>> Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. The cloud-native computing foundation and it's ecosystem partners. [Techno Music] >> Hey welcome back everyone. We're here live in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. It's theCUBE's three-days coverage live, I'm John Furrier, your host, with Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Greg Muscurella who's the Vice President of products at Nutanix. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me John. >> Good to see you. CUBE alumni. So you guys are doing Kubernetes. You're in the throws of all the enterprise. You've got the hyper converged action. A lot of that happening here. >> Yeah. >> So what's new, what's the update? What's going on with Kubernetes and CNCF? >> Well we're using this as an opportunity to talk about the cloud data stack that we've built on top of our core HCF platform. So all the goodness that you get with the easy management. You have storage availability etc. We've layered on top of that a couple things. Certainly, we have our own Kubernetes distribution called Karbon. Very easy to play. >> With a K. >> Karbon with a K. Of course we've got to keep with the theme, right? And, get a high availability production-ready cluster going in a matters of 10 minutes or so. Five minutes... Or two minutes to fill out the form and a few more minutes for it to deploy. That's the easy piece. But really we're designing this for enterprise applications. So it's about persistence as well. So we have our database management services, right? So Arrow which is the other product which manages everything from your oracle databases to MySQL post threads that you'd see more developers using to your object storage with our Buckets product. And then going on to our Epoch monitoring and management. >> You guys have had great success with the product. What's the use case? Why are customers looking for? What is the use case for your customers? Obviously, you got a great infrastructure positioning. You have network storage and compute all keys to the enterprise. Where's the Kubernetes fit into it? Developer? What's the use case? >> So first of all, Kubernetes and cloud-native is a mode of developing applications to create really scalable distributed systems. We are, I mean, at our core, we are distributed systems from compute and storage. This is a way of building on top of that. And letting enterprises really build out a cloud-native application using these new types of tooling. >> Yeah, Greg, one of the things that struck me in the keynote this morning is the stuff that they said that "40% of applications that are being run in "Kubernetes are statefull." Which I remember is one of those things we've struggled with for a bit and people are wondering oh where does state? >> Yeah >> Does it belong there or do I do something different with storage? I'm curious, what you're hearing from your customers and how that fits into what you're doing? >> Right. So Kubernetes and the ecosystem is evolving so quickly. If you look at where we are with Pet sets to Stateful sets to all the things you are going to do to actually manage or talk to storage underneath it, it's evolved very rapidly over the last couple years. So I think what we're seeing is people who are very comfortable running their compute inside and maybe still wanting to talk to storage outside. Whether it be object storage or database that lives outside maybe on virtual machines. We're seeing some of those services migrate to be more native within Kubernetes. So like using a CSI or something to talk to the storage. And now we have some customers that are putting databases inside as well, right? So it's a matter of how mature you are, how adventurous you are and how much you really need that reliability out of your database or whether you need the speeded deployment and ease. >> Yeah. So Greg we talked some at the dot net show in London just a couple of weeks ago. When you talk to your customers, how do they look at Kubernetes? Is this something that there's an oh well I'm going to be using Amazon and Microsoft and therefore it's there? How much does this fit into their hybrid cloud environment? I would think that would be a big piece of your story. >> It absolutely is. And there's obviously a lot of news around multi cloud and hybrid cloud and that's what's really special about Kubernetes and containers as well as the standard interfaces we have for storage and object and databases is that you now have this sort of portability. And so I can actually run the same thing in the Cloud. I can take that and run the exact same load down in my own data center without changing anything out. And the key to that is of course open and standard APIs, right? Of course my data has to be there as well and that can be difficult to move and migrate. But the same application structure, the same development and paradigm supply both in the Cloud and as well as on-prem. And that's what I'm seeing is a lot of excitement to be able to repurpose that as well as an answer to multi cloud or hybrid cloud. >> What's the workload means in terms of data? Because data becomes the critical asset in Cloud. Stateful data has been a big discussion. Where is that here in CNCF? What's your take on the status of how that's playing out? The need in the marketplace? Ready for primetime? What's the evolution