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

>> From Sunnyvale California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering, Accelerate Your Journey to AI, Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, welcome to another conversation here from the Data Visionary Center at NetApp's headquarters in beautiful Sunnyvale California. I'm being joined today by Santosh Rao. Santosh is the Senior Technical Director at NetApp, Specifically Santosh we're going to talk about some of the challenges and opportunities associated with AI and how NetApp is making that possible. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, I'm excited to be here. Thank you for that. >> So, Santosh what is your role at Netapp? Why don't we start there. >> Wonderful, glad to be here, my name is Santosh Rao, I'm a Senior Technical Director at NetApp, part of the Product Operations group, and I've been here 10 years. My role is to drive up new lines of opportunity for NetApp, build up new product businesses. The most recent one has been AI. So I've been focused on bootstrapping and incubating the AI effort at NetApp for the last nine months now. Been excited to be part of this effort now. >> So nine months of talking, both internally, but spending time with customers too. What are customers telling you that are NetApp's opportunities, and what NetApp has to do to respond to those opportunities? >> That's a great question. We are seeing a lot of focus around expanding the digital transformation to really get value out of the data, and start looking at AI, and Deep Learning in particular, as a way to prove the ROI on the opportunities that they've had. AI and deep learning requires a tremendous amount of data. We're actually fascinated to see the amount of data sets that customers are starting to look at. A petabyte of data is sort of the minimum size of data set. So when you think about petabyte-scale data lakes. The first think you want to think about is how do you optimize the TCO for the solution. NetApp is seen as a leader in that, just because of our rich heritage of storage efficiency. A lot of these are video image and audio files, and so you're seeing a lot of unstructured data in general, and we're a leader in NFS as well. So a lot of that starts to come together from a NetApp perspective. And that's where customers see us as the leader in NFS, the leader in files, and the leader in storage efficiency, all coming together. >> And you want to join that together with some leadership, especially in GPU's, so that leads to NVIDIA. So you've announced an interesting partnership between NetApp and NVIDIA. How did that factor into your products, and where do you think that goes? >> It's kind of interesting how that came about, because when you look at the industry it's a small place. Some of the folks driving the NVIDIA leadership have been working with us in the past, when we've bootstrapped converged infrastructures with other vendors. We're known to have been a 10 year metro vendor in the converged infrastructure space. The way this came about was NVIDIA is clearly a leader in the GPU and AI acceleration from a computer perspective. But they're also seen as a long history of GPU virtualization and GPU graphics acceleration. When they look at NetApp, what NetApp brings to NVIDIA is just the converged infrastructure, the maturity of that solution, the depth that we have in the enterprise and the rich partner ecosystem. All of that starts to come together, and some of the players in this particular case, have had aligned in the past working on virtualization based conversion infrastructures in the past. It's an exciting time, we're really looking forward to working closely with NVIDIA. >> So NVIDIA brings these lighting fast machines, optimized for some of the new data types, data forms, data structures associated with AI. But they got to be fed, got to get the data to them. What is NetApp doing from a standpoint of the underlying hardware to improve the overall performance, and insure that these solutions really scream for customers? >> Yeah, it's kind of interesting, because when you look at how customers are designing this. They're thinking about digital transformation as, "What is the flow of that data? "What am I doing to create new sensors "and endpoints that create data? "How do I flow the data in? "How do I forecast how much data I'm going to "create quarter over quarter, year over year? "How many endpoints? what is the resolution of the data?" And then as that starts to come into the data center, they got to think about, where are the bottlenecks. So you start looking at a wide range of bottlenecks. You look at the edge data aggregation, then you start looking at network bandwidth to push data into the core data centers. You got to think smart about some of these things. For example, no matter how much network bandwidth you throw at it, you want to reduce the amount of data you're moving. Smart data movement technologies like SnapMirror, which NetApp brings to the table, are some things that we uniquely enable compared to others. The fact of the matter is when you take a common operating system, like ONTAP, and you can lear it across the Edge, Core and Cloud, that gives us some unnatural advantages. We can do things that you can't do in a silo. You've got a commodities server trying to push data, and having to do raw full copies of data into the data center. So we think smart data movement is a huge opportunity. When you look at the core, obviously it's a workhorse, and you've got the random sampling of data into this hardware. And we think the A800 is a workhorse built for AI. It is a best of a system in terms of performance, it does about 25 gigabytes per second just on a dual controller pair. You'll recall that we spent several number of years building out the foundation of Clustered ONTAP to allow us to scale to gigantic sizes. So 24 node or 12 controller pad A800 gets us to over 300 gigabytes per second, and over 11 million IOPS if you think about that. That's over about four to six times greater than anybody else in the industry. So when you think about NVIDIA investment in DGX and they're performance investment they've made there. We think only NetApp can keep up with that, in terms of performance. >> So 11 million IOPS, phenomenal performance for today. But the future is going to demand ever more. Where do you think these trends go? >> Well nobody really knows for sure. The most exciting part of this journey, is nobody knows where this is going. This is where you need to future proof customers, and you need to enable the technology to have sufficient legs, and the architecture to have sufficient legs. That no matter how it evolves and where customers go, the vendors working with customers can go there with them. And actually when customers look at NetApp and say, "You guys are working with the Cloud