(modern music) >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. theCUBE's been here 12 years today, we've been watching the evolution of the user conference. It's been quite a journey to see and, you know, virtualization just explode. We got two great guests here, we're going to break it all down. Ash McCarty, director of Multicloud Product Management Dell Technologies, no stranger to the VMworld, now VMware Explore, and Josh Prewitt, Chief Product Officer at Rackspace Technology. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, thanks so much, thanks for having us. >> So, you know, the theme this year is multicloud, but it's really all about vSphere 8's out, you got VxRail, you got containers, you got the magic going on around cloud native, which it really points to the future state of where this is going, which is agile enterprises, infrastructure as code, high performance under the hood, I mean, all the things that you guys have been doing for many, many years and decades and business, but now with VMware putting it all together, it feels like, this year, it's like you got visibility into the value proposition, people have clear line of sight into where the performances are from the hardware software and now Cloud, it's kind of coming together, feels like it's coming together. Let's talk about that and the relationship between you guys, Rackspace and Dell and VMware. >> Perfect. That sounds great. Well, thanks so much for having us. You know, I'll sort of kick that off. We've got a huge lifelong partnership and relationship with Dell and VMware and the technologies that these guys create that we're able to put in front of our customers are really what allows us to go drive those business outcomes. So, yeah, happy to dive into it. >> Yeah, and I think to add to that, we understand that customers have a tremendously complex challenge ahead of them on managing their infrastructure. That's why with VxRail, we have intelligent infrastructure. We want it to simplify the outcomes for customers no matter if they're managing VMware or if they're managing the actual hardware infrastructure underneath it. >> Yeah, one of the things that we always talk about, you know, you read about it on the blogs and the news and the startup world, is "Oh, product-market fit," and, well, it kind of applies here, if you think about what's going on on the product side with the Edge emerging, hybrid cloud on pace with private cloud, and obviously, cloud native is great too if you have native applications in there, but now, putting it all together, you're hearing things like the telco cloud, I hear buzzwords like that, I hear supercloud, which we promoting, which you see in companies becoming cloud themselves, with the CapEx being handled by either public cloud or optimized on premise or hosted hardware. I mean, this is now, this is not all about everything's going to the cloud, this is now cloud operations on premise and in hosting hardware, so I'd love to get your perspective on that because you guys are huge hosting, you've got huge experience there, modernizing all the time. What does the modern era look like for the customer? >> Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, I think it's very clear to everybody that it's a multicloud world, right? I think the main question is, are you multicloud as a strategy, or are you multicloud as a situation? Because everybody's multicloud. That ship has sailed, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so, when I look at the capabilities that we have with the partnership with Dell and the VxRail technologies, you know, life-cycle management that you have to go and perform across your fleet can be extremely difficult, and whenever you take something like the VxRail and you add, you know, you have the hardware and you have the software all fully integrated there, it makes it much easier to do life-cycle management, so for a company like Rackspace, where we have tens of thousands of nodes that we're managing for customers across 29 global data centers, and we're all over the place, the ability to have that strength with Dell's hardware, the VMware platform improve life-cycle management makes it so much easier for us to manage our fleet and be able to deliver those outcomes even faster for customers. >> So assuming that VxRail isn't a virtual railroad that delivers data to Rackspace data centers, if it's not that, what is it, Ash? Give us a little premier on what VxRail is. >> Well, VxRail is the first and only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware, so everything we do with VMware is better. >> So hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Hyperconverged infrastructure. >> What we used to call a server because all the bits are in the box, right? >> All the storage is computed in there. >> Everything's in there. Right. >> Simplifies management. And we built in with the VxRail HCI system software, which is really our secret sauce, we built in to actually add those automation capabilities with VMware, so it allows you to scale out very quickly, scale up very quickly. And one of our big capabilities is our life-cycle management, which is full stack, meaning it life-cycles the entire vSphere stack as well as the hardware infrastructure underneath as one continuously validated state, meaning that customers can focus more on their business outcomes and driving their business forward versus spending time managing their infrastructure. >> And when you talk about customers, it's also the value proposition that's flowing through Rackspace because Rackspace, when you install these systems, how long does it take to spin up to have a VM available for use when you install one of these systems? >> Oh, so you can have the system up and running very quickly. So we automate all the day one deployment, so you can have the system up and running in your labs, in your data centers in 45 minutes, and you can have VMs up in provision very shortly after that. >> So what do you do with that kind of agility? >> Oh my gosh, so we've actually taken that, and we've taken the VxRail platform and we've created what we call Rackspace Services for VMware Cloud, and this is our platform that is based on VxRail, it's based on vCloud Director from VMware, and by having the VxRail is already RackStacked, ready to go for our customers, we're able to sign a customer up today, and then, within a matter of minutes, give them access to a vCloud Director portal where they can go in and spin up a new VM anytime they want, but then, it also integrates into all of those cloud management platforms and tools, right? It integrates into your Terraform, so you've got, you know, your full CI/CD pipeline, and so you have that full end-to-end capability. If you want to go click around on a portal, you can using vCloud Director and using vSphere and all that great stuff. If you want to automate it, you can do that too. And we do it all in the backs of that VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Talk about the DPU dynamic. We're hearing a lot about DPUs. VxRail, you guys have some HCI-like vibe there with DPUs. How is that impacting performance, can you guys see? 'Cause we're hearing a lot of buzz around the VxRail and the VMware DPUs really making things much faster. >> I mean, it's the thing we talk about most with customers now is their challenges with scaling their infrastructure, and VxRail is going to be the first and only jointly engineered system that will have vSphere 8 with DPUs functionality and will have the full life-cycle management, and what this really empowers customers to do is, as they're growing their environments that they're scaling out their workloads in the data center, they need a way to scale to that next generation of networking and network security, and that's what DPUs allow you to do. They give you that offload and that high performance capability. >> Talk about the... I'd love to get your guys' perspective, while we're just riffing on this real quick sidebar for a second, if VxRail has these capabilities which you guys are promoting it does and some of the things go on in the modern era, the next gen apps are going to look a lot different. We're kind of calling it supercloud, if you will, for lack of a better description. Yeah, multicloud is a state, I agree. It's a situation and a state, but supercloud is really the functionality of what cloud does. So what do you guys see as, maybe it's tea leaves reading now or dots connecting, what are some of those next gen apps? I mean the Edge is there with, "Oh, the Edge is going to explode," and I can see the Edge having new kinds of apps that we've never seen before, whether it's on premise building lights and however they work or IoT changing. What do you guys see as the next gen app/apps coming out that's not looking the same as now, or how are apps today changing for next gen? 'Cause you get more performance at the Edge, you get more action, you get more co-locations in GEOS, so it's clear multicloud multi-presence is happening too, right? So what are you guys seeing? What's this... >> Yeah, I would say two areas that resonate most with customers is customers transitioning to their cloud native journey, so beginning it and using things like Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, which we fully support and have a white paper out there list for customers, another area is really in the AIML space, so we've been partnering with both VMware and Nvidia to simplify how customers deploy new AIML infrastructure. I mean, it's challenging, complex, a lot of customers are wanting to dive in because it really enables them to better operate and operate on insights and analytics they get from running their business. >> Josh? >> And, you know, I think it really comes down to, whether you want to call it Edge or IoT or, you know, smart things, whatever, right? It all comes down to how we are expected, now, to capture all of the data to create a better user experience, and that's what we're seeing the modern applications being built around, right, is how do you leverage all of the data that's now at your fingertips, whether it's from wearables, machine vision, whatever it may be, and drive that improved user experience. And so that's the apps that we're seeing now, right? You know, of course, you still have all your business apps, all your ERP capabilities that need to exist and all of that great stuff, but at the same time, I also expect that, whenever, you know, now, whenever I'm walking into a store and their machine vision picks me up and they're pinging my phone and pushing me push notifications, I expect to have a better user experience. >> And do a database search on you too, by the way. >> Yeah, exactly, right? >> No search warrants out for 'em, you know, you're good. >> That's exactly it, so, you know, you kind of expect that better user experience and that's where I'm seeing a lot of the new app development. >> Yeah, it's fun, as these cases are intoxicating to think about all the weird coolness around it. The thing that I want to get your thoughts on is, we were just talking on the analyst session earlier in theCUBE, if DevOps is here and won, which we believe it has and infrastructure as code is happening, the cloud native discussion, shifting left CI/CD pipeline, that's DevOps in my mind, that's like cloud native developers, that's like traditional IT in my mind, so that's all part of the coding. DataOps and Security Ops seem to be the most robust areas of conversations where that's the new Ops, right? So, I mean, I made the term up, but new Ops, in terms of the focus, what are you making more efficient? What are you optimizing for? What's your guys reaction to that? Because all the conversations that we talk about is data, security, and then the rest seems to be cool, all good on the developer's side. Yeah, shift left events happening up there, Kubernetes containers, but all the action on the Ops side seems to be data and security. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? Is that right? >> So personally, I do think that it's right. I think that, you know with great power comes great responsibility, right? And so the clouds have brought that to us, all of your infrastructure as code has brought that to us. We have that great power now, right? But then you start to see, kind of, the pipeline attacks that are starting to become more and more popular. And so how you secure something that is as complex as, you know, a cloud native development pipeline is really hard, it's really challenging, so I do think that it warrants the attention. Then on the data side, I think that that matters because when I talked about those examples of a better user experience, I don't want my better user experience tomorrow, I don't want it 20 minutes from now. I want that real time capability, and so with that comes massive requirements from a compute and hardware perspective, massive requirements from a software perspective, and from, you know, what folks are now calling DataOps perspective >> Data addressability, having the data available to be delivered in real time. >> You know, there there's been a lot of talk, here at the conference, about the disaggregation of, you know, the brainularism, if we're going to make up words, you know, the horsepower that's involved, CPU, DPU, GPU. I'll make up another word. We're familiar with the thermometers used during COVID to measure temperature. Pretend that I've invented a device called a Care-o-meter and I'm pointing at various people's foreheads, who needs to care about DPUs and GPUs and CPUs? You know, John was referencing the idea of security at the Edge, data. Well, wow, we've got GPUs that can do things. Who needs to care about that? Obviously, we care about it. You care about it. You care about it. You're building this stuff, you're deploying this stuff, but at what level in the customer stack do they need to care about it? Are you going in, is RackSpace engaging customers and saying, "Look, here's the value proposition: we understand your mission to be this. We believe we can achieve your mission." How far down in the organization do you go before you get to someone where you have to have the DPU conversation? 