of that piece in the Stateful applications? >> Yeah, I think that with the CSI and going GA and 1.13, I think we're seeing some maturity for that. Not everything will be... Not all storage will be addressed over HTTP. A lot of it is going to be through traditional storage implications or interfaces. And I think what's interesting is seeing the move to try to meet enterprise developers or application developers. Kind of where they are. Like if you have an existing app and you need to move it to containerized application, it's hard to eradicate NFS. It's hard to eradicate block storage and go to something complete out of that. And also I think there's some good reasons to use those types of things, especially if you're running a database itself. So if you want to run a database in Kubernetes you're going to need something more robust than object storage, right? So, that evolution, that maturity has been really fast and it's been interesting to see the Kubernetes community adopt that and then customers take advantage of it. >> It's been a top conversation. >> Greg, I wonder if we can sort of zoom out for a little bit here. >> Sure. >> We're talking about Kubernetes. What does cloud-native mean in the Nutanix context and what you're hearing from your customers? >> What does cloud-native mean? Well I don't think it's unique from our perspective. I think it, again, it comes back to for some people it's going to be a 12 factor application. It's going to be using very standard and open APIs to build those applications. And then being pretty smart about how you address things that might tie you into any particular or any particular operating procedure, right? So we see, for instance some good examples around pop-ups or streaming data. We see a lot of people are very rigorous about adopting Kafka, all right. They want to use Kafka APIs. Even though there's a whole bunch of other services that we use and their favorite cloud file or whatever because they are so interested in that multi cloud or hybrid cloud then they are going to chose their APIs pretty carefully. So I think that's maybe the only thing that's a little bit unique in terms of our customer base. Is it's not a lot of start ups that are like, "I don't care, I'm worried about survival. "It's all product market fix. Let me go fast "and if I get locked into any particular vendor, "that's fine, I don't care. "That's tomorrow's problem." Right? We are enterprises, right? And these are guys who are jaded, have experienced the contract renewals with some of their favorite vendors, right? And they don't want to relive those mistakes again. And so they are very interested in having a very open ecosystem to play in. And we support that fully. >> Yeah. >> And stability, too, with the workload. They want mission-critical workloads to run. >> Absolutely. >> Quickly. >> It's interesting. I hear you talk about APIs and we look at something might be good for a bit but we get a sprawl of every technology. >> Sure. >> We have server sprawl. We had VM sprawl. And many ways we get API sprawl. >> Absolutely. >> Every single environment I work into. What's Nutanix's position on how do you manage APIs? How do you make sure you're just not creating something completely separately? >> Well I think, first of all, we really focus on the core APIs, right? So there's certain things that you just have to get these primitives absolutely right. And I applaud the Kubecon community saying the similar thing. So we do that. Right? We've got to get identity right. You got to get your data access layers right. And you have to get a lot of your provisioning things right. Once you start getting beyond that, you're into more esoteric lands and things don't tend to be as tight in, so we can be a little bit more exploratory on other APIs that aren't as core to the surface. So that's the attitude we take, which I think is similar to what we see in the community as well. I mean if you look at how many projects we got over this morning in the keynotes, it's just like a... >> The CNCF is up to 35 projects, I'm told. So. >> Right, and then tons of things that are not in CNCF that are also being used. Right? So it's a proliferation of things that all hope to be successful and kind of become the standard. >> So what's the update with Nutanix? Give us a quick company overview. Get the plug-in. What's going on with Nutanix? What's the big focus? >> Well focus continues to be just modernizing the data center. Right? Making all these applications easier to run, easier to manage and easier to operate. And that's what we're built on, right? That's the core. Again, for us it's going up the stack. It's going into the networking layer. Making sure micro segmentation can happen quickly and easily. We're not needing a Phd. or heavy lifting of things without taking over your entire network. And going up the stack with our cloud-native application stack. >> One of the things that's been clear in the industry in the past six months, certainly hardcore, we saw it come in before with hybrid, the validation of the on-premises. Right? So on-premises had at least low latency, any mission-critical workloads, aren't always going to the Cloud that fast, so the on-premises and on Cloud dynamic is super important for enterprises that are big enterprises. Not like the small, medium sized enterprises. But like the big ones