(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)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on AWS. It's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred Wurden, VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan Bharadwaj, who's the VP and General Manager of Cloud Solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on the showcase. >> Great to be here. >> Great. Thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. >> We've been covering this VMware cloud on AWS since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. What's this mean? And the press were not really on board with the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for AWS and it continues two years later and I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to re:Invent, which is only a couple weeks away Feels like tomorrow. But as we prepare, a lot going on. Where are we with the evolution of the solution? >> I mean, first thing I want to say is October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of IT. When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy came together to announce this. And I think John, you were there at the time I was there. It was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017 year after that at VMworld, back when we called it VMworld. I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we built a service offering now five years old. Pretty remarkable journey. In the first years we tried to get across all the regions, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. In the second year, we started going really on enterprise great features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretched Clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using vSAN and NSX-T across to AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nines of availability that applications started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward, all kinds of integration with AWS Direct Connect, Transit Gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. Along the way, Disaster Recovery, we punched out two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our Outposts partnership. We were up on stage at re:Invent, again, with Pat and Andy announcing AWS Outposts and the VMware flavor of that, VMware Cloud and AWS Outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >> That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And this has been the theme for AWS, man, since I can remember from day one, Fred. You guys do the heavy lifting as you always say for the customers. Here, VMware comes on board. Takes advantage of the AWS and just doesn't miss a beat. Continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, vSphere, and these are big workloads on AWS. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >> Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's evolving quickly and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the customers. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and responding to what customers want. So pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to while at VMC. >> That's a great value proposition. We've been talking about that in context to anyone building on top of the cloud. They can have their own supercloud, as we call it, if you take advantage of all the CapEx and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and continues to make in performance IaaS and PaaS, all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options in the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered. What are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >> Yeah. I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion. Right from day one we were the early adopters of the AWS Nitro platform. The reinvention of EC2 back five years ago. And so we have been having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software-defined data center, compute storage networking on EC2, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally on AWS EC2 global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us, what customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service. And this was somewhat new to VMware. But we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top. So we took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud in AWS. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the Log4j debacle. Industry was just going through that. Favorite proof point from customers was before they could even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying, we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean, these are large banks. Many other customers around the world were super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >> Narayan, that's a great point. The whole managed service piece brings up the security. You kind of teasing at it, but there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera more bits than ever before and at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's going to be a zero-day vulnerability out there. It happens. We saw one with Fortinet this week. This came out of the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me, we see the value when we talk to customers on theCUBE about this. It was a real easy understanding of what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS. But the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >> Well, what's interesting about this is that it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like SAP, we'll go end-to-end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies. So from availability and reliability standpoint, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're going to go help the customer resolve that. It works really well. >> On the VMware side, what's been the feedback there? What are some of the updates? >> Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we work phenomenal backend relationship with AWS. Customers call VMware for the service or any issues. And then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The key management that we jointly do. All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution, do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with the VMware Cloud in AWS. We're presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >> You had mentioned, I've got list here of some of the innovations. You mentioned the stretch clustering, getting the geos working, advanced network, Disaster Recovery, FedRAMP, public sector certifications, Outposts. All good, you guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in? What's on the list this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the new things, the list of accomplishments? People want to know what's next. They don't want to see stagnant growth here. They want to see more action as cloud continues to scale and modern applications cloud native. You're seeing more and more containers, more and more CI/CD pipelining with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new? What's the new innovations? >> Absolutely. And I think as a five year old service offering, innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explore. First of all, our new platform i4i.metal. It's isolate based. It's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally and separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS FSx with NetApp ONTAP, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well. And the second storage offering called VMware Cloud Flex Storage. VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex Compute where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware Cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vCPU memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, top of ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in the industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud DR solution. A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Northstar. Our ability to have layer four through layer seven, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers is sort at the heart of our (faintly speaking). >> The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better faster, networking more options there. The Flex Compute is interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the resource-defined versus hardware-defined? Because this is what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource-defined versus hardware-defined. What does that mean? >> Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware-defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software-defined data centers. And so that's been super successful. But customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally. Lower the cost even more. And so this is the part where resource-defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request before fiber machines, five containers. It's size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. That's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other. They can go back to that host based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >> It's cloud flexibility right there. I like the name. Fred, let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind, let's get into some of the, we have some time. I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on theCUBE is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they start consuming higher level services. That adoption next level happens and because it's in the cloud. So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple use cases? >> Sure. Well, there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that like you said, as there's more and more bits, you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the i4 and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS. So there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with Textract or any other really cool service that has monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their current app base in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >> Narayan, what's your perspective from the VMware side? 'Cause you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where it's being rolled out 'cause you now have a lot of hybrid too. So what's your take on what's happening in with customers? >> I mean, it's been phenomenal. The customer adoption of this and banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production-grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so I have a couple of really good examples. S&P Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS Markit, big conglomeration now. Both customers were using VMware Cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated 1000 workloads to VMware Cloud and AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology. And the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B. The lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware Cloud and AWS. So that's one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe, but constantly entering new markets with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap. >> It's great to see. I mean, the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. Congratulations. >> One of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there and this is a big part of it here. >> It's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issue is another one. You see that constraints. I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security. I mean, I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013 and at that time people were saying, the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on-premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot, the stay current on the isolation there is hard. So I think the security and supply chain, Fred, is another one. Do you agree? >> I absolutely agree. It's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them more efficiently. And then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is the only P1. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >> And Narayan, your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better. All right, final question. I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I want to end with a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a new modern shift. We're seeing another inflection point. We've been documenting it. It's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is, what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What's changed for the better and what's still the same thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >> I'll tackle it. Businesses are complex and they're often unique, that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine managed services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about, that's elastic. You could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that. That's my take, Narayan. >> You got a lot of platform to compete on. With Amazon, you got a lot to build on. Narayan, your side. What's your answer to that question? >> I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constantly (faintly speaking). I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that production quickly and efficiently. I think we are seeing, we are at the very start of that sort of journey. Of course, we have invested in Kubernetes, the means to an end, but we're so much more beyond that's happening in industry and I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >> Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on solving these complexities with distractions, whether it's higher level services with large scale infrastructure. At your fingertips, infrastructure as code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen and Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and AWS getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> This is theCUBE and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation, VMware Cloud on AWS. Jointly engineered solution bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. Day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. You know, one of the key things... Together, day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (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)

>>Hi, buddy. Welcome back to the keeps coverage of AWS 2021. Re-invent you're watching the cube and I'm really excited. We're going to go outside the storage box. I like to say with my lawn Thompson Bukovac, who's the vice-president of block and object storage and Wayne Duso was a VP of storage edge and data governance guys. Great to see you again, we saw you at storage day, the 15 year anniversary of AWS, of course, the first product service ever. So awesome to be here. Isn't it. Wow. >>So much energy in the room. It's so great to see customers learning from each other, learning from AWS, learning from the things that you're observing as well. >>A lot of companies decided not to do physical events. I think you guys are on the right side of history. We're going to show you, you weren't exactly positive. How many people are going to show up. Everybody showed. I mean, it's packed house here, so >>Number 10. Yeah. >>All right. So let's get right into it. Uh, news of the week. >>So much to say, when you want to kick this off, >>We had a, we had a great set of announcements that Milan, uh, talked about yesterday, uh, in her talk and, and a couple of them in the file space, specifically a new, uh, member of the FSX family. And if you remember that the FSA, Amazon FSX is, uh, for customers who want to run fully managed versions of third party and open source file systems on AWS. And so yesterday we announced a new member it's FSX for open ZFS. >>Okay, cool. And there's more, >>Well, there's more, I mean, one of the great things about the new match file service world and CFS is it's powered by gravity. >>It is taught by Gravatar and all of the capabilities that AWS brings in terms of networking, storage, and compute, uh, to our customers. >>So this is really important. I want the audience to understand this. So I I've talked on the cube about how a large proportion let's call it. 30% of the CPU cycles are kind of wasted really on things like offloads, and we could be much more efficient, so graviton much more efficient, lower power and better price performance, lower cost. Amazon is now on a new curve, uh, cycles are faster for processors, and you can take advantage of that in storage it's storage users, compute >>That's right? In fact, you have that big launch as well for luster, with gravity. >>We did in fact, uh, so with, with, uh, Yasmin of open CFS, we also announced the next gen Lustre offering. And both of these offerings, uh, provide a five X improvement in performance. For example, now with luster, uh, customers can drive up to one terabyte per second of throughput, which is simply amazing. And with open CFS, right out of, right out of the box at GA a million IOPS at sub-millisecond latencies taking advantage of gravitas, taking advantage of our storage and networking capabilities. >>Well, I guess it's for HPC workloads, but what's the difference between these days HPC, big data, data intensive, a lot of AI stuff, >>All right. You to just, there's a lot of intersection between all of those different types of workloads they have, as you said, and you know, it all, it all depends on it all matters. And this is the reason why having the suite of capabilities that the, if you would, the members of the family is so important to our guests. >>We've talked a lot about, it's really can't think about traditional storage as a traditional storage anymore. And certainly your world's not a box. It's really a data platform, but maybe you could give us your point of view on that. >>Yeah, I think, you know, if, if we look, if we take a step back and we think about how does AWS do storage? Uh, we think along multiple dimensions, we have the dimension that Wayne's talking about, where you bring together the power of compute and storage for these managed file services that are so popular. You and I talked about, um, NetApp ONTAP. Uh, we went into some detail on that with you as well, and that's been enormously popular. And so that whole dimension of these managed file services is all about where is the customer today and how can we help them get to the cloud? But then you think about the other things that we're also imagining, and we're, re-imagining how customers want to grow those applications and scale them. And so a great example here at reinvent is let's just take the concept of archive. >>So many people, when they think about archive, they think about taking that piece of data and putting it away on tape, putting it away in a closet somewhere, never pulling it out. We don't think about archive like that archive just happens to be data that you just aren't using at the moment, but when you need it, you need it right away. And that's why we built a new storage class that we launched just yesterday, Dave, and it's called glacier instead of retrieval, it has retrieval and milliseconds, just like an Esri storage class has the same pricing of four tenths of a cent as glacier archive. >>So what's interesting at the analyst event today, Adam got a question about, and somebody was poking at him, you know, analysts can be snarky sometimes about, you know, price, declines and so forth. And he said, you know, one of the, one of the things that's not always shown up and we don't always get credit for lowering prices, but we might lower costs. And there's the archive and deep archive is an example of that. Maybe you could explain that point of view. >>Yeah. The way we look at it is that our customers, when they talk to us about the cost of storage, they talked to us about the total cost of the storage, and it's not just storing the data, it's retrieving it and using it. And so we have done an amazing amount across all the portfolio around reducing costs. We have glacier answer retrieval, which is 68% cheaper than standard infrequent access. That's a big cost reduction. We have EBS snapshots archive, which we introduced yesterday, 75% cheaper to archive a snapshot. And these are the types of that just transform the total cost. And in some cases we just eliminate costs. And so the glacier storage class, all bulk retrievals of data from the glacier storage class five to 12 hours, it's now free of charge. If you don't even have to think about, we didn't even reduce it. We just eliminated the cost of that data retrieval >>And additive to what Milan said around, uh, archiving. If you look at what we've done throughout the entire year, you know, a interesting statistic that was brought up yesterday is over the course of 2021, between our respective teams, we've launched over 105 capabilities for our customers throughout this year. And in some of them, for instance, on the file side for EFS, we launched one zone which reduced, uh, customer costs by 47%. Uh, you can now achieve on EFS, uh, cost of roughly 4.30 cents per gigabyte month on, uh, FSX, we've reduced costs up to 92%, uh, on Lustre and FSX for windows and with the introduction of ONTAP and open CFS, we continue those forward, including customers ability to compress and Dedoose against those costs. So they ended up seeing a considerable savings, even over what our standard low prices are. >>100 plus, what can I call them releases? And how can you categorize those? Are they features of eight? Do they fall into, >>Because they range for major services, like what we've launched with open ZFS to major features and really 95 of those were launched before re-invent. And so really what you have between the different teams that work in storage is you have this relentless drive to improve all the storage platforms. And we do it all across the course of the year, all across the course of the year. And in some cases, the benefit shows up at no cost at all to a customer. >>Uh, how, how did this, it seems like you're on an accelerated pace, a S3 EBS, and then like hundreds of services. I guess the question is how come it took so long and how is it accelerating now? Is it just like, there was so much focus on compute before you had to get that in place, or, but now it's just rapidly accessing, >>I I'll tell you, Dave, we took the time to count this year. And so we came to you with this number of 106, uh, that acceleration has been in place for many years. We just didn't take the time to couch. Correct. So this has been happening for years and years. Wayne and I have been with AWS for, for a long time now for 10 plus years. And really that velocity that we're talking about right now that has been happening every single year, which is where you have storage today. And I got to tell you, innovation is in our DNA and we are not going to stop now >>So 10 years. Okay. So it was really, the first five years was kind of slow. And then >>I think that's true at all. I don't think that try, you know, if you, if you look at, uh, the services that we have, we have the most complete portfolio of any cloud provider when it comes to storage and data. And so over the years, we've added to the foundation, which is S3 and the foundation, which is EBS. We've come out with a number of storage services in the, in the file space. Now you have an entire suite of persistent data stores within AWS and the teams behind those that are able to accelerate that pace. Just to give you an example, when I joined 10 years ago, AWS launched within that year, roughly a hundred and twenty, a hundred and twenty eight services or features our teams together this year have launched almost that many, just in those in, just in this space. So AWS continues to accelerate the storage teams continue to accelerate. And as my line said, we just started counting >>The thing. And if you think about those first five years, that was laying the baseline to launch us three, to launch EBS, to get that foundation in place, get lifecycle policies in place. But really, I think you're just going to see an even faster acceleration that number's going up. >>No, I that's what I'm saying. It does appear that way. And you had to build a team and put teams in place. And so that's, you know, part of the equation. But again, I come back to, it's not even, I don't even think of it as storage anymore. It's it's data. People are data lake is here to stay. You might not like the term. We always use the joke about a data ocean, but data lake is here to say 200,000 data lakes. Now we heard Adam talk about, uh, this morning. I think it was Adam. No, it was Swami. Do you want a thousand data lakes in your customer base now? And people are adding value to that data in new ways, injecting machine intelligence, you know, SageMaker is a big piece of that. Tying it in. I know a lot of customers are using glue as catalogs and which I'm like, wow, is glue a catalog or, I mean, it's just so flexible. So what are you seeing customers do with that base of data now and driving new business value? Because I've said last decade plus has been about it transformation. And now we're seeing business transformation. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Well, the base of every data lake is going to be as three yesterday has over 200 trillion objects. Now, Dave, and if you think about that, if you took every person on the planet, each of those people would have 26,000 S3 objects. It's gotten that big. And you know, if you think about the base of data with 200 trillion plus objects, really the opportunity for innovation is limitless. And you know, a great example for that is it's not just business value. It's really the new customer experiences that our customers are inventing the NFL. Uh, they, you know, they have that application called digital athlete where, you know, they started off with 10,000 labeled images or up to 20,000 labeled images now. And they're all using it to drive machine learning models that help predict and support the players on the field when they start to see things unfold that might cause injury. That is a brand new experience. And it's only possible with vast amounts of data >>Additive to when my line said, we're, we're in you talk about business transformation. We are in the age of data and we represent storage services. But what we really represent is what our customers hold one of their most valuable assets, which is their data. And that set of data is only growing. And the ability to use that data, to leverage that data for value, whether it's ML training, whether it's analytics, that's only accelerated, this is the feedback we get from our customers. This is where these features and new capabilities come from. So that's, what's really accelerating our pace >>Guys. I wish we had more time. I'd have to have you back because we're on a tight clock here, but, um, so great to see you both especially live. I hope we get to do more of this in 2022. I'm an optimist. Okay. And keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube you're leader in live tech coverage, right back.

