>>mhm. Okay, we're back. I'm John. Fully with the Cuban. We're going to go deeper into a deep dive into unified cloud networking solution from Pluribus and NVIDIA. And we'll examine some of the use cases with Alexandra Barberry, VP of product Management and Pluribus Networks. And Pete Lambasts, the director of technical market and video. Remotely guys, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>I think >>so. Deep dive. Let's get into the what and how Alexandra, we heard earlier about the pluribus and video partnership in the solution you're working together on. What is it? >>Yeah. First, let's talk about the what? What are we really integrating with the NVIDIA Bluefield deep You Technology pluribus says, uh, has been shipping, uh, in volume in multiple mission critical networks. So this adviser, one network operating systems it runs today on merchant silicon switches and effectively, it's a standard based open network computing system for data centre. Um, and the novelty about this operating system is that it integrates a distributed the control plane for Atwater made effective in STN overlay. This automation is completely open and interoperable, and extensible to other type of clouds is nothing closed and this is actually what we're now porting to the NVIDIA GPU. >>Awesome. So how does it integrate into video hardware? And specifically, how is plural is integrating its software within video hardware? >>Yeah, I think we leverage some of the interesting properties of the blue field the GPU hardware, which allows actually to integrate, um, our soft our network operating system in a manner which is completely isolated and independent from the guest operating system. So the first byproduct of this approach is that whatever we do at the network level on the GPU card is completely agnostic to the hyper visor layer or OS layer running on on the host even more. Um, uh, we can also independently manage this network. Note this switch on a nick effectively, uh, managed completely independently from the host. You don't have to go through the network operating system running on X 86 to control this network node. So you truly have the experience effectively of a top of rack for virtual machine or a top of rack for kubernetes spots. Where instead of, uh, um, if you allow me with analogy instead of connecting a server nique directly to a switchboard now you're connecting a VM virtual interface to a virtual interface on the switch on a nick. And also as part of this integration, we, uh, put a lot of effort, a lot of emphasis in accelerating the entire day to play in for networking and security. So we are taking advantage of the DACA, uh, video DACA api to programme the accelerators and this your accomplished two things with that number one, you, uh, have much greater performance, much better performance than running the same network services on an X 86 CPU. And second, this gives you the ability to free up. I would say around 2025% of the server capacity to be devoted either to additional war close to run your cloud applications. Or perhaps you can actually shrink the power footprint and compute footprint of your data centre by 20% if you want to run. The same number of computer work was so great efficiencies in the overall approach. >>And this is completely independent of the server CPU, right? >>Absolutely. There is zero quote from pluribus running on the X 86 this is what why we think this enables a very clean demarcation between computer and network. >>So, Pete, I gotta get I gotta get you in here. We heard that the GPUS enable cleaner separation of devops and net ops. Can you explain why that's important? Because everybody's talking. Def SEC ops, right now you've got Net ops. Net net SEC ops, this separation. Why is this clean separation important? >>Yeah, I think it's, uh, you know, it's a pragmatic solution, in my opinion, Um, you know, we wish the world was all kind of rainbows and unicorns, but it's a little a little messier than that. And I think a lot of the devops stuff in that, uh, mentality and philosophy. There's a natural fit there, right? You have applications running on servers. So you're talking about developers with those applications integrating with the operators of those servers? Well, the network has always been this other thing, and the network operators have always had a very different approach to things than compute operators. And, you know, I think that we we in the networking industry have gotten closer together. But there's still a gap. There's still some distance, and I think in that distance isn't going to be closed and So again it comes down to pragmatism. And I think, you know, one of my favourite phrases is look, good fences make good neighbours. And that's what this is. Yeah, >>it's a great point because devops has become kind of the calling card for cloud. Right? But devops is a simply infrastructure as code infrastructure is networking, right? So if infrastructure as code, you know, you're talking about, you know, that part of the stack under the covers under the hood, if you will. This is super important distinction. And this is where the innovation is. Can you elaborate on how you see that? Because this is really where the action is right now. >>Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where one from from the policy, the security, the zero trust aspect of this right. If you get it wrong on that network side, all of a sudden, you you can totally open up that those capabilities and so security is part of that. But the other part is thinking about this at scale, right. So we're taking one top of rack switch and adding, you know, up to 48 servers per rack, and so that ability to automate orchestrate and manage its scale becomes absolutely critical. >>Alexandra, this is really the why we're talking about here. And this is scale and again getting it right. If you don't get it right, you're gonna be really kind of up. You know what you know. So this is a huge deal. Networking matters. Security matters. Automation matters. DEVOPS. Net ops all coming together. Clean separation. Help us understand how this joint solution within video gets into the pluribus unified cloud networking vision. Because this is what people are talking about and working on right now. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I think here with this solution, we're talking to major problems in cloud networking. One is the operation of cloud networking, and the second is distributing security services in the cloud infrastructure. First, let me talk about first. What are we really unifying? If you really find something, something must be at least fragmented or disjointed. And what is this? Joint is actually the network in the cloud. If you look holistically how networking is deployed in the cloud, you have your physical fabric infrastructure, right? Your switches and routers. You build your I P clause fabric leaf and spine to apologies. this is actually well understood the problem. I would say, um, there are multiple vendors with a similar technologies. Very well, standardised. Very well understood. Um, and almost a commodity, I would say building an I P fabric these days. But this is not the place where you deploy most of your services in the cloud, particularly from a security standpoint. Those services are actually now moved into the compute layer where you actually were called. Builders have to instrument a separate network virtualisation layer, where they deploy segmentation and security closer to the workloads. And this is where the complication arise. This high value part of the cloud network is where you have a plethora of options, that they don't talk to each other, and they are very dependent on the kind of hyper visor or compute solution you choose. Um, for example, the networking API between an SX I environment or and hyper V or a Zen are completely disjointed. You have multiple orchestration layers and when and then when you throw in Also kubernetes in this In this in this type of architecture, uh, you're introducing yet another level of networking, and when you burn it, it runs on top of the M s, which is a prevalent approach. You actually just stuck in multiple networks on the compute layer that they eventually run on the physical fabric infrastructure. Those are all ships in the night effectively, right? They operate as completely disjointed. And we're trying to attack this problem first with the notion of a unified fabric, which is independent from any work clothes. Uh, whether it's this fabric spans on a switch which can become connected to a bare metal workload or can spend all the way inside the deep You where you have your multi hypervisors computer environment. It's one a P I one common network control plane and one common set of segmentation services for the network. That's probably number one. >>You know, it's interesting you I hear you talking. I hear one network different operating models reminds me the old server list days. You know there's still servers, but they called server list. Is there going to be a term network list? Because at the end of the, it should be one network, not multiple operating models. This this is like a problem that you guys are working on. Is that right? I mean, I'm not I'm just joking. Server, Listen, network list. But the idea is it should be one thing. >>Yeah, it's effectively. What we're trying to do is we're trying to recompose this fragmentation in terms of network operations across physical networking and server networking. Server networking is where the majority of the problems are because of the as much as you have standardised the ways of building, uh, physical networks and cloud fabrics with high people articles on the Internet. And you don't have that kind of, uh, sort of, uh, operational efficiency at the server layer. And this is what we're trying to attack first with this technology. The second aspect we're trying to attack is how we distribute the security services throughout the infrastructure more efficiently. Whether it's micro segmentation is a state, full firewall services or even encryption, those are all capabilities enabled by the blue field deep you technology and, uh, we can actually integrate those capabilities directly into the network fabric. Limiting dramatically, at least for is to have traffic, the sprawl of security appliances with a virtual or physical that is typically the way people today segment and secured the traffic in the >>cloud. All kidding aside about network. Listen, Civil is kind of fun. Fun play on words There the network is one thing is basically distributed computing, right? So I love to get your thoughts about this Distributed security with zero trust as the driver for this architecture you guys are doing. Can you share in more detail the depth of why DPU based approach is better than alternatives? >>Yeah, I think. What's what's beautiful and kind of what the deep you brings that's new to this model is completely isolated. Compute environment inside. So you know, it's the yo dog. I heard you like a server, So I put a server inside your server. Uh, and so we provide, you know, arm CPUs, memory and network accelerators inside, and that is completely isolated from the host. So the server, the the actual X 86 host just thinks it has a regular nick in there. But you actually have this full control plane thing. It's just like taking your top of rack, switch and shovel. Get inside of your compute node. And so you have not only the separation, um, within the data plane, but you have this complete control plane separation. So you have this element that the network team can now control and manage. But we're taking all of the functions we used to do at the top of rack Switch, and we distribute them now. And, you know, as time has gone on, we've we've struggled to put more and more and more into that network edge. And the reality is the network edge is the compute layer, not the top of rack switch layer. And so that provides this phenomenal enforcement point for security and policy. And I think outside of today's solutions around virtual firewalls, um, the other option is centralised appliances. And even if you can get one that can scale large enough, the question is, can you afford it? And so what we end up doing is we kind of hope that if aliens good enough or we hope that if you excellent tunnel is good enough, and we can actually apply more advanced techniques there because we can't physically, financially afford that appliance to see all of the traffic, and now that we have a distributed model with this accelerator, we could do it. >>So what's the what's in it for the customer real quick. I think this is an interesting point. You mentioned policy. Everyone in networking those policies just a great thing. And it has. You hear it being talked about up the stack as well. When you start getting to orchestrate microservices and what not all that good stuff going on their containers and whatnot and modern applications. What's the benefit to the customers with this approach? Because what I heard was more scale, more edge deployment, flexibility relative to security policies and application. Enablement. I mean, is that what what's the customer get out of this architecture? What's the enablement? >>It comes down to taking again the capabilities that were that top of rack switch and distracting them down. So that makes simplicity smaller. Blast Radius is for failure, smaller failure domains, maintenance on the networks and the systems become easier. Your ability to integrate across workloads becomes infinitely easier. Um, and again, you know, we always want to kind of separate each one of those layers. So, just as in, say, a Vieques land network, my leaf and spine don't have to be tightly coupled together. I can now do this at a different layer and so you can run a deep You with any networking in the core there. And so you get this extreme flexibility, you can start small. You can scale large. Um, you know, to me that the possibilities are endless. >>It's a great security control Playing really flexibility is key, and and also being situationally aware of any kind of threats or new vectors or whatever is happening in the network. Alexandra, this is huge Upside, right? You've already identified some, uh, successes with some customers on your early field trials. What are they doing? And why are they attracted? The solution? >>Yeah, I think the response from customer has been the most encouraging and exciting for for us to, uh, to sort of continuing work and develop this product. And we have actually learned a lot in the process. Um, we talked to three or two or three cloud providers. We talked to s P um, sort of telco type of networks, uh, as well