'Cause we didn't even define DPU yet here, which is always offensive to me. >> I think I defined it actually. >> Did you define DPU? Good. Thank you John. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But so who should care? Who should really care about that? >> Oh, that's such a complex question, right? Because everybody, Rackspace included >> But a good one. But a good question. >> Oh, it's a great question. >> Thank you. >> Great question. (laughing) >> Everybody, Rackspace included, is talking about selling business outcomes, right? And ultimately, that is what matters. It is what matters, is selling those business outcomes to the customer. And so of course we're dealing with our business buyers who are just looking for, "Hey, improve my KPIs, make this run faster, better, stronger, all of that great stuff," but ultimately you get down to an IT staff, and to the IT staff, these things matter because the IT staff, they all have budgets that they have to hit. The realities start to hit them and they can't just go and spend whatever they want, you know, trying to hit the KPIs of the marketing department or the finance department, right? And so you have your business buyers that do care significantly about buying their outcomes, and so we're having, you know, the business outcomes conversations with them and then, oftentimes, they will come back to us and say, "Okay, but now we need you to talk to this person over in our IT organization. We need you to talk with our CIO, with our VP of infrastructure," whatever that may be, where we really get down to the nuts and bolts and we talk about how, you know, we can stretch the hardware coming from Dell, we can stretch the software coming from VMware, and we can deliver a higher caliber experience, a lower TCO, by taking advantage of some of the new technologies coming out. >> Yeah, so there's a reason why I ask that awesome question, and it's because I can imagine a scenario where, and this speaks to RackSpace's position in the market today and moving forward and what your history has been, people want to know, "Well, why should I work with Rackspace instead of some mega-hyper-monster-cloud?" If part of the answer is: well, it's because, for very specific application environments, like healthcare we talked about earlier, that might be a conversation where you're actually bringing in Dell to have a conversation about how you are specifically optimizing hardware and software to achieve things that otherwise can't be achieved with t-shirt sizes of servers in a hyperscale cloud. I mean, is that part of the Rackspace value proposition moving forward, that you can do things like that with partners like Dell that the other folks aren't going to focus on? >> Absolutely, it is, right? And a lot of the power of Rackspace is that, you know, we're the best-in-class pure play cloud solutions provider, and we can talk to you about your AWS, your Azure, your GCP, all of that great stuff, but we can also talk to you about private cloud solutions that are built on the backs of Dell Technologies, and in this multicloud world, you don't have that one size fits all for every single application. There are some things that run great in a hyperscale provider, and we can help you get there, but just exactly like you said, there are these verticals where you have applications that don't necessarily run all that well or they're not modernized, they haven't been refactored to be able to take advantage of cloud native services. And if all you're going to do is run that on bare metal in VMs, a hosted private cloud is, by far, the best way to do that, right? And Rackspace provides that hosted private cloud on the backs of Dell technology, on the backs of VMware technology, and we can go deliver those custom bespoke solutions to customers. >> So the infrastructure and the hardware still matters, Ash, yes? >> Absolutely, and I think he just highlighted, while what he does with his customers and what's important to his internal organization is being to deliver faster outcomes, better outcomes, give those customers, to meet those KPIs of those customers consuming their infrastructure at Rackspace, so I think, really, what the DPU and the underlying infrastructure enables is all that full stack integration to allow them to quickly scale to the demands of those customers and what they need in their infrastructure. >> Guys, while we got you here, what do you think about this year's VMware Explore, a lot of anticipation around how many people are going to show up and, you know, all kinds of things around the new name and Broadcom. Big attendance here, I mean, I was very surprised about the size of the attendance and the show floor, the ecosystem, this train is not stopping. I mean, this is VMware's third act, no matter what the contextual situation is. What's your observation of the show? Do you agree, or is there anything that you could want to share about for folks who didn't make it, what they missed? >> Yeah, I mean it really highlights, I mean, you've seen the breadth of the show, I know people that aren't here that aren't able to see it are really missing the excitement. So there's a lot of great announcements around multicloud, around all the announcements, around the vSphere 8 with the DPUs, the vSAN Express Storage architecture, ton of new exciting technologies that are really empowering how customers, you know, the future of how customers are going to consume their workloads in their data centers. >> Josh, they're not short on products and stuff. A lot of moving parts. vSphere 8, a bunch of new stuff. And the cloud native stuff's looking pretty good too, off the tee. >> You know, it does feel like a focus on the core, though, in a way. So I don't think there's been a lot of peripheral noise at the show. Sometimes it's, you know, "And we got this, and this, and this, and this." It's vSphere 8, vSAN 8, cloud software, you know, really hammering it home and refining it. >> But you don't think of it as a little bit of a circus act. I mean the general keynote was theatrical, I thought, I mean, I thought they did a good job on that. I think vSphere 8 was buried a little bit, I thought they could have... They checked the box at the beginning. >> That's true, that's true. >> I mean, they mentioned it, but we didn't see the demos. You know? Demos are usually great. But that's my only criticism. >> Well, that's why we supplemented it with the VxRail announcements, right? With our big announcements around vSphere 8 and with the DPUs as well as the vSAN Express Storage architecture being integrated into VxRail, so I think, you know, it's always that ongoing partnership and, you know, doing what's best for our customers, showing them the next generation and how they consume that technology. >> Yeah, you guys got good props on VxRail. We had a great chat about it yesterday. Rackspace, you guys doing good? Quick update on what's happening with you guys. Give a quick plug. What's going on at Rackspace? What's hot? What's going on? Give a quick plug for what the services are and the products you got going on there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are that end-to-end cloud provider, right? And so we've got really exciting offers in market, helping customers take advantage of all the hyperscale providers, and then giving them that private cloud experience. We've got everything from single-tenant running in our data centers on the backs of vSphere, vCloud Director, and VxRails, all the way through to, like, multi-tenant burstable capability that runs within our own data centers as well. It's a really exciting time for technology, a really exciting time for Rackspace. >> Congratulations, we've been following your journey for a long time. Dell, you guys do continue to do a great job and end-to-end phenomenal work. The telco thing's a huge opportunity, we didn't even go there. But Ash, thanks. Josh, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay, thanks for watching theCUBE. We're live, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets here in Moscone West on the ground level, in the lobby, checking out all the action. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (modern music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. (upbeat music) Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Hey Dave! >> Hey Lisa, how's it going? >> Good, day two. >> Good to see you back here again. >> Exactly! >> Bouncin' between the sets. >> I am. >> 94 guests, it's good. >> In three days, yeah. We've learned a lot already and we're nearing the end of day two. Excited to welcome two new guys to theCUBE, we've got Colin Durocher, Project Manager from Dell EMC, and Sandro Bercelli, Global Product Manager at Telefonica. Gentlemen, it's nice to have you here. >> Great to be here, first time on theCUBE. >> So first time on theCUBE, 20th anniversary of VMware, lots to celebrate, lots going on. From an announcement perspective, momentum perspective, Colin, let's start with you. What are some of the market trends, the customer voices that you were hearing regarding data protection and it's criticality in this multi-cloud world, in which all these enterprises now live? >> Sure, I think we have to put it into context with the growth of the cloud. The cloud is growing exponentially and data protection is one of the leading use cases. I think IDC did a survey recently, 58% of people using the cloud are doing data protection in the cloud. Backup and recovery is the number one use case. So that's one trend. Another trend is more specific to VMworld and VMware. Their vCloud provider program is, or the business unit is one of the fastest growing business units at VMware. They're having incredible success built on the back of fantastic products. And so what we've done is, about a year ago actually, at VMworld last year we formed a three-way partnership between Telefonica, VMware and Dell EMC, to provide a turnkey solution for cloud providers to deliver data protection as a service. >> So I wonder if we can talk a little bit about Telefonica and your business and how it's evolved, say, over the last, I don't know, pick a time frame, decade, better part of a decade. How is it evolving and changing? >> It's a long partnership that you have between Dell EMC and Telefonica and VMware. So we start many years ago, launching new versions of it to see 2.0, 3.0, and now moving to 4.0. So was not so easy doing this journey to improve our service catalog to our customers. And right now, with the VDC 4.0 with the new interface of the cloud director 9.x (mumbles) in data protection software of VMC, but increasing a lot the functionalities show our customers, increasing the user experience of our customers. It is our very valuable to our customers in this new approach of the VDC 4.0. >> So if you think about, if you go back to the early days of virtualization, everybody sort of, you know, took 10 servers, and brought them down to one, which is great, because all the compute power was under-utilized. But of course the one job that needed all that compute power was backup. >> [Colin And Sandro] Sure. >> Then you saw data protection change to accommodate that. Okay, and customers re-architected, et cetera. Now we enter the cloud era, we're knee-deep in it. How is data protection changing, whether it's architecturally, or processes to accommodate multi-cloud? Maybe Colin, you can start. >> Well, so I think another trend that we're seeing is the move from managed services to more of a self service delivery. So providers like Telefonica want to enable their tenants to access data protection as a service, and that has certainly some architectural impacts to it. And, you know, I think that's what's really behind this announcement that we're making here at VMworld. >> The most important part you mentioned is talking about the VDC. It's not just infrastructure as a service platform, it's everything as a service platform. So more than this, you're putting to our customers they're developed services, for example, data protection. Data protection is very important. So our idea in the user experience is to change the customer's life easy. So with the new port, self-serve support or for data protection, the customers right now can do everything in the VDC. This was possible with the partnership between VMworld and WMC. Developing together the new integration of a mod integration using the API for the cloud director, for the new version, is very valuable to us. >> So in terms of impact, give us an example, Sandro, of how this three-way partnership that Telefonica has with Dell EMC and VMware, how is it impacting, not just your customers business, but Telefonica's business? How is it enabling your transformation, from a top line perspective? >> Sure. I think that what we are thinking right now, with Dell EMC and VMware, is a model that must be followed by the other manufacturers. Because they're creating the future, if there's integration between data protection software of Dell EMC and VMware, it impacts directly to our customer, because now our oldest versions, the customer needs to require some... For example, historic procedures, you just talk to someone in Telefonica to asking them. So right now, is immediately through the self-service portal. And this is very important to us to increase the user experience and our customer experience, which is very valuable to us. >> So customer experience improves. How have you been able to expand your customer