(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)

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and etr this is breaking analysis with dave vellante by our estimates aws will generate around nine billion dollars in storage revenue this year and is now the second largest supplier of enterprise storage behind dell we believe aws storage revenue will hit 11 billion in 2022 and continue to outpace on-prem storage growth by more than a thousand basis points for the next three to four years at its third annual storage day event aws signaled a continued drive to think differently about data storage and transform the way customers migrate manage and add value to their data over the next decade hello and welcome to this week's wikibon cube insights powered by etr in this breaking analysis we'll give you a brief overview of what we learned at aws's storage day share our assessment of the big announcement of the day a deal with netapp to run ontap natively in the cloud as a managed service and we'll share some new data on how we see the market evolving with aws executive perspectives on its strategy how it thinks about hybrid and where it fits into the emerging data mesh conversation let's start with a snapshot of the announcements made at storage day now as with most aws events this one had a number of announcements and introduced them at a pace that was predictably fast and oftentimes hard to follow here's a quick list of most of them with some comments on each the big big news is the announcement with netapp netapp and aws have engineered a solution which ports the rich netapp stack onto aws and will be delivered as a fully managed service this is a big deal because previously customers either had they had to make a trade-off they had a settle for cloud-based file service with less functionality than you could get with netapp on-prem or it had to lose the agility and elasticity of the cloud and the whole pay-by-the-drink model now customers can get access to a fully functional netapp stack with services like data reduction snaps clones the full multi-protocol support replication all the services ontap delivers in the cloud as a managed service through the aws console our estimate is that 80 of the data on-prem is stored in file format and that's not the revenue but that's the data and we all know about s3 object storage but the biggest market from a capacity standpoint is file storage you know this announcement reminds us quite a bit of the vmware cloud on aws deal but applied to storage netapp's aunt anthony lai told me dave this is bigger and we're going to come back to that in a moment aws announced s3 multi-region access points it's a service that optimizes storage performance it takes into account latency network congestion and the location of data copies to deliver data via the best route to ensure our best performance this is something we've talked about for quite some time using metadata to optimize that that access aws also announced improvements to s3 tiering where it will no longer charge for small objects of less than 128k so for example customers won't be charged for most metadata and other smaller objects remember aws years ago hired a bunch of emc engineers and those guys built a lot of tiering functionality into their boxes and we'll come back to that later in this episode aws also announced backup and monitoring tools to ensure backups are in compliance with regulations and corporate edicts this frankly is table stakes and was was overdue in my view aws also made a number of other announcements that have been well covered in the press around block storage and simplified data migration tools so we'll leave that to your perusal through other outlets i want to come back to the big picture on the market dynamics now as we've reported in previous breaking analysis segments aws storage revenue is on a path to 10 billion dollars we reported this last year this chart puts the market in context it shows our estimates for worldwide enterprise storage revenue in the calendar year 2021. this data is meant to include all storage revenue including primary secondary and archival storage and related maintenance services dell is the leader in the 60 billion market with aws now hot on its tail with 15 of the market in terms of the way we've cut it now in the pre-cloud days customers would tell us our storage strategy is the following we buy emc for block and netapp for file keeping it simple while remnants of this past habit continue the market is definitely changing as you can see here the companies highlighted in red represent the growing hyperscaler presence and you can see in the pi on the right they now account for around 25 percent of the market and they're growing much much faster than the on-prem vendors well over that thousand basis points when you combine them all a couple of other things to note in the data we're excluding kindrel from ibm's figures that's ibm spinout but including our estimates of storage software for example spectrums protect that is sold as part of the ibm cloud but not reported in ibm's income statement by the way pre-kindred spin ibm storage business we believe would approach the size of netapp's business now in the yellow we've highlighted the portion of hyper-converged that comprises storage this includes vmware nutanix cisco and others vmware and nutanix are the largest hci players but in total the storage piece of that market is less than two billion okay so the way to look at this market is changing traditional on-prem is vying for budgets with cloud storage services which are rapidly gaining presence in the market and we're seeing the on-prem piece evolve of course into as a service models with hpe's green lake dell's apex and other on-prem cloud-like models now let's come back to the netapp aws deal netapp as we know is the gold standard for file services they've been the market leader for a long long time and other than pure which is considerably smaller netapp is the one company that consistently was able to beat emc in the market emc developed its its nas business and developed on its own nasdaq and it bought isilon to compete with netapp with isilon's excellent global file system but generally netapp remains the best file storage company today now emerging disruptors like cumulo vast weka they would take issue with this statement and rightly so as they have really promising technology but netapp remains the king of the file hill you can't debate that now netapp however has had some serious headwinds as the largest independent storage player as seen in this etr chart the data shows a nine-year view of netapp's presence in the etr survey presence is referred to by etr as market share it's not traditional market share it measures the pervasiveness of responses in the etr survey over a thousand customers each quarter so the percentage of mentions essentially that netapp is getting and you can see well netapp remains a leader it has had a difficult time expanding its tam and it's become frankly less relevant in the eye in the grand scheme and the grand eyes of it buyers the company hit headwinds when it began migrating its base to ontap 8 and was late riding a number of new waves including flash but generally it is recovered from those headwinds and it's really now focused on the cloud opportunity opportunity as evidenced by this deal with aws now as i said earlier netapp evp anthony lai told me that this deal is bigger than vmware cloud on aws like me you may be wondering how can that be vmware is the leader in the data center it has half a million customers its deal with aws has been a tremendous success as seen in this etr chart the data here shows spending momentum or net score from when vmware cloud on aws was picked up in the etr surveys with a meaningful n which today is approaching 100 responses in the survey the yellow line is there for context it's vmware's overall business so repeat it buyers who responded vmware versus specifically vmware cloud on aws so you see vmware overall has a huge presence in the survey more than 600 n the red line is vmware cloud on aws and that red dotted line you see that that's that's my magic 40 mark anything above that line we consider elevated net score or spending velocity and while we saw some deceleration earlier this year in that line that top line for vmware cloud vmware cloud and aws has been consistently showing well in the survey well above that 40 percent line so could this netapp deal be bigger than vmware cloud on aws well probably not in our view but we like the strategy of netapp going cloud native on aws and aws's commitment to deliver this as a managed service now where could get interesting is across clouds in other words if netapp can take a page out of snowflake and build an abstraction layer that hides the underlying complexity of not only the aws cloud but also gcp and azure where you log into the netapp cloud netapp data cloud if you will just go ahead and steal steal it from snowflake and then netapp optimizes your on-prem your aws your azure and or your gcp file storage we see that as a winning strategy that could dramatically expand netapp's tam politically it may not sit well with aws but so what netapp has to go multi-cloud to expand that tam when the vmware deal was announced many people felt it was a one-way street where all the benefit would eventually accrue to aws in reality this has certainly been a near-term winner for aws and vmware and of course importantly vmware and aws join customers now longer term it's going to clearly be a win for aws because it gets access to vmware's customer base but we also think it will serve vmware well because it gives the company a clear and concise cloud strategy especially if it can go across clouds and eventually get to the edge so with this netapp aws deal will it be as big probably not in our view but it is big netapp in our view just leapfrogged the competition because of the deep engineering commitment aws has made this isn't a marketplace deal it's a native managed service and we think that's pretty huge okay we're going to close with a few thoughts on aws storage strategy and some other thoughts on hybrid talk about capturing mission critical workloads and where aws fits in the overall data mesh conversation which is one of our favorite topics first let's talk about aws's storage strategy overall as with other services aws approach is to give builders access to tools at a very granular level that means it does mean a lot of apis and access to primitives that are essentially building blocks while this may require greater developer skills it also allows aws to get to market quickly and add functionality faster than the competition enterprises however where they will pay up for solutions so this leaves some nice white space for partners and also competitors and especially the on-prem folks but let's hear from an aws executive i spoke to milan thompson bucheveck an aws vp on the cube and asked her to describe aws's storage strategy here's what she said play the clip we are dynamically and constantly evolving our aws storage services based on what the application and the customer want that is fundamentally what we do every day we talked a little bit about those deployments that are happening right now dave that is something that idea of constant dynamic evolution just can't be replicated by on-premises where you buy a box and it sits in your data center for three or more years and what's unique about us among the cloud services is again that perspective of the 15 years where we are building applications in ways that are unique because we have more customers and we have more customers doing more things so you know i i've said this before uh it's all about speed of innovation dave time and change wait for no one and if you're a business and you're trying to transform your business and base it on a set of technologies that change rapidly you have to use aws services i mean if you look at some of the launches that we talk about today and you think about s3's multi-region access points that's a fundamental change for customers that want to store copies of their data in any number of different regions and get a 60 performance improvement by leveraging the technology that we've built up over over time the the ability for us to route to intelligently router requests across our network that and fsx for netapp ontap nobody else has these capabilities today and it's because we are at the forefront of talking to different customers and that dynamic evolution of storage that's the core of our strategy so as you hear and can see by milan's statements how these guys think outside the box mentality at the end of the day customers want rock solid storage that's dirt cheap and lightning fast they always have and they always will but what i'm hearing from aws is they think about delivering these capabilities in the broader context of an application or a business think deeper business integration not the traditional suppliers don't think about that as well but the services mentality the cloud services mentality is different than dropping off a box at a loading dock turning it over to a professional services organization and then moving on to the next deal now i also had a chance to speak with wayne dusso he's another aws vp in the storage group wayne do so is a long time tech athlete for years he was responsible for building storage arrays at emc aws as i said hired a bunch of emcs years ago and those guys did a lot of tiered storage so i asked wayne what's the difference in mentality when you're building boxes versus cloud services here's what he said you have physical constraints you have to worry about the physical resources on that device for the life of that device which is years think about what changes in three or five years think about the last two years alone and what's changed can you imagine having being constrained by only uh having boxes available to you during this last two years versus having the cloud and being able to expand or contract based on your business needs that would be really tough right and it has been tough and that's why we've seen customers from every industry accelerate uh their use of the cloud during these last two years so i get that so what's your mindset when you're building storage services and data services so so each of the surfaces that we have in object block file movement services data services each of them provides very specific customer value in each are deeply integrated with the rest of aws so that when you need object services you start using them the integrations come along with you when if you're using traditional block we talked about ebs io2 block express when using file just the example alone today with ontap you know you get to use what you need when you need it and the way that you're used to using it without any concern so so the big difference is no constraints in the box but lots of opportunities to blend in with other services now all that said there are cases where the box is gonna win because of locality and and physics and latency issues you know particularly where latency is king that's where a box is gonna be advantageous and we'll come back to that in a bit okay but what about hybrid how does aws think about hybrid and on-prem here's my take and then let's hear from milan again the cloud is expanding it's moving out to the edge and aws looks at the data center as just another edge node and it's bringing its infrastructure as code mentality to that edge and of course to data centers so if aws is truly customer centric which we believe it is it will naturally have to accommodate on-prem use cases and it is doing just that here's how milan thompson-bucheveck explained how aws is thinking about hybrid roll the clip for us dave it always comes back to what the customer is asking for and we were talking to customers and they were talking about their edge and what they wanted to do with it we said how are we going to help and so if i just take s3 for outposts as an example or ebs and outposts you know we have customers like morningstar and morningstar wants outposts because they are using it as a step in their journey to being on the cloud if you take a customer like first adudabi bank they're using outposts because they need data residency for their compliance requirements and then we have other customers that are using outposts to help like dish networks as an example to place the storage as close as account to the applications for low latency all of those are customer driven requirements for their architecture for us dave we think in the fullness of time every customer and all applications are going to be on the cloud because it makes sense and those businesses need that speed of innovation but when we build things like our announcement today of fxs for netapp ontap we build them because customers asked us to help them with their journey to the cloud just like we built s3 and evs for outposts for the same reason so look this is a case where the box or the appliance wins latency matters as we said and aws gets that this is where matt baker of dell is right it's not a zero-sum game this is especially accurate as it pertains to the cloud versus on-prem discussion but a budget dollar is a budget dollar and the dollar can't go to two places so the battle will come down to who has the best solution the best relationships and who can deliver the most rock solid storage at the lowest cost and highest performance let's take a look at mission critical workloads for a second we're seeing aws go after these it's doing a database it's doing it with block storage we're talking about oracle sap microsoft sql server db2 that kind of stuff high volume oltp transactions mission critical work now there's no doubt that aws is picking up a lot of low hanging fruit with business critical workloads but the really hard to move work isn't going without a fight frankly it's not going that fast aws and mace has made some improvements to block storage to remove some of the challenges related but generally we see this is a very long road ahead for aws and other cloud suppliers oracle is the king of mission critical work along with ibm mainframes and those infrastructures generally it's not easy to move to the cloud it's too risky it's too expensive and the business case oftentimes isn't there because very frequently you have to freeze applications to do so what generally what people are doing is they're building an abstraction layer over that putting that abstraction layer maybe in the cloud building new apps that can connect to the back end and the into the cloud but that back end is largely cemented and fossilized look it's all in the definition no doubt there's plenty of mission critical work that is going to move but just really depends on how you define it even aws struggles to move its most critical transaction systems off of oracle but we'll continue to keep an open mind there it's just that today we define the most mission-critical workloads as we define them we don't see a lot of movement to the hyperscale clouds and we're going to close with some thoughts on data mesh so one of our favorite topics we've written extensively about this and interviewed and are collaborating with jamaa dagani who has coined the term and we've announced a media collaboration with the data mesh community and believe it's a strong direction for the industry so we wanted to understand how aws thinks about data mesh and where it fits in the conversation here's what milan had to say about that play the clip we have customers today that are taking the data mesh architectures and implementing them with aws services and dave i want to go back to the start of amazon when amazon first began we grew because the amazon technologies were built in microservices fundamentally a data match is about separation or abstraction of what individual components do and so if i look at data mesh really you're talking about two things you're talking about separating the data storage and the characteristics of data from the data services that interact and operate on that storage and with data mesh it's all about making sure that the businesses the decentralized business model can work with that data now our aws customers are putting their storage in a centralized place because it's easier to track it's easier to view compliance and it's easier to predict growth and control costs but we started with building blocks and we deliberately built our storage services separate from our data services so we have data services like lake formation and glue we have a number of these data services that our customers are using to build that customized data mesh on top of that centralized storage so really it's about at the end of the day speed it's about innovation it's about making sure that you can decentralize and separate your data services from your storage so businesses can go faster so it's very true that aws has customers that are implementing data mess data mesh data mess data mesh can be a data mess if you don't do it right jpmorgan chase is a firm that is doing that we've we've covered that they've got a great video out there check out the breaking analysis archive you'll see that hellofresh has also initiated a data mesh architecture in the cloud and several others are starting to pop up i think the point is the issues and challenges around data mesh are more organizational and process related and less focused on the technology platform look data by its very nature is decentralized so when mylan talks about customers building on centralized storage that's a logical view of the storage but not necessarily physically centralized it may be in a in a hybrid device it may be a copy that lives outside of that same physical location this is an important point as jpmorgan chase pointed out the data mesh must accommodate data products and services that are in the cloud and also on-prem it's got to be inclusive the data mesh looks at the data store as a node on the data mesh it shouldn't be confined by the technology whether it's a data warehouse a data hub a data mart or an s3 bucket so i would say this while people think of the cloud as a centralized walled garden and in many respects it is that very same cloud is expanding into a massively distributed architecture and that fits with the data mesh architectural model as i say the big challenges of data mesh are less technical and more cultural and we're super excited to see how data mesh plays out over time and we're really excited to be part of part of the the community and a media partner of the data mesh community okay that's it for now remember i publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and these episodes they're all available as podcasts all you do is search for breaking analysis podcasts you can always connect on twitter i'm at d vellante or email me at david.velante at siliconangle.com i appreciate the comments you guys make on linkedin and don't forget to check out etr.plus for all the survey action this is dave vellante for the cube insights powered by etr be well and we'll see you next time [Music] you