as enter large enterprise customers. Um, in one particular case, um uh, one, I think. Let me let me call out a couple of examples here just to give you a flavour. There is a service provider, a cloud provider in Asia who is actually managing a cloud where they are offering services based on multiple hypervisors their native services based on Zen. But they also, um, ramp into the cloud workloads based on SX I and N K P M. Depending on what the customer picks from the piece from the menu. And they have the problem of now orchestrating through the orchestrate or integrating with Zen Centre with this fear with open stock to coordinate this multiple environments and in the process to provide security, they actually deploy virtual appliances everywhere, which has a lot of cost complication, and it's up into the service of you the promise that they saw in this technology they call it. Actually, game changing is actually to remove all this complexity, even a single network, and distribute the micro segmentation service directly into the fabric. And overall, they're hoping to get out of it. Tremendous OPEC's benefit and overall operational simplification for the cloud infrastructure. That's one important use case, um, another large enterprise customer, a global enterprise customer is running both Essex I and I purvey in their environment, and they don't have a solution to do micro segmentation consistently across Hypervisors. So again, micro segmentation is a huge driver. Security looks like it's a recurring theme talking to most of these customers and in the telco space. Um, uh, we're working with a few telco customers on the CFT programme, uh, where the main goal is actually to Arman Eyes Network operation. They typically handle all the V NFC with their own homegrown DPD K stock. This is overly complex. It is, frankly, also slow and inefficient. And then they have a physical network to manage the idea of having again one network to coordinate the provisioning of cloud services between the take of the NFC. Uh, the rest of the infrastructure is extremely powerful on top of the offloading capability. After by the blue fill the pews. Those are just some examples. >>There's a great use case, a lot more potential. I see that with the unified cloud networking. Great stuff shout out to you guys that NVIDIA, you've been following your success for a long time and continuing to innovate his cloud scales and pluribus here with unified networking. Kind of bringing the next level great stuff. Great to have you guys on and again, software keeps, uh, driving the innovation again. Networking is just part of it, and it's the key solution. So I got to ask both of you to wrap this up. How can cloud operators who are interested in in this new architecture and solution learn more? Because this is an architectural ship. People are working on this problem. They're trying to think about multiple clouds are trying to think about unification around the network and giving more security more flexibility to their teams. How can people learn more? >>And so, uh, Alexandra and I have a talk at the upcoming NVIDIA GTC conference, so it's the week of March 21st through 24th. Um, you can go and register for free and video dot com slash gtc. Um, you can also watch recorded sessions if you end up watching this on YouTube a little bit after the fact, Um, and we're going to dive a little bit more into the specifics and the details and what we're providing a solution >>as Alexandra. How can people learn more? >>Yeah, so that people can go to the pluribus website www pluribus networks dot com slash e. F t and they can fill up the form and, uh, they will contact Pluribus to either no more or to know more and actually to sign up for the actual early field trial programme. Which starts at the end of it. >>Okay, well, we'll leave it there. Thank you both for joining. Appreciate it up. Next, you're going to hear an independent analyst perspective and review some of the research from the Enterprise Strategy Group E s G. I'm John Ferry with the Cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020. This is theCUBE virtual with VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. It's our 11th year covering VMware. We're not in-person, we're virtual but all the content is flowing. Of course, we're here with Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware who's been on theCUBE, all 11 years. This year virtual of theCUBE as we've been covering VMware from his early days in 2010 when theCUBE started, 11 years later, Pat, it's still changing and still exciting. Great to see you, thanks for taking the time. >> Hey, you guys are great. I love the interactions that we have, the energy, the fun, the intellectual sparring and of course the audiences have loved it now for 11 years, and I look forward to the next 11 that we'll be doing together. >> It's always exciting 'cause we have great conversations, Dave, and I like to drill in and really kind of probe and unpack the content that you're delivering at the keynotes, but also throughout the entire program. It is virtual this year which highlights a lot of the cloud native changes. Just want to get your thoughts on the virtual aspect, VMworld's not in-person, which is one of the best events of the year, everyone loves it, the great community. It's virtual this year but there's a slew of content, what should people take away from this virtual VMworld? >> Well, one aspect of it is that I'm actually excited about is that we're going to be well over 100,000 people which allows us to be bigger, right? You don't have the physical constraints, you also are able to reach places like I've gone to customers and maybe they had 20 people attend in prior years. This year they're having 100. They're able to have much larger teams also like some of the more regulated industries where they can't necessarily send people to events like this, The International Audience. So just being able to spread the audience much more. A digital foundation for an unpredictable world, and man, what an unpredictable world it has been this past year. And then key messages, lots of key products announcements, technology announcements, partnership announcements, and of course in all of the VMworld is that hands-on labs, the interactions that will be delivering a virtual. You come to VMware because the content is so robust and it's being delivered by the world's smartest people. >> Yeah, we've had great conversations over the years and we've talked about hybrid cloud, I think, 2012. A lot of the stuff I look back at a lot of the videos was early on we're picking out all these waves, but there was that moment four years ago or so, maybe even four three, I can't even remember it seems like yesterday. You gave the seminal keynote and you said, this is the way the world's going to happen. And since that keynote, I'll never forget, was in Moscone and since then, you guys have been performing extremely well both on the business front as well as making technology bets and it's paying off. So what's next, you got the cloud, cloud scale, is it Space, is it Cyber? All these things are going on what is next wave that you're watching and what's coming out and what can people extract out of VMworld this year about this next wave? >> Yeah, one of the things I really am excited about and I went to my buddy Jensen, I said, boy, we're doing this work in smart mix we really like to work with you and maybe some things to better generalize the GPU. And Jensen challenged me. Now usually, I'm the one challenging other people with bigger visions. This time Jensen said, "hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. Let's do the entire AI landscape together, and let's make AI a enterprise class works load from the data center to the cloud and to the Edge. And so I'm going to bring all of my AI resources and make VMware and Tanzu the preferred infrastructure to deliver AI at scale. I need you guys to make the GPUs work like first-class citizens in the vSphere environment because I need them to be truly democratized for the enterprise, so that it's not some specialized AI Development Team, it's everybody being able to do that. And then we're going to connect the whole network together in a new and profound way with our Monterey program as well being able to use the Smart NIC, the DPU, as Jensen likes to call it. So now with CPU, GPU and DPU, all being managed through a distributed architecture of VMware. This is exciting, so this is one in particular that I think we are now re-architecting the data center, the cloud and the Edge. And this partnership is really a central point of that. >> Yeah, the NVIDIA thing's huge and I know Dave probably has some questions on that but I asked you a question because a lot of people ask me, is that just a hardware deal? Talking about SmartNICs, you talk about data processing units. It sounds like a motherboard in the cloud, if you will, but it's not just hardware. Can you talk about the aspect of the software piece? Because again, NVIDIA is known for GPUs, we all know that but we're talking about AI here so it's not just hardware. Can you just expand and share what the software aspect of all this is? >> Yeah well, NVIDIA has been investing in their AI stack and it's one of those where I say, this is Edison at work, right? The harder I work, the luckier I get. And NVIDIA was lucky that their architecture worked much better for the AI workload. But it was built on two decades of hard work in building a parallel data center architecture. And they have built a complete software stack for all the major AI workloads running on their platform. All of that is now coming to vSphere and Tanzu, that is a rich software layer across many vertical industries. And we'll talk about a variety of use cases, one of those that we highlight at VMworld is the University, California, San Francisco partnership, UCSF, one of the world's leading research hospitals. Some of the current vaccine use cases as well, the financial use cases for threat detection and trading benefits. It really is about how we bring that rich software stack. This is a decade and a half of work to the VMware platform, so that now every developer and every enterprise can take advantage of this at scale. That's a lot of software. So in many respects, yeah, there's a piece of hardware in here but the software stack is even more important. >> It's so well we're on the sort of NVIDIA, the arm piece. There's really interesting these alternative processing models, and I wonder if you could comment on the implications for AI inferencing at the Edge. It's not just as well processor implications, it's storage, it's networking, it's really a whole new fundamental paradigm, but how are you thinking about that, Pat? >> Yeah, and we've thought about there's three aspects, what we said, three problems that we're solving. One is the developer problem where we said now you develop once, right? And the developer can now say, "hey I want to have this new AI-centric app and I can develop and it can run in the data center on the cloud or at the Edge." Secondly, my Operations Team can be able to operate this just like I do all of my infrastructure, and now it's VMs containers and AI applications. And third, and this is where your question really comes to bear most significantly, is data gravity. Right, these data sets are big. Some of them need to be very low latency as well, they also have regulatory issues. And if I have to move these large regulated data sets to the cloud, boy, maybe I can't do that generally for my Apps or if I have low latency heavy apps at the Edge, huh, I can't pull it back to the cloud or to my data center. And that's where the uniform architecture and aspects of the Monterey Program where I'm able to take advantage of the network and the SmartNICs that are being built, but also being able to fully represent the data gravity issues of AI applications at scale. 'Cause in many cases, I'll need to do the processing, both the learning and the inference at the Edge as well. So that's a key part of our strategy here with NVIDIA and I do think is going to unlock a new class of apps because when you think about AI and containers, what am I using it for? Well, it's the next generation of applications. A lot of those are going to be Edge, 5G-based, so very critical. >> We've got to talk about security now too. I'm going to pivot a little bit here, John, if it's okay. Years ago, you said security is a do-over, you said that on theCUBE, it stuck with us. But there's been a lot of complacency. It's kind of if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but but COVID kind of broke it. And so you see three mega trends, you've got cloud security, you'll see in Z-scaler rocket, you've got Identity Access Management and Octo which I hope there's I think a customer of yours and then you got Endpoint, you're seeing Crowdstrike explode you guys paid 2.7 billion, I think, for Carbon Black, yet Crowdstrike has this huge valuation. That's a mega opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing there? How are you bringing that all together? You've got NSX components, EUC components, you've got sort of security throughout your entire stack. How should we be thinking about that? >> Well, one of the announcements that I am most excited about at VMworld is the release of Carbon Black workload. 