>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco, VMware Explorer 2022, Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. We've been having some great conversations today. Lots of news coming out about VMware and its partner ecosystem. We're going to have another conversation about that next. Please welcome two guests to the program, Chance Bingen, technical marketing engineer at NetApp and Jason Massae, staff technical marketing architect, storage and vVols at VMware. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thanks. >> Glad to be here. >> It's nice to be back in person. >> It is. It's very nice. Oh my gosh. >> And we're hearing there about 7,000 to 10,000 people here, when I was in the Keynote, this morning it was definitely standing room only. >> Yeah, yeah. You've definitely seen the numbers ticked up at the last minute. It was good to see that. It's good, I think a lot of people have really wanted to get back, get that one on one that face to face. There's nothing like being able to, you know, talk to, the experts, talk to the vendors, you know, see your comrades. I mean, that's the thing. I mean, we've seen people that I haven't seen for years, even on my own team, so really good to be back into it. >> It is and it was lots of news coming out this morning during the Keynote. My goodness. But Jason, talk to me, the NetApp and VMware folks had been in tight partnership for a long time. Talk to me about, get both of your perspective from a technical perspective about the depth of the partnership. >> Yeah, so actually NetApp was one of the original design partners for vVols. And with that, now with some of the stuff we're doing with more current stuff with virtual volumes is, NetApp is back and we've got some pretty neat stuff that we've been working on with vVols. And NetApp's got some pretty neat stuff that they've been working on to enable the customers with more features, more functionality with the virtual volume functionality. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Give us a quick primer on what is a vVol? What is a virtual volume? How does it fit into the, into this stack of stuff that we do in IT? >> Yeah. So the easiest way to kind of think of what a vVol is or a virtual volume is you can think of it kind of like an RDM, those row device map, which is kind of a four letter word. We don't really like those, but the idea is that object, that virtual volume is native on the array and presented directly to the VM. But now what we do is we're presenting all of the storage array features up to vSphere and we're managing those storage features via policy based management. But instead of applying storage capabilities at a data store level, we're now applying them at a VM or an application level. So you can have one data store and multiple VMs, and every VM can have a different storage capability managed by a policy that the VI admin gets to manage now. So he doesn't have to go to the storage admin to say, I need a new line, or I need a new volume. He can just go in and create a policy or change a policy. And now that storage capability is applied to the VM or the application. >> Yeah. One thing I'd like to add to that is you can mentioned the word capabilities. >> So we look at the actual data protocols, whether they're file based or block based, you know, I-scuzzy, fiber channel, whatever the case might be. Those protocols have defined sets of capabilities and attributes and things they can expose. What vVols along with the VASA protocol brings to the table is the ability to expose things that are just impossible to expose via the data protocols themselves. So that the, actual nature of the array, what kind of array is it? What's it capable of doing? What is the nature of, you know, encryption? You know, is this going to be a secure, encrypted data store? Is it going to be something else? It just allows you to do so much more with the advanced capabilities that modern storage arrays have than you could ever do if you were just using the data protocols by themselves. >> Right? Yeah. Kind of under that same context. If you think about before with traditional storage, the vSphere or the array really doesn't understand what's going on underlying storage, but with vVols the array and vSphere completely understand at a disc level even, how that VM should be treated. So that helps the storage admin. Storage admin can now go in and see a specific disc of a VM and see the performance on the array. They can go in the array and see, oh, this disc on this VM has got performance issues or needs to be encrypted, or here's the size of that disc. And you couldn't easily see that with your traditional storage. So there's really a lot of benefits and it frees up a lot of time for the storage administrator and enables the VI admin to be able to do a lot of the storage management. >> So there have been, there been a lot of movements over the last decade in the realm of software defined storage. Where essentially all of the things that you are talking about are completely abstracted from the underlying hardware. In this case, you're leveraging the horsepower, if you will and the intelligence of a storage array that has a lot of horsepower and intelligence, and you're accessing those features. You mentioned encryption, whether if you're