base globally leveraging this partnership. >> For example, VDC and Telefonica talking about our business. We are the most important deployments of VM around the world. We are more than 80 countries around the world, in South America and Europe, running the VDC software. This is very valuable to us because if opening our global catalog and using the VMware data protection software producing the TCO to us and to our customers using for example the data duplication and the new functions in the solution is very good to us and to our customers. >> So vCloud director, maybe we could drill into that a little bit in terms of how it's impacted your business. Talk more about the value that it brings to not just you, but your customers. >> Jesus Christ, it was not so easy during that time, you know, we are using vCloud director since the beginning of our global brothers and global structures, so following, during these years, we have the oldest version, we have a lot of limits in the vCloud directory interface. So right now, using the vCloud director nine in the cloud's extension, the cloud director availability, so this is very valuable to us because the VMware changes a lot, the user exchange interface. The old user interface was very ugly to our customers. So right now, vCloud director 9.1 and 9.x is very good interface. In the same way, improving the user experience in the quality of our services. >> So the business impact is that it's simpler to manage, so saving time so people can... >> Sure. And integration. >> Well, I think you have to think about how do service providers like Telefonica differentiate themselves, right? A cloud provider that only offers infrastructure as a service, they're getting their margins squeezed, right? So they have to bring in these value added services. How do they do that better than the others? They differentiate themselves through a better user experience, which means, you know, the way the user interacts with the product. Also it means, it comes down to the cost, right? So that goes directly to the service provider's bottom line. They're able to pass that on to their customers. Then also, performance and scale. Right, so these are really very, very, important points, and that's what I think our partnership is all about. >> How do you guys go to market? Is it a three way? Two way? What's the go-to-market strategy? >> So, our strategy do not compete for the hyperscale providers. >> Right. >> Our VDC, you have our own services running in our own data centers and combining with our global network infrastructure. We can provide a better service to our customers in local perspective, local billing, local support. In this partnership with Dell EMC, consuming the software and technologies many years ago, so we are evolving our services this way and this is the right thing to do right now, to differentiate us from the hyperscale providers. >> And you were.. I'm sorry, go ahead, Colin. >> Well, I was just going to add to that that in terms of our go-to-market, we've made a very big announcement here at VMworld 2018, which is that VMware, the VCPP business unit is actually selling Dell EMC data protection to their service providers. So this is actually our goal, is to really make it a native feature of vCloud director built right in. >> So the VMware cloud, provider business unit is essentially OEM-ing, reselling, your product... >> Yep. >> Which ultimately makes it into Telefonica. >> Sure. And the way that they're doing that, is actually really interesting because it adds value for us in the sense that they allow service providers to pay by the drip. So the way that we sell it is very different than other routes to market that we have and something that I think is of a lot of value to service providers like Telefonica. >> So it's paid by the drip, by that you mean it's a monthly service? >> It's a monthly per-protected VM, very simple, very simple business model. They pay a certain number of cloud provider points for one offering, a different amount for the other offering, and it's paid in arrears on a monthly basis based on what they've consumed. >> And I can cancel any time, it's not like I got to buy three years in advance, or? >> No, absolutely. >> Absolutely. >> So we've been hearing a lot, we hear this a lot, "better together," right, David? At every event and every aspect of life, there's a lot of things that are better together. What, I'm curious, Colin, from your perspective, Dell EMC, VMware, lots of change in the last few years... >> Absolutely. >> How is this, you know, we talked about value streams that go to market, how are you seeing your customers embracing and feeling what Dell EMC and VMware are doing as really better together? How do you simplify the complexities that all these customers are living in with this partnership? >> So, I can say that over the course of history we've had a lot of co-engineering partnerships. Right, between Dell EMC and VMware. I mean, I could probably name five or six of them, and there's a number of them happening right now. This partnership, this aspect of it, is a little bit different because there's a sales and marketing aspect to it, so that's taking the partnership to the next level. Never before has VMware sold Dell EMC product. Right, so that's.... >> Pretty groundbreaking. >> Yeah. This is the next step in better together. For our customers, I mean, there's been an incredible response. We had service provider round tables on Sunday. Lot of excitement about this and actually, I heard two service providers have actually decided to go with this, based on the fact that we have this partnership. So, that's amazing for us. >> Awesome. >> Yeah. >> And then in terms of the evolution of the partnership of the technology, what's the customer feedback loop, if you will, how are they helping to influence the direction the technology goes. >> I think that evolving the catalog and making the customer's life easy and providing the new functionalities, the new features, in the easiest mold, is very valuable to our customers. It's more than providing the (mumbles) in platform service. For more added value of service to the customers, the (mumbles) services, the multi-cloud environments. So our goal is to put all together, providing the hybrid cloud ship, multi-cloud solutions to our customers, is valuable, just as our customers asking to us and claiming to us today. Around the world. >> Well you mentioned your presence in 80 countries? >> Our virtual data centers are present in 80 countries, serving the Americas and Europe. >> Was this possible before the VMware, Dell EMC, Telefonica? >> No, no, we are evolving together. It was not built easy before. Not possible to doing alone before. >> So a lot of growth, what's next? Where do you go from there? You got 80! >> (laughs) >> Where do you go from there? >> I believe that our strategy should evolve in the cataloging freezing the partnership with Dell EMC and VMware, and increasing the... Putting together this new ecosystem and the integration between vCloud director API, ecologic stations in the protection software. I think that is the way, this is the goal, this is our... The processes that are moving now should do... Manufactures are the big parts of our ecostystem is the VDC 4.0. >> So you got a couple of breakout sessions tomorrow? >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Give us the top three takeaways that the attendees will glean from your session. >> Oh gosh. The attendances? >> The key takeaways. What are they going to learn? >> So I think at least one of the sessions that Sandro's participating in is a data protection session. So it's a general session covering all of our recent announcements, our technology, kind of a thought leadership type of thing, and using Telefonica's experience with the vCloud director extensions as a testimonial, an example, to share with the... >> The validation. >> The validation to share with the other customers. >> Bringing together some of the hot topics at the show, obviously, cloud, data protection, walk around the floor, everybody's talking about data protection. >> That's what it's all about, yeah. >> Great! Congratulations! >> Thank you so much. >> Colin, Sandro, thanks so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE and sharing with us what you guys are doing with this partnership. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you! >> Thank you so much, thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are continuing day two of VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Stick around, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, welcome to this special CUBE presentation, where we're covering the Dell EMC Integrated Data Appliance announcement. You can see we also are running a crowd chat, it's an ask me anything crowd chat you can login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. We've got Dell EMC executives, we're gonna hear from VMware executives, we've got the analyst perspective, we're gonna hear from customers and then of course we're gonna jump into the crowd chat. With me is Beth Phalen, who is the President of Dell's EMC, Dell EMCs Data Protection Division, Beth, great to see you again. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> Okay so, we know that 80% of the workloads are virtualized, we also know that when virtualization came on the scene it caused customers to really rethink their data protection strategies. Cloud is another force that's causing them to change the way in which they approach data protection, but let's start with virtualization. What are you guys doing for those virtualized customers? >> Data protection is crucial for our customers today, and more and more the vAdmins are being expected to protect their own environments. So we've been working very closely with VMware to make sure we're delivering the simplest data protection for VMware, taking into account all of the cloud capabilities that VMware is bringing to market and making sure we're protecting those as well. We have to do that without compromise, and so we have some really exciting innovations to talk about today. The first of those is the DP4400, we announced this a few weeks ago, it is a purpose-built appliance for mid-sized customers that brings forward all of our learnings from enterprise data protection, and makes it simple and easy to use, and at the right price point for our mid-sized customers. We're the extension into VMware environments and extensions into the cloud. >> Okay, so I mentioned up front that cloud is this disruptive force. You know people expect the outcome of cloud to be simplicity, ease of management, but the cloud adds IT complexity. How are you making data protection simpler for the cloud? >> And the cloud has many different ways the customers can leverage it. The two that we're gonna highlight today are for those customers that are using VMware Cloud on AWS, we're now enabling a seamless disaster recovery option, so customers can fail over to VMware Cloud on AWS for their DR configurations. And on top of that, we're very excited to talk about data protection as a service. We all know how wildly popular that is and how rapidly it's growing, and we've now integrated with VMware vCloud Director to allow customers to not have to have a separate backup as a service portal, but provide management for both their VMware environments and their data protection, all integrated within VCD. >> Okay great, so, we know that VMware of course is the leader in virtualization, we're gonna cut away for a moment and hear from VMware executives, we're gonna back here we're gonna do a deep dive, as I say we got great agenda, we're gonna explore some of these things; and then of course there's the crowd chat, the ask me anything crowd chat. So let's cut over to Palo Alto, California, in our studios over there, and let's hear from the VMware perspective and Peter Burris, take it away, Peter. (intense orchestral music) >> Thanks, Dave! And this is Peter Burris, and I can report that in fact we have another beautiful day here in California. And also, we've got a great VMware executive to talk a bit about this important announcement. Yanbing Li is the Senior Vice President and GM for the Storage and Availability Business Unit at Vmware, welcome back to theCUBE Yanbing. >> It's great to be here, thank you for having me Peter. >> Oh absolutely we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about but let's start with the obvious question. Why is it so important to VMware and Dell EMC to work on this question, data availability, data protection? >> You know I have a very simple answer for you. You know Dell EMC has been the marketing leader for the past decade, and they are also a leading solution for all of our VMware environment, it's very natural that we do a lot of collaboration with them. And what's most important, is our collaboration is not only go-to-market collaboration, in labeling our joint customers, but also deep engineering level collaboration, and that is very very exciting. Lots of our solutions are really co-engineered together. >> So, that is in service to something. And now putting all this knowledge, all this product together to create a solution, is in service of data protection but especially as it relates to spanning the cloud. So talk to us a little bit about how this is gonna make it easier for customers to be where they need to be in their infrastructure. >> Certainly VMware has been also on a journey to help with our customers, their transition from data center to the cloud, and data protection is a very crucial aspect of that; and we're looking for simpler, scalable, more robust data protection solutions. You know VMware launched our VMware Cloud on AWS service last year, and Dell EMC has been with us since day one; they're the first solution to be certified