>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube with digital coverage of Vmworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCube's 11th year of VMworld. Here we are in 2020 of course, rather than being together at the moscone or at the sand. We're coming to you in your place of work or home when you're watching video, happy to welcome back. We have two of our long time guests on the program. First we have Travis Vigil. He is the Senior Vice President of Product Management with Dell Technologies and joining him is Lee Caswell who's the Vice President of Product Storage and Availability Business unit at VMware, Lee and Travis, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Steve, it's good to see you again. >> All right, so we love kind of the maturation of what's happened. I mentioned 11 years, I get to usually sit down and talk with both of you, we talk about strategy we talk about how customers, and at the end of the day, we know things are changing. Like 2020 things are changing more every day, but one of the big transitions here is talking about that, how applications are changing. In the old days it was hey, I have an application, let me just stick it in a VM and it's going to be good there forever. We know that today I need to be able to react fast, I need to move things forward. And that impacts what VMware and Dell are doing together. So hey Lee, if maybe we come with you give the VMware perspective on that application changing and what that means to there and Travis feel free to chime in when Lee's done. >> Sure. >> Yeah thanks so much Steve and great to have to be back here on theCube. And VMworld is always a great opportunity to talk about how the industry is changing. What's really happening here and so one of the things that we're all finding is that the pace of application change is speeding up. And you know what, I mean you think about infrastructure. We want to think about how you can organize around the fastest changing element. This is one of the things we kicked off with project Pacific and our Tanzu portfolio a year ago. And you're starting to see all the products come roaring through right now as we're integrating Kubernetes. So that container based applications can be managed, secured, protected, just the same way with all the same tools that we have with our traditional VM applications. >> Yeah it's an excellent point. I mean, we are seeing the adoption of the modern applications in VMware environments, just accelerate beyond belief. And we're getting increasing requests from our customers to protect, to manage production workloads in Kubernetes environments and with our power protect data manager. Yeah we're actually announcing that we have all support for the Tanzu portfolio. So that includes TKG TKGI, Kubernetes Clusters, Kubernetes Clusters, and vSphere. So we're really excited to be able to offer this capability to our joint customers. And I think one thing that we're seeing is that the roles in IT are oftentimes blending together. So one of the things we're excited about with our solution is that with our direct data protection integration and vSphere environments. It's actually the be admin that can provision, monitor, manage, and protect the Kubernetes workloads, give unified experience and provide that peace of mind in this next generation world. >> Yeah Travis I'm glad you brought up some of those changing roles. I mean, that was such a big theme for so many years as the Virtualization Admin taking on more responsibility. And Lee teed up the changing application, you've got other roles coming together. You've got the application development team, which often times is disconnected from the infrastructure team. So, from either of you just what are you seeing from your customers? How are they sorting through that? I need to move agile, I need to move faster and that's not traditionally how the infrastructure team has worked. >> Things that we've been working on for example is how we've integrated SRM with vVols and PowerMax. And when you think about that, and we've talked for years right about the vVols for example. What we're responding to now is that customers are coming back and saying, listen, I have HCI, but I also have storage system and I need your help to go and be able to manage these with a consistent operating model and the same team. And that career path for the Virtualization Administrator just continues to grow. They're adding now five native applications, Kubernetes Orchestrated Applications, and being able to manage those across traditional storage and newer HCI systems. This is a really interesting blend of where the companies are working together to make sure that customer responses are being addressed really quickly. >> Yeah, it's a great example Lee. I mean, if you think about Three-tier architecture and PowerMax being the flagship of the heart of a lot of data centers that have been in operation for decades, the fact that we're seeing from our customers, hey, can you take a SRM and vVols, Can you integrate it with PowerMax and SRDF and be able to provide me a step along the way on my modernization journey? Such that I can utilize what I've built up my IT operations about around over the last couple of decades along with the newer deployment models like Hyper-converged infrastructure. And we're seeing that kind of that step forward and a blurring of the lines in terms of roles all over the place. I think another good example Lee is Cloud Native App Dev, right? And customers looking object, S3 object storage capability to provide a simple dev apps friendly way of, developing applications and hybrid cloud environments. And that's why we're really happy that we're able to provide early access for what we refer to as object scale, which works in conjunction with the vSAN Data persistence Platform to allow our customers to deliver modern applications. But at the same time use infrastructure that the IT organization is deploying, for other standard applications. I think that's another good example. >> It's a good point we had blocks through VSand of course right? And added files, what was missing well objects. (laughing) And so... >> Exactly >> We're already together with this persistent storage platform. We've got a way to go on basically supply object scale, object scale storage that can be used for Cloud Native Development. And I think this is a good example, right? This isn't just one hand clapping, right? This is both companies working together to make sure that customers have a seamless experience. That's really important. It doesn't come for granted, right? I mean it really takes co-engineering, joint testing and developing and go-to market together between our companies. I've never seen it working better. