(cheerful music) >> Hello. Welcome to this special nutanix.next coverage, theCUBE. We are in our remote studios in Napa today, with some two great guests talking about hybrid multicloud what that costs them. Tanu Sood, who's the senior director of product marketing, attending. Great to see you, and Saveen Pakala, VP of product management for platform at Nutanix. Great to have you on. A lot of cool things happening with hybrid cloud architectures. When people want to have more cloud and want it more invisible, they want it faster, they want it on multiple clouds, AWS, Azure, GCP, and others. So welcome to theCUBE coverage. >> Thanks so much, John. Thanks for having us here. >> Tanu if I start with you first on the, on the, what is driving the hybrid multicloud architecture? Is it just the fact there's clouds out there or are specific things that you're seeing that customers really want that's a need for their business? >> So you're right, John, over the past few years, we've seen cloud investments really taking off. In fact, last year in the midst of the pandemic, when the economy was showing a downturn, cloud spending was up by 30%. So organizations are looking to cloud for speed, for scale, for elasticity and for app modernization. However, the same organizations would also tell you that there are some workloads that will continue to stay on-prem either in the near term or permanently. So what they're really talking about is this hot notion of hybrid cloud, which is interoperability between their on-prem investments, their existing investments, and their public cloud investments. In fact, I would say Gardner in 2020, they did a survey and 75% of organizations actually talked about hybrid cloud being the preferred ID operating model and an overwhelming majority of those 80% who had public cloud in their infrastructure, They had two or more public cloud providers in their space. So that's the multicloud aspect of it. So whether it's happening as a happenstance audit to deliberate ID strategy, what we are seeing organizations take on, is this hybrid multicloud infrastructure. >> It's interesting. It's so funny to see the dynamics of the evolution, cause it's like, oh yeah, we got some thought, I want more cloud. I want more cloud. I want more cloud. Wait a minute. I want to give up the on premises piece. We've got Amazon, we've got- okay, we've got multiple things happening. How do you pull it all together? So Saveen, I got to ask you the blockers. What it is holding back? Because I mean, it's kind of like it happened, right? People replatforming with cloud, they're not giving up their data centers and or the on-premise component. >> Yeah. What's the blocker. Is it inertia? >> Yeah. Is it time? Is it evolution? Is it skills? What's that, what's holding everyone back? >> Yeah, you know, John, over the last several months quarters, what we have seen is that there are four typical issues that sort of come up. When customers start to look at their hybrid multicloud journey, the first one is, how do I move my on-prem applications, workloads to public cloud? Do I need to refactor the applications as I do that? How do I move that application from one cloud to the other and potentially move it back to the data center? And because the other link platform are disparate between these different destinations, it's usually very challenging. The next question then you come up with is Hey, after I move the application to the public cloud, what about management? Right? It, it is going to be different. It has its own island of infrastructure. The management tooling is different, the skillsets required are different, processes are different. So that becomes another challenge. Then comes the service levels. I'm still responsible for all the service levels, from a backup perspective. DR, security, performance that, you know, I was responsible for on-prem. I'm still responsible for those in the public cloud. And then lastly, I would say, you know, customers want to know that their investment is protected, right? As they move the workloads all around, they want to know that the licenses would follow them. They can actually take advantage of the licenses. they've already procured and not have to procure something new just to run the same workload. So those are some of the challenges that we've seen come up. >> I mean, it's always good to chat with you guys because I remember covering Nutanix back in 2010, there was kind of a new thing and everyone got on the same bandwidth and copied the hyperconvergence. And it was very similar on a whole nother level. It seems now there's another inflection point. I want to get your reaction, Tanu. You can, you can weigh in. That'd be great too. And get your reactions. Well, this whole shift from design thinking, which has been great for, for a decade or so to there's a whole other kind of conversation around system thinking and systems thinking is about platforms and it's about outcomes. But now with what you guys are discussing and launching this year, that next, is it's a systems concept. It's distributed computing. This is kind of a new kind of mindset. How do you guys see that evolving in the customer base? And how do you talk about that? Because this is something that is coming up, kind of like that design thinking mantra. It's like systems thinking, think about the impacts. Can you guys weigh in on your reactions to that? >> Oh yeah. So, you know, when you look at the systems level problem, right, it's really