partners, "you're now working with NVIDIA. "And in the past you worked with a "variety of data source vendors. "So we think we can work with NetApp because, "you're not affiliated to any one of them, "and yet you're giving us that full range of solutions." So we think that performance is going to be key. Acceleration of compute workloads is going to demand orders of magnitude performance improvement. We think data set efficiencies and storage efficiencies is absolutely key. And we think you got to really look at PCO, because customers want to build these great solutions for the business, but they can't afford it unless vendors give them viable options. So it's really up to partners like NVIDIA and NetApp to work together to give customers the best of breed solutions that reduce the TCO, accelerate compute, accelerate the data pipeline, and yet, bring the cost of the overall solution down, and make it simple to deploy and pre integrated. These are the things customers are looking for and we think we have the best bet at getting there. >> So that leads to... Great summary, but that leads to some interesting observations on what customers should be basing their decisions on. What would you say are the two or three most crucial things that customers need to think about right now as a conceptualized, where to go with their AI application, or AI workloads, their AI projects and initiatives? >> So when customers are designing and building these solutions, they're thinking the entire data lifecycle. "How am I getting this new type of "data for digital transformation? "What is the ingestion architecture? "What are my data aggregation endpoints for ingestion? "How am I going to build out my AI data sources? "What are the types of data? "Am I collecting sensor data? Is it a variety of images? "Am I going to add in audio transcription? "Is there video feeds that come in over time?" So customers are having to think about the entire digital experience, the types of data, because that leads to the selection of data sources. For example, if you're going to be learning sensor data, you want to be looking at maybe graph databases. If you want to be learning log data, you're going to be looking at log analytics over time, as well as AI. You're going to look at video image and audio accordingly. Architecting these solutions requires an understanding of, what is your digital experience? How does that evolve over time? What is the right and optimal data source to learn that data, so that you get the best experience from a search, from an indexing, from a tiering, from analytics and AI? And then, what is the flow of that data? And how do you architect it for a global experience? How do you build out these data centers where you're not having to copy all data maybe, into your global headquarters. If you're a global company with presence across multiple Geo's, how do you architect for regional data centers to be self contained? Because we're looking at exabyte scale opportunities in some of these. I think that's pretty much the two or three things that I'd say, across the entire gamut of space here. >> Excellent, turning that then into some simple observations about the fact that data still is physical. There's latency issues, there's the cost of bandwidth issues. There's other types of issues. This notion of Edge, Core, Cloud. How do you see the ONTAP operating system, the ONTAP product set, facilitating being able to put data where it needs to be, while at the same time creating the options that a customer needs to use data as they need to use it? >> The fact of the matter is, these things cannot be achieved overnight. It takes a certain amount of foundational work, that, frankly, takes several years. The fact that ONTAP can run on small, form factor hardware at the edge is a journey that we started several years ago. The fact that ONTAP can run on commodity white box hardware, has been a journey that we have run over the last three, four years. Same thing in the Cloud, we have virtualized ONTAP to the point that it can run on all hyperscalers and now we are in the process of consuming ONTAP as a service, where you don't even know that it is an infrastructure product, or has been. So the process of building an Edge, Core, and Cloud data pipeline leverages the investments that we've made over time. When you think about the scale of compute, data and performance needed, that's a five to six year journey in Clustered ONTAP, if you look at NetApp's past. These are all elements that are coming together from a product and solution perspective. But the reality is that leveraging years and years of investment that NetApp engineering has made. In a a way that the industry really did not invest in the same areas. So when we compare and contrast what NetApp has done versus the rest of the industry. At a time when people were building monolithic engineered systems, we were building software defined architectures. At a time when they were building tightly cobbled system for traditional enterprise, we were building flexible, scale out systems, that assumed that you would want to scale in modular increments. Now as the world has shifted from enterprise into third platform and Webscale. We're finding all those investments NetApp made over the years is really starting to pay off for us. >> Including some of the investments in how AI can be used to handle how ONTAP operates at each of those different levels of scale. >> Absolutely, yes. >> Sontash Rao, Technical Director at NetApp, talking about AI, some of the new changes in the relationships between AI and storage. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas its theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage, exclusive coverage at NetApp Insight 2017, it's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, with my co-host, Keith Townsend at CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Gabe Chapman, Senior Manager, NetApp HCI, and Sidney Sonnier, who's the IT consultant at 4th and Bailey, also a member of the A-Team, a highly regarded, top-credentialed expert. Welcome to theCUBE, guys. Good to see you. >> Hey >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So love the shirt, by the way, great logo, good font, good, comes up great on the camera. >> Thank you. >> We're talking about the rise of the cloud and everything in between, kind of the segment. As a NetApp, A-Team member, and customer. It's here, cloud's here. >> Sidney: Yes >> But it's not yet big in the minds of the Enterprise because they got, it's a path to get there. So, there's public cloud going on, >> Sidney: Right. >> Hybrid clouds, everyone gets that. >> Sidney: Right. >> There's a lot of work to do at home inside a data center. >> Yes, there is, there's an extreme amount of work. And, like you said, these are very exciting times, because we have a blend of all of the technologies and being at an event like