from the cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cute conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to this special presentation we have a launch from Dell technologies updates to the BX rail family we're gonna do things a little bit different here we actually have a launch video from Janet champion of Dell technologies and the way we do things a lot of times is analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things you might have questions on it though rather than me just walking it are you watching herself I actually brought in a couple of Dell technologies expert two of our cube alumni happy to welcome back to the program Jonathan Segal he is the vice president of product marketing and Chad Dunn who's the vice president at price today of product management both of them with Dell technologies gentlemen thanks so much for joining us it was too great to be here all right and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna be rolling the video here I've got a button I'm gonna press Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit go into some questions when we're all done we're actually holding a crowd chat where you will be able to ask your questions talk to the expert and everything and so a little bit different way to do a product announcement hope you enjoy it and with that it's VX rail taking API to the extremes is is the theme we'll see you know how what that means and everything but without any further ado it but let's look fanon take the video away hello and welcome my name is Shannon champion and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with the ex rail let's get started we have a lot to talk about our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the core edge and cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options as well as the latest in software innovations so let's jump right in before we talk about our announcements let's talk about where customers are adopting the ex rail today first of all on behalf of the entire Dell technologies and BX Rail teams I want to thank each of our over 8,000 customers big and small in virtually every industry who have chosen the x rail to address a broad range of workloads deploying nearly a hundred thousand nodes to date thank you our promise to you is that we will add new functionality improve serviceability and support new use cases so that we deliver the most value to you whether in the core at the edge or for the cloud in the core the X rail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VX rail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment now we can support even more demanding applications such as in-memory databases like s AP HANA and more AI and ML applications with support for more and more powerful GPUs at the edge video surveillance which also uses GPUs by the way is an example of a popular use case leveraging the X rail alongside external storage and right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing and as it relates to VDI the X Rail has always been a great option for that in the cloud it's all about kubernetes and how dell technologies cloud platform which is VCF on the x rail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and cloud native applications and we're doing that together with VMware the X ray o is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments designed to enhance the native VMware experience this joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers all right so Shannon talked a bit about you know the important role of IP of course right now with the global pandemic going on it's really you know calling in you know essential things you know putting you know platforms to the test so I'd really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers also you know VDI of course you know in the early days it was HDI only does VDI now we know there are many solutions but remote work is you know putting that back front and center so John why don't we start with you is you know what you're absolutely so first of all us - thank you I want to do a shout out to our BX real customers around the world it's really been humbling inspiring and just amazing to see the impact of our bx real customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here you know just for a few examples there are genomics companies that we have running the X rail that have a row about testing at scale we also have research universities out in the Netherlands on doing the antibody detection the US Navy has stood up a hosta floating Hospital >> of course care for those in need so look we are here to help that's been our message to our customers but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this so just just a pleasure there but as you mentioned just to hit on the the VDI comments so it's your points do you know HCI and vxr8 EDI that was initially use case years ago and it's been great to see how many of our existing VX real customers have been able to inhibit very quickly leveraging via trail to add and to help bring their remote workforce you know online and support them with your existing VX rail because V it really is flexible it is agile to be able to support those multiple workloads and in addition to that we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost-effective catered to everything from knowledge workers to multimedia workers you name it you know from 250 desktops up to a thousand but again back to your point BX rail ci is well beyond video it had crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually and you know where VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads any of our customers out there it supports now a range of workloads as you heard from Shannon whether it's video surveillance whether it's general purpose only to mission-critical applications now with SAV ha so you know this is this has changed the game for sure but the range of workloads and the flexibility of yet rail is what's really helping our existing customers from this pandemic we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments from the ones that we serve all knew and loved back in the the initial days of of HCI now the mission-critical things now to cloud native workloads as well and you know sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI and specifically VX rail gives them that ability to pivot when these you know shall we say unexpected circumstances arise and I think if that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IT strategies look like as they move forward they want that same level of agility and the ability to react quickly with our overall infrastructure excellent want to get into the announcements what I want my team actually your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo so maybe they can dig up that footage talk about how fast they pivoted you know using VX rail to really spin up things fast so let's hear from the announcements first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later so let's get to the actual news that and it's gonna share okay now what's new I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms to further enable IT modernization across core edge and cloud I will cover each of these announcements in more detail demonstrating how only the X rail can offer the breadth of platform configurations automation orchestration and lifecycle management across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent simple side operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications I'll start with hybrid cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell technologies cloud announcements just a few weeks ago related to VMware cloud foundation on the X rail then I'll cover two brand new VX rail hardware platforms and additional options and finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VX rail HCI system software capabilities for lifecycle management let's get started with our new cloud offerings based on the ex rail you xrail is the HCI foundation for dell technologies cloud platform bringing automation and financial models similar to public cloud to on-premises environments VMware recently introduced cloud foundation for dotto which is based on vSphere 7 as you likely know by now vSphere 7 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release in keeping with our synchronous release commitment we introduced the XR l 7 based on vSphere 7 in late April which was within 30 days of VMware's release two key areas that VMware focused on were embedding containers and kubernetes into vSphere unifying them with virtual machines and the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere lifecycle manager or VL CM I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how the X rail fits in in a moment for V cf4 with tansu based on vSphere 7 customers now have access to a hybrid cloud platform that supports native kubernetes workloads and management as well as your traditional vm based workloads and this is now available with VCF 4 on the ex rel 7 the X rails tight integration with VMware cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid cloud but also to deliver kubernetes a cloud scale with one complete automated platform the second cloud announcement is also exciting recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid cloud because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture and with that Dell technologies cloud platform can now be deployed with a four node configuration lowering the cost of an entry-level hybrid cloud this enables customers to start smaller and grow their cloud deployment over time VCF on the x rail can now be deployed in two different ways for small environments customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture it's ideal for getting started with an entry-level cloud to run general-purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost but still with a consistent cloud operating model for larger environments we're dedicated resources and role based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred you can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at 8 nodes for independent management and workload domains a standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes horizon VDI and vSphere with kubernetes all right John there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware's doing with vSphere 7 understand if you wanted to use the kubernetes piece you know it's it's VCF as that so we you know we've seen the announcements delt partnering there helped us connect that story between you know really the the VMware strategy and how they've talked about cloud and how you know where does the X rail fit in that overall Delta cloud story absolutely so so first of all is through the x-ray of course is integral to the Delta cloud strategy you know it's been VCF on bx r l equals the delta cloud platform and this is our flagship on-prem cloud offering that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any cloud right whether it's on prem in the edge or in a public cloud and we've seen the delta cloud platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons one is it offers the fastest hybrid cloud deployment in the market and this is really you know thanks to a new subscription on offer that we're now offering out there we're at less than 14 days it can be set up and running and really the deltek cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models overall comes to the extra