have legacy and containers are nice fit there. So kind of a nice situation for you guys. How does that all play out? Do you agree with that, or? >> Yeah, so I think there's a lot of work loads that are going to, if they're not already in the public Cloud, they're going to go back, they're going to be built in the public Cloud. I mean if I have a gaming application and world-wide customers, I need to be in a presences where they can get me quickly. But similarly there's a lot of applications that are best on-prem. Whether it be because I have regulatory constraints or just that's where my data is and that's where my systems kind of come back together. I need to build my application where my data is because it's a lot easier to move the app in many cases than to move the data. And a lot of people don't want to give up that ownership and that kind of control. They are uncomfortable with moving their data that's not in their four walls. And so we've seen if you look at the CNCF survey data and you look at where Kubernetes is actually being run you'll find that a lot of Kubernetes is being run on-prem. Like some 60% of respondents are actually running Kubernetes on-prem. Now 89% are running in the Cloud which makes sense. As you start looking at folks who are much more mature, so they've been running Kubernetes for a little bit longer, their fleet size is 1,000 machines or more, we actually see them increasing their running on-prem as well. So it's the idea of having the same workloads, the same APIs that can work, start developing in the Cloud, move that application or the exact same application on-prem, work with my on-prem data, I think is very attractive. >> It's interesting, too, we hear a lot of people talk, "Hey, I'm running Kubernetes." Well, great. That's cool. Like what are you running it for? >> Yeah. >> So this gets down to the what is Kubernetes good for? >> Right. >> You're thoughts. >> Yeah, I think it started where people are comfortable with are really Stateless applications. Right? So it's a lot of filter on a pipe. It's a lot of things that are going through a line of some sort. We certainly see a lot of our IoT applications being built on that which is essentially that, right? So there's some intelligence at the edge. We're gathering the data but we're doing some intelligent things with it. Doing some inference there. Filtering the data. Bring it back to the data center. And then doing additional things on that front. So there's both data gathering as well as execution happening on the edge. So that's a big piece of it in our market. And then back to pipeline just kind of core data services. >> We've been following you guys at Nutanix. You guys are doing great. A great product. Now cloud-native is here. What's on the portfolio roadmap for SaaS and cloud-native for you guys? What's the priorities? >> So continuing to fill out the portfolio so that customers can really easily run whatever application they want. So we want those primitives to be there for them. So database storage we've filled out. The monitoring piece and the observability piece is actually really interesting. And so we have a SaaS service that lets you monitor your clusters no matter where they may be. So if you're running them in your favorite cloud provider, fantastic. You can monitor those as well as what you might be running in whatever your on-prem data center is. We have plans to actually let that be run on-prem as well because again some of our customers, especially who are running dark sites, don't want to have any of there information, even observability data go out. So we are trying to serve that customer that has pretty robust needs both around their computer environemnet but also around their data and how they manage it and protect their data. And that's really our critical customer. >> Great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate the time and the insight. Nutanix here on theCUBE. John Furrier with Stu Minium. Three days of live coverage of KUBECON, and CloudNativeCon here in Seattle 2018. 8,000 people. Getting larger every time. It's a global conference. Back with more coverage after this short break. [Techno Music]

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of the third annual NetApp Insight, with customers, partners about 5,000 plus people here Lisa Martin with Stu Minamin and very excited to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time George Kurian the CEO of NetApp. George, thank you so much for stopping by. >> Of course, thank you for having me. >> Really enjoyed your key note this morning, first of all it was standing room only there was about 5,000 plus people here Jean English, your CMO mentioned to us a few hours ago, that this is the biggest collaboration of your partners and customers under one roof, the momentum is palpable the messages are palpable, and I really enjoyed some of the messages that you delivered in your keynote. One, I'd love to get your perspective on the data authority and how NetApp itself has transformed in recent years to become that data authority, what does that mean from your C-level perspective? >> You know, we've always been in the business of helping our customers, help make their businesses better with data. We used to do it strictly in the form of storage systems, but over the last few years we have built a much more robust