this allows us to look at those technologies, look at that fabric, look at that platform, and how we can merge all of those things into an arena that can allow any customer to dynamically move on-prem, off-prem, public cloud, private cloud, but still be able to manage and securely keep all their data in one specific place. >> Gabe, I want to get your thoughts, as he brings up a good point. Architecture's king, it's the cloud architect. Devop has gone mainstream. Pretty much, we all kind of can look at that and say, okay QED, Don, and everyone else put their plans together, but the Enterprises and the folks doing cloud, cloud service providers and everyone else, they have issues, and their plates are full. They have an application development mandate. Get more developers, new kinds of developers, retrain, re-platforming, new onboarding, open source is booming. They have security departments that are unbundling from IT in a way and fully staffed, reporting to the board of directors, top security challenges, data coverage, and then over the top is IoT, industrial IoT. Man, their plate's full. >> Sidney: Right. >> So architecture's huge, and there's a lot of unknown things going on that need to be automated. So it's a real challenge for architects. What's your thoughts. >> So you know, my thoughts about that is, I like to make this joke that there's no book called, The Joy of Menial Tasks. And there are so many of those menial tasks that we do on a day-in and day-out basis, in terms of the Enterprise, whether it's storage, whether it's virtualization, whether it's, whatever it is, right? And I think we've seen this massive shift towards automation and orchestration, and fundamentally the technologies that we're provisioning in today. APIs are king, and they're going to be kind of the focal point, as we move forward. Everything has to have some form of API in it. We have to be making a shift in a transition towards infrastructure as code. At the end of the day the hardware has relevance. It still does, it always will. But the reality is to abstract away the need for that relevance and make it as simple as possible. That's where we have things like hyper converged infrastructure being so at the forefront for so many organizations, NetApp making a foray into this space, as well, is to push, to simplify as much as possible, the day-to-day minutiae, and the infrastructure provisioning. And then, transition those resources over towards getting those next-generation data center applications up, running, and functional. >> Old adage that's been in the industry around making things simple, as our cubbies like an aircraft carrier. But when you go below the water lines, everyone in little canoes paddling, bumping into each other. These silos, if you will. >> Gabe: Right. >> And this is really the dynamic around cloud architecture, is where the operating model's changing. So, you got to be prepared to handle things differently. And in storage, the old days, is, I won't say, easy, but you guys made it easy. A lot of great customers. NetApp has a long history of, but it's not the storage anymore. It's the data fabric as you guys are talking about. It's the developer enablement. It's getting these customers to drive for themselves. It's not about the engine anymore, although, you've got to have a good engine, call it tech, hardware, software together. But the ultimate outcome is the people driving the solutions are app guys. They're just the lines of businesses are under huge pressure and huge need. >> I think you can look at it this way. It's like we're kind of data-driven. You'll see Gene talk about that as part of our messaging. We can no longer be just a storage company. We need to be a data company and a data management organization as we start to have those conversations. Yes, you're going to go in there and talk to the storage administrations and storage teams, but there are 95% of the other people inside of the Enterprise, inside information technology, within different lines of business. They're the ones that we have the most relevant discussions with. That's where our message probably resonates more strongly in the data-driven aspect, or the management, or analytics, and all those other spaces. And I think that's the white space and growth area potential for NetApp, is the fact that we can go in there and have very authoritative discussions with customers around their data needs, and understanding governance. You have things like GPRD, and AMIA. That's a giant open ecosystem for, it has so many requirements and restrictions around it, and everybody's just now starting to wrap their head around it. So building a program around something like that, as well. So there's challenges for everybody. And there's even challenges for vendors like ourselves, because we had, we were mode one. Now we're mode two. So it's kind of like making that transition. And the old speeds, the speeds were always, hey, how fast can you go, what's the files look like, with replication, blah, blah, blah. Now you've got solid, solid state storage. You got SolidFire. Now people want outcomes as a service. Not outcomes anymore, like a cliché, things are happening very dynamically. And last week at Big Data NYC, our event, around the big data world, you couldn't get anymore clear that there's no more room for hype. They want real solutions now. Realtime is critical. And, now watching the keynotes here at NetApp, it's not speed that's featured, although there's a lot of work going on under the hood, it's really about competitive advantage. You're hearing words like data as a competitive advantage. >> Sidney: Yes. >> Sidney, you're in the field, you're in the front lines. Make sense of this. >> The sense that we have to make is, we made up some great points. >> Gabe: Yes. >> Getting the business engaged is one thing, because you still, with the cloud and the cloud architecture, you still have a lot of individuals who are not necessarily sold on it, all the way. So even from a technical perspective. So those guys that are down in the bottom of the boat, so to speak, you still have to kind of convince them because they feel somewhat uncomfortable about it. They have not all the way accepted it. The business is kind of accepted it in pockets. So being, having been on a customer's side and then going to more of a consulting side of things, you understand those pain points. So by getting those businesses engaged and then also engaging those guys to say, listen, it's freeing, the relevance of cloud architecture is not to eliminate a position, it's more to move the mundane tasks that you were more accustomed to using and move you closer to the business so that you can be more effective, and feel more of a participant, and have more value in that business. So that's-- >> So it's creating a value role for the-- >> Right, Right. >> The nondifferentiated tasks >> Absolutely. >> That