secondly I would say is fast and easy upgrades I mean this is this is really this is what VX real brings to the table for all our clothes if you will and it's especially critical in the cloud so the full automation of lifecycle management across the hardware and software stack boss the VMware software stack and in the Dell software however we're supporting that together this enables essentially the third thing which is customers can just relax right they can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated and always be in a continuously validated state and this this is the kind of thing that you know those three value propositions together really fit well with with any on print cloud now you take what Shannon just mentioned and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same the x-ray link structure alongside traditional applications this is a game changer yeah it I love you know I remember in the early days that about CI how does that fit in with cloud discussion and align I've used the last couple years this you know modernize the platform then you can modernize the application though as companies are doing their full modernization this plays into what you're talking about all right let's get you know can't let ran and continue get some more before we dig into some more analysis that's good let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases first up I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new delhi MCB x rail series the DS series this is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of the x rail for workloads at the edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas the X ray LD series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the BX rail portfolio with simplicity agility and lifecycle management but in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches it's a durable form factor that's extremely temperature resilient shock resistant and easily portable it even meets mil spec standards that means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VX rail HCI system software and 24 by 7 single point of support enabling you to rapidly react to business needs no matter the location or how harsh the conditions so whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base running real-time GPS mapping on-the-go or implementing video surveillance in remote areas you can ensure availability integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VX Rail ruggedized D series had would love for you to bring us in a little bit you know that what customer requirement bringing bringing this to market I I remember seeing you know Dell servers ruggedized of course edge you know really important growth to build on what John was talking about clouds so yeah Chad bring us inside what was driving this piece of the offering sure Stu yeah you know having the the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important and that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these edges or some of the more exotic locations you know whether that's manufacturing plants oil rigs submarine ships military applications in places that we've never heard of but it's also been extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VX rails you're managing your edges the same way using the same set of tools so you don't need to learn anything else so operational simplicity is is absolutely key here but in those locations you can take a product that's designed for a data center where you're definitely controlling power cooling space and take it to some of these places where you get sand blowing or sub-zero temperatures so we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat extreme cold extreme altitude but still offer that operational simplicity if you look at the the resistance that it has to heat it can go from around operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range but it can do an excursion up to 55 °c or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours it's also resisted the heats and dust vibration it's very lightweight short depth in fact it's only 20 inches deep this is a smallest form factor obviously that we have in the BX rail family and it's also built to to be able to withstand sudden shocks it's certified it was stand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation it's pretty high and you know this is this is sort of like where were skydivers go to when they weren't the real real thrill of skydiving where you actually the oxygen to to be a put that out to their milspec certified so mil-std 810g which i keep right beside my bed and read every night and it comes with a VX rail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment and we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for for naval chakra quirements EMI and radiation immunity of all that yeah you know it's funny I remember when weights the I first launched it was like oh well everything's going to white boxes and it's going to be you know massive you know no differentiation between everything out there if you look at what you're offering if you look at how public clouds build their things what I call it a few years poor is there's a pure optimization so you need scale you need similarities but you know you need to fit some you know very specific requirements lots of places so interesting stuff yeah certifications you know always keep your teams busy alright let's get back to Shannon we are also introducing three other hardware based editions first a new VX rail eseries model based on were the first time AMD epic processors these single socket 1u nodes offered dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from 8 to 64 cores up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer-aided design next the addition of the latest NVIDIA Quadro RT X GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional workflows designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering deep learning and visual computing workloads and Intel obtain DC persistent memory is here and it offers high performance and significantly increase memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity even when power is lost enabling quicker recovery and less downtime with support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like sa P Hana alright let's finally dig into our HCI system software which is the core differentiation for the xrail regardless of your workload or platform choice our joint engineering with VMware and investments in the x-ray HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers under the covers the xrail offers best-in-class Hardware married with VMware HCI software either vcn or VCF but what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two Dell technologies has a dedicated VX rail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper-converged system that team has also developed our unique the X rail HDI system software which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver a seamless automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere the key components of the x rail HDI system software are shown around the arc here that include the X rail manager full stack lifecycle management ecosystem connectors and support I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today but if you're interested in learning more I encourage you to meet our experts and I will tell you how to do that in a moment I touched on VLC M being a key feature to vSphere seven earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of the xrail lifecycle management the LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them with the X ray all customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business customers tell us that lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively and that it isn't the most efficient economically Automation of lifecycle management in VX Rail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure but as shown here our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages and reduced overall cost of operations with the xrail HCI system software intelligent lifecycle management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated keeping clusters in continuously validated States while minimizing risks and operational costs how do we ensure continuously validated States Furby xrail the x-ray labs execute an extensive automated repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customer's choosing across their VX rail environment the VX rail labs are constantly testing analyzing optimising and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack all the while the x rail is backed by Delhi MCS world-class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software IT productivity skyrockets with single-click non-disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing taking you to the next VX rail version of your choice while always in a continuously validated state you can also confidently execute automated VX rail upgrades no matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster they don't have to all be the same and upgrades with VX rail are faster and more efficient with leap frogging simply choose any VX rail version you desire and be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between only the ex rail can do that all right so Chad you know the the lifecycle management piece that Jana was just talking about is you know not the sexiest it's often underappreciated you know there's not only the years of experience but the continuous work you're doing you know reminds me back you know the early V sand deployments versus VX rail jointly develop you know jointly tested between Dell and VMware so you know bring us inside why you know 2020 lifecycle management still you know a very important piece especially in the VL family yeah let's do I think it's sexy but I'm pretty big nerd yes even more the larger the deployments come when you start to look at data centers full of VX rails and all the different hardware software firmware combinations that could exist out there it's really the value that you get out of that VX r l HTI system software that Shannon was talking about and how its optimized around the VMware use case very tightly integrated with each VMware component of course and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware all of the drivers all of the software altogether tremendous value to our customers but to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment so she Anna mentioned we've run about twenty five thousand hours of testing across each major release four patches Express patches that's about seven thousand hours for each of those so obviously there's a lot of parallelism and and we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality one of the key things that were able to do as Shannon mentioned is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state we've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously a huge amount of automation and then when we talk about that investment to execute those tests that's well north of sixty million dollars of investment in our lab in fact we've got just over two thousand VH rail units in our testbed across the u.s. Shanghai China and corn island so a massive amount of testing of each of those those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state yeah well you know absolutely it's super important not only for the day one but the day two deployments but I think this