portfolio of capabilities. Both technological as well as partnerships to enable customers to use our technology wherever their data sits, whether it's in the edge of the enterprise or in heart of the biggest cloud providers in the world, and we believe that the world will be a hybrid, multi-cloud world, because of the need for speed and efficiency in how IT delivers support to digital businesses. And our idea is to help our customers by using our tools to integrate all of their data for business advantage. So, we see ourselves as someone who is really knowledgeable about being, managing customers' data in a hybrid cloud world. That's what we call data authority for the hybrid cloud. >> And you talked about, this morning too, kind of early in your keynote it sounded like you were addressing, NetApp has a massive install base, to helping those customers understand those that weren't born in the digital age they have to be there now to be relevant, to compete, to identify new service models, so I thought that was a very, poignant message. But something, that Stu and I were talking about is the four, kind of, pillars of digital transformation, walk us through, for those that didn't have a chance to see your keynote, walk us through those four pillars, how NetApp is enabling customers to utilize them. >> Absolutely, we talk to our customers about if you're not a born digital business you need to transform yourself especially using your data, to compete with these born digital companies. And, there are four ideas that we shared with customers that are the cornerstones of such a transformation. The first is that, digital transformation requires IT transformation, businesses usual in IT wouldn't cut it for the digital era. The second is an idea that was created by the Boston Consulting Group, which is that, speed is the new scale. It's the hallmark of competitive differentiation and advantage in the digital world. You know, I was talking about the fact that, Fortnite, a game that was created just a year ago has now got 125 million customers or players. That wouldn't happen in the physical world. And the third is, that because of the need for speed you need to be able to take advantage of innovation sources anywhere, which creates the necessity to operate in a hybrid multi-cloud world where IT is enabling the business to access innovation everywhere. And finally, that while you're doing it you need to think about your data. The critical asset that you have, that the born digital companies don't and how to use that and you need to build a data strategy which requires you to move from thinking about data centers to data fabrics, and so those were four key principles that we're sharing with our customers. >> Yeah, George I think that's a great way to measure what's happening with digital transformation. I wonder if you can help us take a lens at NetApp itself, so, when you talk about speed, NetApp has 26 years of experience, you've got over 10,000 employees a company of this size and this heritage you have some strengths but you're competing against some of those cloud native players. You know cloud is the bar which we are all measured someone said in the keynote this morning, I believe it was you, can you speak especially to the speed aspect how you look internally, what has to change culturally, I know Jean talked to us this morning, operationally there were changes made, that's your background. >> Absolutely, you know I think that we are an example of a company that is using data to accelerate our business right, in multiple ways. The first was in product development, we have used a lot of information about how customers use our systems. How, the support organization reacts to customer situations, and have accelerated cycle times for software development, it was 20 months when I joined, it's now six months on our hardware platforms and on the cloud we're releasing new capabilities every two weeks. So, we've really become a cloud native development organization and it required a lot of changes, I will just tell you that, getting the engineers through to the other side of it, has been extraordinary, they love the new world. They would never want to go back to the old world. Another place is around our custom interface where we've invested a lot more in digital marketing capabilities our CMO Jean English, is an expert in that world and so we have had new discussions with cloud only customers entirely electronically, and on the back end in terms of support we have amassed a lot of information about our customers systems, and now we're using artificial intelligence through a capability called active-IQ to tell them proactively what they can do to bench mark themselves against the best. So we say, listen Stu, we think your system which is operating in exactly similar environment to Lisa's system, is not working as well because you've done these five things. And so there's a lot of ways where we are trying to progress our own transformation. I would tell you that the secret, there are two important lessons learned. One was we started with business led initiatives rather than an end to end transformation of the business. And the second is we structured a transformation program led by the chief transformation officer so that it would become the day to day reality of our business, not the after thought of the normal