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Go ahead Stuart. >> I know Travis I was just saying, we saw how fast VMware went from announcing project Pacific to the GA of the base solution where you needed the cloud foundation to update one already allowing everything to move open. That's going to be a little bit challenging to keep up with that pace of innovation. We've been talking for years on the queue, but we went from the 18 month release cycle to now, most things are like a six week release cycle. So, give us through any other pieces that were portfolio we need to understand the fitting with Tanzu and yeah. How do you move things along and where are the customers with their adoption? Are they sitting there waiting for it, or is this something that is going to be a more traditional enterprise slow roll? >> No I think you hit it spot on Stu the adoption and the deployments of these new architectures are coming very, very quickly, right? Traditional IT is trying to and in many cases successfully moving to a more cloud-like delivery CI/CD approach to how they run their shops and the speed of innovation and the speed and the dynamics of new technologies within the data centers are just, accelerating at a really fast pace. And in order to continue to keep up with these changes, it's I'll reflect back on a little bit on what Lee was talking about. It's understanding where customers are going and jointly working together to target those pain points. And I'll give a very specific example. And then I think maybe Lee, we should start to talk a little bit about Monterey as well, but I'll say a very specific example on joint innovation is, as customers have deployed VMware more broadly and they put more mission, critical large applications on VM, there's been sort of this persistent issue that some of those VMs just were so large or required such high availability, that they were what some IT professionals would refer to as unprotectable. And so we're actually demonstrating with VMware innovation that allows those VMs, those large mission critical Vms that can take zero downtime or even a pause in availability or performance, the ability to take backups without impacting the performance on those VMs. So, that's a very specific thing we're doing, a very specific pin point, but I think it's an example of us working together to target customer customer needs. And then I think more broadly, there's a big trend in composability that part talked a little bit about this morning Project Monterey I'll let Lee kick it off and then kind of talk a little bit about what we're doing to partner with VMware on this initiative. >> Yeah, well great. I definitely want to hear Monterey obviously, edge computing has everybody excited. Travis we've been hearing from the Dell team the last couple of years is that strategy's muttering some of the investment pieces that Dell's doing. So Lee, we hear edge computing. What does that mean? VMware has got a strong telco play that we've watched, for many years. So, just as you said Project Pacific rolled out pretty fast, help us understand a bit more of this Monterey and how fast will this turn into that cascade of products that you talked about for that we sell the last year. >> Yeah thanks, and it's exciting at VMware, right? We're willing to go and share a projects. Overtime project to become products, it's the way it works. And so the project is really a directional vision that says, if you think about what we did with Project Pacific a year ago, and Pacific being like going broad. The idea was applications are changing, we needed to go and basically make Kubernetes integrated with these sphere, with our full VMware Cloud Foundation, and then basically simplify it for customer consumption, and we did that together with the Tanzu brand. Now, Project Monterey, if you think of the Monterey Canyon is now going deep. And what it says is that not only the software architecture has to change, but also hardware, new hardware capabilities, particularly through the use of Smart NICs are a new way for us to think about re-architecting, how compute is basically optimized within a server and then across clusters and even across the hybrid cloud. And so Monterey will be a new way to look at how we go in efficiently offload CPUs and use these new Smart NIC offload engines as a way to think about where hypervisors run, where let's call it software defined, whether it's storage or compute. And most importantly and probably is security. 'Cause one of the things we're finding that applications new applications are demanding is encryption for example or distributed firewalls thinking about like how do we do that secure boot or how do we think about air gapping applications from the infrastructure? And so we're really thinking about how to re-architect the world of security. So the security is integrally distributed throughout an architecture. And so you'll be seeing with Project Monterey our ability to go and drive new products out of that and we're working very closely on an engineering to engineering level with Dell Technologies to make sure this new technology becomes available for customers and fully integrated in the VMware Cloud Foundation. So we have an easy way for customers to digest it which I think that's the thing Stuart right now is there's a lot of new technologies coming so fast, really their partnership means that we're able to consume those more quick. >> Wonderful, yeah Monterey so we're going to go deeper than the grand canyon is deep, but I guess we need to all a breathe under water too. So Travis, as I mentioned, Dell's had for a couple of years, some of these analysts sessions that I've had the opportunity to go through, been watching out that growth of the edge strategy, obviously Dell has everything from some of the hardened pieces on the consumer side, through tying into broad ecosystems. So the software obviously is going to be a huge component of what edges we saw in the keynote stage and video, a big partnership they're obviously a huge important partner for both Dell and VMware. So Travis, from the Dell side, what does this vision of Monterey mean? >> It's extremely important, I'd say transformational potentially for IT going forward and Lee did a really good job of describing the trends, whether that be cloud native Telco 5G, machine learning and data-centric applications, multicloud, and hybrid cloud and that security concern that Lee was talking about. Those are our real trends, and if we can offer infrastructure that is more composable into these dis-aggregated resources, across the edge, across the cloud, across the core, all software defined