things that they're doing, an IT operations, how the have dev you know, the app DevOps folks are trying to do more and get applications to market faster. So we're really suited well for organizations like NetApp to take our technology bundle in it and really make it better for their customers experience. So the program allows for contract vehicles, direct integration, support, engineering, pricing, because not one size fits all. As you see the evolution from On-prem to cloud IoT Edge, a lot of different devices from 100s of dollars to 1000s. So Ranchers committed to making sure that we align our products and pricing to fit some of those low compute platforms and also be able to right size our business model to make them successful. >> Well, congratulations, I love the term OEM still kind of hangs around, I'm old enough to remember when it was actually equipment not software, original equipment manufacturer, which essentially, you're essentially letting NetApp embed your code into their equipment or their software. But this is the relationship of a channel and indirect channel for Rancher which you guys are launching, which is total validation. Appreciate that, I like to get into the NetApp side. Bryce, if you don't mind, because, you know, obviously cloud's not new to NetApp storage becoming more critical, hybrid clouds more important. Tell us about the transformation of HCI because I think this is where Kubernetes and it starts to fit in when you see the cloud native surge coming in. How are you guys looking at this opportunity? >> Yeah, you bet when you, when you look at it from a converged infrastructure or hyper-converged infrastructure or hybrid cloud infrastructure perspective. It's always been about simplicity, right. We're not doing anything in the HCI market in general that can't be otherwise done. It's just making it much simpler, reducing that that learning curve and reducing that time to value that our IT customers get. And so I think we saw it, you know, converged infrastructure and hyper-converged infrastructure, all start out with virtualization is kind of the top layer that's facilitated but now obviously Kubernetes is becoming table stakes in the enterprise. So I think we're seeing all the vendors in the space, put in some kind of automatic deployment of Kubernetes or some easier deployment of Kubernetes, making Kubernetes that top layer rather than just virtualization. And, you know, this is a really great opportunity for us at NetApp to be able to do that. Not only with just any Kubernetes package but one that's very well regarded and beloved in the DevOps communities and that's Rancher. So what we have here is kind of something that's great for IT, and really great for DevOps in terms of being able to centralize multi cluster management across a hybrid cloud ecosystem and really empower those DevOps teams, what they to do what they need to do but still keeping IT at the center of it. >> You know, it's interesting, you know, shift left for security DevOps here, DevSecOps, it's all kind of happening with software, software defined, software operated. This is what this is the new operating environment. What is the use cases that presents itself well for this is it from a customer standpoint? Is it they're looking for certain things when you look at the product definition, you say, okay we have NetApp, we have Rancher. Take me through that thinking, what's the customer use case? What are they getting out of this? >> Sure, I think there's a variety of use cases where you see Kubernetes coming into play. And one of the great things about NetApp HCI, is it's not just simple infrastructure but it's also very scalable infrastructure. So that's where a lot of these types of products fall down. As we get to such such a scale point they don't work because of our scalability and our ability to handle mixed workloads. We can really handle any number of use cases. So in a Kubernetes context, this could be anything from IT departments who are going to containerized applications for their own, you know, the applications that they themselves manage, like ERP systems and so forth that are starting to get containerized. It could also be for bespoke applications that the companies are writing themselves, the DevOps teams that actually write the code that makes the company work. And so there, there's kind of a wide variety of use cases in there that are starting to go to Kubernetes. If not there already, the DevOps teams largely are already using Kubernetes. And this is just a great way to centralize it on on one kind of easy button, but yet very scalable and highly performing infrastructure for that kind of consolidation. >> Jim, this is the holy grail we've you guys have been doing since the beginning of Rancher Labs, programmable infrastructure, infrastructure as code, you couldn't get any clear or here when you start to have mainstream, you know, programmable storage and still programmable networking. All of this is happening. This is what we had hoped for the world's now gone full containers. Now you've got Kubernetes and IDC still shows that the enterprises are only like 30 to 40%. Even deep in their toes in on containers. If that, so you see a coupe call and you see all that at VM world, you'll see that re-invent you're going to see mainstream IT, the classic IT with DevOps. What's your reaction to that? Because there this, you know, what's your, what's your what's your take on this? >> Yeah I think you're absolutely right, we are scratching the surface and I think that we will see IT really embrace, right. This, this becomes the opportunity for business enablement to take, to take shape across all different avenues, IT is building infrastructure and make it, you know, allowing compute to be available. And this is kind of, we'll see this surge, not just the IT operations but really having the different groups from app devs to the business line owners, to those pushing applications, understanding the entire ecosystem. You know, we're talking about NetApp and HCI today but you can think of cross the edge, data center edge cloud, retail point of sale systems, getting immediate updates, dealing with IT operations and the compute platforms. It's really just endless. And we're excited. I think the OEM program is going to allow companies like NetApp and in other verticals and industries to really take shape and take advantage of what Rancher's offering to help them be more efficient across what their critical business apps are trying to do. >> Well, congratulations on NetApp, they're very smart company. They've got savvy customers and they're very loyal. Bryce, with that in mind, what's been the reaction you laid out the use cases when you bring this to market with your customers and partners? What's the feedback thumbs up on this and what's the vibe? >> Yeah, we've had some really enthusiastic early reaction, a couple early customers looking at it. You know, it's been a lot of fun and people are really excited that one of the great things about doing this with Rancher is that it's, it's purely open source software. So, you know, our customers love that. It's, there's, it's kind of a low risk proposition for them. They're very well, well hedged they can push this button and get it started on their NetApp HCI with very little, very little lead up to that very little advanced knowledge and just kind of get started. It's actually there's no incremental costs to use it on NetApp HCI. It's just, if you want a joint support model that it, that that there's a fee. And so you can kind of think of it as an indefinite trial period in a way. And I think that's created a lot of early interest and I think yeah I think it's going to be a really great option for our customers. It's going to add a lot of value to the NetApp HCI product. And so far, everyone's been very excited about it. >> You know, I was talking with Dave Vellante, my co-host in the CUBE also does a lot of storage research, knows NetApp as well. We were also commenting about this dynamic and we kind of call this out in 2016 when VMware was having trouble with the cloud operations. And then they decided to get rid of everything and just partner with Amazon. Everyone's like, that's horrible. It's going to be terrible. They're going to lose all their customers but we pointed out and I think this is true here. And I want to get your reaction, both of you guys, if you don't mind commenting what turned out to be the case was is that there was a clear distinction and operator of infrastructure and software development environments with higher level cloud native services. And they're not necessarily competing directly. They're kind of coming together, this idea of operating infrastructure and IT concept when it goes software and goes cloud, it's not a win, lose dynamic. You have software and you get people often need to operate that either code it or run it. So at large scale, this is where HCI kind of fits in Bryce, right? I mean, because now you got the edge, it's more devices. I mean, this is more infrastructure to run. So more, more stuff you've got to operate all this stuff. It's not going to ever go away. You guys react to that. What do you think? >> Sure. Yeah, I think I mean, from a NetApp perspective our customers use all kinds of infrastructure. They use public cloud infrastructure and NetApp has a really great public cloud focused portfolio, around public cloud services. So that's certainly a market that would be playing in our customers use. And it's part of the landscape, as you say, edge, of course also, and you know, with this solution I think it fits right into that because Rancher becomes this kind of container orchestration control plane. That's hosted on an HCI but can span this hybrid multi-cloud and edge environment all from that kind of centralized location. >> I think the simplification of the workloads is a huge deal. Jim, your, your thoughts on this? I see you've got this great program. You have the OEM program and you got an indirect partner, rising tide floats all boats here with, with this market. What's your take? >> Absolutely. And what better way to launch this program with somebody like NetApp? So yeah, you know, Rancher from its inception has been an open source platform agnostic. I think that will help, you know, help us, not just us but NetApp and other OEM partners, depending on operating system, legacy systems, verticals, industries, we're all playing a part in it. On-prem cloud, hybrid cloud, you know, I think Ranchers really well suited, for this advancement strictly by the way that we've continued in our philosophy of building an open source agnostic platform to help organizations, OEMs, ISBs, cloud providers, you name it. I think that Rancher is really well suited for, you know, kind of taking this additional ride, if you will, right. We're seeing we're all seeing it. And as you pointed out, it's less than 30% adoption today. We're all hoping for that to increase exponentially. >> Yeah, when you go mainstream, you get a lot of issues. Bryce, final question on the news analysis here. Why Rancher Labs from a NetApp perspective, what was the what was the deciding factor