(Upbeat intro music) >> Thanks guys. Hi everybody. Welcome back to The Spheres. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCubes continuous coverage of AWS storage day. I'm really excited to bring on Wayne Duso. Wayne is the vice-president of AWS Storage Edge and Data Governance Services. Wayne, two Boston boys got to come to Seattle to see each other. You know. Good to see you, man. >> Good to see you too. >> I mean, I'm not really from Boston. The guys from East Boston give me crap for saying that. [Wayne laughs] That my city, right? You're a city too. >> It's my city as well I'm from Charlestown so right across the ocean. >> Charlestown is actually legit Boston, you know I grew up in a town outside, but that's my city. So all the sports fan. So, hey great keynote today. We're going to unpack the keynote and, and really try to dig into it a little bit. You know, last 18 months has been a pretty bizarre, you know, who could have predicted this. We were just talking to my line about, you know, some of the permanent changes and, and even now it's like day to day, you're trying to figure out, okay, you know, what's next, you know, our business, your business. But, but clearly this has been an interesting time to say the least and the tailwind for the Cloud, but let's face it. How are customers responding? How are they changing their strategies as a result? >> Yeah. Well, first off, let me say it's good to see you. It's been years since we've been in chairs across from one another. >> Yeah. A couple of years ago in Boston, >> A couple of years ago in Boston. I'm glad to see you're doing well. >> Yeah. Thanks. You too. >> You look great. (Wayne Laughs) >> We get the Sox going. >> We'll be all set. >> Mm Dave you know, the last 18 months have been challenging. There's been a lot of change, but it's also been inspiring. What we've seen is our customers engaging the agility of the Cloud and appreciating the cost benefits of the Cloud. You know, during this time we've had to be there for our partners, our clients, our customers, and our people, whether it's work from home, whether it's expanding your capability, because it's surging say a company like zoom, where they're surging and they need more capability. Our cloud capabilities have allowed them to function, grow and thrive. In these challenging times. It's really a privilege that we have the services and we have the capability to enable people to behave and, execute and operate as normally as you possibly can in something that's never happened before in our lifetimes. It's unprecedented. It's a privilege. >> Yeah. I mean, I agree. You think about it. There's a lot of negative narrative, in the press about, about big tech and, and, and, you know, the reality is, is big tech has, has stood and small tech has stepped up big time and we were really think about it, Wayne, where would we be without, without tech? And I know it sounds bizarre, but we're kind of lucky. This pandemic actually occurred when it did, because had it occurred, you know, 10 years ago it would have been a lot tougher. I mean, who knows the state of vaccines, but certainly from a tech standpoint, the Cloud has been a savior. You've mentioned Zoom. I mean, you know, we, productivity continues. So that's been, been pretty key. I want to ask you, in you keynote, you talked about two paths to, to move to the Cloud, you know, Vector one was go and kind of lift and shift if I got it right. And then vector two was modernized first and then go, first of all, did I get that right? And >> Super close and >> So help me course correct. And what are those, what are those two paths mean for customers? How should we think about that? >> Yeah. So we want to make sure that customers can appreciate the value of the Cloud as quickly as they need to. And so there's, there's two paths and with not launches and, we'll talk about them in a minute, like our FSX for NetApp ONTAP, it allows customers to quickly move from like to like, so they can move from on-prem and what they're using in terms of the storage services, the processes they use to administer the data and manage the data straight onto AWS, without any conversion, without any change to their application. So I don't change to anything. So storage administrators can be really confident that they can move. Application Administrators know it will work as well, if not better with the Cloud. So moving onto AWS quickly to value that's one path. Now, once they move on to AWS, some customers will choose to modernize. So they will, they will modernize by containerizing their applications, or they will modernize by moving to server-less using Lambda, right? So that gives them the opportunity at the pace they want as quickly or as cautiously as they need to modernize their application, because they're already executing, they're already operating already getting value. Now within that context, then they can continue that modernization process by integrating with even more capabilities, whether it's ML capabilities or IOT capabilities, depending on their needs. So it's really about speed agility, the ability to innovate, and then the ability to get that flywheel going with cost optimization, feed those savings back into betterment for their customers. >> So how did the launches that you guys have made today and even, even previously, do they map into those two paths? >> Yeah, they do very well. >> How so? Help us understand that. >> So if we look, let's just run down through some of the launches today, >> Great. >> And we can, we can map those two, those two paths. So like we talked about FSX for NetApp ONTAP, or we just like to say FSX for ONTAP because it's so much easier to say. [Dave laughs] >> So FSX for ONTAP is a clear case of move. >> Right >> EBS io2 Block Express for Sand, a clear case of move. It allows customers to quickly move their sand workloads to AWS, with the launch of EBS direct API, supporting 64 terabyte volumes. Now you can snapshot your 64 terabyte volumes on-prem to already be in AWS, and you can restore them to an EBS io2 Block Express volume, allowing you to quickly move an ERP application or an Oracle application. Some enterprise application that requires the speed, the durability and the capability of VBS super quickly. So that's, those are good examples of, of that. In terms of the modernization path, our launch of AWS transfer managed workflows is a good example of that. Manage workflows have been around forever. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And, and customers rely on those workflows to run their business, but they really want to be able to take advantage of cloud capabilities. They want to be able to, for instance, apply ML to those workflows because it really kind of makes sense that their workloads are people related. You can apply artificial intelligence to them, >> Right >> This is an example of a service that allows them to modify those workflows, to modernize them and to build additional value into them. >> Well. I like that example. I got a couple of followup questions, if I may. Sticking on the machine learning and machine intelligence for a minute. That to me is a big one because when I was talking to my line about this is this, it's not just you sticking storage in a bucket anymore, right? You're invoking other services: machine intelligence, machine learning, might be database services, whatever it is, you know, streaming services. And it's a service, you know, there it is. It's not a real complicated integration. So that to me is big. I want to ask you about the block side of things >> Wayne: Sure >> You built in your day, a lot of boxes. >> Wayne: I've built a lot of boxes. >> And you know, the Sand space really well. >> Yeah. >> And you know, a lot of people probably more than I do storage admins that say you're not touching my Sand, right? And they just build a brick wall around it. Okay. And now eventually it ages out. And I think, you know, that whole cumbersome model it's understood, but nonetheless, their workloads and our apps are running on that. How do you see that movement from those and they're the toughest ones to move. The Oracle, the SAP they're really, you know, mission critical Microsoft apps, the database apps, hardcore stuff. How do you see that moving into the Cloud? Give us a sense as to what customers are telling you. >> Storage administrators have a hard job >> Dave: Yeah >> And trying to navigate how they move from on-prem to in Cloud is challenging. So we listened to the storage administrators, even when they tell us, No. we want to understand why no. And when you look at EBS io2 Block Express, this is in part our initial response to moving their saying into the Cloud super easily. Right? Because what do they need? They need performance. They need their ability. They need availability. They need the services to be able to snap and to be able to replicate their Capa- their storage. They need to know that they can move their applications without having to redo all they know to re-plan all they work on each and every day. They want to be able to move quickly and confidently. EBS io2 Block Express is the beginning of that. They can move confidently to sand in the Cloud using EBS. >> Well, so why do they say 'no'? Is it just like the inherent fear? Like a lawyer would say, don't do that, you know, don't or is it just, is it, is it a technical issue? Is it a cultural issue? And what are you seeing there? >> It's a cultural issue. It's a mindset issue, but it's a responsibility. I mean, these folks are responsible for the, one of the most important assets that you have. Most important asset for any company is people. Second most important asset is data. These folks are responsible for a very important asset. And if they don't get it right, if they don't get security, right. They don't get performance right. They don't get durability right. They don't get availability right. It's on them. So it's on us to make sure they're okay. >> Do you see it similar to the security discussion? Because early on, I was just talking to Sandy Carter about this and we were saying, you remember the CIA deal? Right? So I remember talking to the financial services people said, we'll never put any data in the Cloud. Okay they got to be one of your biggest industries, if not your biggest, you know customer base today. But there was fear and, and the CIA deal changed that. They're like, wow CIA is going to the Cloud They're really security conscious. And that was an example of maybe public sector informing commercial. Do you see it as similar? I mean there's obviously differences, but is it a sort of similar dynamic? >> I do. I do. You know, all of these ilities right. Whether it's, you know, durability, availability, security, we'll put ility at the end of that somehow. All of these are not jargon words. They mean something to each persona, to each customer. So we have to make sure that we address each of them. So like security. And we've been addressing the security concern since the beginning of AWS, because security is job number one. And operational excellence job number two. So, a lot of things we're talking about here is operational excellence, durability, availability, likeness are all operational concerns. And we have to make sure we deliver against those for our customers. >> I get it. I mean, the storage admins job is thankless, but the same time, you know, if your main expertise is managing LUNs, your growth path is limited. So they, they want to transform. They want to modernize their own careers. >> I love that. >> It's true. Right? I mean it's- >> Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if you're a storage administrator today, understanding the storage portfolio that AWS delivers will allow you, and it will enable you empower you to be a cloud storage administrator. So you have no worry because you're, let's take FSX for ONTAP. You will take the skills that you've developed and honed over years and directly apply them to the workloads that you will bring to the Cloud. Using the same CLIs, The same APIs, the same consoles, the same capabilities. >> Plus you mentioned you guys announced, you talked about AWS backup services today, announced some stuff there. I see security governance, backup, identity access management, and governance. These are all adjacency. So if you're a, if you're a cloud storage administrator, you now are going to expand your scope of operations. You, you know, you're not going to be a security, Wiz overnight by any means, but you're now part of that, that rubric. And you're going to participate in that opportunity and learn some things and advance your career. I want to ask you, before we run out of time, you talked about agility and cost optimization, and it's kind of the yin and the yang of Cloud, if you will. But how are these seemingly conflicting forces in sync in your view. >> Like many things in life, right? [Wayne Laughs] >> We're going to get a little spiritually. >> We might get a little philosophical here. [Dave Laughs] >> You know, cloud announced, we've talked about two paths and in part of the two paths is enabling you to move quickly and be agile in how you move to the Cloud. Once you are on the Cloud, we have the ability through all of the service integrations that we have. In your ability to see exactly what's happening at every moment, to then cost optimize, to modernize, to cost optimize, to improve on the applications and workloads and data sets that you've brought. So this becomes a flywheel cost optimization allows you to reinvest, reinvest, be more agile, more innovative, which again, returns a value to your business and value to your customers. It's a flywheel effect. >> Yeah. It's kind of that gain sharing. Right? >> It is. >> And, you know, it's harder to do that in a, in an on-prem world, which everything is kind of, okay, it's working. Now boom, make it static. Oh, I want to bring in this capability or this, you know, AI. And then there's an integration challenge >> That's true. >> Going on. Not, not that there's, you know, there's differences in, APIs. But that's, to me is the opportunity to build on top of it. I just, again, talking to my line, I remember Andy Jassy saying, Hey, we purposefully have created our services at a really atomic level so that we can get down to the primitives and change as the market changes. To me, that's an opportunity for builders to create abstraction layers on top of that, you know, you've kind of, Amazon has kind of resisted that over the years, but, but almost on purpose. There's some of that now going on specialization and maybe certain industry solutions, but in general, your philosophy is to maintain that agility at the really granular level. >> It is, you know, we go back a long way. And as you said, I've built a lot of boxes and I'm proud of a lot of the boxes I've built, but a box is still a box, right? You have constraints. And when you innovate and build on the Cloud, when you move to the Cloud, you do not have those constraints, right? You have the agility, you can stand up a file system in three seconds, you can grow it and shrink it whenever you want. And you can delete it, get rid of it whenever you want back it up and then delete it. You don't have to worry about your infrastructure. You don't have to worry about is it going to be there in three months? It will be there in three seconds. So the agility of each of these services, the unique elements of all of these services allow you to capitalize on their value, use what you need and stop using it when you don't, and you don't have the same capabilities when you use more traditional products. >> So when you're designing a box, how is your mindset different than when you're designing a service? >> Well. You have physical constraints. You have to worry about the physical resources on that device for the life of that device, which is years. Think about what changes in three or five years. Think about the last two years alone and what's changed. Can you imagine having been constrained by only having boxes available to you during this last two years versus having the Cloud and being able to expand or contract based on your business needs, that would be really tough, right? And it has been tough. And that's why we've seen customers for every industry accelerate their use of the Cloud during these last two years. >> So I get that. So what's your mindset when you're building storage services and data services. >> So. Each of the surfaces that we have in object block file, movement services, data services, each of them provides very specific customer value and each are deeply integrated with the rest of AWS, so that when you need object services, you start using them. The integrations come along with you. When, if you're using traditional block, we talked about EBS io2 Block Express. When you're using file, just the example alone today with ONTAP, you know, you get to use what you need when you need it, and the way that you're used to using it without any concerns. >> (Dave mumbles) So your mindset is how do I exploit all these other services? You're like the chef and these are ingredients that you can tap and give a path to your customers to explore it over time. >> Yeah. Traditionally, for instance, if you were to have a filer, you would run multiple applications on that filer you're worried about. Cause you should, as a storage administrator, will each of those applications have the right amount of resources to run at peak. When you're on the Cloud, each of those applications will just spin up in seconds, their own file system. And those file systems can grow and shrink at whatever, however they need to do so. And you don't have to worry about one application interfering with the other application. It's not your concern anymore. And it's not really that fun to do. Anyway. It's kind of the hard work that nobody really you know, really wants to reward you for. So you can take your time and apply it to more business generate, you know, value for your business. >> That's great. Thank you for that. Okay. I'll I'll give you the last word. Give us the bumper sticker on AWS Storage day. Exciting day. The third AWS storage day. You guys keep getting bigger, raising the bar. >> And we're happy to keep doing it with you. >> Awesome. >> So thank you for flying out from Boston to see me. >> Pleasure, >> As they say. >> So, you know, this is a great opportunity for us to talk to customers, to thank them. It's a privilege to build what we build for customers. You know, our customers are leaders in their organizations and their businesses for their customers. And what we want to do is help them continue to be leaders and help them to continue to build and deliver we're here for them. >> Wayne. It's great to see you again. Thanks so much. >> Thanks. >> Maybe see you back at home. >> All right. Go Sox. All right. Yeah, go Sox. [Wayne Laughs] All right. Thank you for watching everybody. Back to Jenna Canal and Darko in the studio. Its Dave Volante. You're watching theCube. [Outro Music]

(pensive music) >> Thank you, Jenna, it's great to see you guys and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS Storage Day. We're here at The Spheres, it's amazing venue. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec who's Vice President of Block and Object Storage. Mai-Lan, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Nice to see you, Dave. >> It's pretty crazy, you know, this is kind of a hybrid event. We were in Barcelona a while ago, big hybrid event. And now it's, you know, it's hard to tell. It's almost like day-to-day what's happening with COVID and some things are permanent. I think a lot of things are becoming permanent. What are you seeing out there in terms of when you talk to customers, how are they thinking about their business, building resiliency and agility into their business in the context of COVID and beyond? >> Well, Dave, I think what we've learned today is that this is a new normal. These fluctuations that companies are having and supply and demand, in all industries all over the world. That's the new normal. And that has what, is what has driven so much more adoption of cloud in the last 12 to 18 months. And we're going to continue to see that rapid migration to the cloud because companies now know that in the course of days and months, you're, the whole world of your expectations of where your business is going and where, what your customers are going to do, that can change. And that can change not just for a year, but maybe longer than that. That's the new normal. And I think companies are realizing it and our AWS customers are seeing how important it is to accelerate moving everything to the cloud, to continue to adapt to this new normal. >> So storage historically has been, I'm going to drop a box off at the loading dock and, you know, have a nice day. And then maybe the services team is involved in, in a more intimate way, but you're involved every day. So I'm curious as to what that permanence, that new normal, some people call it the new abnormal, but it's the new normal now, what does that mean for storage? >> Dave, in the course of us sitting here over the next few minutes, we're going to have dozens of deployments go out all across our AWS storage services. That means our customers that are using our file services, our transfer services, block and object services, they're all getting improvements as we sit here and talk. That is such a fundamentally different model than the one that you talked about, which is the appliance gets dropped off at the loading dock. It takes a couple months for it to get scheduled for setup and then you have to do data migration to get the data on the new appliance. Meanwhile, we're sitting here and customers storage is just improving, under the hood and in major announcements, like what we're doing today. >> So take us through the sort of, let's go back, 'cause I remember vividly when, when S3 was announced that launched this cloud era and people would, you know, they would do a lot of experimentation of, we were storing, you know, maybe gigabytes, maybe even some terabytes back then. And, and that's evolved. What are you seeing in terms of how people are using data? What are the patterns that you're seeing today? How is that different than maybe 10 years ago? >> I think what's really unique about AWS is that we are the only provider that has been operating at scale for 15 years. And what that means is that we have customers of all sizes, terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, that are running their storage on AWS and running their applications using that storage. And so we have this really unique position of being able to observe and work with customers to develop what they need for storage. And it really breaks down to three main patterns. The first one is what I call the crown jewels, the crown jewels in the cloud. And that pattern is adopted by customers who are looking at the core mission of their business and they're saying to themselves, I actually can't scale this core mission on on-premises. And they're choosing to go to the cloud on the most important thing that their business does because they must, they have to. And so, a great example of that is FINRA, the regulatory body of the US stock exchanges, where, you know, a number of years ago, they took a look at all the data silos that were popping up across their data centers. They were looking at the rate of stock transactions going up and they're saying, we just can't keep up. Not if we want to follow the mission of being the watchdog for consumers, for transactions, for stock transactions. And so they moved that crown jewel of their application to AWS. And what's really interesting Dave, is, as you know, 'cause you've talked to many different companies, it's not technology that stops people from moving