and seamlessly managed. I mean, that's a powerful vision. And we're just really excited to be partnering with VMware, jointly engineering this future focusing first on those Smartnecks that Lee was talking about because you need that higher compute, you need that increased bandwidth. You need easier manageability of a distributed infrastructure, and you need that ability to provide easier and more distributed security. So lots more to come, we will be incorporating these technologies specifically in the form of Smartnecks into our HCI and our server portfolio. But this like Lee said, this is a trend that will move from initiative to project to products very quickly. >> Wonderful, well we covered that breadth in that depth as you said Lee. Want to give you both just final takeaways, what you want people to take from Vmworld 2020 Lee we'll start with you and then Travis you get the final word. >> Yeah, we're really looking at a changing world in terms of applications. And so for customers around the globe, look for the partnerships that will bring those new capabilities and make it easy to go and deploy as fast as possible. We started off making sure that people weren't looking down at the infrastructure and started looking up at the apps. We're continuing that process with what we're doing around Tanzu, around our Kubernetes portfolio and stay tuned there'll be more to come, much more as we work together on Project Monterey, lots of exciting news and glad that you were here from VMworld to go and see it all of the light. >> Yeah, I think I obviously agree with everything that Lee just said. I think for me the this VMworld is just, another step forward in a great partnership across Dell technologies and VMware. And I mentioned several things, all of the things that we're doing together I forgot to mention actually that we're the first company to be, to offer a certified solution to protect VMworld Cloud Foundations which I use that specific example again expect more first, expect more joint in engineering and integrations. And I think the power of these two organizations coming together is what's going to be needed to help drive forward into this next generation of modern applications and dynamic workloads and dis-aggregated resources. And so we're just really excited about the innovation, the ability to address customer issues and the strong partnership that we have across Dell technologies and VMworld. >> Well, one of the measurements six that we have today is how fast everyone can respond and move fast. Congratulations on all the progress you've both made in your teams in the last year. And absolutely look forward to hearing more about Project Monterey as that matures. Travis and Lee, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks to you. >> Thanks to you. >> All right, and stay tuned for more coverage of VMworld 2020, I'm Stuart Miniman and as always. Thank you for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of VMworld 2020. Of course, such a broad ecosystem in the VMware environment. Been talking a lot, of course, this year, about what's happened in the Cloud Native space. vSphere 7 has Kubernetes coming into the virtualized environment. And one of those key pieces of doing cloud is you need to make sure data protection still works. And, of course, VMware has a long history working with lots of companies. In this segment, we're going to be digging into the VMware, and Dell, also, solution for data protection. So, happy to welcome to the program. First, I have, from VMware, Tom Spoonemore. He is a product line manager for Modern Application Platform with VMware, and welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumnis, Efri Nattel-Shay, who is with Dell technologies, Director of Data Protection and Cloud Native apps. Efri, welcome back, Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much, it's good to be here. >> So, Tom, I kind of teed it up in my intro. VMware, for the longest time, for as long as I can remember, we've really talked about that ecosystem, those joint solutions. I remember, back when we started "theCUBE", in 2010, you'd go there and it would be, oh, there's $15, no, $20, for every dollar that you spend on VMware that the ecosystem kind of pulls along. When VMware started building the VMware Cloud Foundation and the VMware cloud solutions, data protection really went along with it. So, the integrations that they done with vSphere hold them in there as the environment. Tanzu Kubernetes, there's a lot of new pieces. But I think some of those principles have stayed the same. So, why don't you start us off. Tell us a little bit, philosophically, how is VMware treating this space, and how data protection fills into it, and then, Efri, we'll get your take on it, too. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, from the perspective of VMware and the ecosystem, as you say, we want to be very inclusive. We want to bring the ecosystem and our partners along with what we're doing, regardless of what space it is, and in the Modern Applications Platform and Cloud Native tooling, we're very much thinking along the same lines. And as it relates to data protection in specific, Cloud Native is a place where, mainly it's been thought of as a place for stateless applications. but what we're seeing in people's deployments is more and more stateful applications are beginning to move to Kubernetes and into containers. And so the question then becomes, what do you do for data protection of those applications that are deployed into Kubernetes? And so, with Tanzu, and specifically Tanzu Mission Control, we have included a data protection capability, along with the other capabilities that come with Mission Control, that allows you to provide data protection for your fleet of Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which distribution, regardless of which cloud they're running on, and regardless of how many teams you might have running on a particular cluster or set of clusters. And so, for this reason, we have introduced a data protection capability that is focused around our open source project called Velero and Mission Control operates Velero in your clusters from a central UI API and CLI. That allows you to do data protection, initiating schedules of backups, doing restores, and even migration from cloud to cloud, from a single control point. And part of this vision is not only providing an API that we can handle directly with our own Velero-based implementation, but also opening that up to partners. And this is where we're working with Dell, specifically, to be able to provide that single API, but yet have Dell, for instance, with their PowerProtect solution, be able to plug in