for you guys? >> Well, they just made a lot of sense for us to partner with. Again, the open source nature of it and the free nature of it made it really low barrier to entry for our customers. We really liked that. We also like they're very open and agnostic approach. So, you know, nothing that we're doing here with Rancher has to be at the expense of any other relationships that we have. And that was really that was really an important consideration. You know, it's, it's a very low risk, low cost, easy to get going solution for our customers. And there's very, there's no fear of lock-in with it. And so it's basically just all potential upsides and no potential downsides. And I think it's a really great solution for both IT and for DevOps, which was really critical. >> Real quick question on the customer expectation. Are you guys going to support Rancher? How does a customer get impacted by this? Obviously NetApp has, has their own supporters or is there a joint support? Is you guys going to handle that? How does the customer deal with that touches? >> Yeah, that's, that's really the crux of the deal. There is NetApp is able to provide frontline support for our customers or NetApp HCI customers, if they've, if they've purchased the Rancher support package through NetApp, they can get support for it through NetApp. And we're able to pass tickets back and forth between the companies as needed. So you don't have to have any guesswork about where where the problem and the stack might lie. You just opened your support ticket with NetApp and we can make sure it gets resolved. So that's been a really great part of the deal. >> Well, gentlemen, thanks for coming on. Appreciate the news insight. I do want to ask one final question, while I got you both here. If you don't mind, as we come in to the end of the year 2020, what a crazy year it's been between the pandemic and just the just the shift and the massive sea change of how virtual virtualization, not, you know, server or storage virtualization, but you know, the virtual world we live in remote everything, pandemic, uncertainty the digital transformation is just full throttle just more and more pressure. As we come out of cloud native CUBE con and AWS reinvent, we had VM all this activity. What do you guys think of the most important stories that customers should pay attention to in cloud native? What's what's the high order bit? What's the one thing or two things that really are notable that people should pay attention to that's important? Bryce, we'll start with you. >> I think it's bringing Kubernetes into the mainstream, right? I mean, that's what we see happening. How do you do that in a way that continues to give DevOps the flexibility they need and empower them and the way that Kubernetes does, but but also brings it into the mainstream. That's what I think what everyone's trying to solve right now >> Jim, your take on the most important story people should pay attention to. >> I think the same, I think Kubernetes adoption and really getting that education and people up to speed to start making that transformation. You know, quicker and getting that adoption rate up. I think we'll see a lot of benefits. Like you said, remote virtual in Kubernetes is kind of that framework that needs to get out there, be prevalent and and all of us take advantage, and start working together. >> All right, we'll leave it there. Guys, congratulations on the deal. NetApp embedding Kubernetes and Rancher support inside their hyper-converged infrastructure HCI. Bryce, Jim, thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto. Normally when we do these in person but it's remote with the pandemic, giving you the latest continuing the cube virtual coverage, here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> (Narrator) From around the globe. It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, the digital version, I'm Lisa Martin. I've got a CUBE alumni with me here, now Ronen Schwartz joins me from NetApp, the SVP and GM of Cloud Volumes. Ronen it's nice to see that you're doing well and healthy. >> Thank you, I'm glad to join you, even though it's virtually, I hope it will be fun as well. >> Oh yes it will, and that's one of the nice things with this time that we're all trying to figure out if we have technologies like this to be able to still engage with partners with customers, and there's been so much innovation that's gone. So I'd love to get your perspective on what's going on with them. I know you guys had NetApp Insight just a few weeks or a month or so ago, but talk to me about kind of some of the things that you're seeing in the market from a cloud adoption perspective. >> So cloud adoption is actually not new. What we're saying is a continuous acceleration of the cloud adoption, you know, we kind of started by the fact that we are remote and they think definitely, the pandemic, the need to work, remote engage remotely and so on, and actually even accelerated the adoption of cloud, that's something like that could, even exist, I think what we are saying the NetApp in the market in general is very fast adoption of cloud, the movement of the core services, core workloads into the cloud and organization that are not just adopting cloud, but actually innovating in the cloud faster than ever. >> What's been some of the conversations like with customers, cause I know, you know, we've talked a lot about this in the last nine months, this acceleration of digital transformation and customers needing to pivot multiple times, not just survive during this time period or keep the lights on, but really be able to thrive, and push their business forward. Talk to me about some of the customer conversations you're having, is this more of a business level conversation, right now with respect to moving to cloud from a strategic standpoint, because as every business suddenly had to, everyone got to work from home, that was a big shift. >> It is a major shift and it's also for some organization it's a very un-trivial change that needs to happen to the cadence of doing a business to them, to the specific setting, and then, I think we all as individual kind of feel the change, right, I sometimes have like this huge urge to sit with my team and kind of whiteboard, what needs to happen next. And then it will be different to do it, when it is a virtual whiteboard, but if I take it into the conversation that we're having with customers, I think customers have moved from the first few months when it was really about survival, and how do I make the basic things work and ensure continuity, into the place that organization are looking to leverage the change and increase the increasing innovation, increase the transformation they've already been going through, when it comes to these things I really want, there's a really good article from AWS that I want to share, that is really talking about, the six r's of cloud adoption. And, I really like that as an analogy because it talks about the fact that when you have cloud applications, you have the opportunity to rehost, when you lift and shift, then, you have the opportunity to replatform really designed them from the cloud, from scratch, you have the ability to refactor the applications, meaning that you're actually adopting certain cloud component. And in some cases you are actually repurchasing or retiring applications. And in some places, you just retain them on-premise. So I think organizations are looking into their current situation and they're basically choosing their strategy, not their strategy of adopting the cloud, but their strategy of how to move specific workloads into the cloud. >> Right to be, to take advantage of many things, including cost optimization. So talk to me about the NetApp partnership, you guys have been partners with AWS for seven plus years now, NetApp Cloud Volume Platform for AWS, talk to me about that. >> So, none of it's been a long-term partner of AWS and that data is in the core of the cloud business and basically moving data to the cloud, is also a super important, and NetApp is a company that has been a leader in cloud and data services, in general has been there from almost day one. We have been billing, did the capabilities from the cloud volumes NetApp to the cloud volume service, which is a native service in AWS in the last few years. Basically our latest announcement that we made in, in our Insight event is putting all of that in a single platform, the clouds volume and the cloud volumes platform, and that basically optimizing it for the AWS users, meaning that the user with no additional effort can store data, receives it, access to the data and the performance needed for the right application, but also enjoy out of the box data services, like backup, like disaster recovery, like compliance, and like caching and so on, really giving the different use cases, the full support needed. >> What are some of the changes in use cases that you've seen? Now, we talk about compliance. We just had another expansion of the California consumer privacy act on our ballot, during the last general election. We've seen ransomware on the rise. So talking about backup has been a big topic. Talk to me about some of those use cases that are shifting that you see that NetApp is helping customers address. >> This is an excellent question and they know sometimes people treat storage as infrastructure, but the truth is that the data on that storage is actually one of the most important assets that has moved into the cloud and really building your data fabric with the right level of governance and insurance, where everybody is a really important thing. We just talked about like all of this acceleration of moving into the cloud. What that means is that the core data services are no longer optional. They could not be left to a specific implementation desire or no desire, they have to be built into the platform and kind of be insured in a continuous way. >> Absolutely that data is gold or the new oil, if companies can protect it, secure access it and make sure that they can actually extract insights. So, and as we talk about and Gartner and analysts like show the projections of the volumes of data, just growing and growing and growing. And now we've got companies that have gone from maybe 100% on-site operations to maybe a hundred percent remote. We've got the expansion of cloud and the edge. There's a lot of changes going on there. And one of the things that we do know that's happening from an IT perspective, is it's getting more complex. So, talk to me about now, how you're working with customers to make things simpler as data volumes grow and as they're adjusting to a New World. >> So, sometimes maybe this is my opportunity to definitely correct one of the thinkings that some of the AWS customers might have NetApp, which is, it's focused about storage only, the truth is that, there is a variety of services around the infrastructure that we'll go way beyond storage. I kind of mentioned in my last answer, a few of them like disaster recovery, like backup and we just started to touch upon compliance the ability to understand the data that is moving into the cloud, the