'Cause we said we're going to take those carbon black assets and we're going to combine it with workspace one, we're going to build it in NSX, we're going to make it part of Tanzu, and we're going to make it part of vSphere. And Carbon Black workload is literally the vSphere embodiment of Carbon Black in an agent-less way. So now you don't need to insert new agents or anything, it becomes part of the hypervisor itself. Meaning that there's no attack surface available for the bad guys to pursue. But not only is this an exciting new product capability, but we're going to make it free, right? And what I'm announcing at VMworld and everybody who uses vSphere gets Carbon Black workload for free for an unlimited number of VMs for the next six months. And as I said in the keynote, today is a bad day for cyber criminals. This is what intrinsic security is about, making it part of the platform. Don't add anything on, just click the button and start using what's built into vSphere. And we're doing that same thing with what we're doing at the networking layer, this is the last line acquisition. We're going to bring that same workload kind of characteristic into the container, that's why we did the Octarine acquisition, and we're releasing the integration of workspace one with Carbon Black client and that's going to be the differentiator, and by the way, Crowdstrike is doing well, but guess what? So are we, and right both of us are eliminating the rotting dead carcasses of the traditional AV approach. So there's a huge market for both of us to go pursue here. So a lot of great things in security, and as you said, we're just starting to see that shift of the industry occur that I promised last year in theCUBE. >> So it'd be safe to say that you're a cloud native and a security company these days? >> Yeah well, absolutely. And the bigger picture of us is that we're this critical infrastructure layer for the Edge, for the cloud, for the Telco environment and for the data center from every endpoint, every application, every cloud. >> So, Pat, I want to ask you a virtual question we got from the community. I'm going to throw it out to you because a lot of people look at Amazon and the cloud and they say, okay we didn't see it coming, we saw it coming, we saw it scale all the benefits that are coming out of cloud well documented. The question for you is, what's next after cloud? As people start to rethink especially with COVID highlighting and all the scabs out there as people look at their exposed infrastructure and their software, they want to be modern, they want the modern apps. What's next after cloud, what's your vision? >> Well, with respect to cloud, we are taking customers on the multicloud vision, right, where you truly get to say, oh, this workload I want to be able to run it with Azure, with amazon, I need to bring this one on-premise, I want to run that one hosted. I'm not sure where I'm going to run that application, so develop it and then run it at the best place. And that's what we mean by our hybrid multicloud strategy, is being able for customers to really have cloud flexibility and choice. And even as our preferred relationship with Amazon is going super well, we're seeing a real uptick, we're also happy that the Microsoft Azure VMware service is now GA. So there in Marketplace, are Google, Oracle, IBM and Alibaba partnerships, and the much broader set of VMware Cloud partner programs. So the future is multicloud. Furthermore, it's then how do we do that in the Telco network for the 5G build out? The Telco cloud, and how do we do that for the Edge? And I think that might be sort of the granddaddy of all of these because increasingly in a 5G world, we'll be enabling Edge use cases, we'll be pushing AI to the Edge like we talked about earlier in this conversation, we'll be enabling these high bandwidth low latency use cases at the Edge, and we'll see more and more of the smart embodiment smart city, smart street, smart factory, the autonomous driving, all of those need these type of capabilities. >> Okay. >> So there's hybrid and there's multi, you just talked about multi. So hybrid are data, are data partner ETR they do quarterly surveys. We're seeing big uptick in VMware Cloud on AWS, you guys mentioned that in your call. We're also seeing the VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation and the other elements, clearly a big uptick. So how should we think about hybrid? It looks like that's an extension of on-prem maybe not incremental, maybe a share shift, whereas multi looks like it's incremental but today multi is really running on multiple clouds, but a vision toward incremental value. How are you thinking about that? >> Yeah, so clearly, the idea of multi is truly multiple clouds. Am I taking advantage of multiple clouds being my private clouds, my hosted clouds and of course my public cloud partners? We believe everybody will be running a great private cloud, picking a primary public cloud and then a secondary public cloud. Hybrid then is saying, which of those infrastructures are identical, so that I can run them without modifying any aspect of my infrastructure operations or applications? And in today's world where people are wanting to accelerate their move to the cloud, a hybrid cloud is spot-on with their needs. Because if I have to refactor my applications, it's a couple million dollars per app and I'll see you in a couple of years. If I can simply migrate my existing application to the hybrid cloud, what we're consistently seeing is the time is 1/4 and the cost is 1/8 or less. Those are powerful numbers. And if I need to exit a data center, I want to be able to move to a cloud environment to be able to access more of those native cloud services, wow, that's powerful. And that's why for seven years now, we've been preaching that hybrid is the future, it is not a way station to the future. And I believe that more fervently today than when I declared it seven years ago. So we are firmly on that path that we're enabling a multi and hybrid cloud future for all of our customers. >> Yeah, you addressed that like Cube 2013, I remember that interview vividly was not a weigh station I got hammered answered. Thank you, Pat, for clarifying that going back seven years. I love the vision, you always got the right wave, it's always great to talk to you but I got to ask you about these initiatives that you're seeing clearly. Last year, a year and a half ago, Project Pacific came out, almost like a guiding directional vision. It then put some meat on the bone Tanzu and now you guys have that whole cloud native initiative, it's starting to flower up, thousands of flowers are blooming. This year, Project Monterey has announced. Same kind of situation, you're showing out the vision. What are the plans to take that to the next level? And take a minute to explain how Project Monterey, what it means and how you see that filling out. I'm assuming it's going to take the same trajectory as Pacific. >> Yeah, Monterey is a big deal. This is re-architecting the core of vSphere and it really is ripping apart the IO stack from the intrinsic operation of vSphere and the SX itself because in many ways, the IO, we've been always leveraging the NIC and essentially virtual NICs, but we never leverage the resources of the network adapters themselves in any fundamental way. And as you think about SmartNICs, these are powerful resources now where they may have four, eight, 16 even 32 cores running in the SmartNIC itself. So how do I utilize that resource, but it also sits in the right place? In the sense that it is the network traffic cop, it is the place to do security acceleration, it is the place that enables IO bandwidth optimization across increasingly rich applications where the workloads, the data, the latency get more important both in the data center and across data centers, to the cloud and to the Edge. So this re-architecting is a big deal, we announced the three partners, Intel, NVIDIA Mellanox and Pensando that we're working with, and we'll begin the deliveries of this as part of the core vSphere offerings beginning next year. So it's a big re-architecting, these are our key partners, we're excited about the work that we're doing with them and then of course our system partners like Dell and Lenovo who've already come forward and says, "Yeah we're going to to be bringing these to market together with VMware." >> Pat, personal question for you. I want to get your personal take, your career going back to Intel, you've seen it all but the shift is consumer to enterprise and you look at just recently Snowflake IPO, the biggest ever in the history of Wall Street. It's an enterprise data company, and the enterprise is now relevant. The consumer enterprise feels consumery, we talked about consumerization of IT years and years ago. But now more than ever the hottest financial IPO enterprise, you guys are enterprise. You did enterprise at Intel (laughing), you know the enterprise, you're doing it here at VMware. The enterprise is the consumer now with cloud and all this new landscape. What is your view on this because you've seen the waves, have you seen the historical perspective? It was consumer, was the big thing now it's enterprise, what's your take on all this? How do you make sense of it because it's now mainstream, what's your view on this? >> Well, first I do want to say congratulations to my friend, Frank and the extraordinary Snowflake IPO. And by the way they use VMware, so I not only do I feel a sense of ownership 'cause Frank used to work for me for a period of time, but they're also a customer of ours so go Frank, go Snowflake. We're excited about that. But there is this episodic to the industry where for a period of time, it is consumer-driven and CES used to be the hottest ticket in the industry for technology trends. But as you say, it has now shifted to be more business-centric, and I've said this very firmly, for instance, in the case of 5G where I do not see consumer. A faster video or a better Facebook isn't going to be why I buy 5G. It's going to be driven by more business use cases where the latency, the security and the bandwidth will have radically differentiated views of the new applications that will be the case. So we do think that we're in a period of time and I expect that it's probably at least the next five years where business will be the technology drivers in the industry. And then probably, hey there'll be a wave of consumer innovation, and I'll have to get my black turtlenecks out again and start trying to be cool but I've always been more of an enterprise guy so I like the next five to 10 years better. I'm not cool enough to be a consumer guy and maybe my age is now starting to conspire against me as well. >> Hey, Pat I know you got to go but a quick question. So you guys, you gave guidance, pretty good guidance actually. I wonder, have you and Zane come up with a new algorithm to deal with all this uncertainty or is it kind of back to old school gut feel? >> (laughing) Well, I think as we thought about the year, as we came into the year, and obviously, COVID smacked everybody, we laid out a model, we looked at various industry analysts, what we call the Swoosh Model, right? Q2, Q3 and Q4 recovery, Q1 more so, Q2 more so. And basically, we built our own theories behind that, we tested against many analyst perspectives and we had Vs and we had Ws and we had Ls and so on. We picked what we thought was really sort of grounded in the best data that we could, put our own analysis which we have substantial data of our own customers' usage, et cetera and picked the model. And like any model, you put a touch of conservatism against it, and we've been pretty accurate. And I think there's a lot of things we've been able to sort of with good data, good thoughtfulness, take a view and then just consistently manage against it and everything that we said when we did that back in March has sort of proven out incrementally to be more accurate. And some are saying, "Hey things are coming back more quickly" and then, "Oh, we're starting to see the fall numbers climb up a little bit." Hey, we don't think this goes away quickly, there's still a lot of secondary things to get flushed through, the various economies as stimulus starts tailoring off, small businesses are more impacted, and we still don't have a widely deployed vaccine and I don't expect we will have one until second half of next year. Now there's the silver lining to that, as we said, which means that these changes, these faster to the future shifts in how we learn, how we work, how we educate, how we care for, how we worship, how we live, they will get more and more sedimented into the new normal, relying more and more on the digital foundation. And we think ultimately, that has extremely good upsides for us long-term, even as it's very difficult to navigate in the near term. And that's why we are just raving optimists for the long-term benefits of a more and more digital foundation for the future of every industry, every human, every workforce, every hospital, every educator, they are going to become more digital and that's why I think, going back to the last question this is a business-driven cycle, we're well positioned and we're thrilled for all of those who are participating with Vmworld 2020. This is a seminal moment for us and our industry. >> Pat, thank you so much for taking the time. It's an enabling model, it's what platforms are all about, you get that. My final parting question for you is whether you're a VC investing in startups or a large enterprise who's trying to get through COVID with a growth plan for that future. What does a modern app look like, and what does a modern company look like in your view? >> Well, a modern company would be that instead of having a lot of people looking down at infrastructure, the bulk of my IT resources are looking up at building apps, those apps are using modern CICD data pipeline approaches built for a multicloud embodiment, right, and of course VMware is the best partner that you possibly could have. So if you want to be modern cool on the front end, come and talk to us. >> All right, Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware here on theCUBE for VMworld 2020 virtual, here with theCUBE virtual great to see you virtually, Pat, thanks for coming on, thanks for your time. >> Hey, thank you so much, love to see you in person soon enough but this is pretty good. >> Yeah. >> Thank you Dave. Thank you so much. >> Okay, you're watching theCUBE virtual here for VMworld 2020, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante with Pat Gelsinger, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>lie from Copenhagen, Denmark. >>It's the >>Q covering Nutanix dot Next 2019. Brought to you by >>Nutanix. Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Nutanix. Stop! Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting along side of stew minimum. Of course. We're joined by Regime Mirani. He is the CTO clad platforms at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the Cubans. You need >>to be here as usual. >>So you were up on the main stage talking about your guiding force. Your mission to make enterprise computing so reliable, so ubiquitous that it's invisible. >>You don't think about >>it. You don't even get a little No, I mean, look, >>if you look at any successful technology, consumer technology doesn't need to be aware of the details around it, right? I mean, take cars, even because the first introduced you probably had to understand Rick operate. There was how it all works. Remember for water in the radiator. But most people don't know how to do that today. I wouldn't know how to do that today, even though my Utah actually had to do some of those things. Um, that isn't the point. of the cars or self driving. Now the same thing should happen to computing. And we spend way too much time today just doing things that keep the light. Don't nights on. Just imagine infrastructure patching things up, grading them. I really should be something that not what idea is doing i d should be focusing on the business, delivering applications that their customers need and not so much on managing infrastructure. >>Rajiv, that one click Simplicity is so important, yet we know things are becoming even more complicated. Bring us inside a little bit that you know, you've got 14,000 customers. Guess and there's been a major, basically rewrite of a less to be able to be ready for all of the new ash cloud Native envy me obtained, you know, you name it all of these things. How do you balance getting all of this new stuff up with making sure that you keep that simplicity and don't make things for all of your customers while all the jet engines, uh, you know, >>it takes constant effort. It takes a conscious effort to make sure that things are in drifting away from our goal of being simple and to be frank. At times it has and you know, we periodically to audits off all our work floors. Make sure that as simple as you think they are and haven't drifted over time. And occasionally we do find some rail clunkers and have to go back and fix those things. What >>makes it >>different is that we start with a fairly opinionated view on how things should be done. The idea is to make it simple for 99% of the people, while still offering the all that washed options of one person power users would need them and making sure that we understand what 90% 99% of people need. And focusing on that is very important to a lot of customer focus study sort of design reviews, but also this constant going back and you're taking work feel like we m creation like provisioning of'em. When he started, it was pretty simple right then, as we started adding more and more options eyes, this thing going to use a PC I passed through isn't going to use this option. That option suddenly realized that now they're 30 things that people are feeling into provisional we have, most of which nobody cares I care about. So you go back, read I tte keep doing that again and again and again. >>So rich Eve It's one thing when you talk about living on different servers, whether it be super micro underneath or Delhi Emcee Lenovo H p e. It's >>gonna be a >>little bit different if you're talking about where you're going with H p E Green Lake with, you know, the X in AWS that you talk about when I talk to people, you know, it's like, Oh, I'm trying to use terror form and you know, But I have to write it. One way to work with Amazon. I have to write it another way. If it's, you know, azure G C P S o. You know, will Nutanix be able to keep that simplicity and bring, you know, homogeneity to thes dispersed invite? >>Absolutely. So the point is, watch a layer of abstraction right the way we are going to public cloud away we go every server winter out the way of doing things and sigh all if it starts with the hyper wiser and the story of stock and networking with three layers of abstraction. And if you have the same three components everywhere, everything we built on top of that remains exactly the same. Prison was the same on a P S. On the same. Everything looks the same. So higher level constructs like calm and so on don't have to be aware of what the actual substrate is creating a calm blueprint, whether it works on ZAY on AWS or whether Trump's on SX or whether runs on Nutanix H way. The blue blueprint remains exactly the same. Now, if you want to consume more, service is if you want to consume. So this is an Amazon, which are not available on premises. You want to use things like auto scaling groups in Ec2. Sure, you could then create blueprints that our customers we're putting in the substrate. >>So, in terms of this, you said, you start with a very opinionated place of where the customer is well, First of all, it's based on customer feedback and customer surveys. And so where were are you right now in terms of where the customer is? Are you meeting the customer now, or is the customer ahead or what? Where would you describe that? I think it >>depends on what you're looking at. If you're looking at the core products, absolutely, the customers are with us. They were ready to consume. They actually drive a lot of the innovation that we're doing. We're feeding, feeding back changes that we could be doing to make things even simpler on the private cloud side that's getting there. I think we get a lot off feedback on files on on present pro on com on on Flow because those have started getting a lot of adoption in the market, and we do get a lot of feedback on them on. So our newer products that you started a war being more recently, it's a more collaborative process. There were actually working with customers directly understanding their problems on dhe, moving a roadmap forward based on that. So while it's early in terms off adoption in production, the whole process is very collaborative in those situations. So we really are very close to the customers there. >>What are some of the biggest customer problems right now that they're facing what's what's keeping them up at night and therefore keeping you up at night? >>Security is always a big one. Complexity, people skills. All those things are big problems. In fact, one of the biggest things like that was just training enough people to handle all the complexity in a data set. Is the Morrigan removed from that? The more they don't have to focus on that, the easier you make their lives. The other thing is just a lot of time to spend on routine activities which, which acquired disruption to service is right. This is something we've talked about before. Why does it Why does it require a legacy three tier system to have maintenance windows and downtime to do an upgrade? Google our has downtime. Google is never down for maintenance. Doesn't mean they're not already there waiting all the time. So how do we bring that same kind of capabilities on premises that's gonna focus our long power? >>So, Rajiv, when I'm talking to users out there, when they talk about all of the items that are out there that they need to deal with and the routine task automation is something keeps, you know, coming up. So tell us where automation fits into some of the new things that you were talking about today in this week with your customer? >>Yeah, automation >>for us. Waking automation in three steps anything that's automatic better be safe. First of all, safety is paramount. Started security. It has to be simple, and we talked about how calm provides for that. And then you can start adding in this new wave off technologies around artificial intelligence and machine learning. And it's not so much about automation right now. It's all gone to me. It's it's autonomous operations, not just scripts. That due to a task on dhe, that's >>an area >>we invested in very heavily early on with our prison pro product way, build our own patented or thumbs for machine learning applied them to operational metrics like capacity planning. And what if modeling and dynamic alerts and what we've been doing with that is extending that more into the application layer so that not only can you apply these algorithms to CP when memory, we can actually get insights into Hey, the Leighton see on this particular application looks somewhat unusual, or the amount of cash available on a sequel server is unusually low and act on those, and the other part is acting on on alert. Something happens. There's a human being need to get in wall to solve for that. And if it does, then well, it's not really automatic. Right? So that's the other part that we introduce, which is a cross for a product which lets you define these action chains that automatically, uh, what about to be triggered when Annie went on alert takes place, they can go ahead and fix the problem. But also, you know, simple things like send your slack notification or an email locked. They went, maybe create a snapshot of your wee am so that you could go back and be back problems later. All that sort of thing made really, really simple. >>Yes, it goes back to the simplicity and the invisibility to this. >>Yes, yes. Uh, autonomous data centers, by definition, have to be invisible, right? If if if If you're to get involved in marriage and autonomous Data center, then what's the plane? It's a point. Exactly. So the whole idea is that, uh, human involvement in day to day operations against solo that everybody's focused on applications on line of business use cases. >>Rajiv, when it when it comes to those applications. You know, you talked about some of the new enhancements like envy me on and obtain, You know, Where are your customers today? You know, Are there any interesting applications that you're seeing them deploying today? Ah, Pattern. I've talked about the last couple of years of the Nutanix show, is modernized the platform and then modernized the absolute top of it. Things like container ization. I'm sure to bell curve in a journey where all the customers But you know, what are some of the patterns that air starting emergen where they finding success? >>Yeah, This >>whole wave off new applications around data pipelines with Kafka spark things like that Apache stack effectively which are putting more more off load on storage in particular. So that's that's one area. We see customers looking for more performance. But >>even, >>you know, some of the traditional ah traditional uh, applications like ASAP Hana and epic and meditate expanse. They also have patterns which can benefit greatly with some of that wants wants that we have been making and gets a technical issue. No, The size of the working said with it all fits and car and on sst was spitting on magnetic drives. But something like we've been doing is moving the overheads. If you do have a miss and you go to slow a media, you still get good performance. And that's really how we're getting good to the new. >>Well, yeah, maybe without getting, you know, we don't need to go drill down into the core of the intel chip everything. But you know, Nutanix doesn't just take off the shelf stuff and, you know, put a box together. It's software, and there's work that happens with your partners in the ecosystem. Give us a little flavor as toe. You know where you're making the investments and where some of those partnerships and integrations or a key? >>Yeah, So on the platform side, Ah, a lot of the investments happen in validation of the platforms, making sure that we're ahead of the curve in adopting technologies but also feeding back from our side things we would like to see in the platform. Right? So how do you adapt things like R d m A. To handle not just the traditional work with the happy converge workload? How do you essentially look for things in this new class? of memories that would benefit from data locality for us. So that's one class off partnership that we have the hardware vendors with GHB, with Intel, with the IBM, a whole bunch of people. But >>then >>we also have partnerships up the stock these days with companies like service. Now, with we for backup for for our mind product. I think you saw a little bit of that today. It's a whole bunch of things happening across all areas. >>One of the things that it really comes across at this conference is just how strong Nutanix culture is. The company culture, the humble, honest, hungry and another word that's creeping in now is resilient. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your division of the company and describe how the company's resilience, the employees and the company itself has really displayed itself. >>So, you know, as it any company you know, Any time you go through the kind of growth we have, there's the forward momentum that everybody sees. They also a lot of setbacks that people don't really see, and they've been a whole bunch of us off these in our history. They've been areas where literally. The product has has a floor which is so fundamental we call it internally a near death experience. What's really great until again, from an engineering point of yours, how the teams come together at that point instead of these war rooms, even working weekends, Everybody's there. Everybody's on it and nobody talks about. Hey, look, where's my work? Life? Balance of things like that, especially when they're the customer in world. If there's if there's a problem that's causing customers outages, our engineers will give up everything. They'll give up everything and not just at work with their lives to make sure that gets fixed. And that has helped us get Basti setbacks get back in stride. Happens last Now. It used to happen a lot earlier, but spill this real culture resilience from the big *** in the early engineers. >>All right, Rajiv, what's exciting? You going forward? You know you don't have to touch on this one. But you know, when I saw at the end, the site clusters and hibernate feature was something that was like, Oh, yeah. I don't think I've seen that as to how I could make sure I save my data be ableto, you know, Shut things down. Maybe start there. But give us You know what a little bit. Look forward as to where the team's playing. >>Now, that's kind of, >>you know, thinking that detail thing that you have to do. What, you want to launch a new product, right? Okay, look, the whole point of doing doings, I clusters on Amazon. One of the biggest use cases. This cloud bursting cloud busting is not just about increasing your workload size, scaling it up at some point, you want to scale it down? How do you do that for state for work? Stateless. It's easy. All I'm registering Web servers over that sort of my way, they're gone. But our database that I scaled out over there well, that data can't go away. So we had to find ways to essentially solve for those from. So that's how the hibernate feature came around in general, The bigger question that you asked about, You know what I'm most excited about? I >>think this >>whole convergence of private and public cloud with same stack on both sides is a new new tank. It really hasn't existed before. Um, the father applications can now move back and forth seamlessly between public cloud and private cloud without rewriting without re factoring without a big lift and shift is very, very interesting. But by itself, it's not enough. Um, the flip that's missing is what about data movement? What about if you have your data and Amazon and I want to move it on premises? That there really are no good solutions of the Amazon doesn't give you a P eyes on dhe the tools to do that. So I think data movement's gonna be a big thing. And then Billy, a common service's tack on board because it's not just networking, storage in and compute anymore, right? If you're an Amazon, you're probably using all kinds off. Networking service is security groups. Ah, Route 