that of having the same platform, you know, be available at that multiple locations, wherever you want to run your workloads. That's not the underpin Penang or the foundation, if you will, of your system. And we've done, done just that with clusters, we have basically taken our hyper-converged infrastructure stack plus the hypervisor, plus the management stack, you know, that was running on-prem and we have essentially made it available on the public cloud. Right. So, so that's really the special thing about that is that it's a single infrastructure and single management plane across your private cloud and a public cloud, which really helps organizations to accelerate the hybrid cloud journey. >> And it was the impact for customers could be next, if you have that single layer, it's unify. >> Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, you know, the problems and the challenges that I mentioned earlier, customers will be able to address all of them with, by leveraging something like flustered, sorry, customers will be able to deploy their workloads on private cloud or public cloud without having to, you know, have disparate management models, right. They can have a single, simple and consistent management model between private cloud and public cloud. They are, they will be able to meet the same service levels that they've been able to on-premise, whether it's VR, whether it's backup, whether it's security, whether it's performance and all along knowing that their investment is protected with Nutanix. As you know, we have licensed for affordability of owners, software licenses between private and public cloud. So these are all the benefits that are, that are very real. And, you know, customers really value when they think about overall problem statement, they have a can. >> And what's your reaction to systems mindset, system thinking in terms of customers and other, A list, if you're looking at hybrid cloud. >> Yeah. So John, as you talked about, right, we started from a place of making infrastructure invisible. You just taking a read that complexity of infrastructure. And now we have evolved it to the next level where we are really making clouds invisible. This whole idea of you could be sitting on any cloud, it could be private cloud, it could be any public kind of, multiple public clouds. You don't have to worry about the complexity. There's the software layer, layer that's sitting on top of that. That's really making that underlying layer invisible to you so that you can just get about doing your job. It's all about business outcome at the end of the day. >> By the way, I love the invisible mindset because that's also like, that's what DevOps infrastructure's code was supposed to be; make things invisible, make them programmable. And we got to see serverless and functions coming out. People are really getting excited by the ease of ability to just provision resources. This is a major wave, that's going to have a major impact to enterprises. How has this specifically impacting this hybrid cloud architecture? What do you guys do to make that invisible? Because customers are all like, no, one's deny- denying it's happening. They know like, okay, we know what's happening, like, but they don't know what to do. They're like, how do I start? Who do I hire? What do I change? What do I automate? These are questions. How do you guys see that? >> Yeah, look, I think customers repeatedly tell us that, Hey, ultimately I invest a lot in really making my enterprise IT repeatable, reliable and predictable, right? So after they're invested in the process, the tooling, the people, they want to be able to leverage that regardless of, you know, where the IT direction takes them. When it comes to public cloud, they won't be able to take the same investment that they've made and be able to leverage them and capitalize that on the public cloud. And that's really, you know, the problem statement that we're really focused on. Just making sure that your point to making the infrastructure invisible has to do with, you know, having a platform that hides all the complexity underneath and provides a simple, consistent, you know, framework, if you will, for the applications and the management, the people and the tooling. >> Saveen, tell me about Nutanix clusters. What's that about? What's the value? What's the pitch there, what's it- What's it all about? >> Yeah. In a, in a, in a nutshell, you know, clusters is simply Nutanix software stack delivered on public cloud. Really it's a, it's, it includes our ECI or the POS hyperconverged infrastructure, AHV hypervisor, and prison management plan. And it's the same stack that we have been, that we actually introduced 10 years ago, run by thousands of customers. And they've taken the exact same reliable, big stack. And we had available on the public cloud. And with that, you know, customers get some of those benefits that we talked about earlier. >> And it, talk about the use cases because everyone's talking about day one, day two operations, shift left for security. If I bring that stack into the cloud, what is the use cases that emerge just for the customer? >> Yeah, so John, that definitely some patterns that have emerged with customers you will have with cloud. And in fact, our viewers, won't be surprised to hear that disaster recovery is foremost. A lot of organizations are starting with disaster recovery on public cloud with mechanics clusters. This helps them avoid maintenance and investments