course of business. And so, those are two key practical tips that we would share with our customers about transformation. >> George, NetApp has a strong history with partnerships, when I think about channel lead, NetApp has always been there, from a technology stand point, NetApp has negotiated some challenging waters I think specifically, VMware was a big wave of course acquired by EMC, but NetApp did better in VMware environments than it did in the market as a whole. Today VMware is still a very important piece of the marketplace, but Amazon's another one that is a challenging company to partner with, everybody's always worried, okay how long do you partner with them before they take over. How do you look at that, what are the most important partnerships from a NetApp standpoint, and how do you face those today? >> We've always kept the customer at the center of a partnership. I think that the secret to our success has always been that we keep the customer interests paramount, and it allows us to partner with companies who may be part of some of our competitors. I think today, if I look at it, clearly, in terms of the customer lens we have a lot of work going on with the big cloud providers, both in North America as well as overseas. To help customers architect a truly hybrid multi-cloud, we showed some really exciting work that we've done over the last year to make that a lot more tangible and real, and it's the result of deep engineer to engineer collaboration with them. I think the second area that we're making investments in are really to build the foundation for using data alongside artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically with training and inference models and there we've been fortunate to be able to collaborate with the leader, NVIDIA, in that market. And it's about focusing on what we bring and keeping the customer at the center of the conversation. In terms of the go to market side of things. We've also done work, for example, with Lenovo, where we are bringing complimentary skill sets into the market, they are bringing computing skills, we're bringing storage and data management skills. They have strength in certain geographies and so we feel like it's a really complimentary relationship and we respect all of our partners, what they bring to the market and we're excited to, and honored to work with them to be honest. >> So, one of the things that I've read recently and it was apparent in a lot of the messaging today is the evolution of the data fabric. It's moved, it's transformed from a vision to a legitimate architecture. Talk to us about some of the evolution in the last twelve months and how your customers have helped be able to really make that real? >> We've learnt a lot, about, real use cases of the data fabric. Today, we have hundreds of customers deployed and in production with it, and we've been fortunate to be able to iterate at cloud speed on the new capabilities, it is real today, we allow you to have data management services integrated across all of your environments, in your data center with the world's best flash we've connected and we're very excited to connect our enterprise Grade 8CI solution to it, and of course a catalog of consistent data services that cross enterprise cloud with our 8CI and the biggest public clouds, we have taken advantage of new container technology and capabilities that Kubernetes and Istio bring to the market to build a really good control plane for all of this, we've innovated around data insights using foundational technology from on command insight that gives you now visibility into where all your data sits. And you'll see us continue to bring out really exciting innovations in the data fabric. The reason that the data fabric is resonating with customers is because it helps you build a consistent set of data services in a hybrid multi-cloud world, and use your data for business advantage. That's why it's resonating. >> George, NetApp has gone through some ups and downs over the 26 years. In many ways, it's been close, or people have said it's on the brink of being gone, and it's remade itself. How has NetApp continued to do this, and why should people believe that NetApp is in the position to execute best for the future? >> I think we've always been resilient at looking at things that could have been threats, and making them opportunities. Throughout the generations there was the transition from the internet computing, the dotcom bust that affected everybody, virtualization was supposed to kill storage, the cloud was supposed to kill storage, and through every one of those transitions we have looked carefully at how could we take what could be a threat and make it an opportunity, and make it an opportunity by serving our customers best through those technology moves, and I think that's the core to our success, I would say that what we have done over the last few years, is massively upped the game on execution. We laid out the data fabric strategy four years ago, as a vision and four years later we've got customers, we've got the biggest cloud providers, we've integrated it with the world's best flash and the world's best HCI and we are delivering road maps. So, I think that's really the promise of the new NetApp, we are really, really, focused on execution. >> Another, thing, sorry Stu, that we've heard along those lines