53. How do you take those kind of service is and also make them available on premises. >>So, Rajiv, is there anything you've learned as a team when you look at AWS outposts or Oracle clouded customer, we've had a few years of talking about, but not a lot of deployments yet, so, you know, not saying you're late to the market, but you know what would have been able to sit back and learn from what has been done so far. >>So the >>reason we >>a little bit late to the market is that we think of solving a problem which the other windows are not, Which is kind of what I alluded to before that is that how do you support both the legacy applications on the cloud Net Cloud applications? How do you provide for migration both ways? Applications of a born in the cloud and now you want to move them on premises or applications of a born on premises and you want to move them to the Cloud Outpost is great. I think it's a good good product of technologies that AWS are thinks that hybrid is the right strategy, but it's also one problem. It's also the problem off cloud applications running on premises it does not solve for the problem of legacy applications running and cloud right, that is just a cz difficult as ever. That's that's not become any easier without force. Similarly, if you look at what we are very swing with AWS, it's also legacy applications going going to AWS. But in doing so, they don't have access to all the different networking services that AWS offers because you're not running and a sex, and you're kind of running a different networking start tonight. So with well, thought long and hard about this problem. And I said, Hey, look, we're not going to take the easy answer over here. You can take Take our stock, which is known to run both legacy and cloud native applications. If probe in that on Internet natively into Amazon so that you can use Amazon service is you can use our service is you can a legacy. Applications can run more than applications without giving up. Anything on that, I think is why signal this longer? But I think it's a more powerful solution for the long term. >>Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It's always a pleasure having you on my back and see us again. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for stew. Minutemen stay more of the cubes. Live coverage of dot Next Nutanix here in Copenhagen,

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to two cubes. Live coverage in San Francisco, California for VM World 2019. I'm John Ferrier, Postal Cuba David Lattin, My Coast, Dave. 10 years covering the BM World Paul Maritz laid out the stack early on. We saw that and watch it go through Its motions now >> remain from the marketing people got a hold of >> that mainframe turned into cloud Now hybrid cloud seven years after we first started about 2012 has been great Our next guest, Paul Falsone, S V. P and general manager of the Cloud Native APS. This is a business unit within VM where that is going to the next level. This is the Act three is Jerry Chen said any of you I talked earlier for VM wears a company. I won't say moving up the staff because there is no stack. It's cloud, right? So its applications on top of operating infrastructure Dev ops going enterprise scale is about developers building APS operating them in scale. This is a big focus of what you're doing. >> It is a dead end of the day. One of my close friend of mine, who's in front of customers all the time, reminds our team constantly that our customers applications matter of the most cause. That's what they used to get in front of their customers with the Dillman teams and the tools they're building the user. Japs come second cause that's what supports the abs. And then the infrastructure comes third zone away. There is that stacks it, but never forget you were at the bottom of the pecking order, if you will, when it comes to ultimately bringing full customer value to our company, our customers, businesses. >> And it's one of the things we've been looking back at our 10 years covering VM where I think you're 13 15 of'em world is that the virtual ization of all very quickly around really optimizing server virtualization really kind of change. The game of one kind of knows that our knows the history there, but it did it without any code changes, too, APs and I think that was a very innovative thing. Now we looking containers and what Kubernetes is bringing to the table. You're starting to get some clear visibility into what's happening and what's possible. Could >> you >> share your vision on what that visibility is that you guys are eyeing for the marketplace in four of'em, where, >> sure, the APP development methodologies are changing, changing more today than they have in the last 20 years. We're seeing ah lot of new concepts and approaches that right now really only accessible to a small percentage of application developers worldwide. We want to try to bring those application development methodologies, practices tools to the mainstream so we can. We can touch the 13 or $14 million.1,000,000 enterprise developers around the world and help the CEOs in their line of business counterparts at our customers get a CZ much productivity out of their development teams as possible. At the end of the day, those APS we're gonna power the next decade of those organizations success or failures with their customers, and so that's becoming a real competitive asset. I've had a number of customer discussions here this week where the primary theme is how me help my developers move faster at enterprise scale, but in a regulated environment in an environment where compliance is is front center >> to big things going on in your world that we covered extensively, honestly, pretty impactful to the Vienna, where portfolio one as open source and hefty oh, acquisition half a billion dollars almost a year ago, about a year left in less than a year, probably was that we close in December last year. So yes, ovary. Just recently we know those guys all people. I mean, I've been covering that for a while, and then I'll see the pivotal acquisition. Just announced a drink from the fire hose. There be doing tons of press briefings, those to impact points, kind of leaving a mark. >> So we've been we've been building up to this. I joined AA Drink them were in 2012 through the Sierra acquisition, but I moved into this role about just about three years ago, and one of the things that we identified early on was, ah, close partnership with Pivotal was going to be essential inside of the Del Technologies umbrella for us to exist in thrive together. And so that's where the idea for P Cass was born. So the combination of V. M. R. R and D with pivotal RND focused on delivering our first community service to our enterprise. Customers we brought helped you in last year. Once they saw what we were doing and thought about the possibility of what would happen if we actually took some of the concepts of communities and p ks and embed them into V sphere, That was, I think, the real ah ha moment for for us and the happier team coming together in the power of what that could enable. But all along the way, we always believed that that was just covering the infrastructure side of the equation. You still needed to get through the making the APP developers productive and efficient in this new infrastructure world and so on to be able to do so on any cloud. And that's where the pivotal piece finally came together last just last month. July Pivotal put out a lot of information in the market around how they're evolving their portfolio to be very cool, bernetti centric, moving forward. And that was a big part about getting all the pieces lined up so that the M word could deliver what we announced this week. The in the town's a portfolio with the component tree for building running in managing modern applications on any club, >> we've kind of come full circle here, predates, and I Sarah, But you guys talking about the stack? Yeah. Paul Moretz. I used to have the whole stack. Ed actually applications up here with Simba. Spring sources around. Exactly. And then you had these when I used to call the misfit toys. Have you had some assets in the M. C as coming in Vienna, where Paul Maritz, Joe Tucci decided, create pivotal as the The platform developed next generation applications. Now it's all come full circle there. So my question is related to that stack and particularly the death part of that stack. This audience is not Deb's not, but increasingly, you've gotta attract that audience. So what's what's your thoughts there? And so >> I think pivotals done a very nice job over the years through the Con Foundry Foundation. The work they've done there through the spring community Spring is at this stage is is arguably the most popular modern Java development environment on the planet. So, you know, we're seeing a tremendous amount of leverage of that of that framework and so between the events of pimples is actively involved in Leeds and their ability to help customers, um teach their enterprise developers how to get the most out of this modern tool kit. We think that there is some wonderful ingredients to a recipe to really scale this thing up in a big way. We way. I also believe that Veum we're still has a lot to learn about what it means to best support enterprise developers and their organizations. And so we are quite a bit in learning mode right now. We're gonna take a lot of lessons from the pivotal team as we as we move forward towards the close and learn a lot more about the team in the culture and their customer engagements. But one of the things I think is is front and center to what pivotal has for customers today is their transformation Service's customers. You've got different groups inside a customer summer looking to build the newest applications. Some of them are just trying to get more operational efficiency out of what they have today. Some of these customers have 12,000 applications in their environments. Um, pivotal has ah set of service is that come in and they help them take their existing monolithic applications and just modernize key components of them so they can operate them more efficiently and reclaim a lot of resources to go do other things. That, I think is probably the lowest hanging fruit for enterprise organizations today. And I'm very, very excited about the service is that pimple has to make available the customers on that front. >> Assad and Jerry Chen, earlier than the other set I was mentioning earlier is a VC now, Greylock, big time to your one. We see former VM Where, uh, guy from 22,003. He also worked on cloud foundries in sight. We ask about the white spaces where starts to thrive in one of the transit is kind of pointing to was have some cummings going public. Some are being bought at sizable numbers, but we rift on. The idea of monitoring was a boring category right now. Observe ability, which is just be monitoring 2.0, you got I pose. You got acquisitions. I mean, major action happening in this observe ability space. I bring this up because that's an area you think, Oh, it's a white space Data opportunities for companies to build service is really points to this cloud. 2.0 application Renaissance And I want to get your thoughts on that environment. What needs to be in place to make that happen? Honestly, pivotals keep for you guys. I get that on Vienna. Where side, but for the ecosystem and for the marketplace, people trying to make careers and or do things What is that cloud 2.0, complexity that need to be abstracted away or >> so The Pepto team had a great Craig and Joe had this great, uh, one liner on kubernetes is all about where the people structure meets the infrastructure. When you think about that, our enterprise organizations have thousands if not tens of thousands of developers all trying to do similar. But a lot of cases different things at the same time, across lots of different cloud infrastructures. On the infrastructure team side, you've got private cloud, you've got hybrid cloud. You've got public cloud environments that you have to get your arms around, monitor, manage, secure and get visibility into. We believe that Carini sits at that perfect layer between the two domains on. This is a big part of why we developed Tom's a mission control. It's just that that perfect layer between the two domains, too, access the company's later and give you full visibility into what all of your developers were doing on every piece of your infrastructure. And we also think that's gonna be a very interesting place for third parties to plug into to gain access to all of the community's clusters that we're helping. Our customers managed across their app landscape to do very interesting things. And so we're really excited about the ecosystem that that project will open up. >> You think this opportunity to start ups in there? >> I do. I do. I think there's a ton of other I mean, think about it just really basic math. Ah, VM based application. When it gets containerized, it has just on the compute side alone. Never mind the networking in the storage site. There are 10 times as many moving parts. A typical containerized EPA's 10 times as many moving parts as avian bay Step. If you think about that applied to the networking layer, you think about that applied to the storage layer, the security layer. You've got 10 times as many points to secure. Now, how do you get your head around that level of complexity As a an operations person, you can't do it. Humans can't do it anywhere. You can't write down your actions. Control this on a pad of paper and know what's what's accessing what anymore, >> Dave. One more question, if I may, on the on the VM container thing, there's a debate or are architectural kind of conversation, and customers are having around when to do containers in three days on bare metal or with V EMS. How do you guys talk to that house? The >> steam going because that was my question. So there was a snarky tweets yesterday. I want to get your reaction to it. And the tweet was during yesterday's keynote. I thought we we launched pivotal so that we didn't have to run containers on V EMS. Now the reality to your point is that people are running containers on bare metal. They're running him on vehement the EMS. I don't have any data, but I wonder if you could comment on that >> so way Probably have a couple of snarky comments of our own on this three share one of the things that put up on stage. Yes, I'll start at the kind of a little little. And I worked my way up at the base layer. The testing we're doing with Project Pacific, which is something we announced this week, which is effectively bringing kubernetes into the heart of the sphere. We're actually