to the cloud as quick as they want to, it's culture, it's people, it's processes, it's how businesses work. And when you move the crown jewels into the cloud, you are accelerating that cultural change and that's certainly what FINRA saw. Second thing we see, is where a company will pick a few cloud pilots. We'll take a couple of applications, maybe one or a several across the organization and they'll move that as sort of a reference implementation to the cloud. And then the goal is to try to get the people who did that to generalize all the learning across the company. That is actually a really slow way to change culture. Because, as many of us know, in large organizations, you know, you have, you have some resistance to other organizations changing culture. And so that cloud pilot, while it seems like it would work, it seems logical, it's actually counter-productive to a lot of companies that want to move quickly to the cloud. And the third example is what I think of as new applications or cloud first, net new. And that pattern is where a company or a startup says all new technology initiatives are on the cloud. And we see that for companies like McDonald's, which has transformed their drive up experience by dynamically looking at location orders and providing recommendations. And we see it for the Digital Athlete, which is what the NFL has put together to dynamically take data sources and build these models that help them programmatically simulate risks to player health and put in place some ways to predict and prevent that. But those are the three patterns that we see so many customers falling into depending on what their business wants. >> I like that term, Digital Athlete, my business partner, John Furrier, coined the term tech athlete, you know, years ago on theCUBE. That third pattern seems to me, because you're right, you almost have to shock the system. If you just put your toe in the water, it's going to take too long. But it seems like that third pattern really actually de-risks it in a lot of cases, it's so it's said, people, who's going to argue, oh, the new stuff should be in the cloud. And so, that seems to me to be a very sensible way to approach that, that blocker, if you will, what are your thoughts on that? >> I think you're right, Dave. I think what it does is it allows a company to be able to see the ideas and the technology and the cultural change of cloud in different parts of the organization. And so rather than having a, one group that's supposed to generalize it across an organization, you get it decentralized and adopted by different groups and the culture change just goes faster. >> So you, you bring up decentralization and there's a, there's an emerging trend referred to as a data mesh. It was, it was coined, the term coined by Zhamak Dehghani, a very thought-provoking individual. And the concept is basically the, you know, data is decentralized, and yet we have this tendency to sort of shove it all into, you know, one box or one container, or you could say one cloud, well, the cloud is expanding, it's the cloud is, is decentralizing in many ways. So how do you see data mesh fitting in to those patterns? >> We have customers today that are taking the data mesh architectures and implementing them with AWS services. And Dave, I want to go back to the start of Amazon, when Amazon first began, we grew because the Amazon technologies were built in microservices. Fundamentally, a data mesh is about separation or abstraction of what individual components do. And so if I look at data mesh, really, you're talking about two things, you're talking about separating the data storage and the characteristics of data from the data services that interact and operate on that storage. And with data mesh, it's all about making sure that the businesses, the decentralized business model can work with that data. Now our AWS customers are putting their storage in a centralized place because it's easier to track, it's easier to view compliance and it's easier to predict growth and control costs. But, we started with building blocks and we deliberately built our storage services separate from our data services. So we have data services like Lake Formation and Glue. We have a number of these data services that our customers are using to build that customized data mesh on top of that centralized storage. So really, it's about at the end of the day, speed, it's about innovation. It's about making sure that you can decentralize and separate your data services from your storage so businesses can go faster. >> But that centralized storage is logically centralized. It might not be physically centralized, I mean, we put storage all over the world, >> Mai-Lan: That's correct. >> right? But, but we, to the developer, it looks like it's in one place. >> Mai-Lan: That's right. >> Right? And so, so that's not antithetical to the concept of a data mesh. In fact, it fits in perfectly to the point you were making. I wonder if we could talk a little bit about AWS's storage strategy and it started of course, with, with S3, and that was the focus for years and now of course EBS as well. But now we're seeing, we heard from Wayne this morning, the portfolio is expanding. The innovation is, is accelerating that flywheel that we always talk about. How would you characterize and how do you think about AWS's storage strategy per se? >> We are a dynamically and constantly evolving our AWS storage services based on what the application and the customer want. That is fundamentally what we do every day. We talked a little bit about those deployments that are happening right now, Dave. That is something, that idea of constant dynamic evolution just can't be replicated by on-premises where you buy a box and it sits in your data center for three or more years. And what's unique about us among the cloud services, is again that perspective of the 15 years where we are building applications in ways that are unique because we have more customers and we have more customers doing more things. So, you know, I've said this before. It's all about speed of innovation Dave, time and change wait for no one. And if you're a business and you're trying to transform your business and base it on a set of technologies that change rapidly, you have to use AWS services. Let's, I mean, if you look at some of the launches that we talk about today, and you think about S3's multi-region access points, that's a fundamental change for customers that want to store copies of their data in any number of different regions and get a 60% performance improvement by leveraging the technology that we've built up over, over time, leveraging the, the ability for us to route, to intelligently route a request across our network. That, and FSx for NetApp ONTAP, nobody else has these capabilities today. And it's because we are at the forefront of talking to different customers and that dynamic evolution of storage, that's the core of our strategy. >> So Andy Jassy used to say, oftentimes, AWS is misunderstood and you, you comfortable with that. So help me square this circle 'cause you talked about things you couldn't do on on-prem, and yet you mentioned the relationship with NetApp. You think, look at things like Outposts and Local Zones. So you're actually moving the cloud out to the edge, including on-prem data centers. So, so how do you think about hybrid in that context? >> For us, Dave, it always comes back to what the customer's asking for. And we were talking to customers and they were talking about their edge and what they wanted to do with it. We said, how are we going to help? And so if I just take S3 for Outposts, as an example, or EBS and Outposts, you know, we have customers like Morningstar and Morningstar wants Outposts because they are using it as a step in their journey to being on the cloud. If you take a customer like First Abu Dhabi Bank, they're using Outposts because they need data residency for their compliance requirements. And then we have other customers that are using Outposts to help, like Dish, Dish Networks, as an example, to place the storage as close as account to the applications for low latency. All of those are customer driven requirements for their architecture. For us, Dave, we think in the fullness of time, every customer and all applications are going to be on the cloud, because it makes sense and those businesses need that speed of innovation. But when we build things like our announcement today of FSx for NetApp ONTAP, we build them because customers asked us to help them with their journey to the cloud, just like we built S3 and EBS for Outposts for the same reason. >> Well, when you say over time, you're, you believe that all workloads will be on the cloud, but the cloud is, it's like the universe. I mean, it's expanding. So what's not cloud in the future? When you say on the cloud, you mean wherever you meet customers with that cloud, that includes Outposts, just the programming, it's the programmability of that model, is that correct? That's it, >> That's right. that's what you're talking about? >> In fact, our S3 and EBS Outposts customers, the way that they look at how they use Outposts, it's either as part of developing applications where they'll eventually go the cloud or taking applications that are in the cloud today in AWS regions and running them locally. And so, as you say, this definition of the cloud, you know, it, it's going to evolve over time. But the one thing that we know for sure, is that AWS storage and AWS in general is going to be there one or two steps ahead of where customers are, and deliver on what they need. >> I want to talk about block storage for a moment, if I can, you know, you guys are making some moves in that space. We heard some announcements earlier today. Some of the hardest stuff to move, whether it's cultural or maybe it's just hardened tops, maybe it's, you know, governance edicts, or those really hardcore mission critical apps and workloads, whether it's SAP stuff, Oracle, Microsoft, et cetera. You're clearly seeing that as an opportunity for your customers and in storage in some respects was a blocker previously because of whatever, latency, et cetera, then there's still some, some considerations there. How do you see those workloads eventually moving to the cloud? >> Well, they can move now. With io2 Block Express, we have the performance that those high-end applications need and it's available today. We have customers using them and they're very excited about that technology. And, you know, again, it goes back to what I just said, Dave, we had customers saying, I would like to move my highest performing applications to the cloud and this is what I need from the, from the, the storage underneath them. And that's why we built io2 Block Express and that's how we'll continue to evolve io2 Block Express. It is the first SAN technology in the cloud, but it's built on those core principles that we talked about a few minutes ago, which is dynamically evolving and capabilities that we can add on the fly and customers just get the benefit of it without the cost of migration. >> I want to ask you about, about just the storage, how you think about storage in general, because typically it's been a bucket, you know, it's a container, but it seems, I always say the next 10 years aren't going to be like the last, it seems like, you're really in the data business and you're bringing in machine intelligence, you're bringing in other database technology, this rich set of other services to apply to the data. That's now, there's a lot of data in the cloud and so we can now, whether it's build data products, build data services. So how do you think about the business in that sense? It's no longer just a place to store stuff. It's actually a place to accelerate innovation and build and monetize for your customers. How do you think about that? >> Our customers use the word foundational. Every time they talk about storage, they say for us, it's foundational, and Dave, that's because every business is a data business. Every business is making decisions now on this changing landscape in a world where the new normal means you cannot predict what's going to happen in six months, in a year. And the way that they're making those smart decisions is through data. And so they're taking the data that they have in our storage services and they're using SageMaker to build models. They're, they're using all kinds of different applications like Lake Formation and Glue to build some of the services that you're talking about around authorization and data discovery, to sit on top of the data. And they're able to leverage the data in a way that they have never been able to do before, because they have to. That's what the business world demands today, and that's what we need in the new normal. We need the flexibility and the dynamic foundational storage that we provide in AWS. >> And you think about the great data companies, those were the, you know, trillions in the market cap, their data companies, they put data at their core, but that doesn't mean they shove all the data into a centralized location. It means they have the identity access capabilities, the governance capabilities to, to enable data to be used wherever it needs to be used and, and build that future. That, exciting times we're entering here, Mai-Lan. >> We're just set the start, Dave, we're just at the start. >> Really, what ending do you think we have? So, how do you think about Amazon? It was, it's not a baby anymore. It's not even an adolescent, right? You guys are obviously major player, early adulthood, day one, day zero? (chuckles) >> Dave, we don't age ourself. I think if I look at where we're going for AWS, we are just at the start. So many companies are moving to the cloud, but we're really just at the start. And what's really exciting for us who work on AWS storage, is that when we build these storage services and these data services, we are seeing customers do things that they never thought they could do before. And it's just the beginning. >> I think the potential is unlimited. You mentioned Dish before, I mean, I see what they're doing in the cloud for Telco. I mean, Telco Transformation, that's an industry, every industry, there's a transformation scenario, a disruption scenario. Healthcare has been so reluctant for years and that's happening so quickly, I mean, COVID's certainly accelerating that. Obviously financial services have been super tech savvy, but they're looking at the Fintech saying, okay, how do we play? I mean, there isn't manufacturing with EV. >> Mai-Lan: Government. >> Government, totally. >> It's everywhere, oil and gas. >> There isn't a single industry that's not a digital industry. >> That's right. >> And there's implications for everyone. And it's not just bits and atoms anymore, the old Negroponte, although Nicholas, I think was prescient because he's, he saw this coming, it really is fundamental. Data is fundamental to every business. >> And I think you want, for all of those in different industries, you want to pick the provider where innovation and invention is in our DNA. And that is true, not just for storage, but AWS, and that is driving a lot of the changes you have today, but really what's coming in the future. >> You're right. It's the common editorial factors. It's not just the, the storage of the data. It's the ability to apply other technologies that map into your business process, that map into your organizational skill sets that drive innovation in whatever industry you're in. It's great Mai-Lan, awesome to see you. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Great seeing you Dave, take care. >> All right, you too. And keep it right there for more action. We're going to now toss it back to Jenna, Canal and Darko in the studio. Guys, over to you. (pensive music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to AWS storage day. This is the Cubes continuous coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're going to talk about file storage. 80% of the world's data is in unstructured storage. And most of that is in file format. Devs want infrastructure as code. They want to be able to provision and manage storage through an API, and they want that cloud agility. They want to be able to scale up, scale down, pay by the drink. And the big news of storage day was really the partnership, deep partnership between AWS and NetApp. And with me to talk about that as Ed Naim, who's the general manager of Amazon FSX and Anthony Lye, executive vice president and GM of public cloud at NetApp. Two Cube alums. Great to see you guys again. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Ed, let me start with you. You launched FSX 2018 at re-invent. How has it being used today? >> Well, we've talked about MSX on the Cube before Dave, but let me start by recapping that FSX makes it easy to, to launch and run fully managed feature rich high performance file storage in the cloud. And we built MSX from the ground up really to have the reliability, the scalability you were talking about. The simplicity to support, a really wide range of workloads and applications. And with FSX customers choose the file system that powers their file storage with full access to the file systems feature sets, the performance profiles and the data management capabilities. And so since reinvent 2018, when we launched this service, we've offered two file system choices for customers. So the first was a Windows file server, and that's really storage built on top of Windows server designed as a really simple solution for Windows applications that require shared storage. And then Lustre, which is an open source file system that's the world's most popular high-performance file system. And the Amazon FSX model has really resonated strongly with customers for a few reasons. So first, for customers who currently managed network attached storage or NAS on premises, it's such an easy path to move their applications and their application data to the cloud. FSX works and feels like the NAZA appliances that they're used to, but added to all of that are the benefits of a fully managed cloud service. And second, for builders developing modern new apps, it helps them deliver fast, consistent experiences for Windows and Linux in a simple and an agile way. And then third, for research scientists, its storage performance and its capabilities for dealing with data at scale really make it a no-brainer storage solution. And so as a result, the service is being used for a pretty wide spectrum of applications and workloads across industries. So I'll give you a couple of examples. So there's this class of what we call common enterprise IT use cases. So think of things like end user file shares the corporate IT applications, content management systems, highly available database deployments. And then there's a variety of common line of business and vertical workloads that are running on FSX as well. So financial services, there's a lot of modeling and analytics, workloads, life sciences, a lot of genomics analysis, media and entertainment rendering and transcoding and visual effects, automotive. We have a lot of electronic control units, simulations, and object detection, semiconductor, a lot of EDA, electronic design automation. And then oil and gas, seismic data processing, pretty common workload in FSX. And then there's a class of, of really ultra high performance workloads that are running on FSX as well. Think of things like big data analytics. So SAS grid is a, is a common application. A lot of machine learning model training, and then a lot of what people would consider traditional or classic high performance computing or HPC. >> Great. Thank you for that. Just quick follow-up if I may, and I want to bring Anthony into the conversation. So why NetApp? This is not a Barney deal, this was not elbow grease going into a Barney deal. You know, I love you. You love me. We do a press release. But, but why NetApp? Why ONTAP? Why now? (momentary silence) Ed, that was to you. >> Was that a question for Anthony? >> No, for you Ed. And then I want to bring Anthony in. >> Oh, Sure. Sorry. Okay. Sure. Yeah, I mean it, uh, Dave, it really stemmed from both companies realizing a combined offering would be highly valuable to and impactful for customers. In reality, we started collaborating in Amazon and NetApp on the service probably about two years ago. And we really had a joint vision that we wanted to provide AWS customers with the full power of ONTAP. The complete ONTAP with every capability and with ONTAP's full performance, but fully managed an offer as a full-blown AWS native service. So what that would mean is that customers get all of ONTAP's benefits along with the simplicity and the agility, the scalability, the security, and the reliability of an AWS service. >> Great. Thank you. So Anthony, I have watched NetApp reinvent itself started in workstations, saw you go into the enterprise, I saw you lean into virtualization, you told me at least two years, it might've been three years ago, Dave, we are going all in on the cloud. We're going to lead this next, next chapter. And so, I want you to bring in your perspective. You're re-inventing NetApp yet again, you know, what are your thoughts? >> Well, you know, NetApp and AWS have had a very long relationship. I think it probably dates now about nine years. And what we really wanted to do in NetApp was give the most important constituent of all an experience that helped them progress their business. So ONTAP, you know, the industry's leading shared storage platform, we wanted to make sure that in AWS, it was as good as it was on premise. We love the idea of giving customers this wonderful concept of symmetry. You know, ONTAP runs the biggest applications in the largest enterprises on the planet. And we wanted to give not just those customers an opportunity to embrace the Amazon cloud, but we wanted to also extend the capabilities of ONTAP through FSX to a new customer audience. Maybe those smaller companies that didn't really purchase on premise infrastructure, people that were born in the cloud. And of course, this gives us a great opportunity to present a fully managed ONTAP within the FSX platform, to a lot of non NetApp customers, to our competitors customers, Dave, that frankly, haven't done the same as we've done. And I think we are the benefactors of it, and we're in turn passing that innovation, that, that transformation onto the, to the customers and the partners. >> You know, one is the, the key aspect here is that it's a managed service. I don't think that could be, you know, overstated. And the other is that the cloud nativeness of this Anthony, you mentioned here, our marketplace is great, but this is some serious engineering going on here. So Ed maybe, maybe start with the perspective of a managed service. I mean, what does that mean? The whole ball of wax? >> Yeah. I mean, what it means to a customer is they go into the AWS console or they go to the AWS SDK or the, the AWS CLI and they are easily able to provision a resource provision, a file system, and it automatically will get built for them. And if there's nothing that they need to do at that point, they get an endpoint that they have access to the file system from and that's it. We handle patching, we handle all of the provisioning, we handle any hardware replacements that might need to happen along the way. Everything is fully managed. So the customer really can focus not on managing their