and be a data protection provider underneath Tanzu Mission Control. And so, that's the work that we're doing together to help satisfy this vision that we have for data protection in the Cloud Native space. >> Yeah, agree 100% with Tom. Like Tom has said, when we looked at customer environments three years ago, people talk mainly about stateless applications, but over time, when more storage solutions, persistent data solutions came along, there came the need to, not only provision the data, but also protect it, and be able to do backups, and restores, and cyber recovery solutions, and disaster recovery, and the whole set of use cases that allow a full life cycle of data along the Cloud Native set of applications, not just a traditional one. And what we've seen, we're talking, obviously, with a lot of customers, joint customers with VMware, customers that use our storage solutions, as well as others, on-prem and in the cloud. And what they have shown, to say, there, is that you have the IT infrastructure people on one hand, which have certain needs, and there is the new set of users, the DevOps people, who are writing applications in a new way, and they need to communicate and they need a solution that fits both of them. So, with VMware, with the community, with Velero, we are introducing a solution that is capable of doing both management for the DevOps people, as well as for the other team infrastructure. And, a year ago, we have talked about this coming up, and now it's really there, and it's doing great. >> Oh, Efri, I'm so glad you brought up some of those organizational issues, because it's not just, oh, we have some new applications, and, of course, we need to do data protection. Can you bring us inside a little bit? Your customers, are they aware of what they need to do? Is it central IT that's coming over and telling the DevOps team, hey, don't forget, security, data protection, still super important. How does that engagement go, and what change does that have for the Dell field and the channel? >> Yeah, I think that the more successful organizations really have that kind of dialogue. So, the developers are not operating in silos. They're not doing things themselves. They do, some of the use cases, they do need to copy data for their own use, but they understand that there are also organizational needs. Someone needs to sign the audit pass, the SLAs are in compliance, the regulations are met. So, all of these things, someone needs to do them. And there is a mutual recognition that there is a role for these people and for these people, for these use cases and for these use cases. >> Yeah, I would agree with that. One of the things that we're seeing, particularly as you think about Kubernetes as a multitenant kind of platform, what we're seeing is that central IT operations still wants to make sure that backups are happening with stateful applications, but more and more they're relying on and providing self-service capabilities to line of business and DevOps, to be able to back up their applications in the way that's best for those applications. It's a recognition of domain expertise for a particular application. So, what we've done with Mission Control is allowed central IT to define policy. And those policies then give the framework, or guidelines, if you will, that then allow the DevOps teams to make the best choices within their own field of expertise and for their own applications. >> Yeah, and what we've seen is some of the organizations really like full control over central IT, and some customers have told us, don't give anything to the developers, but most of them are asking for some self-service capabilities for the developers. But then, who is setting the policy? Who is saying, okay, I have a gold policy data protection? Does it mean I replicate to another side? Does it mean I do longterm retention for a month, or for a year? That is for someone in central IT to set up. So, saying what the policy means, or what it actually is, is the job of a central IT, whereas, this application needs application consistency, and it is of gold policy, that oftentimes is the best knowledge and domain expertise of the developer. >> So, Tom, you mentioned Tanzu Mission Control, which is the management solution. Tanzu is a portfolio. Can you help walk us through the relevant pieces here that are part of this joint solution? >> Yeah, sure. So, Tanzu is really a portfolio of applications, or a portfolio of solutions, as you've said. It's really along three main pillars. It's what we call, build, run and manage. Tanzu Mission Control fills in, along with our Tanzu Observability and Tanzu Service Mesh, in our manage pillar. The build pillar is more along the lines of supporting developing of modern applications, developing and deploying modern applications. So, many of the technologies that have come from our acquisitions of Pivotal, as well as Bitnami, make up that pillar, and these are technologies that are coming to fore, and you'll hear more and more about at this VM world and going forward. Our run pillar is really where you'll find Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Now, this is our distribution, but it's more than just a distribution of Kubernetes. It's a distribution of Kubernetes, along with all the tools that you would need to be able to deploy modern applications. So, all of these three pillars come together, along with services provided by Pivotal labs, to really give you a full, multifaceted platform for deploying and operating modern applications. >> Great, and Efri, where are there integrations there? How does the storage fit in has been a discussion we've been having for a few years% when it comes to Kubernetes. >> Yeah, basically, PowerProtect integrates with all of these levels that Tom has mentioned, starting with the lowest levels of integration. With the storage, VMware has Cloud Native storage solutions, which allow things like incremental snapshots to be taken from the environment. And we're using this mechanism in order to copy data efficiently from TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, environment, out of the cluster, into a space-efficient data domain, as a target site. So, that's a storage integration. Then, there is qualification and support for the various run environments that Tom has mentioned, the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated, as well as things that we're working with VMware in order to enable protection for what has been called the Project Pacific, which really allows you very sophisticated capabilities of running multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes cluster API capabilities. So, you can spin up a cluster very, very quickly