as a data protection service for VMware Cloud on AWS. We also work with 4500 VCCP partners, this is the VMware Cloud partner program partners that, you know they are building cloud services based on VMware software defined data center stack. And we are also working with Dell EMC on integrating their data protection source with vCloud, their vCloud Director software, so that you know our customer has integrated data protection for our VCCP partners. So you know across all the cloud initiatives, we are working very closely with Dell EMC. >> So bringing the best of the technology, the best of this massive ecosystem together, to help customers protect their data and give them options about where they operate their infrastructure. >> Definitely. I'm personally very excited about their recent announcement that has been to the Data Domain Virtual Edition, where they're offering a subscription-based data protection bundle that can allow a VMware Cloud on AWS instance to back up their data, you know, using a subscription model, and you can backup 96 terabytes for any single SDC cluster in VMware Cloud on AWS. So they're definitely driving a lot of innovation not only in technology, but also in consumption, how to make it easier for customers to consume. And we're excited to be a partner with Dell EMC together on this. >> Fantastic! Yanbing Li, VMware, back to you, Dave! >> Thanks, Peter. We're back for the deep dive, Beth Phalen and joining us again, and Ruya Barrett, who's the Vice President of Marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection Division, thanks guys for coming on. Ruya, let me start with you. Why are customers, and what are they telling you, in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well, Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort, and collaboration we've been putting in place, and so did Yanbing with VMware, so whether that's integration into vCenter, or vSphere, or vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Automation or vCloud Director, all of this work, all of this engineering effort, and engineering hours is really to do two things: deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers >> But what do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well, simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware. Where as 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer, but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated. Whether you're going directly from storage to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing Hypervisor Direct to application storage. So it really is to automate, and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels, so automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy cloud is for the admins and users, it really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing their backups and restores, so, our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the vAdmins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So, when you talk about power, is that performance, you reference performance, but is it just performance, or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question, Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three fold, it's power in making sure that you have a single, powerful solution, that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow's needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on-premise, or in the cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection, and more importantly restores, is really critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency, we have the best source ID duplication technology in the market, that coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> Alright, I wanna bring Beth Phalen into the conversation, Beth, let's talk about cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true; it's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing cloud into that IT environment, they have to know where their data is, and how is protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here for a long time, we've had our hyper cloud extensions, you can do cloud tiering directly from Data Domain. And now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud on AWS customer, so that you can use that for you cloud DR configuartion, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with vMotion if you choose to; and that's great for customers who don't wanna have a second site, but they do wanna have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great with VMware, with vCloud Director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy, it's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection. And so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks, and your data protection tasks, from one UI in the Cloud Director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing, comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud, is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement, the IDPA DP4400, Ruya what's it all about? Explain. >> Absolutely, so, what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance, turnkey, purpose-built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-sized customers, it's really, to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-sized customers. It's all inclusive in terms of capabilities, so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery, and cloud long-term retention, all at your fingertips, all included; as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UI's. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful protection to mid-sized customers at the lowest cost to protect. And we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, could you talk about the motivation for this product? Why did you build it, and why is relevant to mid-sized customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection we're known for our world-class dedupe, best in class, best in the world dedupe capabilities. And what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that's served enterprise customers for all of these years, and then we're making that accessible to mid-sized customers And there were so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this, we've created a product that a mid-sized company, may have a small IT staff, like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection, that they can have what we bring to the market with best-in-class data protection. >> I wanna follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple, what does it mean for customers? >> Yeah, I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy, two times faster than traditional data protection, simple means easier to manage with modern HTML5 interfaces that include the data protection day-to-day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easy to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add in 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So, when I hear powerful and here mid-sized customers, I'm thinking okay I wanna bring enterprise-class data protection down to the mid-sized organization. Is that what you means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> Yeah. If I'm an IT admin I wanna make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible. And so, we have the broadest support matrix in the industry, I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection on my different applications, that's key, that's one thing. The other thing is I wanna be able to scale, and I don't wanna have to be forced to bring in new products with this you have a logical five terabytes on-prem, you can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalability. >> Petabytes, sorry. >> And then-- >> Sorry. Petabytes-- >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> You live in a petabyte world! >> Of course, yes, what am I thinking. (all laugh) and then last but not least, it's just performance, right? This runs on a 14GB PowerEdge server; you're gonna get the efficiency, you can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So, all of those things come together with power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this IT operations person, what does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah, absolutely. So first, you're gonna get your weekends back, right? So, the product is just faster, we talked about it's simpler, you're not gonna have to get a PhD on how to do data protection, to be able to do your business. You're gonna enable your vAdmins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that you know sound mind that data protection's just happening, it works! We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses, with the most stringent service-level requirements; it's just gonna work. And, by the way, you're gonna look like a hero, because with this 2U appliance, you're gonna be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center, so your boss is gonna think your just a superhero. >> Petabytes. >> Yeah exactly, petabytes, exactly. (all laugh) So it's tremendous for the IT user, and also the business user. >> By the way, what about the boss? What about the line of business, what does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO, I really wanna think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel? And my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't wanna overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business, you need it, but you don't wanna overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind, and the trust that this is just gonna work, then I'm gonna be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario; and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm gonna rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much, don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session, so you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. Alright, let's take a look at the product, and then we're gonna come back and get the analysts perspective, keep it right there. (intense music) >> Organizations today, especially mid-sized organizations, are faced with increased complexity; driving the need for data protection solutions that enable them to do more with less. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 packages the proven enterprise class technologies that have made us the number one provider in data protection into a converged appliance specifically designed for mid-sized organizations. While other solutions sacrifice power in the name of simplicity, the IDPA DP4400 delivers simply powerful data protection. The IDPA DP4400 combines protection software and storage, search and analytics, and cloud readiness, in one appliance. To save you time and money, we made it simple for you to deploy and upgrade, and, easily grow in place without disruption, adding capacity with simple license upgrades without buying more hardware. Data protection management is also a snap with the IDPA System Manager. IDPA is optimized for VMware data protection. It is also integrated with vSphere, SQL, and Oracle, to enable a wider IT audience to manage data protection. The IDPA DP4400 provides protection across the largest application ecosystem, deliver breakneck backup speeds, more efficient network usage, and unmatched 55 to one average deduplication. The IDPA DP400 is natively extensible to the cloud for long-term retention. And, also enables simple, and cost effective cloud disaster recovery. Deduplicated data is stored in AWS with minimal footprint, with failover to AWS and failback to on-premises quickly, easily, and cost effectively. The IDPA DP4400 delivers all this at the lowest cost-to-protect. It includes a three year satisfaction guarantee, as well as an up to 55 to one data protection deduplication guarantee. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 provides backup, replication, deduplication, search, analytics, instant access for application testing and development, as well as DR and long-term retention to the cloud. Everything you need to deliver enterprise-class data protection, in a small integrated system, optimized for mid-sized environments. It's simply powerful. (upbeat music and rhythmic claps) >> Cool video! Alright, we're back, with Vinny Choinski, who is the Senior Analyst for the Validation Practice at ESG, Enterprise Strategy Group. ESG is a company that does a lot of research, and one of the areas is they have these lab reports, and they basically validate vendor claims, it's an awesome service, they've had it for a number of years and Vinny is an expert in this area. Vinny Choinski, welcome to theCUBE great to see you. >> How you doin' Dave? Great to see you. >> So, when you talk to customers they tell you they hate complexity, first of all, and specifically in the context of data protection, they want high performance, they don't wanna have to mess with this stuff, and they want low cost. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> So our research is lining up with those challenges; and that's why I've recently done three reports. We talked to how EMC is addressing those challenges and how they are making it easier, faster, and less expensive to do data protection. >> So people don't wanna do a lot of heavy lifting. They worry about the time it takes to do deployment. So, what did you find, hands on, what'd you find with regards to deployment? >> Yeah, so for the deployment, we really yeah, we focused on the DP4400 and you know how that's making it easier for the IT generalist to do data protection deployment, and management. And what we did, I actually walked through the whole process from the delivery truck to first backup. We had it off the truck and racked up and powered up in about 30 minutes, so, it's a service sized appliance, pretty easy, easy to install. Spent 10 minutes in the server room kinda configuring it to the network, and then we went up to an office, and finished the configuration. After that I basically hit go on the configuration button, completely automated. And I simply monitored the process until the appliance was fully configured. Took me about 20 minutes, you know, to add that configuration to the appliance, hit go, and at the end, I had an appliance that was ready for on-site, and backups extended to the cloud. >> So, that met your expectations? It meshed with the vendors claims? >> It was real easy. We actually had to move it around a couple times, and you know, this stuff used to be huge you know, big box, metal gear. >> Refrigerators. (laughs) >> Refrigerators. It was a small appliance, once we installed it, got a note from the IT guy, had to move it. No tools, easy rack, the configuration was automated. We had to set network parameters, that's about it. >> How about your performance testing, what did that show? >> So we did some pretty extensive performance testing. We actually compared the IDPA Dell appliances to the industry recognized server grid scaled architecture. And basically we started by matching the hardware parameters of the box, CPU, memory, disk, network, flash, so once we had the boxes configured apples to apples shall we say, we ran a rigorous set of tests. We scaled the environment from a hundred to a thousand VMs, adding a hundred VMs in between each backup run. And what we found as we were doing the test was that the IDPA reduced the backup window significantly over the competitive solution. A 54 to 68% reduction in the backup window. >> Okay. So again, you're kind of expectations tied into the vendor claims? >> Yep. You know the reduction in backup time was pretty significant that's a pretty good environment, pretty good test environment, right, you got the hundred to a thousand VMs. We also looked at the efficiency of data transfer, and we found that IDPA outperformed the competitor there as well, significantly. And we found that this is do to the the mature data domain deduplication technology. It not only leverages, like most companies will, the VMware Changed Block Tracking API, but it has it's own client-side software that really reduces, significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network for each backup. And we found that reduced the amount of data that needs to be transferred against the competitor by 74%. >> What about the economics, it's the one of the key paying points obviously for IT professionals. What did you see there? >> Yep, so, there's a lot that goes into the economics of a data protection environment. We summed it up into what we call the cost to protect. We actually collected call home data from 15,000 Dell EMC data protection appliances deployed worldwide. >> Oh cool, real data. >> Real data. So, we had the real data, we got it from 15,000 different environments, we took that data and we we used some of the stuff that we analyzed, the price that they paid for it, how long has it been in service, what the deduplication rates they're getting, and then the amount of data. So we had all the components that told us what was happening with that box. So that allowed us to to distill that into this InstaGraphic that we see up here, which takes 12, shows 12 of the customers that we analyzed. Different industries, different architectures, on the far left of this InstaGraphic you're gonna see that we had a data domain box connected to a third-party backup application, still performing economically, quite well. On the far right we have the fully integrated IDPA solution, you'll see that as you put things better together, the economics get even better, right? So, what we found was that both data domain and the IDPA can easily serve data protection environments storage for a fraction of a penny per month. >> Okay. Important to point out this is metadata, no customer data involved here, right, it's just. >> It's metadata that's correct. >> Right, okay. Summarize your impressions based on your research, and your hands on lab work. >> Yeah, so I've been doing this for almost 25 plus years, I've been in the data protection space, I was an end user, I actually ran backup environments, I worked in the reseller space, sold the gear, and now I'm an analyst with ESG, taking a look at all the different solutions that are out there, and, you know data protection has never been easy, and there's always a lot of moving parts, and it gets harder when you really need a solution that backs up everything, right? From your physical, virtual, to the cloud, the legacy stuff, right? Dell EMC has packaged this up, in my opinion, quite well. They've looked at the economics, they've looked at the ease of use, they've looked at the performance, and they've put the right components in there they have the data protection software, they have the target storage, they have the analytics, you can do it with an agent, you can do it without an agent. So I think they've put all the pieces in here, so it's not an easy thing in my opinion, and I think they've nailed this one. >> Excellent. Well Vinny, thanks so much for for comin' on and sharing the results of your research, really appreciate it. Alright, let's hear from the customer, and then we're gonna come back with Beth Phalen and wrap, keep it right there. (upbeat techno music) >> I was a fortune 500 company, a global provider of product solutions and services, and enterprise computing solutions. The DP4400 is attractive because customers have different consumption models. There are those that like to build their own, and there are those that want an integrated solution, they want to focus on their core business as opposed to engineering a solution. So for those customers that are looking for that type of experience, the DP4400 will address a full data protection solution that has a single pane of glass, simplified management, simplified deployment, and also, ease-of-management over time. >> Vollrath is a food service industry manufacturer, it's been in business for 144 years, in some way we probably touch your life everyday. From a semantic perspective, things that weren't meeting our needs really come around to the management of all of your backup sets. We had backup windows for four to eight hours, and we were to the point where when those backups failed, which was fairly regular, we didn't have enough time to run them again. With Dell EMC data protection, we're getting phenomenal returns, shorter times. What took us eight hours is taking under an hour, maybe it's upwards of two at times for even larger sets. It's single interface, really does help. So when you take into account how much time you spend trying to manage with old solutions that's another unparalleled piece. >> I'm the IT Director for Melanson Heath, we are a full service accounting firm. The top three benefits of the DP4400 simplicity of not having to do a lot of research, the ease of deployment, not having to go back or have external resources, it's really designed so that I can rack it, stack it, and get going. Having a data protection solution that works with all of my software and systems is vital. We are completely reliant on our technology infrastructure, and we need to know that if something happens, we have a plan B, that can be deployed quickly and easily. (upbeat techno music) >> We're back, it's always great to hear the customer perspective. We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth let's summarize, bring it home for us, this announcement. >> We are making sure that no matter what the size of your organization, you can protect your data in your VMware environment simply and powerfully without compromise, and have confidence, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you can restore your data whenever you need to. >> Awesome, well thanks so much Beth for sharing the innovations, and we're not done yet, so jump into the crowd chat, as I said, you can log in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, ask any questions, we're gonna be teeing up some questions and doing some surveys. So thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you in the crowd chat.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, here on theCUBE, our live coverage continues here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands Exposition Center. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walsh. Glad to have you here with us on day one of our three days of coverage here. We're now joined by David Shacochis, who is the Vice President of Product IT Solutions and New Market Development at CenturyLink, and Jim Aluotto. Did I get it right, Jim? >> Jim Aluotto. >> Aluotto. We practiced this many times. Who is the Director of Cloud Provider Business, Americas, at VMware. Gentlemen, in all seriousness, thank you both for being with us. >> Jim: Thank you. >> We certainly appreciate your time. So talking software-defined data centers. First off, let's step really high level here, and just talk about main attributes, qualities. How would you, if your elevator speech would be about what the SDDC would be, how would you describe it, and what are the features? >> Sure, well I'll jump in front of the company that sort of coined the term, and get my answer first, and then let Jim expound from there. Really, I think we can sort of sum up the software-defined data center in a lot of what we've learned in creating a Managed Private Cloud, based on what you would call a software-defined data center platform, in that it minimizes the number of moving parts. We've been doing Managed Private Cloud for as long as Managed Private Cloud has been a thing. And what that used to mean, five, six, years ago, was provision to the network, provision to security devices, maybe it's a converge device, maybe it isn't, maybe it's two different vendors. Sure, you've got vSphere in the middle of it all, but now you're talkin' of different storage tiers. If you want different flavors of storage, you're talkin' to multiple vendors back there. Piecing together a private cloud solution used to mean talkin' to a number of different technology stacks, a number of different API frameworks. And so software-defined data center, where the rubber hits the road, and sort of, from the cold face, means just a simplified view of being able to automate all that together, have it all orchestrated, and have it be one common stack. >> Jim: Nicely done. >> Okay, well, you go do the bookish version. >> Well really, in its most simplistic form, spinning up end-to-end complete automation across compute, network, and storage assets. And lately we've gone to market with VMware Cloud Foundation, that CenturyLink is now spinning up as the root of their service that they're going to market with. And so we've gone through an evolutionary process over the years, where we've proven to the world the advantages of virtualization, virtualize and compute. VMware, in its Act II, is now virtualizing the network. We're virtualizing storage now with VSAN taking off like wildfire. But now we're stitching it all together, in the form of a complete, end to end, automated and provisioned, encapsulated, virtualized data center. >> And that's the big efficiency here, right? It's one-stop shop, basically. You don't have to go out and as you said, look for a number of different avenues, or different pieces of this puzzle. >> So it does, it drives efficiencies in the data center, but it also drives efficiencies and opportunities around the way you operate it. And one of the things that we've been seeing, and it's sort of foundational to our managed services practice, is that the software-defined data center actually drives software-defined managed services. You have to change the way you do managed services to take advantage of all that capability. We have a service we call Cloud Application Manager, which is really our tool that we use to model applications, deploy managed tooling to that application for 24/7 monitoring and management, and uptime and stability support, and then do analytics on that application, to be able to show cost-savings opportunities, best-practice opportunities, in more of an aggregated, reported way. So Cloud Application Manager is a much more automated version of managed services. It's not ITIL from 10 years ago, right? It's not up/down, just base-level ticketing. You need to be able to change the way you do managed services, and you can only do that if you have a reliable underpinning platform. So less moving parts, a software-defined data center lets you change that, let's you change the way you deliver managed services. >> So the CenturyLink has incredible technical chops. There's always a point where you have to decide, build versus buy. CenturyLink, you can choose to build all of this. You can take parts from the open source community, build extremely custom solutions. Why VMware? When you guys have the technical ability to build it, make a differentiating offering, why start with VMware as the base? >> Yeah, I think you go back to what VMware's been in the market doing, and I even sort of talked past it a second ago. The vSphere's foundation is really solid, right? The device, the flexibility you have with the hardware layer, the flexibility you have at the real core or nucleus of your compute and memory virtualization stack is super important. And then really the idea of building out into the software-defined very common ownership stack, and why VMware was great to partner with, with regards to building out our next-gen Managed Private Cloud offering, is because they've wired everything to work together. And you said there are things you could go and try to build on your own? I think it's interesting. What we're starting to see is that, just to use somethin' like OpenStack, as an example, building a private cloud out of OpenStack is certainly