were being mundane tasks, as you called them. >> Yes. >> You can then put that person now on, whether analytics or ... >> All those IoT things like you were mentioning on those advance projects, and use and leverage the dynamic capability of the cloud being able to go off-prem or on-prem. >> Alright, so what's the guiding principle for a cloud architecture? We'll have to get your thoughts on this because we talked about, in a segment earlier, with Josh, around a good devops person sees automation opportunities and they jump on it like a grenade. There it is, take care of that business and automate it. How do you know what to automate? How do you architect around the notion of we might be continually automating things to shift the people and the process to the value? >> I think what it boils down to is the good cloud architect looks and sees where there are redundancies, things that can be eliminated, things that can be minimized, and sees where complexity is, and focuses to simplify as much of it as possible, right? So my goal has always been to abstract away the complexity, understand that it's there and have the requirements and the teams that can functionally build those things, but then make it look to you as if it were your iPhone, right? I don't know how the app store works. I just download the apps and use it. A good cloud architect does the same thing for their customers. Internally and externally, as well. >> So where does NetApp fit in there, from a product perspective? As a cloud architect, you're always wondering what should I build versus what should I buy? When I look at the open source projects out there, I see a ton of them. Should I go out and dive head deep into one of these projects? Should I look towards a vendor like NetApp to bring to bear that simplified version? Where is the delineation for those? >> So the way we see it is traditionally, there's kind of four consumption models that exists. There's an as-a-service model, or just-in-time model. There are, we see converged, hyper converged as a consumption continuum that people leverage and utilize. There are best-of-breach solutions. Because if I want an object store, I want an object store, and I want it to do exactly what it does. That's an engineering solution. But then there's the as-a-service, I mean, I'm sorry, there's a software-defying component, as well. And those are the, kind of the four areas. If you look at the NetApp product lines, we have an ONTAP set of products, and we have an Element OS set of products, and we have solutions that fit into each one of those consumption continuums, based on what the customer's characteristics are like. You may have a customer that likes configurability. So they would look at a traditional FlexPod with a FAS and say that that's a great idea for me for, in terms of provisioning infrastructure. You may get other customers that are looking at, I want the next-generation data center. I want to provide block storage as a service. So they would look at something like SolidFire. Or, you have the generalist team that looks at simplicity as the key running factor, and time-to-value. And they look at hyper converged infrastructure. So there's a whole set. For me, when I have a conversation with a customer around build versus buy, I want to understand why they would like to build it versus buy it. Because I think that a lot of times, people think, oh, I just download the software and I put it on a box. I'm like, well, right, that's awesome. Now you're in the supply-chain management business. Is that your core competency? Because I don't think it is, right? And so there's a whole bunch of things. It's like firmware management and all these things. We abstract away all of that complexity. That's the reason we charge up for a product, Is the fact that we do all that heavy lifting for the customer. We provide them with an engineered solution. I saw a lot of that when we really focused significantly on the OpenStack space, where we would come up and compete against SEP. And I'm like, well how many engineers do you want to dedicate to keeping SEP up and running? I could give you a turnkey solution for a price premium, but you will never have to dedicate any engineers to it. So that's the trade-off. >> So on that point, I just want to followup. A followup to that is you vision OpenStack, which, big fans of, as you know, we love OpenStack. In the beginning, the challenge with the dupe in OpenStack early on, although that kind of solved, the industry's evolved, is that the early stage was the cost of ownership problem. Which means you had the early tire kickers. Early pioneers doing to work. And they iterated through it. So the question around modernization, which came up as a theme here, what are some modernization practices that I could take as a potential customer, or customer of NetApp, whether I'm an existing customer or a future customer, I want to modernize but I don't want to, I want to manage cost of ownership. And I want to have an architect that's going to allow me to manage my data for that competitive advantage. So I want the headroom of know that it's not just about putting a data link out there, I got to make data realtime, and I don't know when and where it's going to be available. So I need kind of like a fabric or a layer, but I got to have a modern infrastructure. What do I do, what's the playbook? >> So that's where that data fabric, again, comes in. It's like one of the keynotes we heard earlier in the General Session yesterday. We have customers now who are interested in buying infrastructure like we buy electricity. Or like we buy Internet service at home. So by us having this fabric, and it being associated with a brand like NetApp, we're, it's opening up to the point where, what do you really want to do? That's the question we come to you and ask. And if you're into the modernization, we can provide you all the modernization tools right within this fabric, and seamlessly transition from one provider to the next, or plug into another platform or the next, or even put it on-prem. Whatever you want to do. But this will allow the effective management of the entire platform in one location, where you don't have to worry about a big team. You can take your existing team, and that's where that internal support will come in and allow people to kind of concentrate and say, oh, this is some really interesting stuff. Coming from the engineering side of things, being on that customer side, and when you go into customers, you can connect with those guys and help them to leverage this knowledge that they already have because they're familiar with the products. They know the brand. So that makes it more palatable for them to accept. >> So from the cloud architect's perspective, as you look at it, you look at the data-driven fabric or data fabric, and you're like, wow, this is a great idea. Practically, where's