file system, but on doing all of the other things that they, that they want to do and that they need to do. >> So. So Anthony, in a way you're disrupting yourself, which is kind of what you told me a couple of years ago. You're not afraid to do that because if we don't do it, somebody else is going to do it because you're, you're used to the old days, you're selling a box and you say, we'll see you next time, you know, three or four years. So from, from your customer's standpoint, what's their reaction to this notion of a managed service and what does it mean to NetApp? >> Well, so I think the most important thing it does is it gives them investment protection. The wonderful thing about what we've built with Amazon in the FSX profile is it's a complete ONTAP. And so one ONTAP cluster on premise can immediately see and connect to an ONTAP environment under FSX. We can then establish various different connectivities. We can use snap mirror technologies for disaster recovery. We can use efficient data transfer for things like dev test and backup. Of course, the wonderful thing that we've done, that we've gone beyond, above and beyond, what anybody else has done is we want to make sure that the actual primary application itself, one that was sort of built using NAS built in an on-premise environment an SAP and Oracle, et cetera, as Ed said, that we can move those over and have the confidence to run the application with no changes on an Amazon environment. So, so what we've really done, I think for customers, the NetApp customers, the non NetApp customers, is we've given them an enterprise grade shared storage platform that's as good in an Amazon cloud as it was in an on-premise data center. And that's something that's very unique to us. >> Can we talk a little bit more about those, those use cases? You know, both, both of you. What are you seeing as some of the more interesting ones that you can share? Ed, maybe you can start. >> Yeah, happy to. The customer discussions that we've, we've been in have really highlighted four cases, four use cases the customers are telling us they'll use a service for. So maybe I'll cover two and maybe Anthony can cover the other two. So, the first is application migrations. And customers are increasingly looking to move their applications to AWS. And a lot of those are applications work with file storage today. And so we're talking about applications like SAP. We're talking about relational databases like SQL server and Oracle. We're talking about vertical applications like Epic and the healthcare space. As another example, lots of media entertainment, rendering, and transcoding, and visual effects workload. workflows require Windows, Linux, and Mac iOS access to the same set of data. And what application administrators really want is they want the easy button. They want fully featured file storage that has the same capabilities, the same performance that their applications are used to. Has extremely high availability and durability, and it can easily enable them to meet compliance and security needs with a robust set of data protection and security capabilities. And I'll give you an example, Accenture, for example, has told us that a key obstacle their clients face when migrating to the cloud is potentially re-architecting their applications to adopt new technologies. And they expect that Amazon FSX for NetApp ONTAP will significantly accelerate their customers migrations to the cloud. Then a second one is storage migrations. So storage admins are increasingly looking to extend their on-premise storage to the cloud. And why they want to do that is they want to be more agile and they want to be responsive to growing data sets and growing workload needs. They want to last to capacity. They want the ability to spin up and spin down. They want easy disaster recovery across geographically isolated regions. They want the ability to change performance levels at any time. So all of this goodness that they get from the cloud is what they want. And more and more of them also are looking to make their company's data accessible to cloud services for analytics and processing. So services like ECS and EKS and workspaces and App Stream and VMware cloud and SageMaker and orchestration services like parallel cluster and AWS batch. But at the same time, they want all these cloud benefits, but at the same time, they have established data management workflows, and they build processes and they've built automation, leveraging APIs and capabilities of on-prem NAS appliances. It's really tough for them to just start from scratch with that stuff. So this offering provides them the best of both worlds. They get the benefits of the cloud with the NAS data management capabilities that they're used to. >> Right. >> Ed: So Anthony, maybe, do you want to talk about the other two? >> Well, so, you know, first and foremost, you heard from Ed earlier on the, the, the FSX sort of construct and how successful it's been. And one of the real reasons it's been so successful is, it takes advantage of all of the latest storage technologies, compute technologies, networking technologies. What's great is all of that's hidden from the user. What FSX does is it delivers a service. And what that means for an ONTAP customer is you're going to have ONTAP with an SLA and an SLM. You're going to have hundreds of thousands of IOPS available to you and sub-millisecond latencies. What's also really important is the design for FSX and app ONTAP was really to provide consistency on the NetApp API and to provide full access to ONTAP from the Amazon console, the Amazon SDK, or the Amazon CLI. So in this case, you've got this wonderful benefit of all of the, sort of the 29 years of innovation of NetApp combined with all the innovation AWS, all presented consistently to a customer. What Ed said, which I'm particularly excited about, is customers will see this just as they see any other AWS service. So if they want to use ONTAP in combination with some incremental compute resources, maybe with their own encryption keys, maybe with directory services, they may want to use it with other services like SageMaker. All of those things are immediately exposed to Amazon FSX for the app ONTAP. We do some really intelligent things just in the storage layer. So, for example, we do intelligent tiering. So the customer is constantly getting the, sort of the best TCO. So what that means is we're using Amazon's S3 storage as a tiered service, so that we can back off code data off of the primary file system to give the customer the optimal capacity, the optimal throughput, while maintaining the integrity of the file system. It's the same with backup. It's the same with disaster recovery, whether we're operating in a hybrid AWS cloud, or we're operating in an AWS region or across regions. >> Well, thank you. I think this, this announcement is a big deal for a number of reasons. First of all, it's the largest market. Like you said, you're the gold standard. I'll give you that, Anthony, because you guys earned it. And so it's a large market, but you always had to make previously, you have to make trade-offs. Either I could do file in the cloud, but I didn't get the rich functionality that, you know, NetApp's mature stack brings, or, you know, you could have wrapped your stack in Kubernete's container and thrown it into the cloud and hosted it there. But now that it's a managed service and presumably you're underneath, you're taking advantage. As I say, my inference is there's some serious engineering going on here. You're taking advantage of some of the cloud native capabilities. Yeah, maybe it's the different, you know, ECE two types, but also being able to bring in, we're, we're entering a new data era with machine intelligence and other capabilities that we really didn't have access to last decade. So I want to, I want to close with, you know, give you guys the last word. Maybe each of you could give me your thoughts on how you see this partnership of, for the, in the future. Particularly from a customer standpoint. Ed, maybe you could start. And then Anthony, you can bring us home. >> Yeah, well, Anthony and I and our teams have gotten to know each other really well in, in ideating around what this experience will be and then building the product. And, and we have this, this common vision that it is something that's going to really move the needle for customers. Providing the full ONTAP experience with the power of a, of a native AWS service. So we're really excited. We're, we're in this for the long haul together. We have, we've partnered on everything from engineering, to product management, to support. Like the, the full thing. This is a co-owned effort, a joint effort backed by both companies. And we have, I think a pretty remarkable product on day one, one that I think is going to delight customers. And we have a really rich roadmap that we're going to be building together over, over the years. So I'm excited about getting this in customer's hands. >> Great, thank you. Anthony, bring us home. >> Well, you know, it's one of those sorts of rare chances where you get to do something with Amazon that no one's ever done. You know, we're sort of sitting on the inside, we are a peer of theirs, and we're able to develop at very high speeds in combination with them to release continuously to the customer base. So what you're going to see here is rapid innovation. You're going to see a whole host of new services. Services that NetApp develops, services that Amazon develops. And then the whole ecosystem is going to have access to this, whether they're historically built on the NetApp APIs or increasingly built on the AWS APIs. I think you're going to see orchestrations. I think you're going to see the capabilities expand the overall opportunity for AWS to bring enterprise applications over. For me personally, Dave, you know, I've demonstrated yet again to the NetApp customer base, how much we care about them and their future. Selfishly, you know, I'm looking forward to telling the story to my competitors, customer base, because they haven't done it. So, you know, I think we've been bold. I think we've been committed as you said, three and a half years ago, I promised you that we were going to do everything we possibly could. You know, people always say, you know, what's, what's the real benefit of this. And at the end of the day, customers and partners will be the real winners. This, this innovation, this sort of, as a service I think is going to expand our market, allow our customers to do more with Amazon than they could before. It's one of those rare cases, Dave, where I think one plus one equals about seven, really. >> I love the vision and excited to see the execution Ed and Anthony, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Congratulations on getting to this point and good luck. >> Anthony and Ed: Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube's continuous coverage of AWS storage day. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>> 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)

>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCube! Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back, here in New York City for the AWS Summit. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Corey Quinn. And I'm happy to welcome two guests from NetApp. First to my right, welcome back to the program from another cloud show earlier this year. Jonsi Stefansson, who's the CCO and Vice President for Cloud Services. And to his right, well it's a first time on the program. I actually was on one of his earlier podcasts, Jeff Dickey, who's joining NetApp as the chief technologist inside that same cloud and data services group. Jeff, welcome and Jonsi welcome back. >> Thank you, Stuart. >> Thank you. >> Okay so Jonsi, let's start with you. So we've watched the cloud and data services. From my words it's like almost, I want a new brand. It's like this is not the ONTAP, everywhere, you know, best NFS, you know the number one thing there, it's about multi cloud, it's about getting the value out of my data that transformation we've seen overall in what was known as the storage industry. There are a lot of new people, a lot of new products, and it's the you know the and is I think there was one NetApp term is all of the history and the things you could trust, but a lot of new things. So give us the updates on what's exciting in your world. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean of course we are still relying on that old trusted ONTAP and WAFL storage operating system in the back end, but we have extracted a lot of that into a more automation or you're consuming it in a more autonomous way. We are actually taking all the the storage norms that the traditional storage admin is really used to, you know tweaking and all of that. That's all done and managed by us. It's fully as a service and we are more focused on the data management capabilities of ONTAP than the actual storage system or the performance of that storage operating system. I mean we are in a very unique position as NetApp. I mean we have a very strong foothold in the enterprise. And now we have integrated services with all the public clouds. I mean fully native integrated services either going through their own console or at their own APIs or with our own UI. So the data management capabilities that we are actually bringing to the table is you can seamlessly migrate from the core to the edge and to the cloud, depending on where you want your data to reside. So our goal is actually to do something very similar as Kubernetes has done to the application layer. They have made it completely mobile, there is no longer that VM format issues that you had in the old days. It's basically just a kernel module, I can move it wherever on top of a hypervisor of choice or a public cloud of choice. But that has always been sort of left behind on some propriety box sitting there. But NetApp like I said, NetApp is in this very unique position of being able to move, migrate, replicate and split the data according to your strategy whether it's on-premise or the public cloud. >> All right, Jeff, would love to hear your viewpoint as what you're hearing from customers. I've known you for many years. Talk about that journey towards cloud and what is cloud and how does it fit into their customer environment. Give us what brought you into NetApp and some of the conversations you're having if you've been digging in with the NetApp team. >> Well the coming to NetApp is actually a long story. I've known the Green Cloud folks for a long time. I think was the first kind of US partner of theirs and had been a big fan of first their cloud and then their software so I was really excited when the data acquisition happened and you know for about a year I was learning like the stuff they're working on and that was blowing my mind and again, I've worked with almost every storage company out there so it was exciting to, like the future of what was happening and then after the acquisition of Stackpoint which I was currently working with, so it's like NetApp kind of took my two favorite companies in a short time so I said, hey, I want to be working on, you guys are doing the coolest stuff that I've seen right now and the roadmap is blowing my mind, I want to join. So it's been a great time here. I think what's most unique, what I've found is that the typical, when you're doing cloud consulting, you go after the low-hanging fruit. It's very simple strategy. You know, if you were to go to a customer and say, "Let's take your highest demanding, "most revenue generating systems "and we're going to migrate those to AWS first." Well they're going to look at the $10 billion contract and you know the two year engagement and say no, we're not going to do that. You go for the low-hanging fruit. But because of the products that have come out and what we're doing in the public clouds, we're for the first time we have NFS, you know like basically SLA performant file system in the cloud that can handle the biggest, baddest on-prem apps. So now that we're able to do that, what customers are doing, they are now we're taking those big ones and it's accelerating the whole journey of the cloud because instead of creating more of a chasm between your public cloud infrastructure and your on-prem, there's a lot of people, you know face it, if you've got a $50 million budget, you're putting it mostly into cloud and some of your on-prem, which again is still generating a lot of revenue, is not getting the love it needs and it's not becoming cloud either and you have this kind of chasm. So it think it's great that with the customers we're working with, they're very excited to be moving what they thought they were never going to be able to move because it just wasn't there. And now they have native connections to all the services they love, like you know, here at AWS. So it's just great 'cause you know, yes they're consolidating their data and you're having less silos, that's exciting. But what excites me most is what are they going to do next and after that what're they going to do next with that? Like as they learn how to use their data and connect more to cloud services and our cloud services and the public cloud services, they're going to be able to do way more than they ever thought they would. >> Something that I think would resonate with a number of folks has been that, I go a little bit back, I'm a little older than I look, although I wear it super well. And I cut my teeth on WAFL and working with SnapMirror and doing all kinds of interesting things with that, it's easy to glance, walk around the expo hall and glance at it and figure huh, I see there's a NetApp booth. You must still be trying to convince AWS to let you shove a filer into us-east-1. That's not really what your company does anymore in the traditional sense but I think a lot of people may have lost that message. From a cloud perspective, what is NetApp doing in 2019? >> So I mean we are really, really software focused. So I mean we are doing a lot of work. We are containerizing that WAFL operating system, we are really excited about launching that as alpha today. That basically means launching as an alpha in October. That basically means that you could get all the ONTAP data management goodies on top of any storage operating system on top of any physical or persistent discs in any of these different public clouds. EPS, Volumes, Google PDs or Azure, we wanted to make it so anybody can actually deploy ONTAP. We've always have that story with ONTAP Select but being able to containerize it, I don't know if we can actually. So we can actually reap the benefits of Kubernetes when it comes to high availability, rapication, auto-scaling and self-healing capabilities to make it a much more robust scale out as well as scale up solution. So that's truly our focus. And our focus for 2019 is of course, we've been really, really busy with our heads down coding for a long, long time or for a long time. Very short time in NetApp terms, but in cloud terms, very, very long. Like for the last 18 months. But now we're really sort of integrating our entire portfolio where we have monitoring, deep analytics, compliancy, Kubernetes, storage providers, schedulers. So everything is sort of gelling together now. >> So I think back a couple of years ago, if you talked to Amazon, the answer to everything was move everything to the public cloud. Today, Amazon at least admitted that hybrid cloud is a thing. They won't say hybrid necessarily but you know with the outposts and what they're doing with their partnership with VMware and the like, they're doing that. When I look at customers, most of them have multi cloud. Now when we say multi cloud it means they have lots of clouds and whether or not they're tied together, they're not doing that and while Amazon won't admit to it and isn't looking to manage in that environment, they're playing in that because if I have lots of clouds, one of them is likely AWS. NetApp sits at the intersection of a lot of this. You have your huge install base inside the data center, you're working very much with Amazon, and the other cloud providers. What I'm hoping to get from you is your insight on customers, you know, where are they today, what are they struggling with in that hybrid or multi cloud world and where do you see things maturing as we go the next couple of years? >> Well I mean, the fact of the matter is, 83% of all workloads still recite on-premise. Whether it stays like that or doesn't, I mean AWS is doing Outpost, Google is doing Anthos, Azure is doing Azure Stack. And the good thing is we are actually playing with all of them we are collaborating on all these different projects, both on the storage layer as well as on the application life cycle management. From our point of view, it is really important that we start tying all the infrastructure related stuff into the application layer so you're actually managing everything from that layer and down. So for a developer like me, it's actually really simple to actually do all the tasks and completely manage my own solution. Of course I need operations to be managing the infrastructure but I should be oblivious to it as a developer and what we are actually seeing customers doing now more and more and it's actually really impressing coming here to New York and meeting all these financial companies, they have always been like probably the slowest movers to the public cloud because of compliancy reasons and other stuff, but they are actually really adopting it. They have segmented out their workloads and really know what teams are allowed to provision and are supposed to be running in the public cloud in order to tap into the innovation that's happening there and what teams are only allowed to work on on-premise environments. So it sort of relates into the true cloud concept. The true cloud concept being everything is a cloud and there is no lock in, have the freedom of choice where to provision, where to spin up your workloads. So we're seeing that more and more from our customers. Wouldn't you agree? >> Yeah, totally agree. >> Yeah, Jeff I wonder if you could give a little bit more as you said, NetApp's done quite a few acquisitions in the last couple of years. What sort of things should people be thinking about NetApp that they might not have a couple years ago? >> Well I know, I'll tell a quick story. My first day as a NetApp employee was at KubeCon in Seattle and I remember I was wearing the Net badge and I had a friend that I was partnered with and he looked at my badge and says, "NetApp? "Like the box in the closet people?" And I just like well I mean not anymore. You know and I think that's the biggest thing. You mean Network Appliance? >> Those of us that have know NetApp long enough. >> Now it's internet application, right? Now it's a little bit different. I think the big thing is you know, it's not just a storage. I mean storage is a key component, and it's very important, but that's not the only thing and I think that on the cloud side it's very important because we're still maintaining this relationship with our storage appliances and everything but we have more buyers now so we can go across the company and say, "What are you doing? "Are you an SRE? "Are you a developer lead? "Are you a VP of operations?" We have all these products that work for them yet in the end, it's a single vision to the deep insights of everything they're doing with us. >> Just quick followup on that, I think when NetApp bought a Kubernetes company, it was like okay, I'm trying to understand how that fits when I look at NetApp's biggest partners, I think VMware, Cisco, Red Hat, all going heavily after software solutions including the kubernetes piece so how does NetApp do differently because you still have strong partnerships there. >> I think we're in a strong place because now we're doing two things, we're bringing the apps to the data and the data to the apps. So it's, where do you want to be? There's the right place for your app. There's a lot of choice now and now we have, you know, now you can choose. Where is this going to live best? Where is this going to operate? Where is this going to serve our customers best? What's going to be the most cost effective? You know, being able to deploy and manage. You know, type in a couple characters and your entire production of Kubernetes deployment is backed up into where you want. Like there's just you know, the apps are nothing without data, the data is nothing without the app right? So it's bringing those two together. I think it's very important to kind of get out there. My job is getting that out that it's not storage silos, this is about your apps. What are you doing with it? Where do you want your apps, and what is that data, how is the data helping your apps grow? You know, we're helping people move forward and innovate faster with these products. >> I mean both companies, my company Green Cloud and the Stackpoint company, we were really, really early adopters of Kubernetes and we've always taken both companies very application-centric point of view on Kubernetes while most everybody else have taken a very infrastructure-centric approach. We were two staffed of companies just developers and we always sort of felt like, because it's a very common misunderstanding that Kubernetes was actually built for developers. It wasn't. It is an infrastructure play, built and developed by the Google SREs to run code. So everything that we are adding on top of it and beneath it, it ties it all together. So I mean for a developer working on our Kubernetes offerings, he's basically working in his own element, he's just doing commands and magic happens in the packet. We tie the development branch to a specific Node Pole. We apply the staging branch to another one and the production environment, once you commit that, then it actually goes through like an SRE process where they are basically the gate keepers, where they actually either allow or say hey we found the bug or we are not able to deploy this according to our standards. So tying it all together, all the way from the storage layer all the way up to the application layer is what we are all about. And I got the same question when we were acquired. When we were Green Cloud, we were in a really, really, good situation where we had term sheets from three different companies. I'm not allowed to say which ones, but everybody, once I sold it to NetApp they were like, "Why NetApp?" But if you go to KubeCon, and you are always there, there is a very live matrix on what the biggest problems are with Kubernetes and persistent volume clearance and storage and data management hasn't been sold yet. And that's where we believe that we have a unique way of offering those data management capabilities all the way up the stack. >> All right well Jonsi and Jeff, thank you for giving us the update there, absolutely. Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be at KubeCon later this year in San Diego we're at Amazon re:Invent. Always go to theCUBE.net to see all the shows that we're at as well as hit the search and you can see the thousand of videos. Always no registration to be able to check that out so check all out all the interviews. And as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (light techno music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. I've been here all day with Stu Miniman, and we've had a jam-packed agenda of guests. We're now coming to the end of our program. We bring back two CUBE alumni. We've got Bharat Badrinath, welcome back. I feel like it's deja vu. The VP of Product and Solutions Marketing at NetApp. And Ken Ringdahl, also an alumni, VP of Global Alliance Architecture from Veeam. Hey, guys. Thanks for stopping by towards the end of the day. I'm sure you guys have both lots of meetings today. Let's talk a little bit about the NetApp-Veeam partnership. NetApp bought Veeam a few months ago, Ken. The reseller relationship that Veeam has with NetApp was announced. Let's talk about the impetus of that, that momentum coming from joint partners, customers, channel partners? Tell me a little bit about that from Veeam's perspective. >> Yeah, sure. I think earlier this year, we announced that resell relationship, which went live in March. So VeeamON was in May, so we were just at the early stages of that, and we've seen some good momentum. We've expanded that relationship. And now we're able to jointly sell the whole portfolio. And I'd say it's a combination of two things: and really it's customers and partners, right? So, we had a lot of success in the channel. Veeam and NetApp have been partnering together on the channel for, you know, five, seven years. A long time now. And just based on the success of our meeting on the channel and then customer demand and partner demand, you know, we decided to expand our relationship and go deeper and really go deeper not only from a go-to-market perspective, but from a product perspective. We're getting even closer together and driving more business and integration and really highlighting the value of the NetApp platform. >> What's NetApp's reaction to when the channel and customers are saying, "Hey, guys." Tell us about that, Bharat. >> We obviously are here to make sure the customers have a great experience with it. And Veeam brings in something which is unique in the market for the customer, so we've heard it from our customers, our joint customers saying that better integration is going to help them. Being the stewards of the customers' data, we want to make sure the data is protected. And Veeam brings that expertise into the market. We integrate better to make it more seamless for the customer, which is what we're doing as we expand this partnership to the next level. >> Both Veeam and NetApp were pretty early in learning into this hybrid, multi-cloud world. Wondering if you have any good customer examples you might be able to share as to customers that are kind of moving towards this future that we're talking about in the partnership. >> Yeah, sure, I mean at Veeam our goal is to really provide a hybrid environment. We started in the virtual world. We expanded to physical. We've gone to cloud. You know, we see NetApp with a very strong presence on-prem. They obviously have strong relationships with the public cloud vendors and have done a really good job of pivoting the strategy and embracing the cloud, which is what we've done at Veeam as well. We see our customers.. they're really choosing cloud. They're choosing best of breed now, right? So, they don't say, "Hey, I'm a single cloud strategy. I don't do just one cloud here. I'm saying best of breed. Maybe I'm doing my machine-learning and AI and Google, And I'm doing my cloud native apps in AWS, and I'm doing my Microsoft native workloads in Azure." And so really you do need to provide that hybrid solution. That's really what we've looked to focus on is taking the strength of where we came up and providing that best solution in the virtual world, extending that to physical, and now going to the cloud. You know, we see lots and lots of customers that they just want a comprehensive solution. They don't want point solutions, a point solution here, a point solution there. They want a comprehensive solution, and so it comes down to two companies really I think that have a very strong strategy for that hybrid world, for best of breed solutions that we can work together in all those facets. >> Yeah, and I think our strategy and Veeam's strategy are pretty aligned when you look at the hybrid cloud, when you look at our data fabric, (inaudible) in the market, and what we are doing to stitch together on-prem and cloud. Veeam happens to be a great partner to help protect that data as we work with the customer along this journey. And today Veeam just announced an SEI part of it as well. Just making sure that we are helping the customer through every aspect of the journey. >> I'm wondering if you might have.. Since the deal was announced earlier this year, any specific customer examples--even anonymized-- that you could share? >> I'm sure there are lots of customers we have had jointly. I don't have any specific ones at this moment. >> There's a few I can highlight. Probably one of the top ten international banks, AMEA. That's a really, really large deal that we're working to get closed. It's multi-million dollars to both of us. Very, very large deal. I think we're seeing success. Veeam's strength has always been sort of in the commercial world, and we're moving up into the enterprise. That's a big impetus for the partnership quite honestly 'cause NetApp has a lot of strength 'specially with the ONTAP system in enterprise. So, I think we're really sort of dovetailing each other. Veeam is bringing NetApp into more of our commercial deals. NetApp is bringing us into more enterprise deals. But really it's across the board: large banks, even healthcare and other deals as well. I don't know if there's any specific names I can call out, but I can tell you it really stretches the entire sort of stretches vertical, all different types, different sizes, different types of customers. >> We just had Dave Hitts on a little bit ago, Stu and I did today, and he kind of talked about in the last five years, really a big revolution at NetApp that has been around 26 years. Ken, you mention that NetApp and Veeam have been partners for about five to seven years. I'm curious what Veeam's perspective is of NetApp's digital and IT and cultural transformation to now go out boldly and say, "We're the data authority," and really kind of wrap their strategy around cloud. >> Yeah, sure. I would say we are in a data-driven world. Data is the currency in the cloud world. We look at ourselves as being the stewards of data availability. NetApp has the strength in that primary data management. There's really a natural dovetail between the two of us and a natural hand-off, where we can provide the entire end-to-end from primary to DR to secondary and really about sort of managing the placement of that data, the value of that data, and the availability of that data. It's incredibly important. I think together we cover that end-to-end. >> Bharat, one of the messages we've been hearing today is talking about there's a lot of complexity out there. NetApp's goal, like many companies in this space, is to try to help simplify. What is the partnership, the integration, reselling.. How does that help simplify solutions for companies? >> Absolutely. As you heard earlier, it was all about providing a comprehensive stack end-to-end, but what makes it simple is when it is comprehensive and integrated, right? So, when the two companies' engineering teams work together to drive that integration, that results in simplicity, which our customers and our partners.. For our partners, it's assurance that we're both working together, so it makes the solution more reliable, works well, as advertised, if you will. And the customer premise is for customers. It's the simplicity in the form of integration, which comes in where the two companies' engineering teams are driving towards that. >> Last question, Ken, for you. In terms of kind of following on what Bharat was saying, the customers now not only need that simplicity, they expect it. I'm curious where is that in that, in the selling motion, where is that conversation? Is it with some of the folks that are down in the technical weeds, who are looking to drastically improve recovery time and recovery point objectives? Or are you also having conversations at the business level of the business going, maybe it's a legacy not cloud-native that needs to go, "We have so much data, which is an advantage, but how do we use that?" Are you seeing those business leaders, business unit leaders in C-levels involved in this conversation with Veeam and NetApp? >> Yeah, yeah, no question. I think traditionally Veeam has really been compelled by the Backup Administrator, by the IT director. Because the product is so easy to try, you can download it, you can try it for free.. Our whole "It Just Works" has been our tagline because it is just so simple to get started with Veeam. We make it simple to get up and running and to manage your backups and also give some of that power back to your customers. In fact, just a quick sidebar. Had dinner last night with a longtime Veeam customer, longtime NetApp customer, and they said, "Hey, look, NetApp is my storage vendor of choice. Veeam is my backup data protection vendor of choice. And they come together well. And NetApp does such a great job from primary to leveraging the snapshot replication," but he told me about this great story. He said, "We had somebody at midnight needed to recover a file. We have self-restore capabilities that they were able to give that power to their end users to go recover a file to their server instead of calling up and opening a ticket. Instead of what took maybe eight hours to go through a whole process to get a storage admin and then a backup admin took eight minutes." I think it talks to the value of the NetApp platform in providing that availability and the simplicity of the Veeam system to be able to give that power and take what might be complex and make it very simple. So, back to your original question, Lisa, about.. We've traditionally really sort of been very, very valuable to that backup administrator, IT admin. As we move further into the enterprise, of course that goes up into VP of IT, all the way up to the CIO. I think our relationship is really bringing us both ways. We can come bottom-up, NetApp can come top-down. And we're hitting both sides and really that whole stack of influencer to buyer to decision-maker in that whole stack. >> Bharat, last question for you. We've got a few seconds left. I'm curious when a customer says, "Veeam is our backup, and recovery, NetApp is our storage," how does that, in this day as, "Hey, cloud is the heart of our strategy," how do you react to, "NetApp is our storage provider?" >> I don't see those as exclusive things. We manage the data on-prem, and Veeam, given their abilities in the hybrid cloud, if a customer considers us as on-prem storage company, that is great. We're working with them to change that impression, to get with them on their journey to the cloud. So we don't want to force them to get into the cloud, but as they move to the cloud, we want to be there to make sure we can manage the data in the cloud. And Veeam, given their hybrid capabilities and where they've been and what they do with the customer, and their ability to manage monthly cloud maps really well, to what we offer the customers. Of course we'd like our customers to change their perception to not just view NetApp as on-prem storage but as a cloud vendor as well, but it takes time for them to change their perception, and we're working very hard on that. As you saw today in the keynote as well, you're starting to see customers.. It has to be driven by the customer need. Sometimes they realize certain things are done better in the cloud, which drives them to the cloud. We want to be there to provide that service for them as they move. >> Well, Bharat and Ken, thanks so much for stopping by at the end of the day here. We appreciate your time, and we look forward to, in 2019, maybe hearing more from that big AMEA bank and some of the great successes they're achieving with this partnership. >> Thank you for having us. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> Our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching. This wraps up theCUBE's full day. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We've had a great day, Stu, talking with NetApp executives, customers, partners, and we want to thank you for watching. Hope you've learned a lot, and of course, watch the replays at theCUBE.net. For Stu, I'm Lisa, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of NetApp Insight 2018, Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and guess who's here now, Dave Hitz, EVP and founder of NetApp, Dave, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you and glad to be here. >> This is a big event, we were in the keynote this morning when we were walking out, standing room only really strong messages delivered by George Kurian, who stopped by for the first time couple hours ago. Great customer story, the futurist was very interesting perspective, 26 years ago, can you envision? >> You know the futurist? >> Where you are? >> Never mind that, I have a very different perspective than him, I think we are entering the golden decade of artificial intelligence. It's smart enough to be super, super cool and it hasn't figured out how to kill us yet, decade. (laughing) >> Lisa: That's good. >> Enjoy your last 10 years. >> Oh no, that's it? >> I, no, no, you asked, you asked that I envision this 26 years ago, oh my god, no, I mean, you know, we were a little start-up and we had these spread sheets that said we would grow to, you know it basically that, what the VC's told us if we could get to 100 million in revenue we can go public, so, naturally our spread sheets showed 200 million (laughs) in revenue, you know or five, six, some where in there and is like, we're so far beyond anything I imagined when we started, and we were doing technical nerdy products for little engineers and little work groups, you know and the idea that that part of the storage market would merge against the heavy duty, high-end enterprise storage market doing databases, and then that would end up colliding with the cloud market and helping, like no we didn't even imagine this stuff that's happening now, I mean it's so far beyond. >> Enabling DreamWorks to make movies, I mean-- >> I love that, you know they do showings, they do previews for their vendors and so I've gotten to take my 11-year-old daughter, she's 11 now, but to see, you know early viewing of some of these movies it's, it's just fun. >> So, Dave, it's always interesting in the industry a lot of time you say like, okay, this architecture is long in the tooth, there's a new generation do things better and everything like that. ONTAP, been around for a long time now.. >> You know, so let me-- >> Seems like it's been reinvigorated with the cloud and everything like that, you know. >> Let me make a comment about that. >> Yeah. >> Cause people do this, oh, ONTAP is so old, isn't that the old generation? So lets talk about old. Mainframes are old, and AS400s are old, and Unix is old, and then there's Windows which is kind of younger, and ONTAP's younger than that, and then there's Windows NT, which was a rewrite of Windows and Clustered ONTAP is younger than that, so like stop with the old, you know I mean iOS is after that, so okay fine we're older than iOS, but it's not an ancient, and then we've revamped it again to go run in the cloud, I mean we first started doing ONTAP running in Azure, sorry I mean Amazon initially, we started that work in 2013 and shipped it in 2014, so like that was yet another refresh so. >> Well, but you bring a point, you've, it is adjusted and moved, it wasn't something that's static. Can you speak a little bit, that cloud, the you know, the rewrite and focus around the cloud and what, that mean internally, I know you've been reinvigorated. >> Ha! >> With everything that's happened for the last few years. >> You know, the cloud everybody's doing it now and everybody's trying to be cloud relevant, we were really struggling early on I will say you know 2013, 2014 we were really trying to get our heads around what to do and a lot of people were stepping back like, no, no, no, let's see if we can slow it down, and, I mean not just outside of NetApp but NetApp as well, and the guy that was the CEO of the time Tom Georgens, and George Kurian was part of the staff then. We, I'm proud of what we did was we said, you know let's really lean in, its either going to happen or it's not going to happen, probably not, based on what we do, and if it does happen we'll be way better off leaning into it early, learning how to make this stuff work, and that's, you know we shipped ONTAP in the cloud in 2014, and it sucked, I mean, and no one body else had anything like it, it was awesome, right, whenever you look at old tech die, the first iPhone sucked too, but it was both great, but it needed so much more work, like the very first rev I remember a story, Joe CaraDonna as a programmer he's like, we tried to get our own IT organization to use it and they told us the security wasn't good enough, so we had to fix the security, like, I mean we've been through so much stuff that's almost five years ago. We've been working on it, and so you do all of this work and then Cloud Volumes is a complete, have you guys had Anthony on? >> Both: Yes. >> Couple hours ago. >> I love how Anthony thinks, so, he's a cloudy guy right from the foundation, he joins the executive staff, whole new perspective on stuff, so Cloud ONTAP, like ONTAP's my baby and we put it in the cloud. I'm proud of that, like you have our forward leaning cloud and Anthony's like, you know, just so you know, that's not nearly good enough, like, that is a very old school infrastructural thing, probably storage infrastructural people will like that they can have their same old OS running in the cloud, but it's not what cloudy people want, cloudy people don't want to run a storage OS in the cloud, cloudy people just want to say, I'd like a volume, please. Here's your volume, Thank you, and by the way, it should be a RESTful API, like God, ONTAP was none of those things and so if you look at the work we're doing now is like, okay, here's a RESTful API, here's the JSON schema, send it to the Azure Resource Manager Like that's cloudy and so, it was because, you know we did a good job engineering getting it in but we didn't, we didn't have that like the, what does cloud smell like? If you know what I mean, like, the right whiff of cloud. Anyway, so Anthony really brought that and I, and I just feel really good about where we are at now, because, it's like cloud developers, develop this stuff for other cloud developers, it feels like that. >> Well in the last five years it sounds like tremendous amounts of transformation, reinvigoration, NetApp has some bold marketing messaging. We are the data authority, we help customers become data driven, you talk about these three business imperatives, customers have lots of choices that, you know public cloud, private cloud, hybrid, George talked about this morning in his keynote that hybrid and multi-cloud is now de facto. >> You know, someone asked me, I was giving a talk and they asked me, okay so much cloud, how long do you think till NetApp's not shipping hardware? And I was like, no, no, like we don't see that going away anytime soon, if anything we think our success in the cloud, 'cause customers want to do that, will help us gain share on-prem because customers also want to do