possible, but there's no one company owning it all end to end. And if you're a service provider, it's up to you to go figure it all out. Or you can go and work with maybe one integrator partner, but they're making their own set of choices, and now you're basically locked in to that particular deployment model. So I think working with VMware, what we found is, first off, they've accelerated our time to market, and our time to value around a Managed Private Cloud offering. There's a lot of interoperability in there. There's a lot we're able to do around hybrid applications, because something you deploy to VMware inside VCF is very similar to something you deploy in your own home-grown environment, to one of the Managed Private Clouds that we've been running for five or six years, where there's just a very clean migration and upgrade path with that interoperability. >> And really it's all about the market opportunity that VMware brings to the table. Our cloud strategy is incredibly simplistic, but yet it has such a compelling business and value proposition, not only to our mutual customers that we're going to market in joint pursuit with, but also to our cloud providers, 500,000 plus enterprise customers using VMware. As we take them along the journey, building out their private clouds, that represents over 60 million workloads, with the inevitability of them moving out to the cloud. So what we've teed up is a cloud provider community with our most strategic partner, like CenturyLink, to increase the odds of that, capturing those workloads onto a VMware platform. The market opportunity that we bring to the table for somebody like CenturyLink is quite extensive, let alone all the benefits that the mutual customer gets. They get to protect their data center, their data and application assets, all the reliability, compatibility, security, that they would expect from their own VMware infrastructure, they would expect from a VMware cloud provider, like CenturyLink. >> Well David, let's talk about the interface into CenturyLink. One of the things that customers are startin' to realize is that they have to differentiate, based on just internal IP. So there's the API to everything, now. What's, if you could describe, well, maybe there is. What's the API to CenturyLink, as I'm consuming this software-defined data center that you guys provide? >> Okay, so sure, so that's actually a really exciting opportunity for us, and it's one that we've been sort of pivoting. If you sort of look at the history of CenturyLink, there was a, and this sort of goes back 10 years, but there was a huge spike of CenturyLink's entry into the business to business market. Acquiring quests, getting the business that basically announced their entrance into the B2B marketplace. Then there was a number of more technology oriented and virtualization management oriented acquisitions, because it recognized two things: one, we needed to be in IT solutions, in cloud, in data center, but also that the network was heading towards a highly virtualized, highly orchestrated, highly software-defined model. The network of the 21st century was not going to be about buying a ton of big iron and putting it into pops anymore, it was going to be increasingly around managing x86 virtualization. So that set off a period of time within CenturyLink where we were acquiring managed services companies, IT solution companies, virtualization companies, that were helping really to increase two things: our ability to virtualize and manage virtualization, and then, secondly, develop software in new ways, and become much more familiar at the application layer. We spent about five or six years with companies like SAVAS, and Tier3, and Cognilytics, really adding to the company in terms of brain power, and know how, and workload fluency. And then now we've just recently closed on the merger and acquisition with Level 3. So now we're very much on a network scale ascendency. The interface into CenturyLink is really taking a lot of those assets that we've built up, and moving them together into more of a platform topology, which is re-architecting the way that we work. We've bought cloud companies, and we invested in virtualization to help us reorganize exactly what you're talking about, which is the way of interfacing with CenturyLink, driving customer experience, being able to have a common user experience, whether you're interacting with it at a CLI, or via an API call, or with a tutorial that you're following via an online interface, and having a common look and feel across those services. So it's a journey. We're still on our way there, but we have the very beginnings of a lot of commonality that's starting to occur, whereby if you log in to our public cloud management service, Cloud Application Manager, or if you log in to our network interconnect service, Network Exchange and Cloud Connect Solutions, or if you log in to our public and private cloud offerings, very common look and feel across the piece, where it's one identity, one billing collection, but then we allow each of those individual services to go and innovate on their own. And that's the key thing. You can go drive common user experience. That's super, but if you're waiting on a portal team to go design your UI for you, you're slowing down. And so we're really bein' able to design a framework whereby there's one common UI, but it's more design patterns that every internal team picks up and works with, and then integrates into their release. >> And it's very important for VMware as well, as we develop our IP that's relevant for cloud provider use cases, is to open up those APIs to do just that, give you the opportunity to own that customer experience and differentiate yourself within the marketplace. >> I think we talked about this last time, too, where VMware's entree into the service provider world really taught them some lessons, and they started adding things to their product that make it easier to be a service provider. And some of the things, like with vCloud Director, and some of the ways that you can now work with that at an HTML5 layer, and sort of create your own version around it, almost interact with vCloud Director at an API level, allows us to factor it in to that mentality of design pattern, thinking in a common UI across all of our services. Right now we're working with a lot of those features on vCloud Director to enable our Managed Private Cloud service. >> So what if the conversation is being then able to show it's all about making it real? What have the real conversations been? >> Yeah, so the real conversations with our customers that we're starting to have are really, and just to tie it a little bit back to this idea of a software-defined data center, I think they're excited by the possibilities. They're certainly looking to really drive instrumentation at more places than they ever were able to drive instrumentation before. And there's the obvious industry examples of IoT, and sensors, and things like that, but even things like business process, and being able to theoretically just rework the way a particular system works, turn it into a micro service, or an application that they can factor in to their overall IT strategy, but then have that start to feed in to a broader data lake that they can then start making business analytical decisions from. That's one of the big patterns that we see, whether it's occurring with a lot of our customers that we work with in the built environment, but in working with the customers that work with CenturyLink, in some of the most deep and influential ways, are the ones that are out there sort of "in space". And I don't mean in space, I mean out there in a geographic spread, like retail solutions, and physical facilities, and things like that, where you have people coming to your location, and you're tryin' to gather all that data back into more of a centralizing motion. That's where we're having some of our most interesting conversations, with those retail brands, with bigger facilities that we want to be able to bring on net, and basically have them turn into data sources for their data lake, that they can then start moving forward and analyzing with some either professional services or tooling, to go and start looking for where those insights lie. >> So for me this is music. What I'm seeing, customers want to wane off of IT functions altogether. They want to invest their resources around their core business. >> John: Their business, right. >> Yeah, exactly. So what they're doin' is, they're relying on the subject matter experts now. The whole notion of being concerned about security, and reliability out in the cloud, that's long gone. They recognize that folks like CenturyLink can deliver at greater economies of scale, more secure, highly available. >> Yeah, and one of the things, one of the best ways we can facilitate those conversations is to share a little bit of our own journey. And it's not because we want to stare at our own product catalog, and walk through it page by page, but to share some of our own journey with the perspective of realizing a long time ago that in our managed security business, it was a big data problem. It's not an implementation and controls problem. And so we've been driving a whole lot more of our story, and some of our service strategy is, not only is it, we feel a lot of these are very valuable services in their own right, but they show off a pattern of: instrument it, drive it back to a data lake, and then take more of an analytical approach to it to add value, as opposed to just being very transactional. >> We talked about the journey. It's been a good one, right? And continued success with that. >> Indeed. >> Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, and we appreciate the time. >> Okay. >> Good, thank you very much Dave and Jim. Back with more. You're watching theCUBE. We are live, here at Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. (percussive music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by Silicon Angle. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program a regular here at the VTUG, but no longer a local, so Chris Colotti who's currently the Field CTO at Tintri, great to see you Chris. >> You too Stu, it's been a while. >> And love the attire. >> I know, I think every time I come and do a presentation, I have a Patriots jersey on of some kind. >> Absolutely, I mean there's a few things we know you for, so you love your virtualization, you love your Patriots, and there's usually some workout thing, so are we going to get some fitness tips (mumbles)? >> Not today, actually you don't want to know what I did the other day with a buddy of mine, so you'll see me hobbling around because it was not a good leg day (laughs). >> Okay, so we'll be getting, I always like to hear, I just had a user on of what they weren't like in the industry, so you'll give us the what not to do to make sure that you can keep your fitness goals. >> Yeah, don't hook up with a buddy who has a lot of sandbags in his truck that likes to work out with them. >> So Chris, for those of our audience that haven't been to the event, and give us just a little bit about your background, what you're doing these days. >> Yeah, so I mean VTUG's, man this has been around forever, I think. >> 12 years now. >> 12 years the Harneys have been doing this, and I've been, I think I've been a part of it for a better part of the last decade or so. One being a Patriot's fan, two being a virtualization person, and where I kind of grew my career from sort of being a Sys Admin to where I am now, I just think this is one of the better events because it's all technology, right? I mean we run into people that it's not just virtualization, you got AWS now, you got people of all walks of life that comes to this and honestly, I think you can't beat the venue, right? I mean especially, how many times have we been here where they cover the windows? If the windows are covered, it's a good year. That's what we say. >> As a matter fact, this is the fifth year we've had theCube, and every year the Patriots are still in the playoffs, working towards the Super Bowl, and they're one step away again. >> I think the worst year for me, was I actually had the center stage keynote one year, and they told me while I was presenting they were actually on the field practicing, and it was all I could to not just stop talking and say I'll be right back (laughs). >> As you said, better part of a decade you've been here, you were working for VMWare, when this was a VMUG, but you've been involved, tell us just what you're doing these days for work. >> Yeah, so I left VMWare and moved over to Tintri, which is I'll flash the word partner, I came over there, actually I came over as a cloud evangelist kind of person, and that shifted a little bit, and while that was around how to use our APIs and things like that for automation and private cloud, now there's actually three Field CTOs, I'm one of 'em, and I spend most of my time really talking to customers, doing events, doing roadmap presentations, where were going, what we're doing, I still spend my fair share on the road doing the shows and stuff, VMworld. >> You just threw in a bunch of things there, talk cloud, API, storage, what are you hearing from customers these days? What are they getting right? What are they struggling with, and what are they looking for? >> Yeah it's funny, so for a long time I was a cloud guy, right? I mean I did VCloud Air, I launched VCloud Air DR, and I think what I heard coming over to Tintri is good, folks are still struggling with that whole, "What do I put in the cloud? "What don't I put in the cloud? "Do I bring everything back?" We've got a lot of customers that have brought stuff back on premises, I think a lot of customers are just still struggling with that concept, I