the starting point? Is this a set of products? Is it an architecture? Where do I start to bite into this apple? >> So ultimately, I think, you look at it, and I approach it the same way, I would say, like, I can't just go and buy devops. >> Right. >> Right, but data fabric is still, it's a concept, but it's enabled by a suite of technology products. And we look at NetApp across our portfolio and see all the different products that we have. They all have a data fabric element to them, right? Whether it's a FAS, and Snapmirror and snapping to, and ONTAP cloud, it's running in AWS. Whether it's how we're going to integrate with Azure, now with our NFS service that we're providing in there, whether it's hyper converged infrastructure and the ability to move data off there. Our friend Dave McCrory talked about data having gravity, right, he coined that term. And it does, it does have gravity, and you need to be able to understand where it sits. We have analytics in place that help us craft that. We have a product called OCI that customers use. And what it does, it gives them actionable intelligence about where their data sits, where things may be inefficient. We have to start making that transition to, not just providing storage, but understanding what's in the storage, the value that it has, and using it more like currency. We heard George talk about data as currency, it really is kind of the currency, and information is power, right? >> Yeah, Gabe, I mean Gabe, this is right on the money. I mean cryptocurrency and blockchain is a tell sign of what's coming around the corner. A decentralized and distributed environment that's coming. That wave is way out there, but it's coming fast. So you, I want you to take a minute to talk about the cloud component. >> Sidney: Sure. >> Because you mentioned cloud. Talk about your relationship to the clouds, because multi cloud is coming, too. It's not yet there yet, but just because you have a cloud, something in every cloud means multi cloud in the sense of moving stuff around. And then talk about the customer perspective. Because if I'm a customer, I'm saying to myself, okay, I have NetApp, I got files everywhere, I've got ONTAP, they understand the management game, they know how to manage data on-prem, but now I got this cloud thing going on, and I got this shiny new toy start-up over there that's promised me the moon. But I got to make a decision. You're laughing, I know you're thinking about it. This is the dilemma. Do I stay with what I know? >> Right. >> And what I know, is that relevant for where I'm going? A lot of times start-ups will have that pitch. >> Oh, yeah. >> Right >> So address the cloud and then talk about the impact of the customer around the choice. >> Ultimately, it boils down to me in many respects. When I have a conversation with a customer, if I'm going to go for the bright and shiny, right, there has to be a very compelling business interest to do so. If I've built a set of tools and processes around data governance, management, implementation, movement, et cetera, around a bunch of on-premises technologies and I want that same effect or that same look and feel in the public cloud, then that's how we transition there. I want to make it look like I'm using it here locally but it's not on my site, it's somewhere else. It's being managed by somebody else, from a physical standpoint. I'm just consuming that information. But I also know I have to go back and retool everything I've spent in the last 15 and 20 years building because something new and neat comes along. If that new and neat thing comes along, it abstracts away, or it makes a significant cost reduction or something like that, then obviously, you're going to validate that or look at and vet that technology out. But reality is, is that we kind of have these-- >> Well, they don't want to recode, they don't want to retool, they'll rewrite code, but if you look at the clouds, AWS, Azure, and Google, top three in my mind, >> Sidney: Right. >> They all implement everything differently. They got S3 over there, they got it over here, so like, I got it resting on-prem but then I got to hire a devops team that's trained for Azure, Sidney, this is the reality. I mean, evolution might take care of this, but right now, customers have to know that. >> We're at a point right now where customers, businesses we go to, realtime is very important. Software as a service is the thing now. So if you have a customer who is just clicking on a button, and if they can't see that website or whatever your business is, that's a problem. You're going to lose money. You're going to lose customers, you're going to lose revenue. So what you have to do is, as a business, discover what you have internally. And once you discover that and really understand it as a business, not just the tech team, but the business actually understands that. Move that forward and then blend some cloud technology in that with a data fabric, because you're leveraging what you already have. Most of the time, they usually have some sort of NetApp appliance of some sort. And then some of the new appliances that we do have, you can either say, have a small spin, put it next to an old appliance, or use some of the OCI, or something of that nature, to help you migrate to a more dynamic, and the thing about it is, is to just make it more a fluid transition. That's what you're looking to do. Uptime is everything. >> Yeah. >> Totally. >> This fabric will allow you to have that uptime so that you can propel your business and sustain your business. Because you want to be able to still use what you have, and still get that ROI out of that technology, but at the same token, you want to be more dynamic than the competition, so that you can increase that business and still grow the business, but now lose any business. >> Sidney, you bring up a good point. In fact, we should do a followup segment on this, because, what I'm hearing you say, and I've heard this many times in theCUBE, but it's happening, and certainly, we're doing our part on theCUBE to help, but the tech guys, whether they're ops or devs, they're becoming more business savvy. They've got to get closer to the business. >> Sidney: You have to. >> But they don't want to get an MBA, per se, but they have to become street MBA. >> Sidney: Right. >> They got to get that business degree through scar tissue. >> Yes. You can't just be the tech anymore, you have to understand why your business is making this effort, why it's investing this technology, why they would look to go to the public cloud, if you can't deliver a service, and try to emulate that. We've seen that time and time again, the concept of shadow IT, and a shift away from resources. And if you want to be relevant longterm, and not just the guy that sits in the closet, and then plugs in the wires, start learning about your business. Learn about how the