exposure to PII, PCI, and how does it fit the different regulations. But NetApp is also offering optimized computing, with our spot, with basically our spot acquisitions, but by NetApp technology, we're also offering the full virtual desktop service. And at least the last one is kind of the perfect example. If you would like to empower a thousand people to get their virtual desktops available, it has become a matter of a single click and full automation is giving you, not only the virtual desktop, but also a dedicated storage that is optimized for that. So we're looking into a variety of services, all of them optimize to work on the AWS cloud, all of that with, out of the box, very easy configuration that empower everybody to basically do the right thing in the clouds. >> So when you're in customer situations and conversations, which I know you still are obviously virtually, and you're saying that, you know, we want to make sure that we really clarify, the NetApp has evolved dramatically since 1992, we've been talking about that for a long time. I used to work at NetApp and marketing back in the day, but when you're having this customer conversations, I actually know let's give me a customer, an example of some successful customers who really understand, the value of the full breadth of value that NetApp delivers, especially in AWS environments. >> I would divide the customers buy in a high-level into three categories. You're seeing the basically application developers with a goal to deliver their application, as fast as possible. And then, they're not only, their need is not just to do it as fast as possible, but they're trying to do it in the most efficient cost effective way possible. So, the NetApp conversation with them is how can infrastructure empower them to do things better, faster, and cheaper, and then, there is actually a list of these capabilities that are supporting them very, very well. An example would be that today, a lot of the new developments are done, especially by the cloud native, are done leveraging Kubernetes. So NetApp is giving you Kubernetes optimized storage, Kubernetes say monitoring and resource optimization, and also of the ocean capabilities, the scalability to manage and optimize your containers. So this is kind of one group that developers group, and there is actually thousands of these customers, that are leveraging NetApp on AWS to deliver that. I think the second group is central IT and central IT has a really tough job these days. They need at the same time to support the innovation as we discussed on the first use case, but also the lift and shift and move of that critical applications. When we're looking at, when we're talking to central IT, we're guaranteeing to them the same latency or close as possible latency, the same performance, the same scale that they had on premise and even more in the cloud. So this is what allows, the largest customers in the world to move their SAP from on-premise to the cloud. Really them, I think that the top five and then, at least five of the top 10 SAP applications are leveraging the NetApp as part of their cloud journey. Another example, and maybe the third example, is that it's basically organization where they are putting an innovation in the cloud in parallel to their existing with their on-premise example, there I think one of our reference customers is Blackboard the vendor that is offering something very relevant these days, which is remote learning and capabilities like that. Well they've actually built a very extensive on-premise environment. A lot of their new capabilities, a lot of the innovation is delivered in the cloud where scale is faster, the resources are available, are much easier, but they still need the power of the best of breed and storage technology. They still are looking for cost effective optimization. And this is where NetApp is helping them. >> How do you kind of bridge their different groups you talked about, the developer groups and what they need and what they expect, and a regular world versus central IT, whose job as you said, is now more challenging with this spread. How does the NetApp help those two groups come together and really evaluate the opportunities that this new situation provides and how NetApp can help them accelerate that? So this is basically where the platform capabilities are playing their role, the developer and also the DevOps organization are able to consume the right capabilities that they need in order to get their job faster, both central IT can go into the same platform and basically manage it from security, from backup, from disaster recovery and from performance general performance perspective, including very easy that built-in automation to move, and the entire application from the 2QIA and into production. So the ability of basically the different users to have an optimized experience, when the developers are looking for productivity, time to market, maybe even the cost effectiveness DevOps is looking for the automation, the agility and basically the life cycle and then central IT is looking to optimize costs into the overall resourcing and really delivering it to multiple groups. Single platform gives you everything in one place, >> Make it sound so easy. So last question is, as we go into the year 2021, remember that joke last year, everyone said 2020 it's hindsight, we going to know everything, I think care to forget a whole bunch of things, but as we move forward, and I think we're all counting on the clock changing and bringing in good things, we've seen a lot of change, we've also seen a lot of opportunities uncovered, and you've talked about some of those. Talk to me about some of the things that NetApp and AWS customers can expect next year. >> So we've been innovating together very, very fast. If I just look into the last few months then, you've seen AWS pushing and outposting to the market as kind of the edge of the cloud. NetApp has been an early partner of that kind of coming together and saying that and really offering the best storage as part of outpost. I think what you'll is the, as we go into 2021 is, the foster innovation and the expansion of the offering is going to continue into 2021. The things that both AWS and NetApp already have in progress are kind of ensuring that, so that wouldn't be a big risk for me to share that I can already see the pipeline as it comes to, as it is going into the customer. I think the second thing that you would see is a lot of focus on optimization and a lot of that optimization done automatically for the customer without the customer needs, without the customer need to proactively define and set things, I think it is a very, very strong trend. We're both set optimization for scale, optimization for performance, optimization for costs are kind of built into the offering. I think as we're scaling into the cloud, you'll see significant growth in the amount of offerings coming from vendors, including NetApp and AWS, but also increased consumption of the customers that are, we'll expect more and more of it to be automatic. I think the last thing that I think we are going to see accelerating in 2021 is system of record moving into the cloud. Innovation has already done in a cloud first approach in almost all cases. That's what we're going to see is significant acceleration in the amount of system of records, moving and moving into the cloud analytics, moving into the cloud, and we're going to see it done by mainstream companies in a very, very large scale. >> Lots of things to look forward to. Ronen, thank you for joining me on theCUBE today and sharing what's the latest updates with NetApp and AWS, any opportunities for your customers. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa, it was a pleasure to meet you virtually. >> Likewise, maybe sometime at some event we'll come back and we'll get to meet in person, I hope so. For Ronen Schwartz, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE.

>>long from Las Vegas. It's the Q covering a ws re invent 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and in Came along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin at AWS Reinvent in Vegas. Very busy. Sands Expo Center. Pleased to be joined by my co host this afternoon. Justin Warren, founder and chief analyst at Pivot nine. Justin, we're hosting together again. We are. >>It's great to be >>here. It's great to have you that. So. Justin Meyer, please welcome a couple of our cue ball. Um, back to the program. A couple guys from nut up. We have Anthony Lie, the S B, P and G m of the Cloud business unit. Welcome back at the >>very much great to be here >>and color coordinating with Anthony's Jandi Stephenson, Chief Technology officer and GPS Cloud. Welcome back. >>Thank you. Thank you >>very shortly. Dress, guys and very >>thank you. Thank you. It's, uh, the good news Is that their suits anymore. So we're not going to have to wear ties >>comfortable guys net up a w s this event even bigger than last year, which I can't even believe that 65,000 or so thugs. But, Anthony, let's start with you. Talk to us about what's new with the net up AWS partnership a little bit about the evolution of it. >>Yeah. I mean, you know, we started on AWS. Oh, my gosh. Must be almost five or six years ago now and we made a conscious effort to port are operating system to AWS, which was no small task on dhe. It's taken us a few years, but we're really starting to hit our stride Now. We've been very successful, were on boarding customers on an ever increasing rate. We've added more. Service is on. We just continue to love the cloud as a platform for development. We can go so fast, and we can do things in in an environment like aws that, frankly, you just couldn't do on premise, you know, they're they're complexity and EJ ineighty of on premise was always a challenge. The cloud for us is an amazing platform where we can go very, very fast >>and from a customer demand standpoint. Don't talk to me about that, Chief technologist. One of the thing interesting things that that Andy Jassy shared yesterday was that surprised me. 97% of I t spend is still on from So we know that regardless of the M word, multi cloud work customers are living in that multi cloud world. Whether it's by strategy, a lot of it's not. A lot of it's inherited right, but they have to have that choice, right? It's gonna depend on the data, the workload, etcetera. What can you tell us about when you're talking with customers? What what? How are they driving NetApp evolution of its partnership with public provider AWS? >>So actually, I don't know if it's the desired state to be running in a hybrid, mostly cloud fashion, but it's it's It's driven by strategy, and it's usually driven by specific workloads and on the finding the best home for your application or for your workers at any given time. Because it's it's ultimately unrealistic for on premise customers to try to compete with like a machine and keep learning algorithms and the rate of development and rate off basically evolution in the cloud. So you always have to be there to be able to stay competitive, so it's becoming a part of the strategy even