actually be a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to so we've got the CIO of Amarillo Texas he was an existing VX rail customer and he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work from home initiative as well as you know we get to hear in his words the value of what lifecycle management means though Andrew if we could queue up that that customer segment please it was it's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it you know as we mature and they I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so so fervently why it was so urgent today three years ago we the answer would have been no there would have been we wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt with it with the x-ray all in place you know in a week we spun up hundreds of instant phones we spawned us a seventy five person call center in a day and a half for our public health we will allow multiple applications for Public Health so they could do remote clinics it's given us the flexibility to be able to to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive and it's not only been apparent to my team but it's really made an impact on the business and now what I'm seeing is those those are my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well all right so rich you talked to a bunch about the the efficiencies that they tie put place how about that that overall just managed you know you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances you need to be able to do things much simpler so you know how does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion it makes it so much easier and you know in the in the old environment one it took a lot of man-hours to make change it was it was very disruptive when we did make change this it overburdened I guess that's the word I'm looking for it really over overburdened our staff it cost disruption to business it was it cost-efficient and then you simple things like you know I've worked for multi billion-dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production simply can't afford that at local government you know having the sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change as I said earlier it's allow us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management because it's greatly simplified and move those resources and rescale them in in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business it's hard to be innovated when a hundred percent of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat all right well you know nothing better than hearing straight from the end-user you know public sector reacting very fast to the Cova 19 and you know you heard him he said if this had hit his before he had run this project he would not have been able to respond so I think everybody out there understands if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology you know it would be much harder all right I'm looking forward to doing the crowd chat and everybody else digging with questions and get follow-up but a little bit more I believe one more announcement he came and got for us though let's roll the final video clip in our latest software release the x-ray of 4.7 dot 510 we continue to add new automation and self-service features new functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch this is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window of course running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates we are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific the xrail version or down Rev one or more more nodes that may be shipped at a higher Rev than the existing cluster this enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in cluster to sum up all of our announcements whether you are accelerating data center modernization extending HCI to harsh edge environments deploying an on-premises Dell technologies cloud platform to create a developer ready kubernetes infrastructure BX Rail is there delivering a turnkey experience that enables you to continuously innovate realize operational freedom and predictably evolve the x rail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations automation and lifecycle management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across core edge and cloud I now invite you to engage with us first the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about the ex rails new features and functionality and score some sweet digital swag while you're at it it delivered via an automated via an augmented reality app all you need is your device so go to the x-ray is slash passport to get started and secondly if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VX rail meet the experts sessions available for a limited time first-come first-served just go to the x-ray dot is slash expert session to learn more you all right well obviously with everyone being remote there's different ways we're looking to engage so we've got the crowd chat right after this but John gives a little bit more is that how Del's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got firfer options for them yeah absolutely so as Shannon said so in lieu of not having Dell tech world this year in person where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions whether it's in the booth or you know in in meeting rooms you know we are going to have these meet the experts sessions over the next couple of weeks and look we're gonna put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to to everyone out there so again definitely encourage you we're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we could still stay in touch answer questions be responsive and really looking forward to you know having these conversations over the next couple weeks all right well John and Chad thank you so much we definitely look forward to the conversation here in int in you'd if you're here live definitely go down below do it if you're watching this on demand you can see the full transcript of it at crowd chat /vx rocks sorry V xrail rocks for myself Shannon on the video John and Chad Andrew man in the booth there thank you so much for watching and go ahead and join the crowd chat

>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Radio 2018. We are in San Francisco for their VMware's Radio 2018. It's their R&D fiesta, party. As Steve Harris said, former CTO, it's like a sales kickoff for engineers. It's a great time, but it's also serious. A lot of real serious discussion and of course people are flexing their technical muscle and stretching their minds. And I'm here with one of the chief operator, one of the main principals and legend in VMware, Raghu Raghuram. Chief Operating Officer, new title. Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services. >> That's right. >> Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> What year did you join VMware? >> 2003 (chuckling) >> 15 years >> So, you've seen many of these radios. >> Yes, it's one of the highlights of the year for me. >> Yeah, super important architect of VMware, great part of the community, leader, architect of the AWS relationship. >> [Raghu] Sure >> Part of that movement with Andy Jassy, Sanjay Poonen. This is the 14th year of radio and VMware has changed a lot since you joined. It's now a world class organization. Getting check marks for one of the best places to work. Certainly for engineers it's like a great party environment. Take a minute to explain the radio culture, it's 14th year, there's t-shirts behind us, to commemorate the key milestones, where it's come from, where it's gone, your thoughts on the program and the community. >> Yeah, I mean this is in fact one of the unique characteristics of VMware. I have checked around with my peers in the industry and I don't think any other tech company of our size does this. Radio stands for R&D innovation offsite. Like you said, we started fourteen years ago just to take a bunch of engineers out from their daily grinds and say, "what could we be building fundamentally that's groundbreaking?" So, I would say it's a cross between a wild science fair and a research conference. In fact, both of these go hand in hand at this place. People publish papers and there is a selection committee just like in serious conferences. In fact, Ray had some amazing stats for this year's submissions and the selection is very very rigorous. At the same time, you'll go upstairs and you'll see the exhibition hall where there are all kinds of things that are displayed. Things that could be very well incremental things in the next release and things that are wild and wacky off the wall that we might never ever do. So, it's really the full gamut. Another interesting thing is we've gone bigger. We are getting people from pretty much all parts of the Emirate. I think there is representation from 25 companies. >> [John] How many engineering centers are there roughly? I mean, there's core centers and then you have engineers all over the world. How many engineers, ballpark? >> I would say, in terms of medium to big size centers, there are probably over a dozen across the globe and literally every continent. Clearly, in the US we have four big centers. In Europe, we have three at least. In Asia, we have another three or four. So, we definitely have over 10. >> I mean everyone who knows the VMware and also knows theCUBE, for nine years, well this is our ninth year covering VMworld, all you gotta do is look at VMworld and you can tell one thing right out of the gate. Very community oriented. All the decisions are made in the community. Also, people who know VMware know you're highly an engineering organization. >> [Raghu] Yep. >> This is not like a lot of marketing fluff. Although, you do have some good marketing here and there, but the point is it's an engineering culture with community. This is unique. I've seen companies that don't walk the talk on "community engineering". They have silos, there's a lot of infighting. How have you- How has VMware preserved a culture of innovation amongst their peers when it's competitive as hell inside VMware? One to be smart, achieve the success. But, also, VMware has always been in always a moving market. How do you guys do it? What's the secret sauce? >> I mean, there's not a single thing. Like you said, culture is something that happens over time and is preserved over time and is preserved through people. It's not like anything you can write down, right? Of course you can write it down. But, it won't be worth the paper it's written down on unless it's practiced everyday by other people. And so, I think that is the key thing here. Right from the get go, customer centric innovation has ruled the rules here. So, the question to ask always is great innovation, look at it from a customer end point of view. I think that matters a lot here. Secondly, there is a lot of emphasis on breaking the rules in terms of doing something disruptive, right? And, the engineers that come here tend to be the kind to respond to that, right? And then lots of venues. Like this is not the only thing that we do, right? We do these things called borathons, which is our internal version of hackathons. We do regional versions of these things. Each of the teams, like the business units, have their own little R&D innovation activities that go on. >> They have a playground. They can basically go outside the scope of their job. >> Exactly. >> Get an idea, a passion, an idea and go after it and not have to