in terms of NetApp's evolution, and continuing to stay relevant, is that the NetApp on NetApp story is one that NetAppians are proud of and should be, but it's also seeming like, is that a differentiator, when you're talking with customers who have so much choice that NetApp on NetApp story, that authentic, this is how we pivoted over the last 26 years to stay relevant, to compete. Tell us little bit about how you're, as the CEO, when you're meeting with customers, how does that story resonate with them? >> Our transformation story is a topic of conversation with all C-level executives. Everything we talked about with our customers today, we are an example of. So, for example, we did not take on an end to end IT re-architecture, we prioritize the digital business initiatives in the company and said, what are the barriers in our own IT that preclude that and so we prioritized IT initiatives to support the digital business transformation of the company. We have created two data hubs in the company as we have progressed those initiatives, one a product data hub through our auto support mechanism, which is now integrated into every technology that we sell to customers, both in the data centers of our customers and the cloud and on the customer facing side we've evolved to a customer hub that so, I think that there are examples that we share both in terms of leadership, people change management, transformation of IT that are extraordinarily relevant and I think that one of the things that we are open about sharing is the mistakes we've made. I think that brings an honesty and a transparency to our relationships with our customers and they trust us because of that. >> Alright, George, it's been really interesting, people have said for years storage is going to be killed off by everything else. If you look at all of the big waves right now data's at the center of all of it. >> George: That's correct. >> What I want you to help us understand is connect the dots for us, because NetApp, most of the customers I talk to here, the first thing they'll think about is, oh, well, NetApp's my storage company. Storage versus the data and how I get value out of that, help us connect the dots as to how I go from being a storage supplier to helping customers become data visionaries, as you say. >> I think one of the really important discussions we have with customers is data is the foundation of a digital business it's sort of the oil of the digital business, and software is the engine. It operates on the data to make the business go better, the challenge that most business leaders have as they think about digitizing their businesses is that they have fragmented their data across systems and silos that were the prevailing norm in IT, not only did it fragment the data, but it made operating IT much more complicated and so two long held paradigms that we have shared are finally coming to reality, NetApp has always been a simplify your data center unlike our competitors and that's coming through for the needs of simplification. And the second is, while you're doing it build a platform that can integrate all of your data, so that you can accelerate your transformation, and I think we're well positioned for that. I think there are customers here who have never met us in the storage systems world, that have joined us on the cloud like WuXi NextCODE, the genomics company that never buys a piece of equipment from NetApp, so we're really excited about an enormous number of those new faces that we're seeing. And then there are customers that started with us, as a storage system supplier, that we are bringing to the cloud. And, so we're going to keep pushing forward. >> Just quick follow up on that, it really opened my eyes, I was at the Cisco show earlier this year and when you talk about the future, Cisco, the networking company, they said, ten years from now you won't think of us as a networking company, you'll think of us just as a software company. What's NetApp of the future? >> We will offer our intellectual property in a broad range of ways, I think we'll still be offering systems but I think the brains of those systems will really be super smart software. Software that's, digitally enhanced and software that's enhanced with machine learning capabilities. I think we'll offer them also as cloud services, and we're really going to be focused on helping our customers with their data problems we think that's an extraordinarily rich landscape and we think that it has the opportunity to propel our business to achieve everything we've wanted to achieve. So, we're excited about the momentum. We are, honored to have so many customers, partners, and technologists here, and I think this is the best insight in the three years that I've been CEO, and I'm looking forward to having an even better one next year. >> Excellent, keep moving up bar, George. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE, you're now an alumni so I'm going to give you a sticker so you-- >> Thank you >> Can brand yourself. Stu and I really appreciate you sharing your insights and your time with us. >> Thank you so much, it's been an honor to be here. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, we are live from NetApp Insights 2018 in Las Vegas, I am Lisa Martin for Stu Minium, stick around we'll be back with our next guest shortly. (upbeat music)