though it was probably asked that developers that drove a lot off cloud adoption to begin with. Maybe, maybe not. Not in favor of the c i o r. You have, like a lot of Cloud Cloud sprawling, but there's no longer sprawling it. It's part of the strategy before every company in my way >>heard from any Jesse in the keynote yesterday about the transformation being an important thing. And he also highlighted a lot of enterprise. Nedda has a long history with enterprise, Yes, very solid reputation with enterprise. So it feels to me like this This is an enterprise show. Now that the enterprise has really arrived at with the cloud, what are you seeing from the customers that you've already had for a long time? No, no, no, I'm familiar with it. Trust Net up. We're now exploring the Clouded and doing more than just dipping their toe in the water. What are they actually doing with the cloud and and we'll get up together, you know, >>we see and no one ever growing list of workload. I think when people make decisions in the cloud, they're not making those traditional horizontal decisions anymore. They're making workload by workload by workload decisions and Internet EPPS history and I think, uh, performance on premises, given customers peace of mind now in the cloud, they sort of know that what's been highly reliable, highly scaleable for them on premise, they can now have that same confidence in the cloud. So way started. Like just like Amazon. We started off seeing secondary workloads like D r Back Up Dev ops, but now is seeing big primaries go A s, a p big database workloads, e commerce. Ah, lot of HBC high forming compute. We're doing very well in oil and gas in the pharmaceutical industries where file has been really lacking on the public cloud. I think we leaned in as a company years ago and put put, put a concerted effort to make it there. And I think now the workloads a confident that were there and we can give them the throughput. We give them the performance on the protocols and now we're seeing big, big workloads come over to the public clouds. >>And he did make a big deal about transformation being important. And a lot of that was around the operational model. Let's let's just the pure technology. But what about the operating model? How are you seeing Enterprises Transformer? There's a lot of traditionally just taken a workload, do a bit of lift and shift and put it to the cloud. Where are they now transforming the way they actually operate? Things because of >>cloud? Absolutely. I mean, they have to They have to adopt the new technologies and new ways of doing business. So I mean, I think they are actually celebrating that to answer point. I think this is not a partnership and we're partnering with. We have a very unique story. We're partnering with all of them and have really deep engineering relationship with all of them. And they are now able to go after enterprise type workloads that they haven't been gone. I've been able to go after before, so that's why it's such a strategic strategic relationship that we have with all of them. That sort of brings in in the freedom of choice. You can basically go everywhere anywhere. That, in my opinion, is that true hyper cloud story lot has always been really difficult. But with the data management capabilities of not top, it's really easy to move my greater replicate across on premise toe are hyper scaler off choice. >>I mean, I think you know, if you're in enterprise right now, you know you're a CEO. You're probably scared to death of, like, being uber, you know exactly on. Uh, you know, if you're you know, So speed has now become what we say. The new scale they used to be scaled is your advantage. And now, if you're not fast, you could be killed any day by some of these startups who just build a mobile app. And all of a sudden they've gotten between you and the customer and you've lost. And I think CEOs are now. How fast are we going? How many application developers do we have? And did a scientist do we have? And because of that, that they're seeing Amazon as a platform for speed on. So that's just that paranoia. I think digital transformation is driving everybody to the cloud. >>You're right. If we look at transformation if a business and Andy Jassy and John for your talked about this and that exclusive interview that they did the other day. And Andy, if you're and a legacy enterprise and you're looking at your existing market share segment exactly, and you're not thinking there's somebody else. What assisting on there on the side mirror? Objects in mirror are closer. Not getting ready for that. You're on the wrong. You're going to be on the wrong side of that equation. But if we look at cloud, it has had an impact on traditional story one of naps. Taglines is data driven. If we look at transformation and if we'll even look at the translation of cloud in and of itself, data is at the heart of everything. Yes, and they talk to us about net APS transformation as cloud is something that you're enabling on prime hybrid multi cloud as you talked about. But how is your advantage allowing customers to not only be data driven, but to find value in that data that gives them that differentiation that they need for the guy or a girl that's right behind them. I already did take over. >>Well, I think if you're you know, if you're an enterprise, you know, the one asset you have is data. You have history now >>a liability Now with an asset. >>Can they can they do anything with it. Do they know where it is? Do they know how to use it where it should be, you know, Is it secured? Is it protected all of those things? It's very hard for enterprise to answer those questions. What one end up, I think it's done incredibly well, is by leaning in as much as we did onto AWS way. Give our customers the absolute choice to leave our on premise business and a lot of people, I think years ago thought we were crazy. But because now we've expanded our footprint to allow customers to run anywhere without any fear of lock in, people will start to see us now not as a storage vendor but as a strategic partner, and that that that strategic partnership is really has really come about because of our willingness to let people move the data and manage the data wherever they needed to be. On that something our customers have said, you know, used to be a storage vendor on along with the other storage vendors and now all of a sudden that we're having conversations with you about strategy where the data should be, you know who's using it is. It's secured all of those kinds of conversations we're having with customers. >>You mentioned moving data, and that was something that again came up in the keynote yesterday. And he mentioned that Hey, maybe instead of taking the data to the computer, we should bring the computer's data. That's something that Ned Abbas has long actually talked about. I remember when you used to mention data fabric was something about We want to take your data and then make it available to where the computer is. I'd like you to talk it through that, particularly in light of like a I and ML, which is on the tip of everybody's tongue. It's It's a bit of I think, it's possibly reaching the peak of the hype cycle at the moment s o what our customers actually doing with their data to actually analyze it? Are they actually seeing real value from machine learning? And I are We still isn't just kicking the tires on that. >>I mean, the biggest problem with deep learning and machine learning is having our accumulating enough on being able to have the data or lessening that gravity by being able to move it then you can take advantage off states maker in AWS, the big Cleary and Google, whatever fits your needs. And then, if you want to store the results back on premise, that's what we enable. With it out of harbor having that free flowing work clothes migration has to count for data. It's not enough to just move your application that that that's the key for machine learning and thought the lakes and others, >>absolutely in terms of speed. Anthony mentioned that that's the new scale. How is flash changing the game >>with perspective, you know, flashes a media type, but it's just, you know, the prices have come down now that you know the price performance couple flashes an obvious thing. Um, and a lot of people are, I think now, making on premise decisions to get rid of spinning disc and replaced with Flash because the R. O. I is so good. Tco the meantime between failures, that's that's so many advantages that percent workloads. It's a better decision, of course. You know, AWS provides a whole bunch of media Onda again. It's just you like a kid in a candy store, you know, as a developer, you look at Amazon. You're like, Oh, my God. Back in the day, we had to make, like, an Oracle decision and everything was Oracle. And now you can just move things around and you can take advantage of all sorts of different utilities. And now you piece together an application very differently. And so you're able to sort of really think I think Dion sees point. People are telling us they have to have a date, a strategy, and then, based on the data strategy, they will then leverage the right storage with the right protocols. They'll then bring that to compute whatever compute is necessary. I think data science is, you know, a little fashion, you know, conscious. Right now, you know, everybody wants to say how many did a scientist they have on their teams? They're looking for needles in haystacks. Someone, they're finding them. Some of them are but not doing it, I think it is. Makes companies very, very nervous. So they're going the results, gonna trying as hard as they can to leverage that technology. >>And you'll see where is that data strategy conversation happening if we think about the four essentials that Andy Johnson talked about yesterday for transformation in one of the first things he said was, it has to be topped at senior level decision. Then it's going to be aggressively pushed down through the organization. Are you seeing this data strategy at the CEO level yet? >>Yeah, we are. But I'm also seeing it much lower. I mean, with the data engineers with the developers, because it's asked, is it is extremely important to be developing on top off production data, specifically if you're doing machine and deep learning. So I think it's both. I think the decision authority has actually moved lower in the company where the developers are the side reliability engineers are actually choosing more technology to use. That fits the product that they are actually creating off course. The strategy happens at the tall, but the influencer and the decision makers, in my opinion, has been moving lower and within the organization. So I'm basically contradicting what yes is a. But to me that is also important. The days off a C t o r C E o. Forcing a specific platform or strategy on to developers. Those days are hopefully gone. >>I think if you're a CEO and you know of any company in any industry you have to be a tech company, you know, it used to be a tech industry, and now every company in the world is now tech. Everyone's building APS. Everyone's using data. Everybody's, you