mean one of the first presentations I did, probably I think, here it was back in 2010, right around that timeframe, when VCloud Air, or VCloud Director was launched, Chris had me, Harney had me come down and do VCloud Director, and it was deer in the headlights, you know? It was so bleeding edge for VMWare at that point to have this cloud product and this automation stuff, and then fast forward to today, you know eight years later, I still think people are struggling with that. They're just not sure how to deal with it, right? And operationally, I think people come and really figure out it's not about cloud so much as automation, we've got to simplify the way we do things, we got to automate more. We've got to take day to day operations and do something different with 'em. >> Yeah, I mean a line we've used often is cloud is not a destination, it's an operations model. >> Yeah, for sure. Unfortunately I think there's a lot of people that still think it's a destination, the old To the Cloud ads, remember those? >> Microsoft, absolutely, there's lots of jokes on that. Yeah, you gave an interesting keynote this morning, I actually had one of the users that came on our program earlier, and she was like, "I really enjoyed that." So Luigi Danakos, a friend of ours and you, tell me a little more about IT in careers, because we know the only thing that is consistent is that things are going to change, so give our audience a little bit of taste of what you talked about. >> So yeah, it was actually interesting, so we came up with the idea because I've come to these and done technical presentations all the time, but inevitably I always get somebody, or a couple people come up to you and say, "How did you get where you are? "How did you evolve?" And people who know my story, what's interesting about mine is I went to school for architectural engineering, I actually have a degree in architectural engineering, drawing blueprints and designing houses, and they always look at me and say, "How did you "get to here? "You were a System Admin, and I'm a Sys Admin, "and how do I grow my career?" So Luigi and figured why don't we sort of take a little bit of that history 'cause now we're kind of, I hate to say we're the old guys on the porch these days, but back in the day, we were younger, we were faster, as you go forward, how do you stay relevant? And that's what we wanted to kind of talk about, so we talk a concept from an author by the name of John C Maxwell and we kind of took one of his books and we kind of cobbled it down to five different aspects and we just talked about what to think about, how to move, not just always knowing the technology, where do you want to go? What do you want to do? And how to get there, not just to sit and say, "Well it's never going to happen for me." You have to make something out of it yourself, and I think the response was pretty good, it was different, it was the first one in the morning, but it wasn't getting hit at 9:00 a.m. with technicals, it was really just us telling our stories around how we got to where we were going, and one of the big parts about Luigi was having just been let go from HP and now he's done some interviews and I thought it was really great 'cause he came right out and said, "Y'know what? "I'm going to just do my own thing. "I've just decided there's never a good time "to start your own company, so why not do it now?" And that was after he went through four or five interviews, so hopefully it resonated with some people. For me, it's always gotten harder to learn. I think as we get older, I made the joke in the session, I lost my phone first thing this morning. Literally, couldn't remember where I put it, dropped it, I called my best friend, Chris Boyd, who's one of the other CTOs and I said have you seen it? Because I'm going to send the, I was going to have him run around the west side with the buzzer going off, the Find my iPhone to go find this, I can't remember what I did yesterday, so learning gets harder. >> Yeah, well learning's harder, the bar's not that high to kind of get into new stuff. When I walk around the show, two things struck me. Number one is the vendors, every single one of them are hiring SEs, and they can't find enough good quality people, and it's more about the people, then it is, you can train them up. And secondly, some of these new spaces, talk about like the cloud space, if you get your Associate's on like AWS? Like people will call you immediately, and there's so much opportunity out there, we both had lots of friends. There's changes in consolidations in the industry, and therefore there's people that hey, it's time for a change, so-- >> Well I never thought I would work for a storage company. Well I worked for VMWare which was acquired EMC years ago, but we still never, as VMWare employees, we didn't work for a storage company. >> VMWare's a software company. >> We were a software company, and I still actually look at Tintri as a software company, yes we sell an appliance, but the crux of what Tintri does really is the software of the OS itself and that's what makes it different. So yeah, and I mean I've had to learn more about storage then I knew before, and I was telling a guy at the show, one of the things that Luigi and I talk to people, always said just learn something new every day, just as small and as silly as it was, and we've told different stories, and a guy asked me, "So what's the last thing "you learned, technology-wise, outside of storage?" I said I actually learned containers because of my home media server environment. I had to go out and learn Docker because I wanted to run some stuff and I didn't want to stand it up, I just wanted to figure out how containers work, so now Tim Gabett and I, we're on the phone back and forth, alright how'd you get that container run? And what'd you do for the storage, and how'd you deal with this? But that to me is what keeps your brain a little bit sharp, I mean I don't do puzzles and things like that, but those stupid side projects we all do because we're technologists I think help. >> Yeah, and you never know when those side projects and passions could turn into an opportunity from careers standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Alright Chris, you've been coming to this event quite a long time, as we said, give us the what's changed and what's stayed the same from your standpoint? >> Aw man, that's a tough one because I think a lot of stuff has essentially stayed the same in the realm of networking and storage, I think there's always a new player, but I look back at the last, I'll probably get myself in trouble here, but what was the last big innovative thing in the IT space when I was a System Admin, and I go back to those easy things, like I remember when I did my first VMotion, and it was like how does that work? And I used to have conversations, and I do that today with engineers, and I say what are we innovating? What are we doing to change the game? And to me, and again this is all my personal opinion, I suppose I'll preface it with that because for most people that know me know I have a pretty strong opinion on stuff, but I think that's the tough part is how do we move forward? How do we evolve to the next, really big, innovative thing that just blows people's minds? And I think AWS definitely did that a little bit when it really started to go mainstream and people realized it was a real thing, it wasn't a book store anymore, they had this other stuff, and we go through these cycles, right? But I think in the standard IT space, I'm still trying to figure out outside of those, what's the next really cool thing that we're going to see from the different vendors? And who's innovating and who's just sort of maintaining? >> Yeah, absolutely, well I can tell you that people here are excited, there's a lot to learn about keynotes this morning, I mean everything from what's happening in the automation space, developers, not a ton of developers at a show like this, but definitely lots of opportunity there, you talked the AWS presentation, he's like, "I'm live-coding and showing you Lambda stuff." Most of the people here aren't quite ready for some serverless world-- >> That was like me doing VCloud Director presentations (laughs). >> And things like that, I remember three years ago, it was like the AWS 101, everybody was like, "Oh my gosh, "this cloud thing sounds really amazing." So it takes some time, we've heard about it. I remember back when I heard about VMotion when it was in development, and still one of those things where you look back at your career and like wow, that was an amazing, it was that magic technology. >> It was almost those conversation, where were you when you did your first VMotion, right (laughs)? >> As a matter of fact, Duncan actually did a blog post about that, "Where you heard about it?" And I pulled in (mumbles) into the thread because I was lucky enough to go to a conference and moderate a session where he explained down to Kernel Zero how it worked, and it was interesting-- >> How he actually did what he did. >> You know what they say, "Any technology that is significantly difficult "to explain might as well be magic." So you're right, interesting stuff to see where innovation's going in the industry, I think most people I know are pretty excited, there's so much going on there, there's no shortage of new things to learn, we just need to reach out and take those opportunities, and I love your advice to keep learning something every day. >> As small as it is, I told these guys this morning that one of my biggest learning experiences was when we moved, I had to learn how to drive a motor home, a house, and deal with stuff that I've never done, right? But it's all learning. I challenged them today to just whether you're going to the sessions or you're just walking around where the vendors are, just understand what those people do and take that away and internalize it and see how you can use it. >> Well Chris, I'm glad to see you're still a true blue Patriots fan there-- >> The tattoo is still real (laughs). >> You haven't picked up the Southern drawl just yet. >> No it's funny, my wife said I pick it up a little bit when I'm around our neighbors, and then when I come back up here, I can really turn on the Boston accent if I tried but (laughs). >> Well, you all come back for lots more coverage here from VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCube. (exciting electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for HPE, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Discover 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, and our next guest is Bill Philbin, who's the general manager of storage and big data for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. Again, good to see you. I think you've been on since 2012, '13, '15. >> Is that right? What, are we carbon dating ourselves now or something? >> We've been tracking our CUBE alumni, but you're heading up the storage business-- >> Do I get a pen? >> We're working on that, Jerry Chen-- >> Seven of them >> Jerry Chen at Greylock wants to have, now, badge values. So, welcome back. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> You were just on theCUBE at VeeamON, which is an event Dave was hosting, I missed it in New Orleans. But a lot of stuff going on around stores, certainly. Virtualization has been around for a while, but now with Cloud; whole new ballgame. Programmable infrastructure, hybrid IT, Wikibond's true private Cloud report came out showing that private Cloud on Prim is $250 billion market. So nothing's really changing radically in the enterprise, per se, certainly maybe servers and storage, but people got to store their data. >> Bill: That's right What's the update from your perspective, what's the story here at HPE Discover? >> So I think there's really three things we're talking about amongst a number of announcements. One is sort of the extension of our All Flash environment for customers, who, as I was saying at Veeam, have the always-on. New world order is we expect everything to be available at a moment's notice, so I was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, using Google Voice over satellite IP on the boat, talking to San Jose, and it worked. That's always-on environment, and the best way to get that is, you know, with an All Flash [unknown], so that's number one. Number two, going back to the story about programmable infrastructures, storage also needs to be programmable, and so, if you've had Rick Lewis or Rick Lewis is coming he'll talk about composable infrastructures with Synergy, but the flip side of that is our belief that storage really needs to be invisible. And the acquisition of Nimble gets us a lot closer to sort of doing that in the same way that you have a safe self-driving car is all the rage. All that rich telemetry comes back, it's analyzed, fingerprinted, and sent out to customers to a point where it's, I call it the Rule of 85. 85% of the customers, the cases are raised by InfoSight and closed by InfoSight, and they have an 85 net promoter score. We're getting to a point where storage can be invisible, cause that's the experience you get on Amazon or as you swipe your credit card, say I want ten terabytes of storage, and that's the last time you have to think about it. We need to have the economics of the web, we need to have the programmability of the web, that's number two, and number three of what we talked about, and this is a big issue, a big thing we talked about with VeeamON, was data protection. The rules of data protection are also changing. Conventional backup does not protect data. I was with a customer a couple weeks ago in London. 120 petabytes; this is a financial services customer now. 120 petabytes of storage: not unusual. 