by VMware. And then, we can take backups of this environment up to data domain target site. And, finally, working with Tom for tons of amount of time and effort to do the integration between Tanzu Mission Control and PowerProtect. So, allowing cloud, multicloud, multilocation environments to be provisioned and monitoring by Tanzu Mission Control, but also protected using PowerProtect. >> Yeah, so, Tom, we talked about supporting the ecosystem, and it's a much faster cadence now than it was in the past. It used to be, it felt like every other year at VMworld, we got together and talked about the major vSphere release. Of course, in the container, in Kubernetes world, we're having a much faster cadence. So, could you just help us understand, what of this is generally available today? We saw vSphere 7 back in the spring. The update, right ahead of VMworld, that really extended Kubernetes beyond just VCF, to be able to be an all vSphere 7 environment. So, we know some of this is here on the roadmap, so help map this out for us, what's here today from VMware and what the timeline is we expect for all of these pieces we've been discussing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Mission Control shipped in March. So we're still relatively new, but as you say, we run Cloud Native ourselves, and so we're releasing new features, new capabilities. literally every week. We have a weekly cadence for release. Our data protection capability was just introduced at the end of June, so it's fairly new, and we are still introducing capabilities, like bring your own storage, doing scheduling of backups, and this kind of thing. You'll see us adding more and more cloud providers. We have been working to open up the platform to make it available to partners. And this is, just generally, with Mission Control, across the board, but specifically, when it comes to Dell, and PowerProtect, the data protection capability, this is something that we are still actively working on, and it is past the architecture stage, but it's probably still a little ways out before we can deliver on it, but we are working on it diligently, and definitely expect to have that in the product, and available, and really providing a basis for integrations with other providers as well. >> Yeah, and in terms of PowerProtect, we have told the audience about a tech preview a year ago, and since then we have released a number of releases. We are having a quarterly cadence. So, it is available for the general consumption for quite some time. Talking about the integration layers that we have mentioned before, we are the first stack to protect VMs and Kubernetes and applications using the same platform, the same UI, the same policies, everything looks the same. And we have recently introduced capabilities such as application consistency for a number of applications. The support for TKG is available for now. And, as Tom has said, we are working on further integrations, such as the integration with Tanzu Mission Control with VMware. >> Wonderful, I want to get a final word from both of you. Efri, we'll start with you. We've got this regular cadence coming up. We know we're only a couple of weeks away from DTWE, the Dell Technology World Experience, where, of course, theCUBE will be there. What should we look for the rest of 2020, or any final comments that you have for customers that might be looking at this environment? >> Sure, I think that, two trends that I'm seeing, and they're just getting stronger over the years. The first thing is multicloud, and multicloud means many things to different people, but, basically, every customer that we are speaking to is talking about, I want to run things on-prem, but I also need to run these workloads in the hyperscaler. And I need to move from one hyperscaler region to another, or between hyperscalers, and they want to run this distribution here, and the other distribution there. And there are many combinations of stacks and Database-as-a-Service and other components of the infrastructure that different developers are using on-prem and in the cloud. So, I expect this to go even further, and solutions like PowerProtect and TKG can help customers to do that job, and, of course, Tanzu Mission Control, to monitor and manage this environment. Secondly, I think that protection is going to follow more the workloads. So, application is no longer the VM. Obviously, it's becoming many different components that are starting to span across locations and across environments. And again, the protection nature of these is going to change according to where and how these workloads are being provisioned. >> Yeah, and I would say the same thing about Mission Control, very much multicloud-focused, Today it's largely an AWS-focused solution. We're changing to add more flexible storage options, more clouds. Azure is something that we'll be doing in the short term, Google Cloud platform and Google Cloud Storage after that, as well as just the ability to use your own on-prem storage for your backup targets. Also, we're going to be focusing on driving more policy-driven backup. So, being able to define policies for groups of clusters, define RTO and RPO for groups of clusters, allowing Mission Control to help determine what the individual backup policy should be for that particular asset. And continuing to work with Dell and other partners to help extend our platform and open it up for other data protection providers. >> Tom and Efri, thanks so much for the updates. Tom, welcome to being a CUBE alumni, and Efri, I'm sure we'll be seeing you in the team, in the near future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Stay with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