doing a snapshot or something like that, what's interesting here is it kind of maps to what we're looking at now, which is the trend in the direction of things like DPUs. >> If you go back in history long enough, we had the, you know, the TOE, NIC, TCP offload, you know, the idea of, hey, you know what, what if we had a smart device with its own brain power and we leveraged it. Well, you guys have been doing that from a vVols all perspective with NetApp filers, for lack of better term. For how long now, when did, when were they originally? >> 6.0 it was so it's been what? 11, 12 years. Something like that. >> It's been a while. So yeah, but it's been a decade or so. >> Mm-hmm >> So what's on the frontier. What's the latest there in terms of, in terms of cool stuff that's coming out. >> So actually today, in one of the things that we worked with NetApp that was part of the design partnership was, you know, the NVMe over Fabric protocol has become very popular to extend that functionality of all flash to the, an external array. And now we announce today, in including with that NVMe over Fabrics, you can now do vVols with NVMe over Fabrics. And again, that was something that we worked with NetApp to be a design partner for them. >> That's right. We're very excited about it. We've always been, you know, NVMe been something we've been very proud of for a while. Delivering the first end to end NVMe stack from inside the host, through the fabric, to the array, with the arrays front ports, all the way to the disc on the backend. So we're very excited about that. >> So target market joint NetApp, VMware customers, I presume. >> Really it's, the key here that I like to make sure customers understand is to see that vVols are on the leading edge of VMware's storage design. Some tend to think that maybe vVols wasn't the primary focus, but actually now it is the primary focus. Now I always like to give the caveat that VMFS and NFS are not going away. Those are still very much stuff that we work on. It's just that most of the engineering focus is on virtual volumes or vVols. >> Yeah. Similarly, when you talk about and you're sort of alluding to vSAN when we start talking about VMFS and things like that. >> Yeah. >> Architecturally, we've been talking to folks about the recent announcements with capabilities within AWS. You know, NetApp in AWS for VMware environments. Breaking out of the stranglehold that the, oh, you want more storage, you must buy more CPU and memory, building block process entails. The reality is no matter what you do with vSAN, you're going to have certain constraints that go away when now you have the option to leverage storage from the NetApp filers. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So how does, how do vVols play in the cloud strategy moving forward? >> Well, so one of the things that we do with, vVols currently is mostly On-prem. But when you have the storage architecture, that vVols gives you as far as individual objects, it makes it much easier to migrate up into the cloud because you're not trying to migrate individual VMs that are on another type of system, whatever it might be, those objects are already their own entity. Right, so cloud, Tanzu, those type of things, those vVol objects are already their own entity. So it makes it very easy to migrate them on and off prem. >> So Chance talk to us a little bit about this from NetApp's perspective. You're in customer conversations, who are you talking to? Is this primarily an engineering conversation? Has this gone up the stack in terms of customers are finding themselves in this default multi-cloud environment? >> Yeah, so interestingly, when I talk to customers these days they are almost all either on a journey to a hybrid multi-cloud or they're in some kind of phase of transforming themselves into their own hyperscaler, right? They're be adopting a cloud service provider model and vVols is a perfect fit for that kind of model, because you have the ability to offer different tiers of service, different qualities of service with VM granular controls or VMDK granular controls, even. And even if you look at First Class Disc, right? Which is something that came out largely to support Tanzu, I think which fantastic use case for vVols as well there, but that gives you the ability to offer something like Amazon EBS, right? You can offer Amazon EBS in a native VMware stack using First Class Discs and vVols. And you're able to apply things like quality of service with that granular control that allows you to guarantee that customer the disc that they bought and paid for. They're going to get the IOPS that they're paying for because you're applying those QoS policies directly to that object on the array. And instead of having to worry about is the array going to be able to handle it? Are you going to have one VM that consumes all your IO, you know? You don't have to worry about that with vVols because you've got that integration with the array's native quality controls. >> And Chance what's in this for me as a customer? I'm hearing productivity, I'm hearing cost savings, control efficiency. Talk to me about the benefits in it for the folks that you're talking to. >> Yeah, absolutely. A lot of times it comes down to, you know I mentioned like the cloud service provider model, right? When