in a secondary data center, just purely for disaster recovery, but it also gives some geographical separation and it gives them the regional cloud options so that they can still meet the data residency requirement, which as you know, is very key for especially companies that based in MIA Interestingly, most of these organizations that are looking at disaster recovery in public cloud using Nutanix clusters are also leveraging their investments in clusters and their cloud instances to drive capacity bursting. So using it when Dev desk or seasonal on-demand bursting. So when you're not using it for fail-over, for disaster recovery, the same cloud investments are being optimized for cloud capacity bursting. And then finally this workload migration, right? So either it's for data center consolidation or migration, or for app modernization. Our customers are looking to migrate some of their workloads to the cloud, but they want to do that quickly or in a timely fashion. So the idea is that you migrate them as is without any app refactoring right away with clusters, and then once you're on the cloud, then you can refactor at your own pace. You can modernize some components of your applications on an as needed basis. So those are the three use cases that we are seeing disaster recovery, capacity bursting, workload migration, but then to your point about day one and day two, operations. Day two operations that are really, really key. When you have public cloud investments, private cloud investments, and multiple public clouds in the mix, it could be really complex to have your IT operations in play, right? So this notion that Saveen alluded to earlier of a unified infrastructure and management plane that oversees your public cloud, multiple public cloud and private cloud in infrastructure, as well as provide operations, not just for your VMs, but also for your containers and storage is key for our customers. So, so this whole notion of easing up on day zero and day one operations, but also day two and day end operations is top of mind for our customers. >> That's really well put, I think that, that'll tying that layer, that horizontally scalable control plane, whatever you want to call it, it really creates a lot of value from the blocking and tackling meat and potatoes disaster recovery, to enabling the migration and replatforming, and then refactoring of those apps. I mean, this is the modernization trend. This is what people are talking about. So this is what people want. This, this is hard to do. And seems hard. Maybe it's easier with you guys. What, what's, what's holding it all back? Because these...I'm sold. I mean, I've been preaching this for years. Like this is finally coming at scale, and then, is it, is it multi-cloud that's the bottleneck or is that not yet fleshed out? Is it more, architectures are not ready? The containerization or the state stateful data apps? Aren't the tools aren't there? Can you guys give me a sense of why it's not going faster? Or is it going faster? >> Yeah. So maybe I'll chime in and let Tanu as well. So we, we introduced clusters late last year and we have seen a lot of momentum and a ton of interest from our customer base. And, you know, for the use cases that Tanu just talked about, that's already happening with many customers that are already well on their hybrid multicloud journey. And, you know, ultimately it comes down to just, you know, where the organization is in their journey. And, you know, especially if you're a Nutanix customer, very familiar with the stack, you know, for them taking the next step, taking, you know, with clusters in AWS, it's actually not that big of a jump, right. And, but if you're not on the platform, then you know, you, you know, some of the challenges we discussed earlier are the things that get in the way. >> It's almost like day one operations tend to is like innovation and day, day two operations is rain it in, you know, get the value. >> Yeah. >> Day one, get going and do some experimentation and day two, make it all operate cleanly. >> Exactly. >> You know, oftentimes, you know, we have conversations even in the forest. So second conversation, the topic gravitates towards app refactoring. When you know that there's a much more heavyweight and complex time consuming project. You can actually get to cloud without pre-factoring and do it at your own pace. And, you know, on your own terms, really. >> I think the migration thing is a huge thing. I mean, at that, I see a lot of that. And then once they get to the cloud, they go, Wow, I could do a lot more here. >> Yeah. >> And that just spawns more. It's a step function value there. And then as open source continues to grow, oh my, it's just, it's just a successful and we don't overthink it, just get to the cloud, understand the distributed nature of the on-premise piece. And boom, then go from there, you see that, that accelerated value distraction. >> And as Tanu said earlier, I mean, we are taking a much, much more of a holistic and uplevel view of management in this hybrid multicloud environment, including non Nutanix environments, right? So we're not stopping at just a Nutanix environment. So just to be answer, you're talking about containers, you're talking multicloud, but also talking about non Nutanix environments that you may have and, you know, give you that one sort of, you know, one single plain of glass, if you will. >> It's DevOps happening at the Dev is I've always been there, now, the OS is