worry about anything. >> Yup, exactly. >> [John] With a path to commercialization, if it hits. >> Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. We have a fairly high success rate, I would say, of taking things that we see here and turning them into product and eventually into monetizable businesses. All the things that go into the product features. >> Give some examples of historically, successes, notables, and then also talk about some ones that aren't notable that have come out. I know a lot has come out of this, the numbers are clear. What are some highlights that have come out of the radio event that have been blockbuster successes? >> A lot of the things that you see in the networking today came out of radio. Things about doing security and networking from the hypervisor up, came from here. What you see today as vSAN, had its roots here. What you see today with the app defense and the security stuff, had its roots here. A lot of the features that are in vSphere today, especially the storage vMotion and so on and so forth, was first showcased here. This goes on and on and on. We also have a lot of things that have shown up here that we have not pursued. For example, almost like an eBay for VM capacity. We didn't pursue it. God knows, that could've been a huge idea. (laughing) >> It's the misses too. >> Yeah, there's the misses too. But, that's the whole point of this. >> Yeah. There's parts to creativity. How much creativity goes on at this event? I mean there's certainly a lot of barnstorming, brainstorming, or whatever you wanna call it. A lot of interaction, physical face to face. How much creativity is happening you think here? >> Yeah, so a few years back they introduced a couple of things. One is a instant birds of a feather. Where you can literally go to a whiteboard and say, "hey let's discuss this topic," and set up a time and then people show up. There's this other one they call Lightning Rounds, which literally happens over drinks I think tomorrow or something. Where people come in and it's lots of the mini gauntlet where nothing is scripted. All sorts of crazy ideas keep flowing. I would say those are two examples where there's a lot of on the spot creativity. As a company, the R&D teams have gotten more dispersed. This is the opportunity for people to get together even within the same business unit or across business units and say let's go solve this problem. You and I have been talking about this on email, let's talk about it face to face. Hey, let's bring somebody else in that's relevant to this conversation as well. So, those are the kind of things that go on here that spark the creativity. And then of course, the exhibits. When people start thinking about these exhibits and talking to people that are showing there, other ideas get spawned off as well. >> Raghu, talk about just from your experience, you got a great track record, and certainly it was in VMware, it goes back to the early 2000s. What is your observation on the innovation formula? What's been the consistent constant of innovation? As the waves have changed- I mean, I've been in Palo Alto for 19 years now, in my 20th year. Even Palo Alto's changed. So, the world's changed, modern. And we'll get to the Amazon deal in a second. Certainly cloud's here. What have you seen as the constant innovation variable? >> What I would say is this. Fundamentally the people that we tend to recruit into VMware are by large what we call, or at least I call, platform thinkers. So, they think of building a fundamental piece of technology that can be possibly be used in 10 different ways, and they build it for one particular use case. And then, the questions goes back to, now we've done this, what else can we do with this foundational technology? If you look at vSphere, does the same thing. If you look at networking, same thing. Storage is the same thing. So, I would say that is the constant. That's one constant here. Which is, how do you build fundamentally a platform that could be used in very different ways. >> Some will also say systems thinking. >> Exactly, so that's a compliment. >> The cloud is a system. >> (mumbles) I think Paul Maritz is a 2010 picture. Although, some of the calls didn't come out. He kind of generally had the architecture. >> Yeah, yeah >> He nailed it (laughs) >> There are a few people like Paul in the world and absolutely he nailed it. >> Dave and I would give him a lot of credit for that. Okay, let's talk about Amazon Web Services. Certainly Radio's now 14th year. At what point did the cloud start clicking in? You said there's some misses, the eBay for VMs. Certainly cloud is on the radar. >> Yeah >> And vCloud, we know what happened there. Pat talked about how you guys really took that opportunity, which is, you made lemonade out of some lemons there with that product. That's my words, not his. When did cloud first appear on the horizon in Radio and how do you see that happening now as we talk multi-cloud? >> You missed the alumni session today. One of the early engineers said when he was interviewed by Mendel, which was in 1999, Mendel is of course the founder and first chief scientist here. He said he foresaw the event. When the engineer asked him, "how are we gonna make money on this?" He thought there would be a day when people just rent computer capacity from a data center instead of going out and buying gear. In some ways- >> He predicted >> He predicted >> Cloud operations >> Back in the company's starting days. But really I think we saw this in 2005, 2006, 2007. At the same time actually as Amazon saw this. But, the big difference was we were growing 100% a year on core business and we had our hands full that way. We felt like as a software company the way to play it was by delivering technology to other people to build it. So, that's when it really made it's way here, in Radio and in the products. >> And by the way, it wasn't obvious to many people in the industry at that time, to Amazon. I've had many conversations with Andy Chassy and he now uses the term being misunderstood. They were completely misunderstood unless you were an entrepreneur who was using EC-2 just to avoid seed money. 'Cause it was a dream for entrepreneur's at that time. I remember that clearly. That was not obvious. It really wasn't obvious until about 2010, nine, 10. So you guys were growing. Missed that. Radio is not about missing it. It's about identifying. >> Exactly. >> So, how does it translate today for Amazon? >> The Amazon relationship, if you think about the technical underpinnings of it, clearly we did a vCloud error. We learned a lot on that. Within some of our engineers, the question that was asked was, "what if we could run a cloud on top of other peoples clouds?" And we did experiments with nested virtualization. We did experiments with bare metal. And then we chose the start of our model. So, that's one of the technical early indicators of what we could do on other people's clouds. So, that's a big thing. The rest of the things we're doing with respect to elastically growing capacity and all those things, came from experiments that were shown up here. So, that was the connection back to Radio. In terms of the Amazon partnership itself, a lot of it was driven from the customer end. As we were thinking about VCN not working the way we wanted it to work, we went back to the customers and said, "what is wrong with this picture?" And, the answer that came back was very clear. They said, we like the hybrid idea, but we want the hybrid to be VMware on prem and Amazon in the cloud because 70% of our customers turned out to be AWS customers. And at the same time AWS was hearing the same thing. Why don't you guys team up instead of being either or? That's what led to the partnership. >> Your team at VMware came as the cloud native piece? >> Yeah >> Aspect of it. So Kubernetes is on the horizon. Not on the horizon, in your face. And you've got service mesh over the top. >> Yep, yep >> That's up the stack. It's networking. >> Yep, exactly. >> Still needs to do networking. >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's like, you guys must be like, hey we love what's going on up there. Come down to the store. >> Yeah. So, the boundary between what is application platform and infrastructure platform is constantly changing. Kubernetes, when it started out people said oh it's an application platform. Now it turns out its actually infrastructure. Same thing in networking. So what we see is, things were the lower level of the infrastructure constructs, the same idea is applied at the next level up. That's why we love Kubernetes. We love Service Mesh. We love similar concepts that are coming about in storage and security it's one- >> A unified stack is coming. >> Yep, exactly. >> Just someone fix networking and then the holy grail, programmable networks. >> Yep >> When are they coming? >> At the application level. >> Let's go >> Yeah >> Holy grail is finally here. It's not where you thought it was gonna be. >> It is at both places, right. I mean, it's tying back to the conventional layer, two layer, three stuff because that's also important still. >> Raghu, I love having a chat with you. It's great to chat. >> Good to see you again John. >> Super impressive with the work you've been doing. Love the cloud deal with Amazon, you know that. Love what's going on at Kubernetes and containerization. Love what's going on with Service Mesh, unified stack. Love cryptocurrency, which I didn't get to ask you. >> Yep >> Thumbs up? >> Crazy things going on there too >> Thumbs up, okay, thumbs up. >> We're watching the cryptocurrency. >> Watching, token economics coming right behind it. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at Radio. We're the signal. 2018, Radio 2018. I'm theCUBE with Raghu. I'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to theCUBE We continue our coverage here live. We are in the Sands at Dell Technologies World 2018. Big show, 14,000 plus they're expecting here. 4,000 just in the business partners summit alone. So a very impressive turnout here in day one, as I said, of three days of coverage on theCUBE. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Lee Caswell who's a VP of Products at VMWare. Lee, good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here, yes. >> John: Every year we get together like this, right? >> Well, you know, there's always something new to talk about, right? >> John: Absolutely, and we're also joined by Chris Stanley here, who's the IT Manager at the Celtic Manor Resorts in Newport, Wales. Chris, the first person from Wales I think I've ever met, as a matter of fact. >> Chris: (laughs) A privilege; thank you. >> For me it is, but thank you for being here. We appreciate the time. So we're talking about your migration, and, really, it wasn't a migration, it was like your head-first dive into the hyper-converged environment. You didn't tiptoe around it, you didn't wade into the water, You guys just dove right in. >> Chris: We're fearless, yes. >> What was the driver of that decision to be so fearless? >> Chris: As an organization, we've grown very quickly the last few years, and we've got significant growth in new hotels and a new conference center coming on board. And we're bursting at the seams in our existing environment, so we needed a platform that we could grow into this new environment very quickly and with predictive costs as best as we could. >> And so, Lee, walking them through this, >> Yeah, >> I mean, there's no convincing to be done here, but you do have to inspire some confidence, right? So somebody who's making a pretty bold move like this how did you approach that, and what did you do as far as assigning? >> Lee: You know, our partnership with Dell EMC is just a great testament here, right? I mean, you've taken the latest of 14G servers, for example, as part of VxRail. So you've got the best in hardware combined with VMWare underlying VCN software packaged up together, right, in a single point of support in a way that really makes us able to drop in and get started. Right, when you think about this, this is also interesting, in that here's a customer you know, in this case, you were using converged infrastructure in the past. >> It really is. Yeah. >> That's very common, right? So people who are looking for the advantage of like, how did I get the operational efficiencies? And now what you find is hyper-converge changes the operational model, and so it's around speed and agility, right? More than cost, right? And so, together, that's kind of the, our partnership is so powerful for customers looking to go and basically drive that kind of efficiency. >> Chris: Definitely, yeah. >> Keith: So, Chris, talk to us about that decision process. In typical organizations, this is Wired U, You're on theCUBE and it's so special. It's easy to talk about use cases on the edge VDI, specific, non-mission critical applications. But when it comes to stuff that runs the business, if it's down, the CIO, the CFO is at someone's desk asking when it's going to be back up. How did this discussion start? Was it from the bottom up, or was it from the top down? Exactly which teams said, "You know what? We need more agility, HCI, go!" >> Chris: Definitely from a bottom up perspective, but supported from top down when we came for it. We could see it in our environment, in our growing environment. We're a 24 hour business in a resort hotel, and we have little downtime Or, sorry, little time to do any upgrades, etc. So resilience within that environment was key to us for our uptime, so failing over with VMWare we use, with the VxWare we get now DRS and the Enterprise version which it comes with which we hadn't in our converged. So there is that automation of balancing your workloads, not having someone there watching it all the time so that has freed up a lot of time for my guys. Going forward there will be a lot more free time as well so we've got more time to concentrate on the guests and how we can make their experience better. >> So the story behind Converged systems, you know you have SAP, Oracle, BASSP, all these mission critical apps mission critical runs on CI and then everything else to run on, even from a vendor support, you know you talk to all the major software vendors, they say you all CI is the best opportunity. How did that conversation go with vendors when you said you know what, we're going to run mission critical on, I'm assuming vSAN? >> Lee: This is on vSAN in VxRail. >> vSAN, you know, we can't see your TR1 software providers and you know what, we're all vSAN, global size and scope, global? >> What, as an environment? >> Yes. >> It's a global environment really of over four hotels at the moment but growing into a bigger environment. We're going for an international conference center so kind of this sort of size, not quite as big as this but we're definitely not support from the hyper converged. And all our core systems are written on it, yes. Big Oracle databases, SQL, and our exchange service and there was a split between two clusters now in VxRail so we can, we can fail over to a node in VxRail, we can fail over to a cluster as well so as an SLE for up time we're business critical and the guys at the top of Celtic Manor have seen how that is for business you know. If we're not serving people or taking money then we're giving money back in a case for disruption. >> All right so you've been into this for a little bit less than a year now, correct? >> Correct, yes. >> I know Lee's sitting right next to you but let's just for a moment. I'm sure there has been at least a troubling moment of that transition or at least a hiccup somewhere that you had to settle, you had a problem, right? Something came up, if someone's watching this, thinking I wonder what they got hit with and how they handled it, how did you work around that, how did you adapt that, what would that be? What was the, maybe the one little hiccup right now that you've successfully- >> With deployment? >> Yeah. >> Nothing much but when we were migrating from a Converged infrastructure to a hyperconverged we added on the SANs to the hyperconverged so we could see them migrate over. A couple of servers didn't take too well to that one being motioned over. Nothing of the critical ones thankfully. But they, it was either a Windows update or once they restarted, it was only two of the servers but, we used the recover point then within VxRail and literally go back five, 10 minutes, which we did and up and running again, switched over, and we were you know, back up and running, but it was we had the decision there of, how long do we troubleshoot it for or do we just, that was our first instance of using recover point so we hadn't done it in a live environment so it was kind of, okay and pretty much out but it worked and it filled us with a lot of confidence now that we could do, we have that resilience going forward in an environment. >> Well let's talk about day two. >> I was just going to comment Ray, that this is part of the partnership that's so powerful for us right, is, you know I think VMWare learn that supporting storage systems, as we know, it's a little different than just computing. You know this, right, I mean, you know the idea of like, hey listen, a purple screen isn't the worst that can happen, 'cause you can reboot, right? It's really about, like, my data. And so when you start thinking about that, the ability for us to partner with Dell AMC who understands what it means to be supporting in a datacentric world, like that element, right is so powerful for us, right, because we've got a partner here who really understands the ability and that's part of the powerful concept of VxRail. >> So we had Tom Burns earlier and we were talking about VI and the importance of CI and there's still a great, I think, desire and temptation, and valid that CI gets you on the ground, running quickly, complex systems, easily deployed relative to traditional architectures. Talk to me about the practical of HCI, Day 2 Operations, CI, relatively easy to deploy but you still have some traditional operations concerns. What specifically did you guys see as the advantage Day two once you went to ACI? What's saving you all this time? >> Purely I think the time saver is the management of the system or the lack of management that we now need to do. There's, you've got one pane of glass to see everything which is very nice, you haven't got something separate for your SANs, your SX hosts, your networking and that support that you have, you know, there's one of them to call. You're not fighting between different entities saying it's your fault, it's your fault, there you go, sort it, so again that has freed up a lot of time, you know not knowing who to call or where to call but, you know, having one person who's going to sort it out and take ahold of that and fix it for you. And the remote support then, which is very good you know, you've got someone else monitoring your systems if you enable it, so you've got Dell support there and they can potentially see something before you do so I kind of gained another IT person for in this solution which is very nice. >> Yeah, we kind of joke you know, that a lot of people talk about hyperconvergence as if it's about us, but hyperconvergence is about you. When you think about it, right, it's about hyperconverging the IT staff. If you can hyperconverge the staff, right, that's when hyperconvergence does well, when we have one team, it's a converged team and people are like, hey listen, I'm going to go to a VMcentric management model. Now I can go and debug things right from a single console which is V center. That model works really fast, right? And where Converged still does a good job, right, is where I've got storage scaling at big scale but separate from compute separate. Hyperconvergence is about, it's about the organizational environment right? >> Very much so, bringing it all together, yeah. And it's simplistic in VMWare being so tightly integrated with VxRail was our main call against the other vendors, as a big call to, while they, you know, it's the best chef with the best ingredients, let's use that, not a dessert chef with the best ingredients >> Yeah, we have 500,000 customers who are familiar with V Center, right, and if you know V Center you know V SAN, you know VxRail, right? >> You can get simplistic again, so you already know it. >> Yeah, right. >> Well we could talk about this til we're blue in the face. I think we need to go see it in operation, don't you Keith? >> We'll set you up with some golf >> Now we're talking, be careful Chris, what you offer. Lee, Chris, good to see you guys. Thanks for being with us, we appreciate you sharing the story. Thank you very much. Back with more, here from Dell Technologies World we are live on theCUBE in Las Vegas.

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> A couple of years ago the research analysts at Wikibon coined the term "true private cloud" and it was based on the recognition from talking to practitioners in our community, that they weren't really able to reshape and reform their business and stuff it into the cloud. Rather, what they wanted to do was bring the cloud experience, the cloud operating model, to their data, wherever that data existed. My name is Dave Vellante. Welcome everybody to this Cube Conversation. HCI, the fundamental foundation for IT transformation. I'm here with Jon Siegal who's the Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming out. >> Yeah, good to see you as always. >> So what's happening in the world of HCI? It's hot, it's exploding. Give us the update. >> Wow, is it hot. I mean 2017 has been quite a year when it comes to the hyper-converged infrastructure. It's the hottest IT infrastructure segment in terms of growth right now. 40, 50, 60% a year, depending on who you talk to. Regardless, it's big. A couple billion dollars this year and it's going to be up to 10 billion dollars by 2021. So we're talking big, big, big. And I think really what this has to do is the fact that it's really gone mainstream. Right? It's really crossed the chasm and for a couple reasons. One is I think what you just referred to is what you're calling the "true private cloud," if you will, experience that customers want. This is really a de facto, HCI is the de facto now, foundation for what customers really need to build a private cloud, number one. >> Okay, so what about HCI, I mean, I understand why it's growing because it essentially does bring that cloud experience. What about HCI makes it that foundation for cloud? Can you elaborate a little bit? >> Absolutely, first of all it's software-defined. It's dirt simple. We essential make it a Turn-Key. So really what we're helping customers do is build a foundation so they can build an IAS, or a platform as a service on top. In order to build the foundation, you have to make it as simple and