you're looking to build a robust service catalog and you're able, you want to be able to meet all these like, we mentioned Tanzu, right? Containers as a service, you're able to provide the persistent volumes for your Kubernetes containers that are again, these native objects on the array and you have these fine grain controls, but it's handled at massive scale because it's all handled by storage policies, Kubernetes storage classes, which are natively mapped to VM storage policies through Tanzu. So it just, it gives you the ability to offer all of these services in a, again a rich and robust contents catalog. >> So what are you doing? So you mentioned a couple of things in terms of using array based quality of service. So give me an example of how you're avoiding issues of contention and over subscription in an environment where I'm an administrator and I've got this virtual volume that's servicing this VM or this app on this VM. What kind of visibility do I have down into the actual resources because look at the end of that chain there's a physical resource. And that physical resource represents, what? IOPS and bandwidth and latency and throughput and all of this bundle of things. So how do you avoid colliding with others who are trying to carve vVols out of this world? >> You mean like a noisy neighbor type of thing? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So that's actually one of the big benefits that you get with vVols is that because those vial objects are native on the array, they're not sharing a loan or a volume. They're not sharing a resource. The only resource they're actually sharing is the array itself. So you don't get that typical noisy neighbor where this one's using all the resources of that volume because really you're looking out at the all encompassing array. And so a storage administrator and the VI admin have a lot more insight. The VI admin can now go to the storage admin if there's say a debugging issue, they want to find a problem. The storage admin now can see those individual objects and say, oh, well this VM, it's not really this, it's not all the discs. It's just disc number two or disc number three or they can actually see at a single disc level on the array, the performance, the latency, you know, the QS, all that stuff. >> Oh, absolutely. >> And that really is what, it frees up at the storage admin's time because the debugging is so much more simple. And it also allows the storage admin a lot more insight. Right? They know those, what's the problem. If you were typically looking at a loaner volume, they don't really know what's going on inside that and neither does the array. But with vVols, the array knows what each disc and how it's supposed to be treated based on the policies that the customer defines. So if one VM is supposed to have a certain QS and another VM isn't. The array knows that that VM, if it goes above it, it's going to be like, nope, you can't have those resources. You weren't granted those resources, but this one was. So you have much more control. And again, it's at an application or a VM level. >> And it's still, it's fairly dynamically configurable. I spoke to a customer just the other day. They are a cloud service provider. And what they do is their customers are able to go in and change their quality of service. So they go into that service portal and they say, okay, I'm paying for gold and I want platinum and they'll go in. They know that they've got a certain time where they need more IO capacity. So they'll go in, they'll pay the fee, increase that capability. And then when they don't need it anymore, they'll downgrade again. >> Okay, so that assumes some ability at the array level to do some sort of resource sharing and balancing to be able to go out and get, say more IO. Because again, fundamentally, if you have a virtual volume, that's drawing its resources from five storage devices, whether those are SSD based or NVMe or spinning disc that represents a finite it amount of resource. The assumption is if you're saying that the array is the pool that you need to worry about, that assumes the array has the ability to go beyond here, based on a policy. >> So that's how it works. It does... >> Well, essentially. I mean, you can't outrun physics. So if the array can't go faster, but the idea is that you understand the performance profile of your array and then you create your service tiers appropriately. >> Okay. >> Yeah. And one of the big benefits is like Chance was saying, if you want to change a profile that used to be a Storage vMotion to a different data store. Now it's just a policy change. The storage admin doesn't have to do anything. The VI admin just changes the policy. And then the array understands, oh, I now need to treat that different. And that's exactly what Chance was talking about in that cloud provider situation, where today I'm using a 100,000 IOPS. I need to use 200,000 tomorrow for special, whatever it is, but I only need to use it for tomorrow. So they don't have to move anything. They just change the policy for that time. And then they change it back. They don't have to do anything on the array itself. They don't have to change anything physically on the VM. It's just a policy change. And that's really where you get that dynamic control of the storage capability. >> So as business dynamics are changing and I'm thinking of like black Friday or Prime day, being able to dial things up and dial it down, they have the ability to do that with a policy. >> Yes. >> Exactly. >> So huge time savings there. >> Oh, it's huge. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And it simplifies because now, I don't have to have multiple data stores. You can have one data store, all your VMs in there. You can limit test and dev and you can maximize business critical applications. Again, all via policy. So you've simplified your infrastructure. You've gone to more of a programmatic approach of managing your storage capabilities. But you're now managing at the VM level. >> So we mentioned that the cloud chaos (indistinct) that was mentioned this morning during the Keynote and we're saying a lot of customers are still in this cloud chaos phase. They want to get to Cloud Smart. How is this going to be one of those tools that helps customers pull the levers, dial the knobs, to be able to get to eventually, Cloud Smart. >> I could go on for this for hours. (Lisa Laughs) (Chance chuckles) This is really what simplifies storage. Because typically when you use traditional storage, you're going to have to figure out that this data store has this capability or another example, as you mentioned was Tanzu. If you're managing persistent volumes and you're not using something like vVols, if you want to get a certain storage capability, you have to either tag it or you have to create that data store with that capability. All of that goes away when you use vVols. So now that chaos of multiple data stores, multiple lines or multiple volumes, all that stuff goes away. So now you're simplifying your infrastructure, you have a programmatic approach to managing your storage and you can use it for all of your different types of workloads. So cloud, Kubernetes, persistent volumes, all that type of stuff. And again, all being managed via a simple and again, programmatic approach. So you could automate this. You know today, like you said, black Friday. Okay, Black, Friday's coming up. I want to change the policy. You could automate that. So you don't even have to go in and physically make the change of the policy now. You just say on Fridays, change it to this policy on Sunday night, change it back. >> Yep. >> Again, that's not something you can do with traditional storage. >> Okay. >> And I think from a simplification standpoint as well, you know, I was telling you about that other customer a couple days ago, they were running into the inability to grow beyond the bounds of VMFS file systems for very, very large VMs. And so what I talked to them about was look, if you go to vVols, you're not bound by file systems anymore. You have the capacity of the array and you can have VM discs up to 62 terabytes, you know, as many as you want. And it doesn't matter what they fit in because we can fit them all. So it's, to be able to, and that's some of our largest customers, the reason they go with vVols is to be able to grow beyond the bounds of traditional storage, anything like path limits, you know. That's something you have to contend with. >> Path limits, line limits, all that stuff. Typically just disappears with vVols. >> All those limits go away. Guys- >> They go away. >> Amazing. Congratulations on the work that you guys have done. Thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE talking about the value in it for customers and obviously the technical depths of the NetApp, VMware relationship. Guys, we appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks for having us on. >> Our pleasure. For my guests and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So stick around. (upbeat music)

>>We're seeing green here at Vemo in 2022, you're watching the cube, Dave ante and David Nicholson wrapping up our second day of coverage. Dave, good show. Good to be, you know, again, good to be back. This is our third show in a row. We're a Cuban as well. So the cube is, is out there, but same every, every show we go to so far has been most of the people here haven't been out in two plus years. Yeah. Right. And, and, and they're like, Hey, let's go. Let's hug. Let's shake. I got my red band on cuz we've been on a lot of shows or just being careful <laugh> um, you know, Hey, but it's great to see people back, uh, >>Absolutely >>Such a different vibe than virtual virtual sucks. Everybody hates it now, but now it's going hybrid. People are trying to figure that out. Yeah. Uh, but it's, it's in your view, what's different. What's the same >>In terms of, uh, in person versus hybrid kind of what's happened since what's >>Different being here now versus say 2019, not that you were here in 2019, but a show in 2019. >>I, I think there's right now, there's a certain sense of, uh, of appreciation for the ability to come and do this. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, >>As opposed to on we or oh, another show, right? >>Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, and, uh, a personal opinion is that, um, I think that the hybrid model moving forward is going to end up being additive. I don't know that I don't, you know, people say we'll never go back to having in person the way we did before. Um, I'm holding out hope that that's not the case because I, I think so there's so much value to the kinds of conversations that we have, not only here on the set with folks in person, but just the hallway conversations, uh, the dinner conversations, um, those are so critical, uh, not only with between vendors and customers, but between different business units. Um, you know, I, I, I came into this thinking, you know, I know Veeam very well. I've known them since the beginning. Um, but you think I'm going to a conference to talk about backup software and it wasn't like that at all. I mean, this is, this is an overarching, very, very interesting subject to cover. So how is it different? I think people are appreciative. I wouldn't say we're backed full throttle a hundred percent, um, uh, back in the game yet. But, uh, but we we're getting there. Some >>Of the highlights Veeam now, number one, statistical tie for first place in revenue. There aren't a lot of segments, especially in storage where Dell is not number one, I guess technically Dell is like, I don't know, half a percentage point ahead, but Veeam's gonna blow by that. Unless Dell gets its data, >>Protect me as the luxury of focus, they can focus >>Like a laser on it focus. Right? That, that we, we saw this in the P PC where focused, we saw Dell's ascendancy cuz they were focused on PCs, right? Yeah. We saw Seagate on dis drives Intel and microprocesors Oracle on databases and, and, and Veeam applied that model to what they call modern data protection. Um, and, and the, so the reason why we think they're gonna go past is they growing at 20 plus percent each year. And, and I can almost guarantee Dell's data protection business isn't although it's been in a, I, I sense a downward slope lately, they don't divulge that data. Um, but if they were growing nicely, they would be talking about it. So I think they've been kind of hiding that ball, but Dell, you know, you can't count those guys out they're baby. >>No, you can't. And there's always >>A, they don't like to lose. They get that EMC DNA still in >>There. Yeah. You take, you can, you might take your eye off the ball for a little while to focus on other things. But uh, I think it'll be healthy for the industry at large, as Veeam continues to take market share. There's definitely gonna be pushback from, from others in the field, but >>The pure software play. Um, and you know that no hardware agenda thing and all that I think is, is clearly in Veeam's favor. Uh, but we'll see. I mean, Dell's got other, other strengths as do others. I mean, this is, this is, let's not forget this, this, this market is crowded and getting kind. I mean, you got, you got other players, new, new entrants, like cohesive in Rubrik Rubic, by the way is the one I was kind of referring to. That seems to be, you go to their LinkedIn, they seem to be pivoting to security. I was shocked when I saw that. I'm like, wow, is that just like a desperation move? Is that a way to get your valuation up? Is that, is there something I'm missing? I, I don't know. I haven't talked to those guys in a little bit, need to get, get there, but cause he and Rubrik couldn't get to IPO prior to, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the tech sell off the tech lash. >>If you will Veeam, didn't need toves. We have 30% EBITDA and, and has had it for a while. So they've been, they caught lightning in a bottle years ago, and then now they got the inside capital behind them. Um, you got new entrance, like, like Kuo, you got com. Vault is out there. You still got, you know, Veritas is still out there competing and you know, a number of other, you get you got is wherever HP software landed in, in the MicroStrategy, uh, micro strategy. <laugh> um, no not micro strategy anyway, in that portfolio of companies that HP sold its software business to, you know, they're still out there. So, you know, a lot of ways to, to buy backup and recovery software, but these guys being the leader is no surprise. >>Yeah. You know, it's, I, I, I have to say it to me. It's a classic story of discipline >>Microfocus, sorry, >>Microfocus. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You know, it's funny. I, I, I could see that logo on a, I know I've got a notebook at home. Um, but, but theme is a classic example of well disciplined growth where you're not playing the latest buzzword game and trying to create adjacent businesses that are really, that might sound sexy, but have nothing to do with your core. They've been very, very disciplined about their approach, starting with, you know, looking at VMFS and saying, this is what we're gonna do, and then branching out from there in a logical way. So, so they're not out ahead of the tips of their skis in a way that some others have have gotten. And those, you know, sometimes swinging for the fence is great, but you can strike out that way also. And they've been hitting, you know, you could say they've been hitting singles and doubles just over and over and over again for years now. Well, that's been a great strategy. >>You've seen this a lot. I mean, I, I think you watched this at EMC when you were there as you, it was acquisitions to try to keep the growth up. It was, it was great marketing. I mean, unbelievable marketing cloud meets big data. Oh yeah. And you'd hear on CNBC. AMC is the cloud company. You're like, eh, fucking