business is run and how it generates revenue and see what you can do to affect that. >> Yeah, and the jobs aren't going away. This nonsense about automation killing jobs. >> No, it's not. >> And they use the mainframe as an example, not really relevant, but kind of, but there are other jobs. I mean, look at cyber security, huge data aspect, impact story. >> Sure, it's huge. >> That paradigm is changing realtime. So good stuff, a lot of good business conferences we should do a followup on. I'll give you guys a final word in this segment. If you could each weigh in on what cloud architects should be doing right now. I mean, besides watching theCUBE, and watching you guys here. They got to have the 20-mile stare. They got to understand the systems that are in place. It's almost like an operating system model. They got to see the big picture. Architecting on paper seems easy, but right now it's hard. What's your advice for cloud architects? >> I mean, I say continue to follow the trends. Continue to expose yourself to new technologies. I mean, I'm really interested in things like serverless and those type technologies, and how we integrate our platforms into those types of solutions. Because, that's kind of the next wave of things that are coming along, as we become more of an API-driven ecosystem, right? So if it's infrastructure, if it's code, if it's everything is just in time instance of spin up, how do I have the communications between those technologies? You've just got to stay well ahead of the curve and, you know ... >> John: Sidney, your thoughts? >> My thoughts are along those lines. Not only from a technical perspective but also like you were talking about, that business perspective. Understand your business needs. Because even though, and be able to provide a portfolio, or a suite of tools that will help that business take that next step. And that's where that value. So it's kind of like a blend. You're more of a hybrid. Where you're coming in, not only as a technical person, but you're coming in to assist the business and develop it and help it take it's next step. >> John: And IT is not a department, anymore, it's everywhere. >> No it's not, not. >> It's integrated. >> It is the business. >> Yes. >> Guys, great conversation here on the future of the cloud architect, here inside theCUBE at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, theCUBE's coverage. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music) (fast and furious music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Dave Vellante. Dave, it's been an exciting almost two full days, and we're very excited to be joined by Joel Reich, the EVP of products and operations at NetApp. And none of us can believe you haven't been on the Cube before! >> I haven't been. I'm sure I've sure I've watched a lot of the episodes, but I've never been a guest. >> I apologize for that. I'm shocked, given our past history and relationship, but welcome. >> Thank you. >> And we like to hear that- >> We'll see how I do before you invite me back again. (laughing) >> As a former NetApp-ian, I have high hopes. So Joel, NetApp is positioning itself as a storage software company for multi-cloud world. What does that really mean? >> So what it means is that, you know, when I think about it, when I talk to customers, the problem space about how do I manage my data has gotten so wide and so broad in the last three years because, you know, it used to include to walls, just the space between the four walls of the data centers that you owned. And now the problem space is that plus other data sources you might need to take to grow your business. It might be infrastructure as a service that you built in the cloud. It might be a software as a service application that you're running that's still your data, but it's in some other person's data center. So what it means is that we've really focused on the fact that the world is going to be hybrid cloud and that it's going to be multi-cloud. And the problems that, a high-class problem to solve is how to allow people to manage their data in that world. >> And we've been talking all week on the Cube, and you see it now at VMware's results, there's a lot of tailwinds, but part of that is the customer reality that they can't bring their business into the cloud and reformulate it to force fit it into the cloud. Rather, they have to bring the cloud to the data. >> Joel: Yep, exactly. >> That's sort of your wheelhouse. When you think about multi-cloud, are you talking about being the data store that multiple clouds can access? And do you see it going beyond that, where people are, you know, cross-clouding, if you will, inter-clouding? >> Sure, yeah, I mean, and the mechanisms vary by which people will do that. You know, we see people wanting to still own their data, in other words still have it behind their firewall. So one of the ways they can cross connect to multiple clouds is they can put a storage system, you know, NetApp storage system, in a cold location facility, let's say an Equinix facility, and there they have access to all of the fastest, broadest pipes that you could find anywhere on the network. And you can do a direct connect to Azure. You can do an express connect, or direct connect to Amazon or express connect to Azure, and make a decision about, you know, who has the best pricing plan or who has the best contractual terms or legal terms for you to go to the cloud. So you know, there's that way to do it when you're trying to manage, really just physically own your data when you're concerned about the privacy or sovereignty of it. There's other ways of doing it also, where our storage management software can sit in the cloud. We have a product called Cloud ONTAP, and you can buy it as a service in Amazon, or you can buy it as a service in Azure. And you could store your data in their infrastructure, and because it has a built-in capability of moving from one, you know, from one vendor to another, you don't have to worry about format differences between the cloud vendors. So you can migrate, you know, across, you could SnapMirror, which is a replication capability that we've had for 20 years, and you could be multi-cloud in that sense also. >> You know what's interesting about that, Joel, is when I first started looking at NetApp, and there was no such thing as cloud, but it struck me that you guys were early on with the concept of storage as a service. You had many, many services within your solutions, whether it was copy services or even data reduction services, well ahead of its time, that were bundled in to the platform. And you would invoke those as necessary. Very sort of cloud-like or, you know, we all talk about serverless today, and that's sort of the model, is invoking services as I need them. >> Yes. >> Kind of composable, if you will. So very compatible, in concept anyway, with cloud. So take us through kind