using combinations to make the sphere better. We're also going to expose communities to our customers through V sphere, just like we exposed the EMS today. This is a pretty exciting project for the for the company in our early testing of this project, based on the advanced scheduling capabilities of the SX hyper visor take advantage of modern hardware. We're seeing an 8% better performance in a certain test sweet versus what you'd see on bare metal so are ready at the early stages. We're seeing some benefits now take that a step further. The big public college for writers out there if you look at service is like G K on Google. If you look at a ks, uh, recast on Amazon, a cast on his door, every single one of their community service is is run against a virtualized environment, not on a bare metal environment. Why is that? Well, because their customers are using containers in VM, side by side, the flexibility you get out of that virtualization layer. Whether you're a big public cloud provider or your ah smaller enterprise shop running your own data centers, the benefits are proportionate, rather equal on dso >> the narratives off a little bit. What you're saying. What I hear you saying is people use virtualization for a lot of efficiency and scale reasons that's independent of what happens with bearnaise decisions. So if you decide you want to run Cubans on bare metal, go >> to go to town. We think >> if you want to do that, >> you want to do that. But we don't. We actually see a lot of customers who have started down that path. When they go to get to that operational stage, they're realizing they're now dealing with firm where again, they're dealing with Nick drivers again. They're dealing with stuff, and they can easily take that and turn it over to their ops team that's already managing a huge virtualized state and operated with the same tool. >> That's a really a layer thing around round scale. You do the virtual ization for Ryan reasons, and then cos sits on top of it for a whole another reason. >> And the I'd say its operations scale these operations teams need to, you know, just look at the number of announcements we made this week. For an ops team to get their head around all of these new technologies simultaneously is impossible to bring them in one new capability of time into the thing that they're already operating for. That organization is very >> positive. If I understood yesterday, you're claiming better before 8% better performance relative to bare metal. I know that's apples to apples. Or what kind of juicing you're doing on the benchmark >> sex schedule that it chooses it right there. >> I want to ask you about integration and look at it as a quasi. His story of the the industry. You go back to see A with all the acquisitions, right? Historical force it with fusion. Different layer of the stack. I know. Certainly Del did a lot of acquisitions. Some of them work. Some of them didn t m c. Same thing pretty successful. Actually. VM were great engineering. Um, very strong. Go to market on really good acquisitions. My question is on integration with the nice Sarah background, I wonder. I mean, nice. Sarah seems to be very well integrated into the VM. Where platform How is integration The state of integration today within V. M. Where is it a lot easier today because we're living in this AP I economy. What about VM? Wears sort of integration ethos. One of the challenges. I wonder if you could comment and that long. So >> I've been through, uh, to significant integrations of'em where the 1st 1 was with this nice era on. I was on the I was on the incoming side, not the receiving side. The next was with hep Theo. I was on the receiving side, not the incoming side. And so, as coming into this year, back in 2012 Pat was extremely supportive and asked his entire team to be very supportive of getting us integrated quickly and productive. A CZ fastest possible. We were on campus on the via more campus from the next era office within days of the deal closing. That's how efficient Veum work. That's like that's the mindset hammerhead coming into. We were in a building. We were co located with the other networking engineers and product managers. Within the first week on, we were off to the races. That was about 100 20 person company. Hep Ko is about 100% company, Um, about the same efficiency we were consolidating. Offices were bringing them over again, mostly distributed team, but they had a center of gravity. In Seattle. We had a center of gravity in Bellevue. We brought the team's over within within a couple of months in about three months. In three and 1/2 months in, we had the team fully integrated. The organizational design done all the tools in a greater we're all in the same systems. So what happens very quickly now, an organization that's much bigger like like pivotal 3000 employees. Public company takes a little bit longer to get from Deal announced the deal close because it's too public entities. It'll take a little bit longer to do all the integration, but we're already thinking thinking about we know them so well and they know us so well. We already know where the potential landmines are, where the potential rough spots are. Pat prides himself and, uh, this pushes down into the rest of them were on well, welcoming new team members in new groups into the company. And so we try to do that really were very culturally sensitive way optimized for the right tool kit s O that we take, we take some learning like cloud health. When they came in, they had a lot of expertise around. SAS drooling and support of customers were adopting all of that, right. Were jettisoned some of our older tools in favor of some of the things that >> we're gonna win the modernization. So I want to get your thoughts on the last question for the second congratulations, your your your area. We love what you're doing. We think it's super important. Would be covering it like a blanket this year and going forward. But Pakistan came on was wrapped. Talking about 10 years and doing the riffing on the Cube are 10 years covering it. We have some 10 years forward, which waves to be on. They highlighted on the past 10 years in this ear acquisition as a critical moment to bring VM. We're into the S T D C kind of concept started networking up, so we know the history they're sti n and then going forward, he says. If you're not a networking and security in the next wave and Kubernetes is Number one, you're really gonna be missing out. So we highlighted networking, security and kubernetes. But networking. It's nice here on both sides of that 10 year spectrum. You're part of that. >> Why is that? Why is that wise >> watching people know that networking is the most important piece of the wave here? What's the relevance of what he's saying? Share their thoughts on >> Think about the increasing complexity of what at modernization drives into the infrastructure. You're getting smaller and smaller moving parts that that need to operate together at scale in a comprehensive, logical way. But at any point in time, if you're if you're an enterprise organization, if you've got if you've got compliance requirements, audit ability, requirements. If you want to protect, you hear about the number of of small towns that get blackmailed on a daily basis because someone's secured an encrypted There, there, there count taxpayer data and they're there, their victims. All right, this is this >> is some say, cyber warfare. >> It is something. So if you think about in orderto help, our customers get the most out of their developers, these tools that open up I think the potential of a lot more avenues of attack get a lot more complex. And so we think that these two have to progress hand in hand. One. We do want to help developers go as fast as possible. We won't help enterprises get the most out of those developers. That's a big part of why we brought them were into into the damn warfare. We're bringing a pivotal into the VM. We're family, but at the same time, we recognize that the infrastructure has to progress. Every bit is fast, and the network is the thing that ties all these parts together. Whether it's a layer three year layer for networking today or level layer several networking layer seven AP I based networking in the future >> all. I mean, I'm not gonna bring up I ot or industrial i ot to takeovers of physical devices, whether it's a self driving bus off a cliff or taking over towns and cities warfare, I mean the service areas of enormous networks, Internet connectivity applications over the cloud native. Anyway, we know that, right? So a lot to talk about. Thanks for coming on. The Cube Sharing your insight. Senior Vice President, General manager, The Cloud Native APS Group. This is really the key instrument with envy em where to take kubernetes and the advancement of cloud to 0.0 to the next level. I'm John for a day. Volante, be back after this short break.

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with Dave Vellante as well, Stu Miniman, who's been doing interviews with us all week, our next guest is Roland Acra, Senior Vice President, General Manager of the Data Center Group. He's in charge of that core business of data center now, at the center of cloud and the edge. Roland, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> So a lot of announcements, a lot of the big guns are out there for Cisco, you got the data center, you got the networking group, and you got IoT, and then cloud center suite was part of the big announcement, your team had a big piece of the keynote yesterday and continues to make waves. Give us a quick update on the news, the key points, what was the announcements? >> Yeah, the two big announcements for my group were ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex Anywhere, and we captured them under a common moniker of There's Nothing Centered About the Data Center Anymore, because both of these speak to things going outside the data center. ACI Anywhere is the integration of ACI, our software-defined networking solution, into two of the most prominent public cloud providers out there, Amazon and Azure, and for HyperFlex Anywhere, the exciting news is the expansion of HyperFlex, which is our hyper-converged solution, also outside the data center, to the edge of the enterprise, specifically branch offices and remote locations. >> And the other thing that came out of our conversation here on theCUBE and also on the keynote, is that the center of the value is the data center, as you guys pointed out with the slides, big circle in the middle, ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, but the network and the data and the security foundation has been a critical part of this new growth. >> Yes. >> Take a minute to explain the journey of ACI, how it started, where are we? It's been a progression for you guys, certainly inside the enterprise, but now it's extended. What's the journey, take us through that. >> When ACI came into the market five years ago now, we have a five year anniversary, ACI brought a software-defined networking solution into the market. It brought an automated network fabric capability, which said you can no longer screw yourself up by having incoherence between one part of the network and another, it's all managed coherently as one thing, and it brought, to your point about security, what's called segmentation of applications. Today, applications have data, they have databases, they have different sensitive pieces, and it's important to be able to tell the network not only get the traffic from one place to the other, but also selectively get the traffic that I tell you to get there, and not the one, and don't get the traffic that has no business getting there, and that's known as segmentation, which is a security concern, particularly when you have sensitive data like consumer data or things that have regulatory things around them. ACI has brought that to the market. That was the value proposition of ACI. We worked on then expanding ACI in the direction of scale. Customers have two or more data centers for disaster recovery, for resiliency, we made that possible. We got to bigger and bigger footprints. Then we took ACI to the edge of the enterprise. What if somebody wanted to put some computing capability in a store, or in a logistics center. ACI then was expanded with that. Step N minus one, was we took ACI to bare metal clouds. Customers now want to deploy also things in co-locations or bare metal clouds. We decoupled ACI software from the Cisco switches, which is the ACI hardware, and ACI became completely virtualized, and still able to be doing everything it does in hardware on premise, in software instead, in somebody's else's capability. And yesterday we announced the full combination of this, which is what if you don't want the ACI soft switching or hard switching, can you use the native switching of a public cloud, like Azure or AWS, and you tell the other APIs, please let those packets go from A to B because they're part of the whitelisted paths,, and don't let packets from C to D go because they're part of the blacklisted paths. And that was the full integration with these clouds-- >> Can you abstract that complexity? >> Completely, completely. One orchestrator, which is the multi-site orchestrator, the same one people have used on premise, that they've developed their policies around, so that we have invested a lot of sweat equity in that controller, it's where also they put their compliance, verification, and audit and assurance, and they use that thing even when something goes to Azure or it goes to AWS. >> So you mentioned the progression. So it's now your full progression, from core to the cloud, including edge-- >> Going through edge. >> What has been some of the results? You mentioned that segmentation's one of 'em, I get that. How has ACI been used, what are some highlights that show the value, because people start looking at ACI, saying, hmm, I like this, I like scale, I have a scale challenge with the new cloud world and edge, and complexity's abstracted away with software, okay, check, so far, so good. Where has been the success of ACI and how do you see that unfolding specifically in the cloud? >> Yeah, the biggest value our customers have gotten, cloud or no cloud, has been with ACI, they've been able to shorten the speed of change, shorten the time for change, therefore increase the speed of change of their network, because now the network needs to operate at the speed of the applications. Applications reconfigure themselves sometimes on hourly or daily basis, and it used to be that changing something in the network, you sent a ticket to somebody who took weeks to reconfigure things. Now that