(soft music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And we're digging in with VMware with the latest update of the VMware cloud, on AWS definitely technology solution set that the ecosystem has been very interesting into. And to help us do that deep dive happy to welcome back to the program, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of the cloud platform business unit with VMware. Kit, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me Stu. >> All right, so you brought along some slides said if people want to watch we've done an executive interview to give kind of the general business update, but when it comes to the technology, you know I guess we start with VMware, Amazon partnership is a deep integration we've heard both from Andy Jassy and for Pat Gelsinger, on how much engineering work and how critically important it is. Anybody from the technical side understand that one of the interesting things in cloud is that Amazon created bare metal instances to support this solution. So one of the items here is that there is a new bare metal instance. So why don't you bring us inside, you know What the updates are and what this means to the user base? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah so the bare metal support is something that we worked very closely with AWS on when we were first launching VMware cloud on AWS. And the idea there was that bare metal support is that it very similarly models, EC2 virtual machines, in the sense of each of these Vms VM types or instance types, as they say, are various kinds of T short sizes, right? And so they have a lot of these different instance types. And so similarly speaking, on the bare metal side, we're also seeing a lot of different instance types there. So we started out with an i3.metal instance, and we added an r5.metal instance and now we're really excited to add what we're we're calling i3en.metal. And so lets bring about slide to talk more about all the new capabilities there with i3en. You know, we have found when we talk to customers is that they love the simplicity of the hyper converged model that i3 brings. What they said was, hey, we've got a lot of workloads that are storage capacity battle. And so that meant that, you know they had the issue there is workloads, they use some amount usually a good amount of CPU memory, but they have a lot of storage capacity requirements. What that meant with i3, is they had to get a lot of these i3 hosts to get enough storage capacity to support those workloads. And obviously, they have some extra compute capacity lying around. And so you know what we've done here with i3en, is dramatically increase the amount of storage capacity. So we can see here, what is it about 45 terabytes or so so much, much larger than what you can get about four x larger than we can get on i3en. metal today. So this is again, very targeted to those very large workloads that needed beefy underlying server and, just trying to better align the customer needs and workload needs with the underlying physical capabilities. And so this is just going to be one of many that we'll bring out. We've got, a whole pipeline of these actually. And, you know, again, you can imagine all the different types of VM instance types, right? There's GPU ones, there's FPGA based ones, you know, so there's all sorts of different shapes and sizes. And, you know as we get more and more feedback from customers, as they're running more and more applications, we'll get more and more of these instance types out there as well. >> Yeah, it's really interesting Kit it give, it gives me flashbacks. I'm thinking back to your 10 or even 15 years ago, when you talked in the early days of, did I just deploy VMware on the servers I had? Or did I buy servers that had the configuration, so I could optimize and take advantage of the feature functionality that's needed? All right, when I heard some of the things you talked about there, about the, you know, being able to use certain workloads and the like, one of the feedbacks I've gotten from users is, you know, the overall price of this, let's just say it's not the least expensive solution to start with. So, so, what, what are, what are some of the new entry level options that you have with the VMC on AWS? How does this update help? >> Yeah, yeah, first of all on the price side what we have found is that this is actually extremely price efficient price competitive. if you're able to utilize all the underlying physical and variable capacity. But you know, as you just mentioned, Stu, you know, the default configuration is three nodes of those i3 hosts, and that those three hosts aren't small either, right? They're pretty beefy and if you just want to get started, just try something small. Well, today, we do have actually a OneNote instance. But that OneNote instance, is just a temporary is kind of a testbed, if you will a proof of concept type of environment. It's not a long term, long running a production environment. And so customers kind of have this OneNote on the one hand or three notes on other and, you know, obviously they're saying, "Hey, why can't we just start with two nodes, "make it super simple, "reduce that price point again "for a very small footprint deployment, "and then allow us to scale up." So we bring up the next slide, what you can see is that that's exactly what we've done here as well, supporting two nodes now. And the idea here is this is a full production environment. You get all the great VMware technology, you can do motion stuff, HA, you get availability, and so forth, stores policies, as you see here. So again, this is meant to be a long lived, fully supported production environment that can also scale up if need be, right? You might start out with two nodes, but then find, "Hey, I want to add three or four or more." And you can certainly fully do that and fully support that. So again, this is just giving customers more optionality, more flexibility for where they want to to come in. What we've been doing thus far is talking with a lot of customers that had, you know, pretty large footprints and saying, "Hey, I want to move a good chunk of my data center, "or I've got a lot of workloads I want to burst." And of those cases, three or more nodes made a lot of sense. What we're finding now is that a lot of customers do want that flexibility to start smaller, just with two nodes really simple, kind of put their toe in the water, if you will and get a feel for the service and then expand from there. >> Yeah, okay, Kit, one, one quick follow up on this, you mentioned that if customers are maximizing, you know, leveraging the full environment they I have there, it's very cost competitive. You know, how are we hearing from data from from customers? What is their, their growth pattern? Are they getting good utilization? Do, do they have a good feel for, how to manage that economics in the AWS space, a lot of talk about things like FinOps these days, and how to make sure that the technical group and the Financial Group are working close together. >> Yeah, such a great question, actually. And the whole notion of the economics around this is a huge focus area for us. We have a whole Cloud Economics group, as a matter of fact, that we frequently bring in to talk with customers to help them think through all these different things. There's, there's a number of different considerations there. You know, a lot of look from, going from on-prem into the Cloud to the VMC on AWS. And, you know, with VMC on AWS, our prices are just public cloud in general, it's very easy to understand the price 'cause it's right up front, you're getting charged, right? On Premise a bit more difficult to