of where you are today, with the architecture, you know, used to be so simple. EMC block, NetApp file, right? And that's changed dramatically. And of course I'm oversimplifying. Where are we today with the portfolio and the company strategy? Maybe you could talk to things like all-flash arrays, hyper-converged, bring us up to date. >> So I mean, I think there's, we look at, you're right, we do take a services perspective of what we're building. And what I do, we look at that there's a consumption continuum that people actually want to buy those services in different shapes or forms. So when we think about it, it's not, we don't have a separate clustered data ONTAP roadmap for, you know, our next high-end FAS system that has different features than the roadmap for the version of ONTAP that's going to run in the cloud. It's actually one product, right, that we build to be able to be consumed in different ways. And that, you know, when you think about it, that's kind of like a microcosm of our strategy, which is that what we're trying to do is make those data services available no matter where the data happens to be. And so to give you an example of a new service that we've implemented as part of cluster data ONTAP, it was in a new release that we did this past spring called 9.2. So it has a feature in it called Fabric Pools. And what Fabric Pools allow you to do is, you know, we have this idea that over time, storage becomes a service-level based thing and you have a capacity tier and you have a performance tier. And over time whatever that performance tier is going to be built of is going to be, you know, as flash progresses to Optane and things like that, that capacity tier is going to get faster and faster and faster, and it's always going to be a little bit more expensive than the, I mean, the performance tier is going to get, you know, it's going to get bigger, it's going to get faster, it's always going to be more expensive than the capacity tier. So Fabric Pools is essentially designed, if you forward think a bunch of years, when what you've got in the data center is all flash, you know, where's your capacity tier going to be? Well so in essence what we're doing is we're doing tiering between all flash and any S3 target. So that S3 target could be Glacier. The S3 target could be S3, I mean the S3 target could be, you know, it could be any S3 target. It could anybody's object store. And essentially what happens is, the system will manage secondary data and snapshot data into that capacity tier, but it'll manage it all together so that you're getting the most efficient use you can of flash. So you look at that and say, okay, that's the consumption model. That's a traditional consumption model, where you're buying controller-based functionality. Well it turns out that cloud ONTAP can use Fabric Pools also. So what that means is I can deploy, I could go to Amazon's Marketplace, I can buy Cloud ONTAP for I think it's $1.45 an hour, and I can run an instance, I can set up a cluster in the cloud, and I could use EC2 storage. And I could use Amazon storage and I could run ONTAP on it, and then if I want to I could implement Fabric Pools and I could tier to S3 or Glacier, right, within the cloud. >> The point is, the value of that is single point of control. >> Joel: Yeah. >> And customers will pay for that value. >> My point is actually, the point is was trying to make is that it's a consumption model choice. I'm not going to force someone, I view the cloud as our friend, right, what we're trying to do is find ways for people to leverage either the infrastructure of the public cloud or their on prem infrastructure to be able to manage their data in ways that they can't. >> And discretely selling that software as a service. >> Joel: Yes. >> Yeah. >> Exactly, or as a feature of our standard appliance product. >> But a much different model than taking a Seagate disk drive, packaging it into a controller, and selling it for 10X what you paid for it. >> Right, exactly. So you know, that's really the exciting thing is trying to find ways of making what we have portable into the different ways that people want to consume data management services these days. >> A couple questions for you, Joel. You mentioned the word "friends." You've been, NetApp, long-time friends with VMware. >> Yes. >> Since we're one year post combination of Dell EMC, how has the NetApp VMware relationship evolved? One of the things we heard Michael Dell say this morning was it's very important to maintain the independence of the VMware ecosystem. Talk to us about how in the last year that relationship has progressed and how that's helping NetApp continue its history of being very innovative. >> Yah, so there's always been coopetition, there's always been places where, you know, our products overlapped and where you could do similar things with VMware at the server level that we could do at the storage level. But from the beginning, you know, the integrations that we did with them I think were, you know, really helped move the market and really helped move both of our businesses. I think there's like three things that we're doing right now that are new, you know, in the last year with them. One of them is we built another version of ONTAP, which we call vNAS, which can run on top of VSAN. And you know, in an ESX environment and provide, you know, NFS and CIFS file services on top of VSAN, right? So that's a really interesting combination of both of our software-defined products that solve a customer problem. Another thing we've done is, you know, we've announced our HCI product, NetApp HCI, and we have a really close partnership with VMware. We decided that that was the way to go, that we didn't want to build our own hypervisor, and that they did a really good job on the management side, and you know, that our integration of those three things would build something, you know, with our strength being at the storage management layer and their strength being at the hypervisor and management layer, that that would help us build a really effective, competitive product. So you know, I think those are two really good examples of that the partnership is moving forward. Lots of interesting integrations, we're working on figuring out how to bring value to what VMware is now doing with AWS. Cause we have a very large install base. I came to the show and I asked, well how many combined customers do we have with VMware? And it's 50,000 combined customers over the years we've been doing this. So you know, our customers want to know how to get access to that capability, how to move into AWS in a way that provides them an interim step. So there's some really good cooperative work going on between our developers in that area. >> And a couple of strong GTM routes, right, through, you mentioned a new version of ONTAP for VSAN. Yesterday Pat Gellsinger mentioned there's now 10,000 