that, right? George's picture shows, yes there is traditional on-prem IT, enterprise IT, there's private clouds people, HCI, convergence CI, and then there's public cloud. To me the interesting question, is why do people do those different things, the number one driver for public cloud is innovation, like, if you just, like all the catchwords you can think of, if you want to start up a DevOps team to-go program, I would like a new mobile phone app and I want it to take a picture of the person's face, oh look it's a woman, she looks happy, and then you want it to listen to her, to the voice, and like transcribe the voice and then do a sentiment analysis on the words, oh, she looked happy but it's snarky, and then you want to feed that into neural net deep learning engine, and say, what should we try to sell her, like, I guaranteed you, the team working on the public cloud will beat the on-prem team hands down every time. Right, I mean that's, so when you look at people and they go, we want all in on the cloud, or there's got to be 100% cloud. My question is what, what's your, like, don't start with that, what's your problem? If it's derive innovation, for the private cloud, typically that's just all about speed. They're so uniform regular, they're all the same you have extra capacity, you know you got empty rack space, for where the next one goes, someone says, I need some storage, and you say, hey, it's got a self service offer defined API, like, just do it yourself, and then in the enterprise space, the enterprise IT, Unix, Windows, clients, server, like that zone, probably the bulk of your investment, right? That's where you been spending the money historically. Probably still the bulk of most people's investment, but they want to modernize it, they don't want to get rid of it, they don't want to turn it off, it's working, but they'd like it to work better, so flash enable it, just get the performance issues out of the way. By the way, shrinks your footprint in the data center, frees up space, and connected to the cloud. Like not moving it, but just back it up or do DR, or like something cloudy and so to me I look at those three goals are tightly linked to the three styles of infrastructure. Notice, I haven't talked about products yet? The conversations I like to have with customers these days, help me understand what your business challenges are, your trying to move faster, be more innovative, modernize the stuff you have. Okay, like what ratio, now lets talk about how we could do those things together with the Data Fabric and let you build the Data Fabric you need, I mean, our Data Fabric strategy is not to tell customers what to do, it's to help them build the Data Fabric they need for their needs based on, oh, we're all about innovation, all on the cloud, like okay fine. We can do that like, but let's talk about that or is it. Now I'm stuttering. >> You bring up a great point there, Dave. >> I'm excited about this stuff. >> It's really exciting 'cause you know I think back, you know, just a couple of years ago, if you go to the enterprise, oftentimes storage was the boat anchor to prevent me from moving forward. Now we know that data, is absolutely going to be one of the drivers going forward, how do we help those people make that transition? How do you see NetApp driving that transition? So boating, that's an interesting word because I think if you look at cloud compute, it's very easy to move compute into the cloud, right. >> Stu: Yes. >> The thing about compute is it just happens and then its done, like you turn it on, you turn if off. You spin up the VM, you spin down the VM, it's easy. The reason data is a boat anchor is not because its a boat anchor, because data is the hard part, like you fired up the compute to the cloud but usually you're computing some data, well, how did you get the data to the place where the compute is? And then when you're finished a lot of times you created some data, well, how do you keep track of the data you created in the cloud, and is it legal for it to stay in the cloud, and now you want to put the data in a different cloud or put the data in your own data center and like, who's watching all that data? It's not a boat anchor because data sucks, it's a boat anchor actually because its the important thing you want to keep forever, right? I mean, maybe you do or maybe you want to delete it and know for sure it's gone. Like, those, compute doesn't have any of those issues. So, what's my point, whatever is hard, like if this was easy anybody can do it, right? Whatever is hard, you go hire lots and lots of smart people to work on hard problems and then customers are like, whoa, you're solving hard problems, I guess I will pay you after all. Isn't that what business is? >> So the majority of your conversations start with helping customers identify what they've got, where best to spread out their investments, it's not product based its about business outcomes. I'd love to get kind of in the last few minutes here, your perspective on NetApp's own IT and digital, and cultural transformation, how does that help your legacy long time enterprise customers feel an even stronger trust with NetApp? >> I think prior to our cloud work customers for the most part, customers and potential customers, they knew us, you know, it was interesting even as we thought about marketing the new work that we are doing, one of the questions was like, how much should be about the cloud, how much should be about the old stuff, and we've really leaned in almost 100% on telling people our new cloud stories, they're both public and private. And our VP of marketing I think she had a really, Jean English, she had a really good perspective. She basically said look, we've been telling the on-prem storage iron story for 26 years and if there's a customer who's out there waiting to decide who to use I don't think telling them that story again and year 27, is going to be the thing that makes the difference, like, they've decided they're happy with their Hitatchi or they're EM's, whatever it is, but, but they don't know that NetApp can help them in this brave new world. Right, they have no clue that ONTAP is also running on Amazon, I mean, It's like, seriously, I can run ONTAP on Amazon? Yeah like fire it up, it's five bucks an hour, or whatever the number is, it's like that's crazy, you know and so, so and then people go, well, we've had so many conversations where they're trying to get a cloud strategy together, and we talk about all these things and data movement and data management and cloud, and like just all of these tools and they're very excited about where they're trying to go and they said, you know, by the way, I do also have a on-prem storage need. Could you do me a quote for like what I need this week and meanwhile let's do some planning about what I need next year, right, you've got both of them working together, and I think it's that combo that's important. >> Last question, how do you, if only you had more energy and excitement like legitimately about this, but how do you keep some of the NetApp folks that have been here for a long time? How have you helped reinvigorate them to, to really be able to digest the massive impact that you guys are being able to make across industries? >> One of the things I think helps, 'cause there is a... Let me back up a step, you know, Steve Jobs, is such an awesome guy and also in his life he made so many mistakes, and one of the things he did when, when Apple was almost entirely floated on their Apple III business and, was that Apple III, Apple II? And he was doing the Mac, and basically his message to everybody else was, if you're not working on the Mac, you suck, except, by the way, that's the product that's floating the entire business and generating all the products, and I really was conscious of, like that's the wrong way to do it. And when I look in particular of what we're doing we've got new operating systems like E-Series and like SolidFire, the HCI is a whole new thing, and yet ONTAP is still shot through our entire product line. I mean, the Cloud Volumes' the cool, hottest new thing. It's ONTAP under the covers, right, and you look at the HCI it's got the SolidFire block storage built in there as a very scalable model, oh but if you'd like files guess what? We run ONTAP in a VM, it's HCI it runs VM, and so actually if you look at what's going on in there the work that we've done going way back, and yes it's evolved, it's changed, but that same work is actually shot through as technology, no longer the front piece but it's shot through all of it as technology, so it is kind of a unifying characteristic. If you talk about that, I think it helps people get more comfortable both internally but, we have the same, you know, you asked how do you get employees comfortable, a lot of customers have the same problem, you know-- >> Lisa: Right. >> They've spent a lot of investment and learning ONTAP's foibles over the year and Cloud Volume's hides all of that. So, gee, maybe I don't like this, you know what if you need all those features Cloud ONTAP, you can run ONTAP, like some people do want to do that, so, I just feel like the fact that the pieces all fit together, work together, actually gets people comfortable with it. >> Excellent, well Dave thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you for sharing your energy, and your excitement, your passion and all this wisdom and looking at where you guys are 26 years later, we look forward to year 27. >> Great, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, we're at NetApp Insight 2018 in Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we're live at NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay, in Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host for the day is Stu Miniman. We're welcoming back two distinguished alumni to theCUBE, we've got Anthony Lye SVP and GM of the Cloud BU at NetApp. Hey, Anthony, welcome back. >> Hello, thank you very much. >> Fresh from the keynote stage. And we've also got a Tad Brockway, the head of product Azure Storage, Media and Edge at Microsoft, Tad, welcome back. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So guys, this is day one, keynote this morning, it was standing room only, 5,000 plus people here, Jean English was on your CMO of NetApp and said, most ever customers and partners under one roof at NetApp. So that's exciting. Let's talk about partnerships. NetApp has been around 26 years and the slide of partners and sponsors this morning was like a NASCAR slide. Tell us Anthony, about what you guys are doing, and how you're evolving your relationship with Microsoft? >> Oh, I mean, I think of all the relationships, Microsoft is unique. Tad and I have worked together now for over a year. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And it's an engineering relationship. There is absolutely no doubt about it. We are doing things in Azure that nobody else has ever done. I think we sort of bring 26 years of NetApp experience to the infinite possibilities that Azure brings to its customers. It's transformation based on, very reliable infrastructure. So you get all the forward looking values of Azure, complemented by the 26 years of NetApp. >> Yeah, it's a great way to-- >> So a year ago, at this very event, NetApp Insight 2017, you announced some exciting things. One of them being Azure NetApp files. >> Anthony: Correct. >> Tell us about, a year later, where you are with that? I know McKesson, big brand in healthcare, they're going to be on stage tomorrow, give us a little bit of perspective about what that announcement has transformed into, one year in? >> Well, let me give you my perspective and then Tad, you should obviously give the view of Microsoft. For NetApp, it's given our customers confidence and confidence in their choice of public Cloud, that they now feel that Azure has distinct advantage in that it can land workloads that today currently run on NetApp. And they have the confidence that Microsoft has selected NetApp, that Microsoft will sell the service, Microsoft will support the service, Microsoft will build the service. I think we've also done something quite unique in the way the service is delivered. We could have just thrown up storage and said to customers, "You manage it." But I think together, we wanted to try and provide almost like dial tone, we just wanted storage to be there, and we wanted to give people performance guarantee. So they felt very comfortable picking a particular performance level with a particular workload. And that's not been done before. So, we're seeing fantastic results from customers, we have a backlog that's growing by the day, and customers who have been onboarded onto the system, have rave things to say about it. You'll hear from one of those customers tomorrow on stage with Tad and I. But Tad, how would you characterize the year? >> Yeah, sure. So, a lot of engineering effort, and that's the thing that makes this, customers don't care about how something is implemented, they care about the value that they get out of it. But it's because we've put so much effort into this across our companies, from an engineering standpoint, that there's nothing like this in the industry today. As we roll this out into Azure regions around the world, it is going to be a highly differentiated offering. And that's because fundamentally, what we're doing is, we're bringing Azure NetApp into Microsoft data centers, and we're wiring NetApp ONTAP directly into Azure. So we've worked together on the design for some advanced networking capability, all the way down to the switch level, where we have very low latency, very high throughput from the Azure Public Cloud, all of the infrastructure, all of the customers VMs, directly into ONTAP, very low latency, very high bandwidth. So all of the performance characteristics of ONTAP on-prem, and then bringing that into the Public Cloud. So you get really a no compromise transformation for your existing apps and you get the ability to provision that app volumes in a way that is fundamentally unique, it fits with the whole Cloud paradigm of being able to pay for your resources as you go, the democratization of IT so that individual business units can go provision volumes. So it really is Cloud paradigm plus all of the performance capabilities of ONTAP. >> I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. When I think about Microsoft and NetApp, you both have really, it's called today Hybrid Multi Cloud. But Microsoft it's been given a lot of credit that it's got a strong Hybrid strategy. When I think back, I mean, Microsoft's always had storage as part of the Stack. If today, and Azure Stack, you've got Storage Spaces Direct, you've got a Cloud first strategy. So I want to be able to do the same thing in public Azure as when I'm building solutions, put it in the environment, can you help connect, where does that this ONTAP solution fit in there? Because, some people would say, "Well, come on Microsoft, "wouldn't you just build this with your own solutions?" Why do you turn to NetApp? >> So, it's true, I guess, the spirit, I think the spirit of what you're asking is, it's an observation that what brings our companies together is an appreciation for enterprise customers being able to do things on their terms. That involves customers taking existing IT workloads and then transforming them over to the cloud, as opposed to zeroing everything out and starting over, that's just not realistic. So, it's the strategy for Microsoft and the strategy for NetApp, and then our partnership together to meet customers where they are, help them evolve. So scenarios like Hybrid, they fit very nicely within that and Microsoft's portfolio with Azure Stack and some of the other things that we're doing there with Data Box, and so on. These are edge investments that are intended to extend the reach of Cloud into customer environments. And then to make it really easy for customers to take their existing assets, and then take advantage of the Cloud. That fits with the whole model of what we're doing with ONTAP as well. >> Anthony, we would love to hear your piece because there's NetApp pieces that are going into the Cloud but we see Microsoft, the Cloud is the starting point, we start in the public Cloud, and then that pushes out to the edge. >> Yeah, I think, I would make two points, I think, just to reinforce what Tad said, that there's just a technology that sits behind the file system that you cannot underestimate the importance of what Dave Hitz really started. I mean, ONTAP does things that no other file system can do. It manages the data in a very particular way, it allows us to run NFS and SMB protocols on the same volume for certain use cases. It has almost linear performance throughput characteristics. And we've been able to take that file system and then build intellectual property for certain workloads. So, NetApp is really the most commonly deployed platform for SAP. We are probably still the biggest platform for Oracle Database deployment, for MySQL deployment. So I think there's a technology, I think there is a sort of a history and legacy in Linux and open source based workloads, that we have an understanding of that adds to Microsoft. Now, the second point I would say is, I personally agree very much with Tad, but I think what you're going to see is IT will be redefined by Cloud. What I mean by that is, the Cloud will essentially establish the baseline and then push itself and it's sort of it's own access control lists, security models, those will end up getting pushed back to IT. So I think you're going to see a Cloud defined IT business as opposed to an IT defined Cloud. >> Yeah, I buy that. >> And I think there's just so much elegance and simplicity and scalability in Azure. Now, they had 25 years of watching everybody else make a mess of legacy IT, and now Azure is such a pure environment that it can extend, I think, and provide tons of value outside of Azure. >> So you guys mentioned, I think, Anthony, you mentioned when we kicked off, that this is really kind of an engineering partnership, when if we look at the history that both NetApp and Microsoft, have massive install basis of customers, customers that didn't start out in the digital era, obviously, customers that are born in that too. I'm curious, you mentioned about IT, from a joint selling standpoint, where are these conversations initiating? Are you talking with the IT folks? Are you going to the business folks who are having a more business outcomes led conversation? So Anthony, I will start with you? >> Well, so I would say, my favorite line about Cloud was, actually a line Marc Benioff quoted which was, what Clouds do is they democratize innovation. And if you think about that for a second, the environments that we grew up in, the big companies had a material advantage in their use of technology. The small companies couldn't afford to do it. You look at Azure now, and any single person on the planet can consume Azure. They don't need permission, in many cases, and ideas that would never get through the business case, can now be started on Azure. And there are so many great ideas and concepts that needed that sort of easy onboarding and services that, machine learning and artificial intelligence, there's a handful of companies that could buy that stuff themselves. Azure gives you access to all of that. So I think what's happening is that democratization has sort of infused more buyers. So what used to be a fairly linear process through the CIO has now been fractured. A lot of application developers are buying by themselves. Line of business people are funding project work sometimes without IT's knowledge. So for us, we wanted to make sure that we could allow traditional customers to extend to Azure, traditional customers to migrate to Azure, but we wanted to build a service that would appeal to the new Cloud buyer. To the application developer, to the data scientist. And I think we've done a very good job doing that. >> Yeah, no, I agree. I think, it's the combination of empowering folks to go do things to increase productivity at the individual business unit level, but then do that with technology that has taken decades of thousands of engineers to develop. This combination, there really is nothing like it in the industry, it's really unique. >> At lunch, I was talking to a couple of users here, and they were a little bit nervous, a little bit excited, going to go through some sort of Cloud certification. Cloud is an opportunity for a lot of people to scale up on new skill sets. I'm sure there's new certification. Can you talk a little bit about how you're helping customers move towards the future? >> Yeah, I think we've sort of, in many ways made, ONTAP, very much a relevant service in Azure and what we hope that means is for all of the people that have been very loyal to NetApp and to ONTAP that their skill set now translates into the Cloud compensations. One of the things we'll say, on stage tomorrow is, Microsoft and NetApp have worked together to create a certification that blends the best of what ONTAP can do for workloads, strategy and design with the wealth of services that Azure has. It's awesome to be onstage with Tad, we provide a critical service, but Microsoft has how many services now, in Azure? >> Tad: Oh, Gosh, hundreds. >> Hundreds and hundreds of services. And as a developer, I feel, you're like a kid in a candy store when you're in Azure, you can switch on almost anything and find services that will do incredible things that you could never get from IT. You could just never get those services. What Microsoft has is a scale so vast, I mean, how many data centers will you be at, by the end of the year? >> Well, we're in 54 regions today, and then each region has multiple data centers. >> Anthony: Hundreds. >> So anyway, we're all over the planet. >> So guys, we're out of time, but just really quickly, so we've seen this evolution, you guys have lived this evolution in the last year. The public preview is out for-- >> Azure NetApp files. >> Azure NetApp files, any Sneak Peek you can give us into what some of your customers are going to be saying tomorrow about the business outcomes like, reducing costs, or speed of transactions, that are going to be here tomorrow? >> You should get Brad up here from McKesson because he's awesome. Brad's been on point for it and I think, you'll hear from a customer tomorrow that they plan to bring the biggest enterprise workloads to Azure. I mean, I think when he names the applications, they are non-trivial applications that couldn't move, but now with Azure Netapp files can. I think he's also going to say that as well as benchmarking very well at the big workloads, we actually benchmark very well on the cost curve. That we can migrate workloads and give very good cost, I think characteristics as well as performance. So we've tried to give people that two dimensional flexibility. >> Well, that's going to be something not to miss. So if you're here at NetApp Insight, check it out, if you're not, watch it on their live stream. Tad, Anthony, thanks so much for joining-- >> Thank you, very much. >> Stu and me and sharing with us the momentum and the vision that you're now seeing manifest. We appreciate your time. >> Perfect, thank you. >> From Stu Miniman and I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE Live from Las Vegas, NetApp Insight 2018, stick around we'll be back after a short break.