understand that you've got a lot of capital expenses, you got a lot of other sort of operational expenses, you know, power electricity, people, and how do you, how do you make all the right computations there? So we have whole teams to help people think through that. But usually, what we have found is that price is not the main thing, right? Price is kind of a secondary or tertiary type of consideration. The main thing is always one of our primary use cases, it's like, man, I need to get out of my data centers, or my data center is that capacity, I want to keep it but I really need to be able to burst to the cloud, maybe some sort of test dev* like test in the cloud and production on pram or vice versa. Those are the key use cases that bring customers in, and then it's really a question of, okay, now that you know, you want to do this, how do we do this as effectively, efficiently from a cost perspective as well as possible, right? And that's where that sort of economic discussion starts to happen. And then you get into more of the details like, okay, which kind of instance type do I want? What are the cost metrics of that? Can I actually fill it to capacity? That's where we start getting into those more specific situations for each customer. >> Excellent, we have that. That really tees up for me kit, when, when I think about the, you know early customers that I've talked to that are using VMC on AWS, they tend to be your enterprise customers, they're big VMware customers, they've enterprise license agreements, and the like. VMware has got a strong history working across the board. And you talk about Cloud in previous solutions. You've had close partnerships with the, with the managed service providers. >> Yeah. >> So my understanding is you're actually looking to help connect between what you've done with a managed service project in the past and this VMware on AWS solution. So bring us inside, you know this, this, this option >> Sure. Yeah, let me let me break it down for you 'cause we do work with a lot of partners. You know, obviously from VMware, its inception partners have been, you know, core to our strategy and core to our success, right? What we've actually been doing, actually somewhat kind of quietly over the past 15 years anyway, isn't really building out, what we call our VMware Cloud Provider Partner Program, and the VCPP program. And, you know, the idea there is that we do have a lot of these managed service providers that can take our software and run it on behalf of their customers, essentially, delivering our software as a service to their customers. And that's been great. We've seen a lot of success stories there. And we have about 4200 of these folks now, like a tremendous amount spread all around the world, all sorts of different geographies, and also all sorts of different industry verticals. And so you see a lot of these folks getting really specific, you know, let's say to the finance, vertical, you know, in and around Wall Street, running all sorts of great services for the financial services firms. Well, these folks are looking to evolve as well and what they're saying and seeing is like, hey, you know, just this basic idea of running infrastructure. Well, I can do that. But it doesn't necessarily differentiate me right? I need to move up the stack and start offering more services, and really trying to be a very, you know, sort of boutique and targeted solution for their customers. And so a lot of these customers, you know, obviously want to run on VMC on AWS. And so what we've been doing is enabling these partners to, you know, sell through essentially VMC on AWS that to sell these servers to their customers. But one of the challenges there is that they're only able to sell the full sort of bare-metal server, they weren't able to break that up or split that across customers as they can do today within their own environments. In fact, today, within their environments, they use something called VMware Cloud Director. And this is software that we give them. And you know, it's really nice that you can take a vSphere environment, software-defined data center and break it apart or kind of carve it up, if you will, into multiple smaller tenants, then, the, you know, each of these customers can, can take part of. And so but we didn't have that functionality for VMware Cloud on AWS. And so that's for the announcements all about, so let's pull up the slide to talk about that. The basic idea here is we can now enable the same software defined data centers that are running inside of AWS as part of VMware Cloud on AWS to be accessed by VMware Cloud Director. And so what we've done is actually made, we call it VCD, for short made VCD, a service that we now operate, and it runs there alongside VMC on AWS. And so now these managed service providers can leverage the VCD as a service to rule out access and, and carve up these SDDC that they get. And, you know, the takeaway here is that we're just giving these partners much greater flexibility and optionality in terms of how they consume, the underlying bare-metal infrastructure on VMC on AWS, and then give that out to their own customers again, giving greater customer choice and options, those customers. >> All right kit, so the other big thing that we've covered this year with VMware, of course, is the launch of vSphere 7. What that means the cloud native-space, the whole Tanzu portfolio line. So help us understand how all the application modernization Kubernetes and like ties into now the solution that we're talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's about a huge focus for us, as you know. Yeah, we launched Tanzu last year at Vmworld. And have, then launched the product set earlier this year, it's finally ready to GA. It's in great customer interest and has customer traction there. And obviously, one of the big questions people had was like, "Hey, how can I get this for VMC on AWS?" And so the specific product they were looking at there was called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. And so the idea with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is that it enables a customer to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters across any cloud, right? And you can do this on AWS, you can do this on-prem, on vSphere, or other clouds and so forth. And, so obviously, this technology needed to come to BMC. You know, the thing we talk about with customers, when it comes to VMC on AWS is this notion of migrate the modernize, that we can migrate you off of your on-prem infrastructure to this modernized cloud infrastructure that is VMC on AWS. And once you have that modernized infrastructure, it makes it much easier to modernize