customers on VSAN, talked about obviously with AWS as another GTM opportunity for you. >> Yeah, I mean, our teams work together great. There's no question about it. >> Yeah, I mean you guys have always been right there, in the inner circle of integration with VMware. I mean, in the days where, you know, EMC was trying to control the chessboard, NetApp was always able to have products like, same day, you know, as integrated as anybody. And that was important for VMware to show its independence. >> Well you know, Mountain View is much closer to Sunnyvale than Hopkinton. (laughing) >> It's true. >> So you talked about, you chose not to develop your own hypervisor. Others have. So maybe talk about that a little more, how you differentiate from some of the other hyper converged players. >> I mean, I don't, you know, there are other ways of dealing with, you know, when people don't want to spend money on a license, there are other ways of dealing with that problem than building your own hypervisor. You know, for example, so in our HCI product, we can scale server and, we can scale compute and storage independently. So you don't actually get locked into buying, you don't have to buy another VMware license if all you're doing is selling combined storage, you know, combined HCI nodes. By breaking them apart and having separate HCI nodes, we don't drive people into consuming VMware licenses that they might not need, right, in order to meet the demands of, you know, what they're trying to build. So I think we've taken a much different approach to HCI. We talk about it as second generation. The core, there's a lot of value to it. The core value in differentiation is really ease of setup and use that people have grown to expect from HCI combined with an amazing amount of quality of service and workload guarantee, you know, guaranteed workload per workload performance and scaling to, you know, 100 nodes, which, you know, we think really makes HCI a data center class technology. You know, not an edge technology, not a single application technology, but by adding data management features and having that real ability to scale to very large systems, we think we really, you know, come into the market at a time when HCI is ready to move to that next step of not just being single workload, single application. So we think we're there at a good time, with the right product. >> How about all-flash arrays? Bring us up to speed on that. You guys made an acquisition of SolidFire, great acquisition, picked it up at a good time in the marketplace, got it for I think a relatively good price, really good company, true software defined, built for sort of cloud-oriented applications. So how have you integrated that asset, where do it fit in your portfolio? And maybe you can share some proof points. >> Yeah, so we've seen a lot of success with that. You know, what we were doing, when we bought SolidFire, there were a whole bunch of motivations for it. One of the motivations was we knew we needed access to the new buyers. We knew we needed access to people who were making decisions about deploying applications independent of the infrastructure that they happened to have in their data center. Right, they were trying to find new ways of doing things. So when we bought SolidFire, you know, a lot of it was, we loved the technology. A lot of it was getting access to the new buyers and bringing them to the table. And it's funny cause I was noticing today in a bunch of customer meetings that I had here, that you know, in the past I'd have meetings and it would be like sort of the same IT stack, here's the system admin, here's the server admin, here's the network admin, here's the storage person sitting around the table. And when I talk about, you know, we talk about the data fabric, which is the way we tie together, you know, our hybrid clouds. When I talk about that, you know, either people would start to yawn or they'd start to feel threatened because you know, we're talking about something that was a new world for them that they didn't quite know how they would fit in. One of the things I'm seeing now, especially this year, is that customers are coming to the table with both with a cloud architect, and you know, the person who's trying to figure out how they get to the next place, plus the person who owns the existing infrastructure, and they're trying to figure out how to modernize it. So it's something, you know, when we bought SolidFire, we had this theory, okay, we got to go, we have this new technology, it's aimed at a new buyer. And one of the things I'm seeing now is that the portfolio sale of the things that we're offering is starting to be relevant to actually, we don't have to go find the different people. We're actually starting to see them come to the table and talk to us together. So you know, all-flash for us, that's been what's driving the company. We went, we made a big investment about two and a half years ago. It started to pay off last year. We're still growing much faster than the market, much faster than companies who are a lot smaller than us, and the last, you know, market research data that I saw had us as number two in the world, after really not even, you know, being in the top single digits about three years ago. So that's been a really good thing for us, both for our install base but also winning new footprint and winning new business that we didn't have before. We're displacing legacy competitors, one a day. I think George talked about it in our last earnings call. We're replacing EMC once a day, right, at least, and accelerating past that. And it's replacing the old stuff. And a lot of it is because of what we've done with flash. A lot of it is also because it's a future proof. Okay, well, how am I going to, so let's say I decide I want to move this part of this workload that's on here, one workload that's on here to the cloud next year. Alright, NetApp, how could you help me do that? And we'll go through and talk about, this is what we do with Azure, this is what we do with Amazon, right, this is what we do with IBM Cloud. None of our competitors can do that. >> Excellent, and so, sorry to cut you off, we've got to wrap. But you've got a NetApp Insight 2017 Change the World with Data coming up in, you're going to have to come back to Vegas in October and Berlin, and I'm sure, >> Right here, I might even be sitting in the same place. (laughing) >> I hope you get some fresh air. >> Let's make that happen. Let's get the Cube to Insight. >> There we go! Thank you so much for joining. You're now a Cube alumni, which is fantastic. >> Thank you, do I get a t-shirt? >> Congratulations, a pin I think. >> Yeah, a pin. Alright, well for my cohost Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, we want to thank you for watching. Come right back. We've got more exciting coverage from day two of VMworld 2017 right now. (bright music)