getting stronger and stronger. Now it's changing too the intelligent edge is around the corner. That's just another edge. That's just another premise in my mind. So again, this flexes with what you guys are thinking about. So I think the edge brings up a lot of action too. Big time. Exciting news. Let's extend this into the news. So you guys have some exciting news. Talk about what's new, what's the big stories what's breaking. What's exciting. What's the top stories coming this year? >> Sure, sure. So since we launched clusters late, late last year on AWS, we have focused on a couple of things. One is expanding the availability, right? So we have added multiple regions. Now the total number of regions, AWS regions that we support is 23. We also recently added support for AWS gov cloud for a US federal customers. And we have FedRAMP moderate authorization. So that's, which is very key for that customer base. We also added some really new and exciting capabilities such as elastic VR. Some of that Tana already mentioned. Hibernate and resumed, which is a very unique capability from clusters where you can hibernate and our clusters and, you know, give up all the betterment in order to compute, but still have your data intact in as three, just so you can resume it very quickly whenever the need arises again. And you know, last but not the least, we are super excited about bringing clusters to Microsoft Azure. This has been a long and strong partnership with Microsoft. And as you heard in the keynote, we are actually starting the preview at this event, and, you know, opening up to the customer so that they can get that firsthand feeling for the product and work with us in bringing the product to GA. >> And John- >> Multicloud world. Oh, sorry. Tanu, go ahead. >> No, so this is exactly what I was going to say. This is multicloud coming to pair, right? So we talked about hybrid cloud and now here we are with multicloud options for you. >> What's interesting is that everyone always, you know, as the trends change, you know, this is changing, that company's shifting and you guys have evolved beautifully. And I think the way people are leveraging cloud really shows their strengths and run the cloud actually highlights the strengths. If you play it properly, you can survive. I mean, look at snowflake. They don't even have a cloud. There are data cloud now. So, you know, if you bring, if customers can bring their, their architecture to the cloud, they can actually do a lot of re, rearchitecting and rechanging to modernizing their business. This is something that's kind of only in the past few years, that's come up. This is quite a big trend. Do you guys see the same thing happening faster or is it just we're inside the ropes? And we love it so much. (laughs) >> Yeah. Like I said, earlier, organizations that are at different levels of the journey, but we're seeing happening all around us. And we're embracing that. We're actually embracing that trend, Enabling that trend because we truly believe hybrid cloud is the more practical reality. And we want customers to have the cloud on their own terms and not feel like they have to, you know do something just because they're forced to, or they're not able to, cost-effectively or even technically for that matter. >> Oh John >> Okay, well- Go ahead, Tanu, sorry. >> I was just going to say that our CEO, Rajiv Ramaswami, puts it really well. The cloud is brilliant operating model, right. So it really should not be about variable workloads. It should just be an easy operational model for you to engage with. >> Yeah. I think you guys have a great strategy. And I think the invisible really rings true with me as well as that horizontally scalable control plane, because the innovation is happening, but the operations have to be reigned in and support the expansion as well. Which means you have to kind of focus on the fact that you've got to reign in the data and you've got to make it invisible. If you look at Lambda functions, and you've got serverless trend booming with the edge, it's got to be invisible and programmable. It just has to be. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> Great stuff. All right. Final question for you both, if you don't mind. Tanu we'll start with you. >> Okay. >> What's the big story this year at .next? If you had to summarize it and tell your friend that you're driving in the elevator up to the top floor, what's the big story that should be talked about? That's being talked about this year at .next? >> Taking unified infrastructure and management and having Azure in preview is really the big news here. So go to nutanix.com/azure, to learn more, show us your interest there, sign up for a test drive. It really is a very easy way for you to experience a product in action. And you'll just see how simple it is to deploy a hybrid cloud with clusters on Azure and under an hour. >> Saveen, final word for you. What's the big news? What's the takeaway? >> Yeah, look, I, I would say that, you know, your cloud on your terms is really the big news. That's driving everything they're doing back in the office billing products and ultimately, you know, delivering or making that whole hybrid cloud journey a reality for our customers. >> Tanu and Saveen, thank you for coming on, sharing that commentary on theCUBE coverage at .next. Thanks for coming up. >> Thanks so much John. Thanks for all. >> It was our pleasure. >> Thanks for watching. More coverage, stay tuned. (cheerful music)