your applications, you've got all sorts of great AWS services sitting there. So now the application itself can start taking advantage of all these things, as well as these new type of capabilities. So let's pull up the slide for this one. So what we're announcing here is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid plus on VMC on AWS. And what this gives you is all that great functionality, the ability to get Kubernetes seamlessly running on top of your VMC environment right next to all of your existing apps. So it's not one of those situations where you need, you know, separate clusters or different environments. You can have a single environment, they can have both your traditional applications and your more modern ones. And Tanzu Kubernetes Grid takes care of all the management of that Kubernetes environment. It ensures that it's up to date, properly lifecycle manage, manage local security, you get a Container Registry there, can elastically scale based on demand. And of course, you get all that great consistency as well. And we do a lot of customers that are multicloud that, that are doing things across different environments. And so TKG can replicate itself and give you that consistent management across any of those environments on-prem and the cloud between clouds. So that's really what the power of this is. And again, it's really taking VMC from just being a platform from migrating your existing workloads to really being a platform for modernizing those workloads as well. >> Yeah, it's interesting Kit, you know if when I think about traditionally, VMware, it was, you know, let me take my app and I'm going to shove it into the end and I'll never think about it again. So what's the change in mindset? How do you make sure that it's not just, you know, stick it in there and forget about it, but, you know, can move in change which is, you know, really the, the call for today is that I need to be more agile, I need to be able to respond to change? >> That's a great question. And we actually spend a lot of time talking about this with customers. So if we take a step back, you know, it's important to understand the traditional journey most customers are looking at when they're moving to the cloud. I talked about this notion of migrating then modernizing. Oftentimes, you know, before the advent of VMC on AWS, you didn't have the ability to take those two apart, you had to migrate and modernize simultaneously. In order to move to the cloud, you actually had to do a bunch of refactoring and retooling and so forth to your application. And obviously, that created a lot of challenges because it slowed how quickly customers can move up to the cloud. And so what we've done, which I think is really, really powerful is kind of broken those two apart. To say, you know what, you may have a business imperative to get out of the data center, we can help you do that, we can move, you know, some customers moved hundreds of workloads a week, up to VMC on AWS. And then once you've done that, you're now a little bit more breathing room, right? You've gotten out of your immediate business problem, and let's say in this case, closed-ended data center. And now you can sort of focus on okay, how do I think about modernizing these applications? How do I think about the interior points to opening them up and actually getting inside of them? And so I think, you know, the most valuable aspect of the approach that we've taken here is that ability to, to separate out those two to get the quick business wins that you need. And then to take the time to think about, okay, how do I actually modernize this? How do I want to? What sort of technologies do I want to use? How should I do this right, rather than just need to do this quickly? And so I think that's a really, really powerful aspect of our approach, and that we can give customers more optionality in terms of how they approach their modernization efforts. >> Yeah, so, so Kit, the final question I have for you, the VMware AWS partnership has been around for a couple years now. >> Yeah. >> What would you say is the biggest change technically, from when the solution was first announced, just to where we are today with all the new updates that you've talked about? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Look, it's hard to pick one, right? I think the biggest thing in general, is just the increasing maturity of this offering. And that goes really across the board, technical maturity, operational maturity, compliance, certification maturity, right? Getting more and more of those under our belt, global reach maturity, right? We started off in one region, but now we're all over the world, pretty much every region that AWS has. You see more and more features, you know, we're constantly releasing new features, new hardware types. And so I think that's really the biggest thing. It's not been like one singular thing, what has been is just a lot of work by the team across 1000 different areas, and moving all those in parallel. And that's really been the heavy lift that we've had to do with the past few years. You know, as we talked about, it was a lot of work just to get this thing out in the first place, right? We had to do a lot of technical work with AWS to enable this bare metal-capability. And so we got that one out, we got it out and had that initial service. There have been a lot of limitations, right? We just had one instance type, only one region, you know, didn't have as many compliance certifications. So obviously that limited the number of customers initially, right? Just because there are some restrictions around that. So our goal has really been to open this up to as many customers, in fact, every customer, all of our 500,000 odd vSphere customers to be able to move to VMS on AWS. And so we're slow, you know, slowly but surely, every month knocking down more and more barricades to that, right? And so what you're seeing is just a tremendous explosion of innovation and effort across the entire team. And so it's really it's kudos to the team for their continued effort day in day out of these past three years or so, to get VMC on AWS to where it is today. >> Excellent, well, thank you so much, Kit. Great to talk to you. Congratulation to the VMware and AWS team. And of course, looking forward to talking to more of the customers down the road, as they take advantage of this, hopefully at Vmworld, and some of the Amazon shows too. Thanks so much for joining us Kit. >> Thank yous Stu. >> All right, stay with us for lots more coverage, of course VMware Cloud on AWS really exciting and interesting topic we've been covering since day one. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)