(upbeat techno) [Announcer] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 There's over 5000 customers, partners, Netappians, analysts, press here. TheCUBE is here as well, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman back for our second year of covering. We're joined by two guests, one an alumni and one a new guest to theCUBE, Henri Richard EVP a worldwide field and customer operations from NetApp, welcome. >> Good morning. >> Morning. And Kamran Amini, the VP and GM of data center infrastructure from Lenovo, welcome back! >> Glad to be here. >> So guys, Lenovo, NetApp, just about a month ago announced some exciting news, Henri let's start with you, kind of give our viewers who may not be that familiar with the news announcement what this new technology partnership is all about. >> Well, it's a multi-faceted partnership. I think it's important to understand that for us there is a component that has to do with a worldwide engagement of Lenovo around storage solutions that will be infused with NetApp technology. There's a second element, which is the opportunity for us to pull or go to market organization in certain countries, and get to critical mass to cover the needs of customers. And then the last part, the one that's probably the most talked about, is a joint venture in China where we will combine our forces to serve the needs of the very fast-growing Chinese market. >> Alright, yeah. Henri, I was at the Lenovo event where this was announced, want you to give us a little bit about the field engagement, because it really does seem a place where NetApp and Lenovo, there's good synergies there, but there's not a ton of overlap. Maybe explain a little bit from the field engagement. >> That is really one of the reasons we were excited, I think, on both sides to do this agreement. You know, we feel that Lenovo is a fantastic server company, that's demonstrated incredible momentum in the last 12 months. We have ourselves, you know, modestly a pretty nice momentum in the storage business, and in coming together I think we can be stronger in serving the needs of customers that have both compute and storage needs. When we did the analysis of our market coverage, it so happens that there's a lot of places where we're strong and Lenovo can benefit from that, and other places where they're strong, and we can benefit from it, so you're correct in stating that there was not that much overlap. And then lastly, we've put in place a process where our go-to-market organizations are going to combine their strength and help each other in some of accounts where both a strong compute story and a strong storage - needs to be integrated to serve the needs of the customer. >> Let's talk a little bit more, guys, about the impetus from the customers. The keynote this morning, as I was mentioning was jam packed, and we heard a lot, Stu, about the customer experience, and how NetApp is an enabler of customers to harness their data to become data-driven. Kamran, from your perspective, what was some of the customer input that really sort of brought this partnership - and this multi-faceted partnership - together? >> I think as we see customers looking their applications, not only current applications, but emerging applications, data's becoming very critical. And be able to accelerate data and the availability of data is going to be key for them, alright? As you heard earlier this morning, data's gold, right? It's the next oil, as we think about it. So we looked at our customers and at their transforming moving toward machine learning and AI, big data analytics, and it's driving massive amount of data that you have to be able to accelerate and be able to give results back. The partnership was the best of breed here. Looking at a leader partner around all flash and growing massively with their data-management solutions, and us leveraging our server technology and the capability we bring as a data center group, bring the both of best breeds to deliver an end solution for customers is really what we're focused on. And it's all being driven, really, by data, really where we see the acceleration happening in the workload aspect of it. >> You know, I was listening to the keynote this morning it talked about how customers today, it's a hybrid, multi-cloud world, is what NetApp positioned, and what I actually like is both NetApp and Lenovo are really aware and work with, really, the hyper scalers out there. There's a bunch of years that we kind of - there was this fighting from certain vendors out there, it was like, "Don't go that, that's not the future," you know, "We know what we're telling." Maybe talk a little bit about how that plays into philosophy, how you deal with customers, and how that leads to co engineered solutions that you'll work with together. >> Well, I think that both companies have a history of being good partners in the industry. Let's start there. Secondly, you're right, that some vendors in what we call traditional IT, are still fighting the reality of the hybrid multi-cloud, and I think that that's the path to death. Lenovo doesn't have that position, we certainly don't have that position, and we believe that combining our strength, when we're serving the customer to help them go to the public cloud, to help them leverage both great compute capabilities on prem and the extraordinary innovation that happens in the cloud is the right way to serve the customers. >> No, absolutely. I think that customers are looking to be more agile, all right? As their business evolves, and they're seeing competitive nature in their line of business, agility is becoming more and more important. Everybody also has to fit within a budget, so the hybrid-cloud story is really the path. And today, again, Lenovo is serving six of the top 10 hyper-scalers today from a technology, and we believe the hybrid-cloud story for on prem is the path of the future, where the customer adopt and deploy, to be more agile and reactive to their markets. >> George Kurian talked about, in his keynote this morning, that we seemed to kind of initially address, stand up has a massive install base, a lot of enterprises that were not born in the digital age, so he kind of talked about something that reminded me of what you said, Henri, is, "If customers don't adapt, transform rapidly at scale, they're out of business." So NetApp itself has undergone a very significant transformation, I'd love to understand from both of your perspectives, Henri, we'll start with you. How does the NetApp Lenovo multi-faceted partnership deliver differentiators? Presumably Lenovo has a lot of choices to do a partnership with a cloud storage data management company. What are some of those unique things from NetApp's field? >> So, one of the salient points that George made this morning is that for legacy companies, you know, they have to understand that the fact that they already have data is a huge asset that they need to leverage, right? That's using that data is how they're not going to become disrupted by a new company. Startups have agility, but they don't have the data. So jumping on that opportunity was certainly something we did at NetApp, and we have an application called Active IQ that actually takes a massive data lake of information we get from our systems, and is helping our customers make better usage of our technology. So just an example of our digital transformation. To the point of the relationship with Lenovo, the nice thing about our data fabric strategy is that it is not related to NetApp hardware, it's really all encompassing, it's there to serve the needs of the customer to be able to leverage the value of their data. And so it makes it very easy to partner with us, because really we're not parochial about, how we go about leveraging the technology. >> Yeah, I think what we see is, you know this digital transformation is driving many new use cases. IOT's becoming a big thing, putting edge to the cloud. So, data and our understanding data, and what you can do with data, is going to become more relevant across all lines of business. And that's where we're really focused on, and our transformation as Lenovo it's all around, "How do we address that shift that's happening in the market, where customers are moving away from data being just there to actually leveraging data and being able to create an outcome out of that data so it's going to be effective?" >> Alright, so this was announced about a month ago. Give us a little insight, how's the rollout been going? What's the reaction been from customers, channel partners, and the like? >> So I think channel partners, analysts, and press have been very positive, right? I think as we talked about being frictionless, it's been there, right? I think people see that what we said is actually out there. We're seeing good success in parts of geography worldwide already for the parts that have been shipping as of 09/14. We have our DE series shipping shortly, in early November, and we're going to continue acceleration in our channel partners and our customers. So we're very excited, I think as we saw prior to announcement we were growing triple digits in all flash as Lenovo. I think that with the expanded TAM going from 15% to averaging above 90% on market with the storage portfolio, we're excited here. We're anxious to keep going. >> Yeah, I'll go a little further, I would tell you that I think many channel partners felt hostage to some of the other choices in the industry. And the overwhelming feedback to the announcement of this relationship is, "Thank God, I now have an alternative that is powerful, with great focus on the compute side, great momentum on the storage side, bringing together best of great portfolio, and now I've got choice that I didn't have before." So I think there's a very high level of expectation, excitement, and I expect the momentum with channel partners and distributors to be very high. >> Let's unpack that joint go-to-market GTM strategy a little bit more. Let's talk about it first from the NetApp side. How are you going to market with an image and your partners? The selling motion, how do customers engage? Help us understand that. >> So NetApp is really coming from a very high-touch sales model, you know the beauty of our partnership with Lenovo is they have a velocity model. So for the part of the markets that are really about having velocity, I think it's a perfect marriage. The second thing is, they have a much larger world-wide presence than we do, I mean they've got physical location in many countries where we are not present. So that's expanding the footprint of potential close in service to NetApp customers. And then lastly, you know, the world is evolving very quickly, it's all about the apps, and I am excited about the fact that my go-to-market team rubbing shoulders with the Lenovo team is going to get more intelligent about compute, which is important for us to understand the real needs of the customers. >> Lisa: And Kamran, from your view? >> I mean I think we - And Lenovo serves over 160 countries, as you know, Henri, so we have a very expanded. We serve customers all the way from SMB all the way to very large enterprise like cloud service providers and MSBs. I think the momentum we have based on the park announcement is really provides an alternative solution to the HPE 3PAR and Delhi AMC, right? As Henri stated I think a lot of our channel partners, our disties, our value-added resellers are looking for an alternative route of a solution between the two leading platform solution providers here. And I think we're seeing that momentum, right? I think as of 09/13 when we made the announcement at Transform, we're seeing the excitement and the pull coming from the field and driving it, and of course we of course have a direct sales model, right? Having that high touch with a customer, selling the value prop of this storage solution and entire portfolio we can bring in, and the partnership value that brings in with NetApp here. >> Alright, so what should we expect to see from this partnership in the near future? >> Well, I think, you know, expansion of the product portfolio, particularly in the case of the China JV. One of the mission of that JV will be to design products specifically for the Chinese market, which we all know is very big and growing extremely fast, so that's one aspect that is yet to be seen. And then the second thing is as we collaborate on solving real customer problems, I expect to see a higher level of innovation, as we understand both sides of the equation and how we can bring our technologies together to solve real customer problems. >> The last question for both of you. You both talked about this joint partnership gives both NetApp and Lenovo and your respective install bases choice. What is the one differentiator? Why would a customer choose to go this route versus, as you mentioned, Delhi MC, HPE...? >> So I think you look at where NetApp has had leadership performance in all flash, and Ontap's amazing software, data management software solution. And look at Lenovo, we've been the fastest-growing server provider in the world. We see where we're bleeding in HPC environments, and really driving software to find. So I think customers are looking for, "How do I take the best of breed of things and bring it together? And making sure when you bring it together it is working together." So part of having the relationship of leveraging the NetApp technology is that Lenovo storage portfolio also provides that ability that says, it's a proven technology, the server technologies and the storage are proven. So it doesn't matter if a customer wants to leverage a NetApp technology with a Lenovo server, it is a proven solution for them, and they can depend on the value it's going to deliver. >> From my standpoint, you've got two credible, long term, solid people in the industry, partnering to get best-of-breed solutions with an eye towards being leaning into the cloud, and I think that in two days, IT business with a new wave of IT, if you don't embrace the cloud, the cloud will kill you. And so I think that's our unique differentiation, is that we have two companies that can serve our customers on prem needs, but have a very comprehensive private cloud, public cloud, and on prem strategy. And I think that nobody else can claim that differentiation. >> Henri, Kamran, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and chatting and sharing a little bit more about this exciting partnership. We look forward to hearing news next year! >> It's been a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, and we are live from NetApp Insight 2018, we'll be back after a short break. (upbeat techno)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome to theCUBE, we are live at NetApp Insight 2018, I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by Stu Miniman. Stu and I are going to be here all day. And this is the third annual Insight, with customers and partners and NetAppians and analysts and press. Stu this is the second time theCUBE has been here. We just came from the keynote and the interesting thing that Stu, that you and I both noticed, was at least the first 75 minutes of the keynote that we got to see today, none of the product news was announced. It was really about strategy, #datadriven, how NetApp wants to enable their customers from DreamWorks to oil and gas companies, health care, etc. To use data, develop a data strategy, to move their businesses into the digital age. >> Yeah, Lisa, first of all, great to be working with you again. >> Always. >> And I'm excited, it's second year that we've been at this show, third of the NetApp Insights that we've done. Cause we've done both the U.S. and the European shows. My first time actually coming to a NetApp event. I remember, gosh I'm showing my age, I remember when NetApp started, network storage was becoming a thing. NetApp really rose its ascendancy with file systems and NAS, and FAS was the one operating system to rule them all, really grew into a very sizable business. Company's about $6 billion worth of revenue and I think somewhere about 10,000 employees. Today, NetApp is really the largest independent storage company after Dell took EMC off as an independent now, so it's interesting to watch. George Kurian got on stage and talked about digital transformation. And one of the things I'm really interested in looking at is how is NetApp doing in that transformation? Because, most people when I was talking to some customers at some of the meals and walking the floor and things like that it's, NetApp is my filer company. I buy boxes, sometimes I mine some software and there's some things there, but I'm the guy that runs NetApp Gear, if you will. And that transformation, what is the NetApp of 2019 and beyond? Are they a storage company? Are they a hybrid, multi-cloud software led something something company in the future? Are they a services company? There's a nice ecosystem here, so that's what I'm excited to dig into. George Kurian he in the keynote this morning, laid out the four things that companies need to do for digital transformation. It's something we'll dig into, but yeah, I had to go search NetApp on the news release and be like, oh Cloud Insights, and ONTAP in the Cloud, and HCI and Partnership News and things like that, so there definitely is some news, they just didn't talk about it in the keynote. >> Yeah, it was an interesting keynote for me, and as theCUBE we go to a lot of keynotes, many times a year, and this was an interesting start to it. It's clear from the NetApp messaging on NetApp.com, NetApp Insight, things that are being put out on media that they're really putting cloud at the heart of their strategy. The discussions and the keynote this morning included futurist Gerd Leonhard, who's going to be on the program with us in just a few minutes. Interesting take on data, humanity, the only thing that NetApp talked about was about 75 minutes minutes into they keynote this morning was when Anthony Lye got on, he's going to be on the show later today, talking about the data fabric. And I think some of the messages that NetApp was wanting to get out is that data fabric is transforming from a vision into an architecture kind of foundationally to enable organizations to employ those four principals of digital transformation that George Kurian talked about. Digital transformation requires IT transformation, speed is the new scale, some interesting thoughts and concepts there, more conceptual. I liked the DreamWorks customer, I think she's a great speaker. Kind of talked also about how DreamWorks, everybody knows DreamWorks, "Shrek", "How to Train your Dragon", are becoming more morphing from a customer to an engineering partner. So that was and interesting kind of, I wouldn't even say undertone, but part of the story today. >> You know, Lisa, absolutely. When you look at traditionally, not only NetApp, but all the storage companies, where they sold to. It was the storage budget, and oh how do I manage with the explosion of data, and that growth and what's the performance, the speeds and feeds, the price per terabyte, all that kind of stuff? I thought we could actually take George Kurian's four characteristics and say, how's NetApp doing? First is digital transformation requires IT transformation. >> (Lisa) Right. >> I heard yesterday in some of the sessions they actually had some of NetApp's IT people talk about how they're leveraging and using new technologies. We talked about speed is the new scale, well how fast is NetApp? We have a number of acquisitions. There was the big SolidFire acquisition which is now fully part of the portfolio. They had a Kubernetes company that they bought recently. They've had management companies that they bought. How fast is NetApp keeping up with the pace of what they're doing? Hybrid multi-cloud, I think NetApp first of all was really what you would call software-defined before that was a thing, and they were very early in jumping on this wave of we need to play in the cloud environment. Most of the storage companies really lined up and was like, oh wait, Amazon's the competition, you can't do that, but NetApp was partnering with Amazon for many years, now I'd like to see more proof points as to what customers are doing, how are they doing it differently. But absolutely we're going to have Microsoft Azure on the program with Anthony Lye, this afternoon. I know we're going to be talking about Amazon, we're going to be talking about Kubernetes and Istio, where does NetApp fit into that environment? I've been going to theCUBE Con shows for a couple years, and storage is actually lagging in that space. When you talk about having persistent data, that's not something we're there with. We spent more than a decade trying to fix storage and networking in the virtualized environments, and NetApp played a strong role in helping on the storage piece there. So it would be great to see how they are going to play into the Kubernetes and issue discussion. And the last piece is they said moving from data center to data fabric. >> Right. >> Which is the closest tie to the products as you said. >> (Lisa) Yes, exactly. >> To what they're doing. >> Well, Stu we have a jam-packed schedule today, all day. We're going to be able to unpack a lot of things from NetApp, execs, to their branding folks, to customers, so Stu and I will be right back with our next guest. Again, theCUBE Live from NetApp Insight 2018. We'll be right back. (music)