40 of it was Hadoop, and they were surprised because it's unprotected, it's on servers, it's sort of the age of the client-server, and the age of Excel spreadsheets all over again. We realized that most businesses were running on Excel, so All Flash, a different way of supporting our customer support experience, and number three, it's all around how do you protect your data differently. >> What's the big trend from your standpoint, because a lot of that self-driving storage concept, or self-driving car analogy, it speaks to simplicity and automation. >> That's right >> The other thing that's going on is data is becoming more irrelevant, certainly in the Cloud. Whether that's a data protection impact or having data availability for Cloud-native apps, or in memory, or all kinds of cool stuff going on. So you got to lot of stuff happening, so to be invisible, and be programmable, customer's architectures are changing. What's the big trend that you're seeing from a customer standpoint? Are there new ways to lay out storage so that they can be invisible? Certainly a lot of people were looking at their simplification in IT operationally, and then have to prepare for the Cloud, whether that's Multicloud or hybrid or true private Cloud. What architects are you seeing changing, what are people doubling down on, what's the big trends in storage, kind of laying out storage as a strategy? >> So I think the thing about storage in the large, one of the trends obviously that we're seeing is sort of storage co-located with the server. When I started at HP now seven years ago, gen six to gen ten, which we've announced here at this show, the amount of locally attached storage in the box itself is massive. And then the applications are now becoming more and more responsible for data placement, and data replication. And so, even while capacities are growing, I think six or seven percent is what I saw from the latest IDC survey, the actual storage landscape, from a shared storage company, they're actually going down. And the reason is, application provisioning, application-aware storage is really the trend, that's sort of number one. Number two, you see customers looking at deploying the right storage for the right applications. hyperconverge with SimpliVity's a really good example of that, which is they're trying to find the right sort of storage to sort of serve up the right application. And that's where, if you're a single-PoINT provider company now in storage, and you don't have a software-only, a hyperconverge, an All Flash in a couple different flavors, including XP at the top, you're going to find it very, very difficult to sort of continue to compete in this market, and frankly, we're driving a lot of that consolidation, we put some bookends around what we're prepared to pay for. But if you're a PoINT providing storage company now? Life is a lot harder for you than it was a couple years ago. When we started with All Flash, I think it was like 94 All Flash companies. There are not 94 All Flash companies today. And so, I think that's sort of what we see. >> Well, to your point about PoINT companies are going to have a hard time remaining independent, and that's why a lot of 'em are in business to basically sell to a company like yours, cause they fill a need. So my question relates to R&D strategy. As the GM, relatively new GM, you know well that a large company like HPE has to participate in multiple markets, and in order to expand your team, you have to have the right product at the right time. One size does not fit all. So the Nimble acquisition brings in a capability at the lower end of the market, lower price spans, but it also has some unique attributes with regard to the way it uses data and analytics. You've got 3PAR Legendary at the high end. What's the strategy in terms of, and is there one, to bring the best of both of those worlds together, or is it sort of let 20 flowers bloom? >> So, I don't know if it's going to be 'let 20 flowers bloom', but I would probably answer a couple different ways. One is that InfoSight, you're right, is unique value proposition, is part of Nimble. I would bet if I come see you in Madrid, if you have me back for the, whatever, 13th time, [Laughing] that we'll be talking about how InfoSight and 3PAR can come together. So that's sort of the answer to number one. The answer to number two is, even though within the Nimble acquisition, one party acquired the other party, what we're really looking at is the best breed of both organizations. Whether that's a process, a person, a technology, we don't feel wedded to, "Just because we do it a certain way at HP, that means the Nimble team must conform." It's really, "Bring us the best and brightest." That's what we got. At the end of the day, we got a company, we got revenue, but we got the people, and in this storage business, these are serial entrepreneurs who have actually developed a product, we want to keep those people, and the way you do that is you bring 'em in and you use the best and greatest of all the technologies. There's probably other optimizations we'll look at, but looking at InfoSight across the entire portfolio, and one day maybe across the server portfolio, is the right thing to do. >> And just to follow up on that, Tom, if I may, so that's a hard core of sort of embedded technology, and then you've got a capability, we talk about the API economy all the time. How are you, and are you able to leverage other HPE activities to create infrastructure as code, specifically within the storage group? >> So if you look at us, at our converged systems appliances like our SAP HANA appliance, databases greater than six terabytes, we have 85% market share at Hewlett-Packard. And the way we do that, and that's all on 3PAR by the way, and the way we do that is we've got a fixed system that is designed solely to deliver HANA. On the flip of that, you have Synergy, which is a composable programmable infrastructure from the start, where it's all template-based and based on application provisioning. You provision storage, you provision the fabric, you provision compute. That programmable infrastructure also is supported by HP storage. And so, you have-- You can roll it the way you want to, and to some degree I think it's all about choice. If you want to go along, and build your own programmable infrastructure and OpenStack or VCloud Director, whatever it is, we have one of those. If you think simplicity is key, and app and server integration is important part of how you want to roll it out, we have one of those, that's called SimpliVity. If you want a traditional shared storage environment, we have one of those in 3PAR and Nimble, and if you want composable we have that. Now, choice means more than one, I don't know what it means in Latin or Italian, but I'm pretty sure choice means more than one. What we don't want to do is introduce, however, the complexity of what owning more than one is. And that's where things like Synergy make sense, or federation between SerVirtual and 3PAR, and soon we'll have federation between Nimble and 3PAR. So to help customers with that operational complexity problem, but we actually believe that choice is the most important thing we can provide our customers. >> I've always been a big fan of that compose thing, going back a couple years when you guys came and brought it out to the market. We're first, by the way, props to HP, also first on converged infrastructure way back in the day. I got to ask you, one of the things I love doing with theCUBE interviews is that we get to kind of get inspiration around some of the things that you're working on in your business unit. Back in 2010, Dave and I really kind of saw storage move from being boring storage, provisioning storage, to really the center of the action, and really since 2010 you've seen storage really at the center of all these converging trends. Virtualization, and hyperconverges, all this great stuff, now Cloud, so storage is kind of like the center point of all the action, so I got to ask you the question on virtualization, certainly changed the game with storage. Containerization is also changing the game, so I was telling some HP Labs guys last night that I've been looking at provisioning containers in microseconds. Where virtualization is extending and continuing to have a nice run, on the heels of that we got containerization, where apps are going to start working with storage. What's your vision and how do you guys look at that trend? How are you riding that next wave? >> It all comes down to an application-driven approach. As we were saying a little earlier, our view is that storage will be silent. You're going to provision an application. That's really the-- see, look at the difference between us and, let's say, Nutanix with SimpliVity. It's all about the application being provisioned into the hyperconverged environment. And if you look at the virtualization business alone, VMware's going to have a tough go because Hyper-V has actually gotten good enough, and it's cheaper, but people are really giving Hyper-V a much better look at than we've seen over the course of the last couple years. But guess what? That tool will commoditize, and the next commoditization point is going to be containers. Our vantage point, and if you look at 3PAR, you look at Nimble, we're already got it, we've already supported containers within the product, we've actually invested companies that are container-rich. I think it's all about, "What's the next--" >> And we at Dacron last year said, "We know you're parting with all the guys." But this is a big wave. You see containers as-- >> I see containers as sort of the place that virtualization sort of didn't ever get to. If you look at-- >> John: Well, the apps. >> On the apps absolutely, positively. And also it's a much simpler way to deploy an application over a conventional VM. I think containers will be important. Is it going to be important as the technology inflection point around All Flash? >> John: Flash is certainly very-- >> That I don't know, but I think as far as limiting costs in your datacenter, making it easier to deploy your applications, et cetera, I think containers is the one. >> What's the big news here, at HPE Discover 2017, for you guys? What's the story that you're telling, what's going on in the booth? Share some insight into what's happening here on the ground in Las Vegas from your standpoint. >> So I would say a couple of things. I think if you look out on the show floor, it seems more intimate and smaller this year. And there's a lot of concern, I think, that HP is chopping itself off into various pieces and parts, but I think the story that maybe we're not telling well enough, or that it gets missed, is out of that is actually a brand new company called Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which is uniquely focused on serving enterprise infrastructure customers. And so I think, if I was going to encourage a news story, it's about the phoenix of that, and not the fact that we've taken the yes guys, and the software guys, and the PC guys. It's that company, maybe in Madrid we'll do this, and that company, that's really, really, really exciting. And as you said, storage; sort of in a Ptolemy versus Galileo approach. We believe everything, first of all, revolves around storage. We don't believe in Galileo. So if you look in here at the booth, we've announced the next generation of MSA platforms of 2052, we've got the 9450 3PAR -- three times as fast, more connectivity for All Flash solutions. We've talked about the secondary Flash array for Nimble, most effective place to protect your data is on an array, is on a type where the data came from, and that is the secondary Flash market. We're big into Cloud, we've talked about CloudBank here, which is the ability to keep a copy of your store-once data in any S3-compliant interface, including Scality. I don't know if I'm forgetting, I'm sure I'm forgetting something. >> John: There's a lot there. >> There's a lot there. >> I mean, you guys, I love your angle on the phoenix. We've been seeing that, we've been covering seven years now, and it is a phoenix. And the point that I think the news media is not getting on HP, there's a lot of fud out there, is that this is not a divested strategy. There's some things that went away that were the outsourcing business, but that was just natural. But this is HP-owned, it's not like it's like we're getting out of that, it's just how you're organizing it. >> And with a balance sheet that now is really a competitive weapon, if you will, you're going to see HP both grow organically and inorganically, and I think as the market continues to consolidate, the thing to remember also is there's fewer places to consolidate to. And so if you're a start-up, there's a handful of companies that you can go to now, and probably the best-equipped, right-sized, great balance sheet, great company, is Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Well we had hoped to get Chris Hsu on, but I've always said the day we talk about the debates on management style, but I've always been a big believer as a computer science undergraduate, decouple highly cohesive strategy is a really viable one, I think that's a great one. >> Yeah, and there's still a good partnership with DXC, there'll be a great partnership with Micro Focus, and there's both financially as well as from a business perspective. But it's really an opportunity to focus, and if I was at another company, I would wonder whether or not if their strategy continues to be appropriate. >> Bill Philbin, senior Vice President and general manager of storage and big data at Hewlett-Packard Enterprises, theCUBE more live coverage after the short break. From Las Vegas, HPE Discover 2017, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante with theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.