Turn-Key as possible. So what we've done is, we've made sure that there's a single throat to choke. We made sure that we it there the automation for deployment, for day-to-day management, all the way through lifecycle management. We made sure that we have a platform, if you will, that now allows it now to enable self-service. You can start small and grow. The pay-as-you-grow model, for example, that has really been, I think, widely received very positively in the cloud space. As you said, we're bringing the cloud-like attributes to on prem with HCI as a foundation. >> So let's unpack those a little bit. So, one of the things you think about with the cloud vendor, public cloud. I swipe the credit card. I have a relationship with that vendor. It's a single throat to choke. Is that the relationship that I have with you when I do business with you? >> Yes. So, Dell EMC, and one of the reasons that Dell EMC has become number one in this space, is because we've made it simple for customers. We have the HCI appliance called VxRail. It's the only HCI appliance on the market that's co-engineered with VMware, to insure that we have that single throat to choke for our customers. >> Okay, so there's an integration component. I mean, you don't go all the way up to the highest level application, but from an infrastructure standpoint, services are fully integrated. Is that right? And you come in, and when I install it, all those services are there? It's not like I'm rolling my own? >> This is fully integrated in Turn-Key. Really what, you know, again, the reason I think we're seeing HCI take off like we are, is because we've taken a lot of that pain, and the aggravation that customers have to spend trying to build to maintain their core infrastructure, We've taken that on. Right? And we're actually doing that for them. So that when it arrives, from day one, all the way through day 365, we've taken care of the automation for them, and this allows them to spend much more time focused up the stack. Right? So they can actually start to figure out where hey can differentiate their business with IT, because IT plays a critical role in how customers are going to transform their business and go from really a traditional IT model, to a digital transformation model. In order to do that, they need to spend less time building and maintaining the infrastructure, and that's really what HCI has done for our customers. >> Well, I think that's a really important point, and it's a big reason why it's growing so fast. Just to throw some data in there, we see about 150 billion dollars over the next 10 years exiting, what you were talking about, that low level infrastructure management, shifting labor resource up to whatever, AI, or, doing other types of application development work, digital business transformation. So let me ask you, am I correct that you can manage your hyper converged products as a single entity of pools of resource? >> Exactly right. So really what we've done is we've simplified the infrastructure, like I said. What we're doing is, we're bringing the cloud like experience to on prem, like you said. And that means we need to simplify management, as well, and that's a key part of it. So that the entire virtual infrastructure, right, can be easily managed by a VMware administrator. >> So let's test that a little bit. There are two attributes that people in our community talk about when they talk about the cloud and all. There's the self service component, and the pay by the drink. >> Yes. >> Can I actually use your products to create that type of capability for my business? >> Absolutely. So, we have a couple different options here. So, first of all, HCI, the basic premise of HCI, is that it allows customers to start small and grow. Right? And we're basically able to tailor the hyper converged, configuration to whatever our customers need. So they only buy what they need, and then they can easily grow, and seems to grow to what they want, number one. Number two, is we have capabilities, things like cloud flex, flexible financing models, and financing structures, so that customers can literally pay as they grow, much like they do in the cloud space. >> How about hybrid? Is the, I mean, everybody talks about hybrid. Hybrid cloud is the future, but can you accommodate, sort of, hybrid models with HCI? >> Absolutely. So again, HCI is that foundation for the cloud, and then we seamlessly integrate with tools, with VMwear, for example, like vRealize automation, and other things like that. And that allows things like self service which allow customers to first of all, manage their on prem, like a cloud. And then we also have capabilities for customers to even tier their data, if you will, to public clouds, as well. >> Can you give us a little bit more detail, Jon, on the underlying technology here. What are the key enablers? You mentioned, software defined. How should we think about the technology enablers to HCI? >> I think the technology enablers t6o HCI first and forward is software defined. It is based on software defined capabilities out there. VCN's a very popular one, as an example, which is really greatly simplifying moving customers away from that three tier, kind of, infrastructure model, to a new two tier model. Right? And customers really can appreciate the simplicity of this. So this allows them, again, from day one all the way through day 365, to be able to automate the deployment, automate the management, automate the life cycle management, all the way across the board. >> How about the family? You're part of Dell, now, Dell Technologies. What's that like? What's Dell bring to the HCI conversation? Talk about that a little bit. >> It's been tremendous. First and foremost, what we've done with HCI is we've leveraged, essentially, our partnerships across the Dell technologies companies. For example, I don't think there's a better example at Dell Technologies of where their groups are working together.6 We have, for example, VxRail is a perfect example of how we have Vmware and Dell EMC working, essentially, very, very closely together to ensure that we have a seamless experience for our customers. It's the only co-engineered, HCI appliance on the market with VMware, number one. Number two is we're also working very closely with Pivotal, because what customers need is they build that on prem cloud. They start with HCI, and then on top of that you can then add Turn-Key IAS which his our integration with Vmware. You can add Turn-Key platform as a service which is integration with Pivotal. So, all together what we're trying to do is enable our customers to have that on prem, cloud experience. >> All right, give us the summary. So, specifically the announcements, and what's the portfolio look like, post announcement? >> Yeah, so, what we're announcing today, we're real excited about. We're taking the simplicity, if you will, of HCI, and marrying that to the power and the flexibility of 14th generation PowerEdge servers, because what's really interesting is that, yes, HCI is defined by software. But really what it's all about is how well you integrate the software with the hardware, to ensure a Turn-Key experience for our customers, and that's what we've done introducing our VxRail and XC series appliances based on 14th generation PowerEdge6 servers. >> Okay, so you've got, sort of, horses for courses, I like to say. Different work loads are going to require different configurations. You know Dell EMC, you've been known for your large portfolio. The saying is, "Better to have overlap, than it is to have gaps." You feel like you've got the gambit covered, here? >> We do. So up until now, I think, we've seen HCI, as I said, cross the chasms. For HCI, last couple of years, was traditionally used for noncritical workloads, whether it was VDI projects, it could be test DEV. Sometimes it was small consolidation projects, and then we've started to see over the past year, it started to be applied to the majority of virtualized workloads. And now with this announcement, we think it now can apply to all workloads across the data center. That's because what 14th generation PowerEdge servers bring to the table, is first and foremost, it brings together powerful, and predictable performance. We're talking double the IOPs. Right? We're talking more predictable performance where actually customers can now expect less than a millisecond response time for their key applications. Applications like online transaction processing which in the past, hadn't necessarily been applied to HCI. So really what I think this announcement is doing overall, is we set HCI as the foundation for the on prem cloud, and up until now, we've support some workloads in the data center. But now, with this announcement, with 14th generation PowerEdge servers running our HCI solutions, we can now extend HCI across the data center, and extend that cloud like experience now, to all the applications in the data center. >> Great. Okay, let's wrap. Where do people go to find more information and dig into the product details? >> Oh, yeah. We make it really simple Again, that's HCI, it's simple, right? So, DellEMC.com/HCI is where you can go. We're also going to have a crowd chat, hashtag Nextgenhci. I believe it's going to be December 1st, so we'd love to have customers tune in and check that out, and participate, as well. >> Excellent, Jon, thanks very much for coming back to theCUBE. >> All right. >> Great to see you again. >> Great as always, thanks a lot. >> Appreciate it. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. We're out. (upbeat jazz music)

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

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering VM World, 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the CUBE's live continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017. We're on day two, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks so much for joining. I'm joined by my cohost Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to be joined by CUBE first time visitor, Mike Flaum senior product manager to HPE. Welcome Mike. >> Thank you for inviting me here. I appreciate to have the opportunity. >> Great announcements over the last day and half. Tell us what's new with HPE and Vmware. >> Sure, so today our announcement went out, Vmware cloud foundation on top of Synergy. This is a follow on announcement that we had for Vmware cloud foundation on top of DL380 which is the industry leading rack based server. What we've done is we've now extended to our composable platform on Synergy and that was the announcement that went out earlier today. >> Composable infrastructure and Vmware cloud foundation, on paper doesn't kind of make sense. That you have this thing that's super flexible and what's supposed to be a reference kind of validated design, how does that work. >> It really accomplishes two things. What we're hearing from our customers very specifically is how do we make it easier. It's really not about technology, it's that how do people consistently do these deployments. So by using a composable platform it allows them to standardize and do the implementations. Then on top of that Vmware cloud foundation has its own installation appliance that installs to the Vsphere, the VSAN and the NSX. We're totally online with Vmware by making it easier for the customer implementations. Then the ongoing maintenance and support of it. >> Sorry, I was going to say