know, trying to figure out machine learning. And so I think what's happening is CEOs are are increasingly becoming technically literate. They have to Exactly. They're dead if they're not. I mean, you know whether your insurance company, your primary platform, is now digital if you're a medical company or primary platform additional. So I think that's a great stat. I saw that about two and 1/2 years ago. The number of software engineering jobs in non tech surpassed the number of jobs in tech, so we used to have our little industry and all the software engineers came to work for tech companies. Now there are more jobs outside the tech segment for engineers, and there are in the text >>well, and you brought up uber a minute ago and I think of a couple of companies examples in my last question for you is real. Rapid is about industries. You look at uber for example, what the fact that the taxi cab companies were transitional. And we're really eager to, you know, AP, if I their organizations, and meet the consumer demand. And then you look at Airbnb and how that's revolutionized hospitality or pellet on how it's revolutionized. Fitness Last question, Jonesy, Let's go for you. Looking at all of the transformation that cloud has enabled and can enable what industry you mentioned when the gas. But is there any industry that you see right now that is just at the tipping point to be ableto blow the door wide open if they transform successfully? >>Well, I mean way are working with a lot off pharma companies and genome sequencing companies that have not actually working with sensitive data on if those companies, I mean, these are people's medical histories and everything, so we're seeing them moving now in close into the cloud so those companies can move to the cloud. Anybody can move to the cloud. You mean these sort of compliancy scaremongering? You cannot move to the cloud because of P. C. I or hip power. Those days are over because aws, Microsoft and Google, that's the first thing they do they have? Ah, stricter compliancy than most on premise Homemade tartar sentence. So I see. I see that industry really moving into the cloud. Now >>who knows what a ws re invent 2020 will look like Gentlemen I wish we had more time, but thank you. Both Young and Anthony were talking with Justin and me today sharing what's new with netapp. What? You guys are enabling customers. D'oh! In multiple. Same old way. We appreciate your time where my car is. Justin Warren, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from AWS or reinvent 19 from Vegas. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE! Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's fourth year of coverage at KubeCon CloudNativeCon, we're here in San Diego, it's 2019, I'm Stu Miniman, my host for this afternoon is Justin Warren, and happy to welcome two guests from the newly minted platinum member of the CNCF, NetApp, sitting to my right is Matt Baldwin, who is the director of cloud native and Kubernetes engineering, and sitting to his right is Rob Esker, who does product and strategy for Kubernetes, and is also a forward member on the CNCF, thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so Matt, maybe start with you, NetApp, companies that know, I've got plenty of history with NetApp there, what I've been hearing from NetApp for the last few years is, the core of NetApp has always been software, and it is a multicloud world. I've been hearing this message since before the cloud native and Kubernetes piece was going. Of course there's been some acquisitions, and NetApp continuing to go through its transformations, if you will. So help us understand NetApp's positioning in this ecosystem. >> In Kubernetes? >> Yes. >> Okay, so, what we're doing is, we're building a product that allows you to manage cloud-native workloads on top of Kubernetes, so we've solved the infrastructure problem, and that's kind of the old problem we're bored to death talking about that problem, but what we try to do is try to provide a single pane of glass to manage on-premise workloads and off-premise workloads, and so that's what we're trying to do, we're trying to say, it's now more about the app taxonomy in Kubernetes, and then what type of tooling do you build to manage that application in Kubernetes, and so that's what we're building right now, that's where we're headed with the hybrid multicloud. >> There's a piece of it, though, that does draw from the historical strengths of NetApp, of course. So we're building, we are essentially already in market a capability that allows you to deploy Kubernetes, in an agnostic way, using pure open unmodified Kubernetes, on all of the major public clouds, but also on-prem. But over time, and some of this is already evident, you'll see it married to the storage and data management capabilities that we draw from the historical NetApp, and that we're starting to deploy into those public clouds. >> With the idea that you should be able to take a project, so a project being in a namespace, namespace having an application in it, so you have multiple deployments, I should be able to protect that namespace, or that project, I should be able to move that, and that data goes with it, so that we're very data-aware, that's what we're trying to do with our software is, make it very data-aware and have that align with apps inside of Kubernetes. >> Yeah, so Rob, maybe step back for a second, one of the things we've heard a few times at this show before, and it was talked about in the keynote this morning, is that it is project over company when it comes to the CNCF. Project over company, so it's about the ecosystem, the CNCF tries not to be opinionated, so it's okay for multiple projects to fit in a space. NetApp moving up to a platinum sponsor level, participated here, NetApp's got lots of histories in participating and driving standards, helping move where the industry's going, where does NetApp see its position in participating in the foundation and participating in this ecosystem? >> Yeah, so great question, and actually, I love it, it's one of my favorite topics, so, I think the way we look at it is, oftentimes projects, to the extent they become ubiquitous, define a standard, a defacto standard, so not necessarily ratified by some standards body, and so we're very interested in making sure that in the scenario where you want to employ this standard, from a technology integration perspective, our capabilities can operate as an implementation behind the standard. So you get the distinguishing qualities of our capabilities, our products and our services, vis-a-vis, or in the context of the standard, but we're not trying to take you down a walled garden path in a proprietary journey, if you will. We would rather compel you to work with us on the basis of the value, not necessarily operating off a proprietary set of interfaces. So Kubernetes, broadly perceive it as a defacto standard at this point, there's still some work to be done on rounding out the edges, a lot of it underway this week, it's definitely the case that there's an appeal to making this more offerable by, pardon the expression, mere mortals, and we think we can offer some help in that respect as well. >> Yeah, where is its usability? I mean, that's the reason I started stacked on cloud, was that there was a usability problem with Kubernetes. I had a usability problem with Kubernetes. That's what we're trying, that's how I'm looking at the landscape, and I look at all the projects inside of the CNCF, and I look at my role is, our role is to, how do we tie these together, how do we make these so they're very very usable to the users, and how we're engaging with the community is to try to align this, basically pure upstream projects, and create a usability layer on top of that. But we're not going to, we don't want to ever say we're going to fork any of these projects, but we're going to contribute back into these projects. >> So that's one concern that I have heard from some customers, which speaking of which, some of them yesterday, one of the concerns they had was that, when you add that manageability onto the base Kubernetes layer, that often, various vendors become rather opinionated about which way we think this is a good way to do that, and when you're trying to maintain that compatibility across the ecosystem, so some customers say, "Well I actually don't want to have to be too closely welded "to any one vendor, 'cause part of the benefit "of Kubernetes is I can move my workloads around." So how do you navigate what is the right level of opinion to have, and which part should actually just be part of a common standard? >> Think it needs to be along the lines of best practices, is how we do it. So, let's take network policy, for example, applying a sane, default network policy to every namespace. Defining a sane, default pod security policy, building a cluster in a best practices fashion, with security turned on, hardening done, where you would've done this already as a user, so we're not locking you in in any way there. So that's, we're not trying, I'm not trying to curate any type of opinion of the product, what we're trying to do is harmonize your experience across all this ecosystem, so that you don't ever have to think about, "I'm building a cluster on top of Amazon, "so I got to worry about how do I manage this on Amazon." I don't want you to have to think about those providers anymore. And then on top of those, on top of that infrastructure, I want to have a way that you're thinking about managing the applications on those environments in the exact same way, so I'm scaling, or I'm protecting an application on-premise, in the identical way I'm doing it in the cloud. >> So if it's the same everywhere, what's the value that you're providing that means that I should choose your option than something else? >> So, we do have, this is where we have controllers that live inside of the clusters, that manage this stuff for the users. So, you could rebuild what we're doing, but you would have to roll it all by hand. But you could, we don't stand in the way of your operations either, so if we go down, you don't go down, type of idea. But we do have controllers, we're using CRDs, and so our app management technology, our controllers are just watching for a workload to come into the environment, and then we show that in the interface, but you can just walk away as well, if you wanted to. >> There's also a constellation of other services that we're building around, this experience, that do draw, again, from some of the storage and data management capabilities, so staple sets, your traditional workloads that want to interact with or transact data against a block or a shared file system. We're providing capabilities for sophisticated qualities of persistence that can exist in all of those same public clouds, but moreover, over time, we're going to be, and on-premise as well, we're going to be able to actually move, migrate, place, cache, per policy, your persistent data, with your workloads, as you move, migrate, scale, burst, whatever the model is, as you move across and between clouds. >> How far down that pathway do you