software-defined capability means the network reconfigures and people can change generations of compute on the fly, and the network is in lockstep with that. The agility and speed has been great. The other value has been the value of automation, which is people can run a bigger and bigger and bigger network with a small number of people. You don't have to scale your people the more switches you have. Again, because programming and automation comes to the rescue with that. >> Well I'll tell you, people who are watching right now can look behind Roland and see that it's a packed house. We're in the dev net zone, which has been the massively growing organization within Cisco. Community's been growing very fast, people are developing on top of the networks, and these are network folks, and as well there's new talent coming in. So skill gap is shortening, so you're getting a different makeup for a Cisco user, your customers are changing and changing, growing, existing base plus new people. Talk about that dynamic about how that impacts this intent-based networking, this notion of policy software is defined. >> Yes, you it's you know what many people have been calling infrastructure as code, which is you go from scripting to actually coding and composing very sophisticated automation capabilities and change management capabilities, for an automatable system, which is what ACI is. It's made for people drawing on the strengths that they were doing in the application domain or in the server domain, and bringing that into the network. And that's a new and exciting thing, it brought the network within the purview of coders, people who know how to do Python and know how to do Go language and things which are modern and exciting for the younger generation. It's made also for bringing the analytical capabilities, you know, a lot of what those young coders are used to is a lot of logs, a lot of visibility, a lot of analytics running on, because they've done that on web servers, they've done that on applications that run in the cloud, and we now offer the network, which is very rich in data. If you think about, we see every packet, we see every flow, we see every pattern of how the traffic is changing, and that becomes a data set that is subject to programming because then from there you can extract anomaly detection, you can extract security signatures of malware, you can extract prediction of where the traffic is going to be going in six months. There's a lot of exciting potential from the telemetry and the visibility that we bring into that framework. >> And as you point out, devs love that. I mean Cisco, we've talked about this, is one of the few large established companies that has, in our view, figured out developers, right? There's a lot of examples of those companies that haven't and continue to struggle, we've just witnessed here the dev crowd. I want to ask you about ACI and how it's different from, for example, VMware NSX. What's the differentiation there? >> The biggest differentiation is ACI is one system through which you manage the entire network, the overlay which is the virtual view of the network that the applications care about, as well as the underlay, which is the actual real delivery system that makes the packets get from A to B with quality of service and so forth. So that's first thing. It actually does a lot more, it has much more scope than NSX does. The other thing that's very unique about ACI is we have integrated it with every hypervisor on the planet and every container management framework on the planet, and ever bare metal system on the planet, which means that any workload, something sitting on a mainframe, something sitting on a Sun Oracle server, something on OpenStack on OpenShift, on VMware or on Hyper-V, and now on the EC2 APIs of AWS or on Azure, all of those are integrated with ACI. We're not wedded to one hypervisor, and our cloud implementation that we announced yesterday is a true integrated cloud capability, it's not a bring your own license and go put it on bare metal at AWS, which has been VMware's cloud strategy is to team up with AWS and let customers bring their software licenses into AWS bare metal. That's not EC2. And of course that's not Azure and that's not the other clouds we're going to be doing. So the openness to being multi-cloud on premise, which means every hypervisor and every container framework, and bare metal, with one system. We're extending that into the cloud to give customers choice and openness, that's really a very fundamental philosophy in networks. >> So much wider scope. That's kind of always been Cisco's philosophy in partnership. When you think about HyperFlex going back 10 years when you guys sort of created that with partners and then multiple partners now, maybe talk about that journey a little bit. >> HyperFlex? >> Yes. >> Yeah, 'cause hyperconvergence is another very exciting and fast growing trend in our industry. And really, HyperFlex started off with the hyperconverged infrastructure, started of being the notion of putting a mini-cloud in a box on-premise for application developers to rapidly deploy their applications, as if it was in the cloud. So speed and simplicity were really at a premium, and that's really what defines hyperconvergence. And we've done a tremendous amount of work at Cisco to make speed and simplicity there, because we've integrated network compute storage and a cloud management system called Intersight to give that whole capability to customers. We then hardened it. We took it from being able to do VDI kind of workloads and rather benign workloads, to mission-critical workloads. So databases are now running on HyperFlex. ERP systems are running on HyperFlex, the real crown jewels of the enterprise are now running on HyperFlex. Then we made it multi-cloud. We opened it to all hypervisors and to all container frameworks. We announced OpenShift yesterday, we have already done Hyper-V, we had done OpenStack and DSX, so again, same spirit of openness. And yesterday's announcement was, what if I want to take hyperconvergence outside of the data center in hundreds or thousands of remote locations? Think a retailer. In a retail environment, some of the most interesting data is born outside the data center, it's born in a store. The data is center that follows the customer who's interested in a plasma TV, and that data has a perishable lifetime. You act on it on location and on time or you lose the value. So sending it over, taking two hours to do a machine learning job on it and come back, the customer's already back home watching a movie. And so the window of opportunity for the data is often right there and then, and that's why our customers are taking their computing environment off into where the data is, to act on it fast and on location. >> It sounds easy but I want to just get your thoughts on this, because this is a critical data challenge. If data's stored in classic old ways, data warehouses and fenced off area, it's kind of in the internet, you're not going to have the latency to get that data in real time. Talking about real time data that's addressable for part of the application value. So this is a new notion that's emerged with dev ops and infrastructure as code. >> That's right. >> That's hard. How do you guys see that progressing, how should customers prepare to have that data centered properly for app addressability, discovery, whatever the uses of the data contextually is, time series data or whatever data it is, this is a critical thing. >> It's a critical thing, and there's no one answer, because depending on what the data is, sometimes you only see the value when you concentrate it and consolidate it, because the patterns emerge from rolling out a thousand stores worth of data and seeing that people who buy this toothbrush tend to buy that toothpaste. There may be that value where you want to concentrate the data, but there are also many things where acting on the data in the moment and on location quickly without referring to the other thousand stores extracts 90% of the value of that data. So that's why you want to do forward deploy computing on that data. >> So this highlights network programmability, this means the applications driving the queries or the network for that data, if it's available... So there's two things, network programmability from the app, and availability of the data. >> Yeah, and the ability for the entire infrastructure, network, compute, and storage, and hyperconvergence is the automation of all three to be able to deliver its value equally in remote locations or in a cloud, as it would have in a data center, because that's where, the application's going to want to go where the value is, and if the infrastructure can't follow it there, then you get a degraded ability to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Right, real time decisions happen at the edge, but then as you describe, you got to bring data back, certain data, back to the cloud, do the modeling there and then push the models back down. So you're going to have-- >> And you're going to have decision making distributed. >> And you've got to have low latency to be able to enable that. >> Yeah, and the same goes for other considerations. For example, why is it important to do, allow people to put data both on their premises and in the cloud? For disaster recovery, for data replication, for resiliency. Sometimes for governance reasons. GTPR in Europe says the data of European citizens that's personally identifying has to stay in Europe. Somebody may not have a data center in Europe. Could they take advantage of a co-location ability or somebody else's cloud? >> This is the theme we're seeing at this show this year, and certainly at the center of the news is, complexity is increasing 'cause it's just evolution, more devices are connected, diverse environments, scale for cloud and connectivity, but software driving that. So I got to ask you the question. Go back to the old days, you know, the 1990s, multi-vendor was a big word. Now multi-cloud feels the same way. This is the openness thing. How would you describe multi-cloud strategy for Cisco in context of this notion of being open? >> It is really the new dimension of openness, right? We've been open in the past to multiple forms of physical networks. Customers to use wireless or fiber or copper or what have you, we need to give them an IP network that operate equally well over all media. That was one dimension of openness. Another dimension of openness was, does a product from vendor A work with a product from vendor B? My router, your router, my switch, your firewall, those are other dimensions. Hardware and software coupling. Can I buy the hardware from Peter and the software from Mary, will it work well? The new dimension of openness is, can a customer avail themselves of any form of cloud, either because they like the tooling and how well their developers are more efficient on a given cloud, or because the pricing of the other guy, or the third guy has a point of presence in Tokyo, which this one doesn't. All of those are business choices that if we make our technology, let them take advantage of them with no technical restriction, they will, because now they can shop on the merit of what they want to do, and not on, oh well, sorry, if you want to go to Azure, I can't help you, but if you're willing to settle for your own premise or for Amazon, then I have a story for you. So that's-- >> Roland, you're leading the team on the core crown jewels for Cisco, as you guys, the rising tide's floating all boats here within the company. What's your plan for the year, what's your goals, you'll be out there pounding the pavement with customers, what's your objective, what do you hope to accomplish this year in 2019? >> Well 2019 is the year of many things for us, it's a very exciting year. It's the year of, on the physical infrastructure side, we're taking our switches to 400 gigabit per second. We have our new silicon capability, our new optics, so we're going to be able to scale for the cloud providers who are heading the next frontier of speed and density and scale. So performance will always, always be there, and when we're done with 400, we're already going to be asking about 800. So that's an exciting new generation of switches. ACI Anywhere getting deployed now and adopted across multiple clouds, is another exciting thing. HyperFlex Anywhere, we're really looking forward to the potential in financial services, in logistics, in retail, where's there's a lot of deployed data at the edge. And then, security is a never finished journey, right? Everything with give our customers in the way of security, because there, there's an active actor who's trying to make you fail, right? It's not that you're only fighting physics to get to 400 gigabit, then you win. There we have a guy who's trying to foil your schemes and trying to foil their schemes. Security is a great-- >> Constant attacks are on the network. You guys have seen this movie before, so you know how critical, Roland thanks so much for spending the time, congratulations on ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere, intent-based networking at the core. It's theCUBE bringing you all the data, we have an intent here to bring you the best content from Cisco Live in Barcelona. I'm John, Dave Vellante, stay with us for live coverage, day two of three days of coverage here in the dev net zone, packed with developers learning new skills. We'll back with more after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017! Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We're on day three of our continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. We've all counted our steps, lots of steps we've gotten in, lots of great conversations. I am Lisa Martin with my co-host John Troyer. We're joined now by two guests who are new to theCUBE. Chanda Dani, Senior Director of Product Marketing, Storage and Development at VMware. Welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you. >> And you're also joined by Mark Vaughn, you're the Director of Strategic Technology Group with Presidio, welcome! >> Yes ma'am, thank you. >> So guys we're at day three of, hopefully your feet aren't too sore, of VMware 2017. Big announcements on Monday about VCF, on AWS yesterday, the pivotal container service with Google, Pat Gelsinger mentioned on Monday, 10,000 customers on VSAN. Chanda, have you heard from customers at the event? What has their reaction been to some of the great news that's been announced? >> Customers are actually really excited. They see VMware evolve and become more and more mature and bigger, and the see us as a partner. In the context of VSAN, they are even more excited. I met a lot of customers who wanted to try out our hands-on labs, and these were actually storage admins who were like, "I'm really interested, can you guide me through this process?" I had a session on Sunday and I thought, people are still pouring in, checking into the hotel. And the session had four, five hundred people and it was on VSAN and there was so much excitement! So it's really, really amazing. Great time for VSAN right now. >> Wow, did Pat say adding 100 customers a week? >> Yes, we are adding 100 customers a week. >> That's remarkable, and it sounds like you're seeing maybe a shift in terms of the skill types that are wanting to learn about this technology? >> Exactly, so VI admins have always been a champion, but what has been very interesting this VMware that a lot of storage admins have come to the show and they are all at the hands-on labs and the sessions wanted to learn about it more and more. >> From a market perspective, Mark, question for you. Given that, and we're hearing quite a bit, John, over the last couple of days on both of our sets here, generational shifts, skillset shifts. In terms of shifts and trends in the market, what are some of the data center trends that you've heard, Mark, articulated on the show floor and from your partner, VMware, this week? >> There's definitely the shift with VMware Cloud on AWS. That's been a real emphasis this week, which again builds on what we've been doing in the private data center. So building on VCN, building on NSX, building on the VMware hypervisor. So those are some trends we've really seen and, honestly, in the data center in general, we've seen a shift in storage the last few years. So it's moving more towards an emphasis on the software. So whether you're releasing that now as a virtual appliance or a cloud appliance, or going a step further and having a solution that is totally self-defined, like VCN, we're beginning to see the emphasis move from hardware to software. >> So Mark, we've had a lot of innovation in hyperconverged infrastructure in the last few years. With VCN being one of the pillars of innovation. But the market is interesting, a lot of players in the market, some being pulled out, others entering, where are we in this whole evolution? What is the state of hyperconverged infrastructure and hyperconverged storage in 2017? >> As we look so much to public cloud, and it's been such a buzzword for the last few years, we've noticed that a lot of our customers have moved to it and realized it doesn't work everywhere. But what attracted them to the cloud, they still want, even when they run on-prem data center now. So they want that flexibility, they want that ability to scale easily, they want flexible billing, as well, and consumption-based models. And so software-defined storage and VSAN really create the ability to, you may not want everything in the cloud. But you can still have what you liked about the cloud in your own data center. And so that's part of the modernization story that we're walking through with a lot of our customers. >> Chanda, how are you seeing the consumption models? Software versus VMware ready-nodes, build-your-own partner ecosystem, how are people taking, you know, is it in the cloud, is it on-prem, how are people taking these in? >> Actually, this is one of the key reasons why customers like VSAN, the wide choice of consumption models that they have. They can fully-customize it, build it themselves, they can go with the ready-nodes, they also have a choice to go with an appliance-based solution which we have with Dell EMC called VxRail, and they also like the choice that, what they could do on-prem, now they can do it on AWS and it's just yet another site for them. And, for example, disaster recovery as a service is one of the use cases they really want to move forward with. I just came back from a customer meeting, explaining to them how it would work, and they're really excited and waiting for it to come. >> So you mentioned Dell EMC, and one of the questions I had was, just about one-year-post combination of Dell taking over. One of the things that was very clearly articulated during the keynote by Michael Dell himself was that, the importance of the VMware ecosystem really growing. And the independence. So long-time partners, Presidio and VMware, talk to us about your channel strategy, and how it's going to evolve or is evolving as you need to give customers this flexibility of private-public hybrid based on their needs and this consumption-driven model. How is the channel strategy evolving to facilitate that? You can both take a shot at that. >> One thing I've noticed, upfront, when it comes to consumption models is, we're actually seeing vendors like Dell and other OEM partners beginning to offer consumption models where you can actually now get hardware on six-month, one-year, you know, shorter term, where it gives you the flexibility of the cloud of, you don't have to make a longterm commitment to hardware, you can flex, you can grow. Even when it's on-prem, you can still have some of that flexibility. We've also worked out some cost models for some of our customers where we can help them have that flexibility and consumption models to allow them to actually grow on-prem in a similar way that they would in the cloud. >> Chanda, same question for you, the channel strategy. Kind of, what do you see as some of the next steps to make that channel, and make, event the partnership with Presidio even better? >> Right. So actually, Presidio has been a very successful partner for VSAN and, talking about channel strategy, if you look at it, VSAN, today, has 10,000 customers. vSphere has 350,000 customers. We are not even 4% penetrated in our own install-base, and given the tight correlation between vSphere and VSAN, we all know that vSphere obtained this large install-base through our channel. So for VSAN to have such a big install-base and increase our penetration, it is actually channel that will do that for us. And Presidio is well ahead on that curve right now. So our strategy, actually, is related to server refresh. It is projected that, by the end of 2019, about 60% of our customers would be going through a server refresh. And as they go through a server refresh, they adopt hyperconversion infrastructure more and more. Because they're buying these new servers, they say, might as well buy a ready-node. And we want to ensure that our channel is well-equipped to take advantage of this wave that is coming. So there are many things we are doing, for example, number one, that they are able to build their practice. And Presidio is quite ahead there. But the rest of the world is able to do that too, globally. And secondly, we are trying to simplify and streamline things for them by having product packages which they can sell easily. For example, we have a package of vSphere and VSAN called HCI Kit, where we have designed it such that, the most profitable way to sell vSphere is to sell it with VSAN, because if they sell vSphere, if they qualify, the ad-plus at the back is 10%. But if they sell the HCI kit, which is Vspere and VSAN, the back-end ad-plus is 30%. So for our channel, the most profitable way is to sell vSphere along with VSAN. Then we have also designed a whole bunch of sales tools. Like, they can go into an account, do an assessment, do a whole sizing for the VSAN ready node, do a full ready-node configuration with our OEM partners such as HP, Dell, Fujitsu, Lenovo, et cetera, they are all at the solution exchange here. And then they can have a full TCO conversation. All of this is now available for our channel, and we went ahead and did a practice builder workshop in all major cities globally to help them come up to speed on all this stuff. There are many other programs. And we are now providing POC gears so that you can actually do successful POCs too. So it's now execution for us. >> Yes. And it's been great because VMware has really created and ecosystm that we can work well within, and it actually creates a journey for our customers. So we've been able to walk a number of customers, I was working with a customer just this week that has been a long-time ESX environment for their VMware hypervisor. Probably four years ago they began using VSAN early on, and since that time they've moved, VSAN is now their primary storage, and now they're moving into deployment in SX. And as that is going along, they're beginning to look at vRealize Operations, they're beginning to look at Airwatch, so it really creates an ecosystem that we can walk people through the journey of moving into these, and there's often opportunities where we can come in and do a number of these at a time. But there's also a lot of opportunities where customers kind of need to mature their own processing and go through this journey. >> Mark, I'd like to drill down on that a little bit. I've known you for years, you know, back in the day when the virtualization admin was the role that was just created, and started to bridge some of those silos between storage, networking, Windows, security, teams. You talked about the channel, let's talk about the customer uptake and enablement on their side. Who are the people that are being trained on this? Is it, do folks still have the traditional storage admin? Is it a combined team? Who's buying it, who's responsible for it, and how are you helping them succeed with VSAN? >> We really have to approach that based on each customer's individual makeup. And we need to see how their organizations worked out, and where their skillsets lie. But we see that, really, as a mix. It's been much the same way as networking. At first, networking was separate from virtual networking, and they quickly realized as, you know, 80 or 90% of their environment became virtualized, you can't just sit outside of the hypervisor, you have to be participating in the network inside the hypervisor as well. So there's definitely skillsets that the storage admin brings to bear that the average systems admin doesn't have. So it's really a partnering of the two. And I see the same thing with cloud. So, where virtualization admin was a niche ten years ago, now you can't work in the data center if you don't know how to participate in the virtualization environment and you're not familiar with VMware. Cloud is kind of becoming a niche, but in five years you won't be able to work in the data center if you don't know cloud. >> Yeah, what's one of the trends that we've seen as well, just in doing some reading online, is that, it used to be, everybody was trained, you know, that would come here to VMworld, would be trained in virtualization and certifications. And now we're starting to see that shift towards cloud. Sounds like there's been this natural evolution that's been customer-driven, in terms of enablement and the education, but you're now seeing the importance of the guys and gals that are storage admin, maybe the system admins as well, the VI admins. How are you guys working together to sort of tailor the conversation as more ... You see a diversity in the types of people that are interested in this type of technology, and as the conversation, maybe on the storage side, goes up to the C level, because they're storing massive amounts of data that's got to be able to extract value from in new lines of business. How is your enablement evolving as these skillsets are shifting? >> Alright, so, the name "hyperconvergence" actually says it all, it's not just causing convergence of technologies, it's causing convergence of people and skillsets and teams as well, and that does include people who just used to be computer admins and storage admins and network admins now. So going back to that context of how we are doing the enablement, I think what we are doing right now is helping each side understand the value, and having them come together. Earlier they used to work as silos, and now the teams are coming together just as the technology is coming together. And as regards, talking to decision-makers in the organizations, at the CIO level, people are more interested in competitive advantage for their own organization. And we find that the hyperconvergence technology allows the entire organization to move fast. So CIOs are able to do their business initiatives in a much faster way, get their profits coming in a much fast way, their risks are minimal, so they like the technology for that reason. And VP of infrastructure, applications, et cetera, like the technology because it streamlines the operations, standardizes the processes for them. VI admins have always been a champion, because it's so easy to use for them, the learning curve is very less. And storage admins really like it because, at the time when their traditional array is running out of capacity or horsepower, they don't have the budget to go and procure something new. They do have the budget to go and acquire a few servers and SSDs, they are still able to move forward and give the organization what it needs within the budget constraints, and yet meet the timeline. So this is something which is driving a lot of convergence. >> And storage has always been so critical to how virtualization works and operates. From vMotion to DRS, there's so many baseline features that relied on the underlying storage. So the storage admins and the VI admins have been growing closer and closer together for a long time. But what we're seeing with hyperconverge, and whether it's on-prem or, especially, in the cloud, is it's not only changing the storage technology, but it's changing the cost model. So now the conversation also has to happen at a business level of, is this going to be capex? Is this going to be opex? Is this going to be a traditional purchase method? Is this going to be a consumption method? So the conversation, now, actually, has to transcend from just the technology to also the business impact and the business drivers behind selecting one method or another. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And that's a theme that we're hearing a lot, as customers talk about digital transformation. Well I love the play on words with "convergence", and it sounds like the different folks that are now really needing this type of technology are folks that you've had the chance to speak with at the show. So we want to thank you guys for taking the time on Day Three to come and chat with us on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> For our guests, and for my co-host John Troyer, I am Lisa Martin, you've been watching theCUBE live on Day Three, continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. We'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)