from a go to market perspective, yesterday I think Pat Gelsinger had said 10,000 customers on VSAN, a huge install base with Vsphere. Talk to us about sort of the specific joint customer opportunities globally that you are seeing. >> Sure, so with the install base of Vsphere and then the VSAN install base, our customers are really asking for this. One of the things that we've done also is that we have OEM SKUs. We're actually taking the VCF and the VCN and you're able to buy these products directly from us, from Vmware. There's a synergy between, no pun intended, to actually have our customers be able to buy just from one vendor. So we're able to purchase the Vmware and the Synergy from HPE. That's been ongoing. >> Customer reaction in general? The concept is kind of abstract. We get Vmware on AWS. It took us awhile to get that. Are customers getting kind of, they can have that type of flexibility in their own data center? >> Absolutely. What happens is, is that when the DL380 announcement happened it was great for a rack based system. But that really doesn't scale super large. Customers think about customers that have multiple cabinets, multiple rows, multiple data centers, and that's really where the VCF on Synergy makes a huge difference. It's for the large data center deployments. Those customers are like wow we really see the value in VCF, but we really want to have it on Synergy for this platform because we have large data centers. That's really where. And the customers take those large data centers, they also want to be able to leverage VCF on AWS. They want to have this hybrid approach to having the workloads being both in the cloud and on premise. >> So let's talk a little bit about day two operations. What is it like, or what's the differentiator for Synergy and VCF versus any other solution? >> The difference is what makes it composable. On the Synergy platform we have an actual hardware that's the composure and it runs OneView. OneView has certain templates in order to make the compute, network and storage all run appropriately for the VCF on top of it. The part that the customers like about VCF is the SDDC manager, which is they look at this and wow that manages all the Vsphere, the NSX and VSAN. They need to have the composable and OneView management of the underlying hardware. That's where we come in from the composable side. >> One of the things that, I think it was Michael Dell that talked about this morning about this growing volumes of data. Everybody knows data is fuel and its pathway to other sources of economy within an organization. As we look at servers and storage, what is the sea level conversation around these technologies in terms of the benefits, like speeds and feeds and things like that. How is the HPE Vmware announcement today with composable, what are some of the key business problems that that's going to solve for a CEO, CIO, CTO? >> One of the things that happens is this proliferation of equipment. They buy a blade system. They buy a storage array. They buy networking. It ends up being on three different vendors. One of the benefits of doing it on Synergy, is that we're using the local storage. So the local storage is great but it requires the VSAN that comes from Vmware. Then the VCF is what puts it all together. It's not that you can't use Vsphere and NSX and VSAN separately, the benefit is to put it onto one system on the Synergy that combines it all together. For the CIO what happens is instead of buying three different equipment, three different vendors, managing three different firmware streams, now you have it all converged onto one system that's purpose built for this. So that's really the main difference. >> I hear cost reduction. Reduced CAPX, reduced OPX. Are you seeing customers be able to move resources around and be able to utilize resources for other strategies within their companies? >> Absolutely. On the Synergy we have a technology called Virtual Connect which is actually hardware. One of the things that it does when you run these composable templates on top of it, is that it makes it one resource pool. If you have compute resources or storage resources that are in different cabinets, it presents that to the VCF manager and you're able to move that as needed. It makes it easier because it sets it up as one giant computer. Whereas before it might be segmented based upon the cabinet level. That's really one of the main differences, have the fluid resource pools. But it really relies on having the VCF on top of it. >> Talking about that data center wide resource pool, I'm a customer, I have complicated data center, I have DL380s, I have DL580s, I have Synergy, I have original chassis. Help me move forward to this vision of VCF. What's the road map for a typical customer who has a diverse data center? >> This question comes up all the time. The customers say look we're on your existing products and we have those for years. What I tell them is if you just need to do an incremental add, then to buy that particular hardware platform. If you're building a new data center, you want to pick the next generation platform and so what you want to do is do your proof of concept on the Synergy and then build that for the future. It's not that the other platforms don't work. It's not that they're not going to continue to be supported. They will. But you're always taking a look at where do I want to be two years from now. That's the big difference is that I'm going to look at Synergy and leverage the Vsphere which I've been using for years. I'm going to use the VSAN which was just recently certified. But it's also a component of VCF and I'm able to leverage that local storage which compresses it all down into one hardware platform. That's where the customer's really get the added benefit. >> Terrific, well Mike thank you so much for joining us on the CUBE today and explaining from your perspective the impact that the announcement with HPE and Vmware on composable means today. We want to thank you for watching the CUBE again. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Keith Townsend. We are live on day two of VMWorld 2017. Keep watching, we'll be right back. (funky music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone live, here in Las Vegas from VMworld 2017, I'm John Furrier of the Cube, live coverage of VMworld 2017 with my cohost Dave Vellante, next guest Dom Delfino, senior vice president of sales and systems engineering, Cube alum, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thanks guys, good to be here again. >> RAC are covering VMworld, the ecosystem has been a little tide goes out, tide comes in, real clarity this year, cloud, you want it on private cloud, public to private cloud or Amazon. >> Dom: Right. >> Any questions? >> Dom: Exactly. Clear. >> This is the vision coming to fruition. This is what you're seeing this year at VMworld. I think in particular when you talk to the customers, they're now in a state of cloud reality. There was sort of this big rush, I'm going to try to move as much to the public cloud as possible and then in terms of the scale they got there, they start to have then challenges on that side, they realize, I need to have a dual strategy. I need to have a private, a public, a hybrid strategy. I think you see all the announcements that we've made today, with DFC on AWS going live now, with more coming around the world in different zones as we progress throughout the rest of the year and into next year, as well as all the service offerings we just announced, Wave Run is a service, VRNI is a service, NSX is a service, app defense, which is our latest security strategy as well. Customers really see how it comes together now and they want to go down that journey with VMware. >> It's important too to clarify, I call the high level messaging, so it's got clarity, but also VMware and ecosystems has a lot under the hood and it can get very technical, so you got to balance the speeds and feeds to feed the red meat to all the practitioners and then the high level. I got to ask you the question because people that are sitting out there on this cloud reality that you mentioned, they don't have a lot of people sometimes. Someone's got to implement this stuff, automation's coming, okay I get that, but getting to the cloud is not easy. I still got to run my shop, what is that operational reality right now because cloud reality, okay I get it, but now I got to turn my on premise into a true private cloud with a new operating model, new practices, how are the VMware customers dealing with that? >> I think that's part of moving away from the legacy as fast as you can or at least where you have to keep it, you've got to sort of isolate it and put it in a corner because it's the legacy that's holding most of us back, right? Because I got to understand how to run the legacy, keep the lights on, that takes 20, 30, 40, 50% of my time, depending on the customer, depending on their infrastructure at the same time I've got to retool my skills, I've got to retool my tool kits that I use, my run books, my operational processes, but now they at least have a direction to build to. All the customer meetings we're having here today it's about software defined. How do I build this abstraction layer? Okay we've been doing this with VMware for years on the compute side, many of them have ventured down the journey with us on the NSX side, we see 10,000 customers roughly on the VSAN side as well and that's about putting together, putting the automation tool set around it and really building that same experience that they can get in the public cloud, which it's fast and it's easy on their on prem data centers as well. Sometimes there's many reasons to retain on the private side, data sovreignty, intellectual property, all of those things as well. I think that's where the customers are in the journey right now and it's now they feel comfortable with the direction and they're going to adopt quickly. >> I like this idea of cloud realities. We've been talking on the Cube today about configuring the cloud to the realities of your organization's data. You're talking about governance, security, data locality, etc. so it really comes back to a data challenge. You can't just take all your data and shove it up into the cloud. What are you seeing from customers in that regard? >> I think there's a regulatory component to that as well, particularly if you go overseas, to Europe and Asia, there's a lot more challenges around that as well. I think what you're seeing is that customers recognize the fact that not everything is going to go into the public cloud at this point, so they're really prioritizing, burstable work loads, temporary work loads, definitely a prime opportunity to put in the public cloud. New application development, definitely a primary opportunity to put in the cloud. If I'm in the health care business and I have to retain health care records for x number of years and I'm responsible for HIPPA compliance around them, maybe not something that I'm just going to shove up into the cloud today. It's use case specific depending on and application specific, depending on the vertical industry, the customer resides in and depending on where they are in their journey to the cloud as well. >> You've got a lot of momentum in your business right now. Basically you're on fire. We talked about the cloud realities, that's part of it. The AWS announcement last year, even though it was a year ahead of time, gave a lot of clarity to people. How much of the momentum is due to those factors? Again, the cloud reality, the fact that people are now more comfortable with your cloud strategy and saying okay, I'm willing to make maybe a multi-year commitment with VMware. Is that a factor? >> It is a factor, it is a factor and I think the two remaining components, accelerating and capturing momentum in the market of our SCDC strategy being VCN and NSX has also helped that reality come to fruition for customers as well. It is software defined, we've been talking about software defined data center for a long time, like everybody else in the industry, we talk about things sometimes a lot sooner than they come to fruition, but now that they put together VC ware with NSX with VSAN, and they say hey, I can actually build a private cloud that's fast and easy, which is the reason a lot of my IT people or my application developers were going around me, because the public cloud was faster and easier. Wasn't necessarily cheaper, but it was definitely faster and easier, now customers who've been on that journey with us for the last year realize they can offer the same thing on prem as well and take advantage of both. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. What's the biggest walk away for you right now, looking at VMware, if you had to talk to customers that are not here and looking at the online coverage, certainly Twitter you'll bump into a lot of Cube coverage and lot of pictures, lot of architectural slides. What's the big walk away so far, day one? >> I think tremendous innovation is the big walk away. In many different categories coming forward, you'll hear another big announcement tomorrow coming up in terms of what we'll be doing in conjunction with one of our sister companies in the application development world. But also about taking security to the next level with app defense, so microsegmentation has become fairly ubiquitously known within the industry now, how do I take that into the guest, into the operating system, into the application layer? How do I secure those things as well? You see a lot of customers getting hit with ransomware attacks this year, those are big reality checkers for you if you're the one sitting behind the keyboard that's got to defend your environment against that and rebuild it and I think they really see VMware continue to push the envelope to develop very innovative solutions to these approaches that are very cost effective and that are also very high performance. >> Personal question, as you're out in the field talking to customers, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen the waves. What's the biggest thing that you notice, observe out there right now? What's happening? Share some color with the landscape in the marketplace. >> I think there's some good recognition from customers around the type of operational transformation that they're going to have to go through in this journey. It's not about the network independent from storage independent from security independent from computer anymore. Infrastructure is one entity, that's the way the application owners and the application developers view it and want to consume it, that's the way that infrastructure teams are going to have to deliver it. I think there's a lot of recognition of that. I think there's recognition that the security problem is bigger and badder and worse than ever and it's not going away any time soon and there's sort of no magic box. If there was, you'd pay a lot of money for it to make your problems go away, but it's really something that has to be ubiquitous. Infosect policy has to be aligned with infrastructure security implementation. I could have the greatest policy in the world, if I can't actually implement it, I'm not going to get the benefit to that security there. I think those are some of the things as well. I think sort of the container world is going through a little bit of the post high upcycle, what's the reality check of that environment as well right now, we saw this with open flow and SDN five and six years ago. >> John: Saw it on big data with Hadoub. It's so expensive to run, why even do it? At some point, it can be total cost ownership and ease of use, old school topics. >> We're well into production ready phase of software defined networking. We're well into the production ready phase of software defined storage and hyperconverge infrastructure we need to take containers into that next phase as well. >> Bottom line, what does cloud ready mean to an enterprise these days? >> Cloud ready means that application, that work load is portable and I can deliver the same level of availability, service and agility, whether it's in the public cloud or whether it's in my private data center. Or I move it back and forth between both. We're certainly excited about the momentum we see with our customers, I think you can see and hear the buzz around VMware going on this year and I think it's the best it's been in a few years. >> You run the SE team as well right? >> Dom: Yes I do. >> How does that work? SE's are like the Navy SEALS John always talks about on the beach, they, >> I like to call them the conscience of the sales force. >> There you go, right. Customer trusts them, but at the same time, they understand the customer requirements at a very deep level. How are they organized? How do they fit into the partner ecosystem, maybe you could explain that a little bit. >> Yeah I think traditionally we've organized our SE's, aligned them with product categories, so I've got networking and security SE's, I've got cloud management, automation, orchestration SE's and software defined storage SE's, but I think that sort of is the base line and then you start to build their skill sets toward solution, towards a solution. What types of solution? Is it containers on open stack? Is it VMware's STDC stack? Is it around particular vertical solutions? If you're an SE on my health care team, you're probably very focused on electronic health records and EPIC and Medtronic and different applications like that. How do you solve those customers' problems at the higher level and be able to drill down at the same time with the domain experts from those customers when they want to understand how OSPF works and NSX or they want to understand how lund creation works in VSAN. It's sort of an evolution in terms of building skills. You've got to start at the deepest levels and then you got to build to how those products and those technologies integrate together to provide the customer with a solution. >> So as you move toward this multi cloud word, throwing another buzz word, but is this cloud architect like SE role emerging? >> We'll call them a solution architect. That solution may be a cloud solution, it may be a vertical solution targeted at a specific customer base and make sure that we do what's appropriate to serve our customers. >> John: What's the coolest thing you've worked on this year? >> I've got to think that app defense is the coolest thing that we've got out this year. I think that we've solved a lot of problems with microsegmentation from a network security perspective. I think now going up into the guest and into the application layer and providing an analogous functionality there is going to be really a very very prevalent way of preventing breaches, malware, malware propagation, ransomware in the future as well. I'm a little bit of a security geek, it's attractive to me. I really see that as just an ongoing, it's not even a battle anymore, it's a war now for our customers. We want to help them win that war. >> John: Ransomware has been so brutal. >> Ransomware's been brutal and I mean, see customers almost going out of business. >> Well it's become a board-level topic overnight. It is a serious board-level topic, not just lip service. You're seeing that right? >> You will see in some circumstances boards actually pulling the chief information security officer out of IT and having them report directly to the board. >> Well it makes a lot of sense. >> John: The pressure is unbelievable. >> The pressure is unbelievable right? >> In a lot of regards you would think that the CSO certainly should not report to the CIO, it's kind of like the fox watching the hen house dynamic. Maybe that's not the best analogy, but there should be an inherent tension there number one, but number two is what's the right regime? Why is it IT's problem? It shouldn't be. >> Yeah I think it goes back to information security policy versus actual implementation and the gap that's existed between those two for years for many reasons, networking being a flagrant issue in that context, where I could say oh, this application, this user needs to talk to this application, this application needs to this set of data. How do we implement that? That's not the easiest thing with the tool set that customers who run legacy networks have had historically. I think now that we have some of those things, you'll see the scenario I just described where a few organizations are pulling the CSO out of IT and reporting to the board or some, we've seen board level mandates for segmentation initiatives within the technology area as well so I think this is going to be an ongoing battle that we face moving forward. >> This is the biggest problem I would say at the Cube all day long because part of the value proposition of cloud and dev ops and apps is having data in real time. To be liberal with the data, you run the risk of opening it up so you can't do it the old way. >> Part of the cloud adoption and the new wave of applications about moving these businesses forward, the security is one of those things that will move you backwards from where you are today. I think it's important that we be able to tackle all these battles on all different fronts at the same time. >> If I may, I know we got to go, but there's another dynamic as well which is the recognition that we are going to get penetrated and yet I think it was the third leg of Pat's slide today was response. Boards are saying it's not if, it's when. How do we respond? That's a critical part of the implementation. >> I think it's, we talk about IOT. Think about the number of new entry points you create into your infrastructure, every device you connect to the network itself. Keeping them out is a huge challenge. The question is what can you do as the owner/operator once they are inside? How do you limit, how do you restrict the level of risk that you have and exposure you have to your data, to your applications to your customer information, so on and so forth and I think that's what we've brought to the table in a substantial way with microsegmentation with NSX and I think you'll see that continue to really raise the game with app defense as well. >> Dom Delfino, great to have you, great color, great commentary, you're like a pro. He's just like a anchor with us, SportsCenter >> If Pat fires me am I in? No? >> John: You're in. >> All right. >> Pat fire him so we can hire him. >> John: Don't fire me, Pat, I like my job. >> Dom, thanks so much, good coverage, always great. >> Dave: Thank you, pleasure. >> Bringing a great attitude to the Cube, great energy. More come, day one as we continue down, wind down day one and three days of wall to wall coverage with the Cube VMworld two sets, double barrel shotgun of content here at the Cube, we'll be back with more after this short break. (electronic music)