think we are, 'cause one criticism of Kubernetes is that a lot of the tooling that we're used to from more traditional ways of operating this kind of infrastructure, isn't really there yet, hence the question about, we actually need to make this easier to use. How far down that pathway are we? >> I'd argue that the tooling that I've built has already solved some of those problems. So I think we're pretty far down the path. Now, what we haven't done is open sourced all of my tooling, right, to make it easier on everybody else. >> Rob, NetApp's got strong partnerships across the cloud platforms, I had a chance to interview George at the Google Cloud event, I know you partner of the year, I believe, on some of these stuff, help us understand how some of the things Matt and the team are building interact with the public clouds, you look at Anthos, and Azure Arc, and of course Amazon has many different ways you can do your container and management piece there. Talk a little bit about that relationship and how, both with those partners and then across those partners, work. >> Yeah, it's, how much time do we have, so there's certainly a lot of facets to that, but drawing from the Google experience, we just announced the general availability of Cloud Volumes ONTAP, so the ability to stand up and manage your own ONTAP instance in Google's cloud. Likewise, we announced the general availability of the Cloud Volume service, which gives you the managed push button as a service experience of shared file system on demand, at Google, I believe it was either today or yesterday, in London, I guess maybe I'll blame that on the time zone conversion, not knowing what day it was, but the point is, that's now generally available. Some of those capabilities are going to be able to be connected to our ability from MKS, to deploy a on-demand Kubernetes cluster, and deploy applications from a marketplace experience, in a common way, not just with Google but Azure, with Amazon, and so frankly the story does differ a little bit from one cloud to the next, but the endeavor is to provide common capabilities across all of them. It's also the case that we do have people that are very opinionated about, I want to live only in the Google or the Microsoft or the Amazon ecosystem, we're trying to deliver a rich experience for those folks as well, even if you don't value the agnostic multicloud experience. >> Yeah, and Matt, I'm sure you have a viewpoint on this, but it's that skillset that's really challenging. I was at the Microsoft show, and you've got people, it's not just about .NET, they're embracing and open to all of these environments, but people tend to have the environments that they're used to, and for multicloud to be a reality, it needs to be a little bit easier for me to go between them, but it's still, we're making progress but there's work to do. >> Matt: Yeah, what's the question? >> Yeah, so, I know you're building tools and everything, but what more do we need to do, where are some of the areas that you're hopeful for, but where are the areas that we need to go further? >> So for me it's coming down to the data side. I need to be able to say that, when I turn on data services, inside of Kubernetes, I need to be able to have that workload go anywhere, because as a developer, I'm running a production, I'm running an Amazon, but maybe I'm doing tests locally on my bare metal environments, right, I want to be able to maybe sink down some of my data that I'm working with in production down to my test environment. That stuff's missing, there's no one doing that right now, and that's where we're headed, that's the path, that's where we're headed. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up, actually, 'cause one of the things that I feel like I heard a little bit last year but it is highlighted more this year, is we're talking a little bit more to the application developers because, Kubernetes is a piece of the infrastructure, but it's about-- >> It's the kernel. >> Yeah, it's the kernel there, so, how do we make sure we're spanning between what the app developer needs and still making sure that infrastructure is taken care of, because storage and networking are still hard. >> It is, yeah, I mean I'm approaching, I'm thinking more along the lines of, I'm trying to think more about app developers, personally, than infrastructure at this point. For me, so I can give you a cluster in three minutes, right, so I don't really have to worry about that problem. We also put Istio on top of the clusters, so it's like we're trying to create this whole narrative that you can manage that environment on day one, day two type operations. But, and that's for an IT manager, right, so inside of our product, how I'm addressing this is you have personas, and so you have this concept, you have an IT manager, they can do these things, they can set limits, but for the developer, who's building the applications or the services and pushing those up into the environment, they need to have a sense of freedom, and so on that side of the house, I'm trying not to break them out of their tooling, so part of our product ties into Git, so we have cd, so you just do a git push, git commit to a branch, and we can target multiple clusters. But at no point did the developer actually draft DAML, or anything, we basically create the container for you, create the deployment, bring it online, and I feel like there's these lines, and the IT guys need to be able to say, "I need to create the guardrails for the devs, "but I don't want to make it seem like "I'm creating guardrails for the devs, "'cause the devs don't like that." So that's how I'm balancing it. >> Okay, 'cause that has always been the tension, in that there's a lot of talk about DevOps, but you go and talk to application developers, and they don't want to have anything to do with infrastructure, they just want to program to an API and get things done, they would like this infrastructure to be seamless. >> Yeah, and what we do, also what I'm giving them is service dashboards, because as a developer, you know, because now you're in charge of your QA, you're writing your tests, you're pushing it through CI, it's going to CD. You own your service and production, right? And so we're delivering dashboards as well for services that the developers are running, so they can dig in and say, "Oh, here's an issue," or "Here's where the issue's probably going to be at, "I'm going to go fix this." And we're trying to create that type of scenario for a developer, and for an IT manager. >> Slightly different angle on it, if I'm understanding the question correctly, part of the complexity of infrastructure is something we're also trying to provide a deterministic sort of easy button capability for, perhaps you're familiar with NetApp's Nason ATI product, which we kind of expand that as hybrid cloud infrastructure. If the intention is to make it a simple, private cloud capability, and indeed, our NetApp Kubernetes service operates directly off of it, it's a big part of actually how we deliver cloud services from it. So the point is that, if you're that application developer, if you want the effective NKS on-prem, the endeavor with our NetApp ATI product is to give you that sort of easy button experience, because you didn't really want to be a storage admin or a network admin, you didn't want to get into the, be mired in the details of infra, so that's obviously work in progress, but we think we're definitely headed down the right direction. >> It does seem that a lot of enterprises want to have the cloudlike experience, but they want to be able to bring it home, we're seeing that a lot more. >> Yeah, so this turnkey on-premise, turnkey cloud on-premise, and, with NKS we can, the same auto-scaling, so take the dynamic nature of Kubernetes, so I have a base cluster size of say four worker nodes, right, but my workload's going to maybe need to have more nodes, so my auto-scaler's going to increase the size of my cluster and decrease the size, right? Pretty much everybody only can do that in the public cloud. I can do that in public cloud and on-premise, now. And so that's what we're trying to deliver, and that's pretty cool stuff, I think. >> Well there's a lot of advantages to enterprises operating in that way, because people out here, I can go and buy them or hire them, and say "Hey, we need you to operate this gear," and you've already done it elsewhere, you can do it in cloud, you can do it on-site, I can now run my operations the same across, no matter where my applications live, which saves me a lot of money on training costs, on development costs, and generally it makes for a much more smooth and seamless experience. >> So Rob, if you could, just love your takeaway on NetApp's participation here at the event, and what you want people to take away from the show this year. >> So it's certainly the case that we're doing a lot of great work, we like people to become aware of it. NetApp of course is not, I think we talked about this in perhaps other contexts, not strictly a storage and data management company only. We do draw from the strengths of that as we're providing full stack capabilities, in a way that are interconnected with public cloud, things like our NetApp Kubernetes service as really the foundational glue in many ways, to how we deliver the application runtime, but over time we'll build a constellation of data-centric capabilities around that as well. >> Matt, I would just love to get your viewpoint as someone that built a company in this ecosystem, there's so many startups here, give us kind of that founder viewpoint of being in this sort of ecosystem. >> Of the ecosystem... So this is, I came into the ecosystem at the beginning. I would have to say that it does feel different at this point, I'm going to speak as Matt, not as NetApp. And so my thinking has always been it feels a lot like, you're a big fan of that rock band, right, and you go to a local club, and we all get to know each other at that local club, and there's maybe 500 of us or 1000 of us, and then that band gets signed to Warner Brothers, and goes to the top, and now there's 20,000 people or 12,000 people. That's how it feels to me right now. I think, but what I like about it is that, it just shows the power of the community is now at a point where it's drawing in cities now, not just a small collection of a tribe of people. And I think that's a very powerful thing with this community, and like all the, what are they called, the Kubernetes Summits that they're doing, we didn't have any of those back when we first got going, I mean it was tough to fill the room, and now we can fill the room, and it's amazing, and what I like seeing is people moving past the problem of Kubernetes itself, and moving into what other problems can I solve on top of Kubernetes, so you're starting to see all these really exciting startups doing really neat things, and I really like, like this vendor hall I really like, 'cause you get to see all the new guys, but there's a lot of neat stuff going on, and I'm excited to see where the community goes in the next five years, but it's, we've gone from zero to 60 insanely fast, 'cause you guys were at the original KubeCon, I think, as well. >> It's our fourth year doing theCUBE at this show, but absolutely, we've watched it since the early days. I'm not supposed to mention OpenStack at this show, but we remember talking to JJ and some of the early people there, and we interviewed Craig McLuckie back in his Google days, and the like, so we've been fortunate to be on here since really day zero here, and definitely great energy, congrats so much on the progress, I really appreciate the updates on everything going, as you said, we've reached a certain state, and adding more value on top of this whole environment. >> Yeah, we're in junior high now, right, and we were in grade school for a few years. >> All right, well Matt and Rob, thank you so much for the update, hopefully not an awkward dance tonight for the junior people. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here from KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>>live from San Diego, California It's the Q covering Koopa and Cloud Native Cot brought to you by Red Cloud. Native Computing Pounding and its ecosystem >>Welcome back. This is the cubes. Fourth year of coverage at Q. Khan Cloud, Native Con. We're here in San Diego. It's 2019. I'm stewed. Minutemen, my host for this afternoon is Justin Warren and happy to welcome to guests from the newly minted platinum member of the CNC F Net Up. Sitting to my right is that Baldwin, who is the director of Cloud Native and Communities Engineering and sitting to his right is Rob Bhaskar, who's the product product strategy for Kubernetes. And it's also a board member on the CME CF, thank you both for joining us. Thank you. All right, s O, you know, maybe start with you. You know, uh, you know, companies that No, I've got plenty of history with net up there. What I've been hearing from that up last few years is you know, the Corvette has always been software, and it is a multi cloud world. I've been hearing this message before. Kind of the cloud native Trinity's piece was going, Of course, there's been some acquisitions and met up continuing to go through its transformations if you will s o help us understand kind of net ops positioning in this ecosystem >>in communities. Yes. Okay, so what we're doing is we're building a product that large manage cloud native workloads on top of community. So we've solved the infrastructure problem. And that's kind of the old problem. We're bored to death. Talking about that problem, but we try to do is try to provide a single painting class to manage on premise. Workloads and off permits were close. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to say it's now more about the AP taxonomy in communities. And then what type of tooling do you build to manage that that application and communities and says what we're building right now? That's where we're headed with hybrid. >>There's a piece of it, though, that does draw from the historical strength of map, Of course. So we're building way have, essentially already in marketing capability that allows you to deploy communities an agnostic way, using pure, open unmodified kubernetes on all of the major public clouds, but also on trump. But over time and some of this is already evident. You'll see it married to the storage and data management capabilities that we draw from the historical NetApp and that we're starting to deploy into those public clouds >>with the idea that you should be able to take a project. So project being the name space, new space, having a certain application in it. So you have multiple deployments. I should be able to protect that name space or that project. I feel to move that and the data goes with it. So they were very data where that's what we're trying to do with our. Our software is, you know, make it very data. Where have that aligned with APS inside of communities, >>So maybe step back for a second. What? One of the one of things we've heard a few times at this show before and was talking about the keynote this morning is it is project over company when it comes to the C N C F Project Project over company. So it's about the ecosystem. The C in C F tries not to be opinionated, so it's okay for multiple projects to fitness face not moving up to a platinum a sponsor level. You know, participant here, Ned. It's got lots of history's in participating and driving standards, helping move where the industry's going. Where doesn't it up? See its position in, you know, the participating in the foundation and participating in this ecosystem? >>Yeah, So great question, actually. Love it. It's for my favorite topic. So I think the way we look at it is oftentimes, project to the extent they become ubiquitous, define a standard a de facto standard, so not necessarily ratified by some standards body. And so we're very interested in making sure that in a scenario where you would employ the standard from a technology integration perspective, our capabilities can can operate as an implementation behind the standard. So you get the distinguishing qualities of our capabilities. Our products in our service is Visa VI or in the context of the standard. We're not trying to take you down a walled garden path in a proprietary, uh, journey, if you will weigh, would rather actually compel you to work with us on the basis of the value, not necessarily operating off a proprietary set of interface. Kubernetes broadly perceive it as a defacto standard at this point, there's still some work to be done on running out the edges a lot of underway this week. It's definitely the case that there's a new appeal to making this more off herbal by pardon the expression mere mortals way. Think we can offer Cem, Cem, Cem help in that respect as well? >>Yeah, for us, its usability, right? I mean, that's the reason I started stacking. Cloud was that there was usability problem with kubernetes. I had a usability problem. That's what we're trying. That's how I'm looking at the landscape. And I look at kind of all the projects inside the C N c f. And I look at my role is our role is to How do we tie these together? How do we make these? So they're very, very usable to the users. How were engaging with the community is to try to like a line like this, basically pure upstream projects, and create a usability layer on top of that. But we're not gonna we don't want ever say we're gonna fork into these projects what we're gonna contribute back into these. >>That's one concern that I have heard from. Customers were speaking with some of them yesterday. One of the concerns I had was that when you add that manageability onto the base kubernetes layer, that often very spenders become rather opinionated about which way we think this is a good way to do that. And when you're trying to maintain that compatibility across the ecosystem. So some customers saying, Well, I actually don't want to have to be too closely welded to anyone. Vendor was part of the benefit of Kubernetes. I can move my workloads around. So how do you navigate What? What is the right level of opinion? Tohave and which part should actually just be part of a common sense >>should be along the lines of best practices is how we do it. So like, Let's take a number policy, for example, like applying a sane default network policy to every name space defying a saying default pod security policy. You know, building a cluster in the best practices fashion with security turned on hardening done where you would have done this already as a user. So we're not looking you in any way there, so that's we're not trying. I'm not trying to carry any type of opinion in the product we're trying to do is urbanize your experience across all of this ecosystem so that you don't ever have to think about time now building a cluster on top of Amazon. So I gotta worry about how do I manage this on Amazon? I don't want you to think about those providers anymore, right? And then on top of those on top of that infrastructure, I wanna have a way that you're thinking about managing the applications on those environments in the exact same way. So I'm scaling protecting an application on premise in the identical way I'm doing it in the cloud. >>So if it's the same everywhere, what's the value that you're providing? That means that I should choose your option than something else. >>So wait, do have This is where we have controllers and live inside of the clusters that manage this stuff for the user's so you could rebuild what we're doing, But you would have to roll it all by hands, but you could, you know, we don't stand in the way of your operations either. So, like if we go down, you don't go down that idea, but we do have controllers we have. We're using charities. And so, like our management technology, our controllers are just watching for workload to come into the environment. And then we show that in the interface. But you could just walk away as well if you wanted to. >>There's also a constellation of other service is that we're building around this experience, you know, they do draw again from some of the storage and management capabilities. So staple sets your traditional workloads that want to interact with or transact data against a block or a shared file system. We're providing capabilities for sophisticated qualities of persistence that can be can exist in all of those same public clouds. But moreover, over time, we're gonna be in on premises. Well, we're gonna be able to actually move migrate, place, cash her policy. Your put your persistent data with your workload as you move migrate scale burst would repatriate whatever the model is as you move across in between clouds. >>Okay, How how far down that pathway do you think we are? Because 11 criticism of proven it is is that a lot of the tooling that were used to from more traditional ways of operating this kind of infrastructure isn't really there yet. Hence into the question about we actually need to make this easy to use. How far down that pathway away? >>Why would argue that tooling that I've built has already solved some of those problems. So I think we're pretty far down. The people ride down the path. Now what we haven't done is open sourced. You know all my tools, right? To make it easier on everybody else. >>Get up, Scott. Strong partnerships across the cloud platforms. I had a chance to interview George at the Google Cloud event. New partner of the year. I believe some of the stuff help us understand how you know something about the team building. Interact with the public cloud. You look at anthems and azure Arkin. Of course, Amazon has many different ways. You can do your container and management piece there, you know, to talk a little bit of that relationship and how both with those partners and then across those partners, you know, work. >>Yeah, it's a wow. So how much time we have? So so there's certainly a lot of facets to to that, But drawing from the Google experience. We just announced the general availability of cloud volumes on top. So the ability to stand up and manage your own on top instance and Google's cloud. Likewise, we've announced the general availability of the cloud volume service, which gives you manage put fun as a service experience of shared file system on demand. Google, I believe, is either today or yesterday in London. I guess maybe I'll blame that on the time zone covers, not knowing what what day it was. But the point is that's now generally available. Some of those capabilities are going to be able to be connected to our ability from an ks to deploy, uh on demand kubernetes cluster and deploy applications from a market marketplace experience in a common way, not just with Google, but has your with Amazon. And so, you know, frankly, the story doesn't differ a little bit from one cloud to the next, but the the Endeavour is to provide common capabilities across all of them. It's also the case that we do have people that are very opinionated about I want to live only in the Google or that Microsoft of the Amazon, because we're trying to deliver a rich experience for those folks as well, even if you don't value the agnostic multi cloud expert. >>Yeah and Matt, You know, I'm sure you have a viewpoint on this, but you know, it's that skill set that that's really challenging. And I was at the Microsoft show and you've got people you know. It's not just about dot net, there's all that. They're they're embracing and opened all of these environment. But people tend to have the environment that you used to and for multi cloud to be a reality, it needs to be a little bit easier for me to go between them, but it's still we're still we're making progress. But there's work to do. Yeah, s so I just, you know, you know, I know you're building tools and everything, but what what more do we didn't need to do? What were some of the areas that you know you're hopeful for about a >>year before I need to go for the supreme? It's down. It's coming down to the data side like I need to be able to say that on when I turn on data service is inside of kubernetes. I need be able to have that work would go anywhere, right? And because it is a developer. So I have I'm running a production. I'm running an Amazon. But maybe I'm doing test locally on my bare metal environments. Right? I need I want to be able to maybe sink down some of my data. I'm working with a production down to my test environment. That stuff's missing. There's no one doing that right now, and that's where we're headed. That's the path that's where we're headed. >>Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up, actually, because one of the things that I feel like I heard a little bit last year, but it is violated more this year is we're talking a little bit more to the application to the application developer because, you know, communities is a piece of the infrastructure, But it's about the Colonel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the colonel there. So, you know, how do we make sure you know, we're standing between what the APP developer needs and still making sure that, you know, infrastructure is taken care of because storage and networking they're still hard. >>It is. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm approaching. I'm thinking more along the lines of I'm trying to work about app developers personally than infrastructure This point on for me, you know, like so I have I give you a cluster in three minutes, right? So I don't really have to worry about that problem, you know, way also put Theo on top of the clusters. So it's like we're trying to create this whole narrative that you can manage that environment on day one day, two versions. But and that's for like, an I T manager, right? And society instead of our product. How I'm addressing this is you have personas and so you have this concept. You have an I T manager. They do these things that could set limits for the developer who's building the applications or the service's and pushing those up into the environment. They need to have a sense of freedom, right? And said on that side of the house, you know, I'm trying not to break them out of their tooling. So, like wait part of our product ties in to get s o. We have CD, you know? So you just get push, get commit to a branch and weaken target multiple clusters, Right? But no point to the developer, actually, drafty animal or anything. We make way basically create the container for you. Read the deployment, bring it online. And I feel like there's these lines and that I t guys need to be able to say I need to create the guard rails for the Debs. I don't want to make it seem like I'm creating guardrails for the deaths caused the deaths. Don't like that. That's how I'm balancing it. >>Okay, Because that has always been the tension and that there's a lot of talk about Dev ops, but you don't talkto application developers, and they don't wanna have anything to do with infrastructure. They just want a program to an A p I and get things done. They would like this infrastructure to be seamless. Yeah, >>and what we did, like also what I'm giving them is like service dashboards. Because as a developer, you know, because now you're in charge of your cue, eh? You're writing your tests you're pushing. If your c I is going to ct you on your service in production, right? And so we're delivering dashboards as well for service Is that the developers are running, so they dig in and say, Oh, here's an issue or here's where the issue is probably gonna be at I'm gonna go fix this. Yeah, and we're trying to create that type of like scenario for developer and for an I T manager, >>slightly different angle on it, by understanding that question correctly is part of the complexity of infrastructure is something we're also turned Friday deterministic sort of easy button capability, for perhaps you're familiar with them. That's nice. And a C I product, which we we kind of expand that as hybrid cloud infrastructure. If the intention is to make it a simple private cloud capability and indeed are not, a community service operates directly off of it. It's a big part of actually how we deliver Cloud Service is from it. The point is, is that if you're that application developer, if you want the effective and CASS on prom thing, Endeavor with are not a PhD. I product is to give you that sort of easy button extremes because you didn't really want to be a storage admin network at you didn't want to get into the be mired in the details of infra. So So you know, that's obviously work in progress. But we think we're definitely headed down the right direction >>for him. >>Yeah, it just seemed that a lot of enterprises wanna have the cloud like experience, but they want to be able to bring it home that we're seeing a lot more. Yeah. >>So this is like, this turn cheon from this turnkey cloud on premise and played with think has weaken like the same auto scaling. So take so take the dynamic nature of opportunities. Right. So I have a base cluster size of four worker notes, right? But my work, let's gonna maybe maybe need to have more notes. So my out of scale is gonna increase the size my cluster and decrease the size right Pretty much everybody only do that in the public cloud. I could do that in public and on premise now and so that's That's what we're trying to deliver. And that's nickel stuff. I think >>that there's a lot of advantages thio enterprises operating in that way because I have I people that here I can I can go and buy them, hire them and say way, need you to operate this gear and you, you've already done elsewhere. You can do it in cloud. You can do it on side. I could know run my operations the same across no matter where my applications leave, Which saves me a lot of money on training costs on development costs on generally makes for a much more smooth and seamless experience. So, Rob, if you could just love >>your takeaway on, you know, kind of net up participation here at the event and what you want people to take away off from the show this year. >>So it's certainly the case that we're doing a lot of great work. We, like people toe become aware of it. Not up, of course, is not. I think we talked about this and perhaps other context, not strictly a storage and data management company. Only way do draw from the strength of that as we're providing full stack capabilities in a way that are interconnected with public cloud things like are not a Cuban. Any service is really the foundational glue in many ways how we deliver the application run time, but over time will build a consolation of data centric capabilities around that as well. >>I would just love to get your viewpoint Is someone that you know built a company in this ecosystem. There's so many start ups here. Give us kind of that founder viewpoint of being in. They're so sort of ecosystem of the >>ecosystem. So this is how I came into the ecosystem at the beginning. I would have to say that it does feel different. Att This point, I'm gonna speak as Matt, not as now. And so my my thinking has always been It feels a lot like kind of your really your big fan of that rock bands, right? And you go to a local club way all get to know each other at that local club. There's, like maybe 500 of us or 1000 of us. And then that band gets signed a Warner Brothers and goes to the top it. Now there's 20,000 people or 12,000 people. That's how it feels to me right now, I think. But what I like about it is that just shows the power of the community is now at a point where is drawing in like cities now, not just a small collection of a tribe of people, right? And I think that's a very powerful thing with this community. And like all the where they called the kubernetes summits that they're doing way, didn't have any of those back when we first got going. I mean, it was tough to fill the room, you know, Now, now we can fill the room and it's amazing. And what I like seeing is is people moving past the problem with kubernetes itself and moving into, like, what other problems can I solve on top of kubernetes, you know? So you're starting to see that all these really exciting startups doing really need things, you know, and I really likes it like this vendor hall I really like, you know, because you get to see all the new guys. But there's a lot of stuff going on, and I'm excited to see where the community goes in the next five years. But it's we've gone from 0 to 60 insanely because you guys were at the original coupon. I think, Well, >>it's our fourth year doing the Cube at this show, but absolutely we've watched the early days, You know, I'm not supposed to mention open stack of this show, but we remember talking T o J j. And some of the early people there and wait interviewed Chris McCloskey back into Google days, right? So, yeah, we've been fortunate to be on here, really? Day zero here and definitely great energy. So much. Congrats. So much on the progress. Really appreciate the updates, Everything going. As you said, right, we've reached a certain estate and just adding more value on top of this whole >>environment. We're now like we're in, like, Junior high now. Right on were in grade school for a few years. >>All right, Matt. Rob, Thank you so much for the update. Hopefully not an awkward dance tonight for the junior people. For Justin Warren. I'm stupid and back with more coverage here from Q Khan Cloud native 2019. Diego, Thank you for watching Cute