have a cloud. So, so you, you you've seen companies do that to your point about getting ahead of your skis. VMs never done that EMS like, eh, this is the product that works great. Yeah. Customers love it. They buy it, you know, we got the distribution channel set up and so that's always been, been, been part of their DNA. Um, and I think the other piece is putting meat on the bone of the tagline of modern data protection. When I first heard that I'm like, mm, okay. >>But then when you peel the onion on that, the core is back up in recovery, a lot of focus on recovery. And then the way they, I remember it was there in the audience when they announced, you know, support for bare metal, people went crazy. I'm like, wow, okay. They cuz they used to say, oh, never virtualization forever. Okay. So they beat that drum and you never say never in this business, do you, and then moving on to cloud and hybrid and containers and we're hearing about super cloud now, and maybe there'll be an edge use case there it's still unclear what that pattern is. You've talked about that with Zs, but it's not clear to me where you put your muscle yet in, um, in edge, but really being able to manage all that data that is people talk about data management that starts to be data management. And they've got a footprint that enables 'em to do that. >>Yeah. And, and I'd like to see that same discipline approach. That's gotten them here to continue no need to get on board a hype cycle. Um, what I really love from a business execution perspective from Veeam is the fact that they know their place in terms of the, their strategic advisory role for end user customers and their places largely in partnership with folks in the channel partners, large and small, um, in a couple of the conversations we had over the last few days, we talked about this idea that there are fewer and fewer seats at the table. Uh, working with customers, customers can't have 25 strategic vendor partners and a lot of smaller niche players that focus on something even as important as backup will pretend that they are, that they hold the same sort of strategic weight as a hyperscale cloud provider. Does they pretend that they're gonna be there in the CX O meetings? Um, when they're not Veeam knows exactly how to best leverage what they do with customers and that's through partners in the channel. >>The other thing is, um, new CEO, a non Eron, uh, the fifth CEO, I think I'm correct. Is that right at, at VE yes. Um, so two founders, uh, and then when Peter McKay came on, he was co CEO. Um, and then, um, yep. And let's see, I think yep. You the fifth. Okay. So each of the CEOs kind of had their own mark. Right. Um, and we asked an on in the analyst thing, what do you want your legacy to be? And I, I loved his answer. He's like, this is a fragmented business with a lot of adjacencies and we are the leader in revenue, but we only have 12% revenue share. I want to take that to 25%, 40%. That's like EMC at 30 plus percent of the storage market, Cisco of 60% of the networking market. Wow. If anybody could ever get there, but so 25 to 30% of a market that's that's big. Yeah. I liked his demeanor thought he had a really good style philosophy. Well-spoken well spoken. So new leadership, obviously insight brought him in to take them to the next level. Um, and, and really drive. I gotta believe get ready for IPO. We kind of admitted that. >>Yeah. And I, and IPO for them, one thing he mentioned is that, um, in this case, this is not an IPO let's high five and go to Vegas and get table service because now we finally have money. Uh, they're not doing, you know, obviously an injection in capital from an IPO is always a good thing or should be a good thing if handled properly, but that's not their primary driver. So it'll be very interesting to see if they can hit the timing. Right. Um, how that, how that works out >>Well and, and bill large is his was predecessor. Uh, he, he, he took over, uh, once the company, excuse me, went private. Um, >>Yeah, that phone backed up. >>I still good in the mic once the company went private, uh, well, no, they were always private. Once they got acquired for five plus billion dollars from inside capital, um, they, they put bill in charge, perfect choice for the transition. And it was like, okay, bill. It's like, when you, my brother's a sailor. He says, Hey, take, take the wheel, see that lighthouse or see that tree go for it, keep it on track. And that's what bill did. Perfect. And he knew the company knew where all the skeletons were buried and, and was perfect. Perfect transition for that. Now they're bringing in somebody who they feel can take it to the next level. They're at a billion. He said he could see 5 billion and, and beyond. So that's kind of cool. Um, the other thing was ecosystem as companies got a really robust ecosystem, all the storage array vendors came on. >>The, the, the backup appliance companies, you know, came on to the cube and had a presence here. Why? Because this is where all the customers are. This is the leader in backup in recovery. Yeah. They all want to partner with that leader. Now they're at out the other shows as well, uh, for the Veeam competitors, but frankly, Veeam, Veeam competitors. They don't have, like you said, they're pure play. Many of them don't have a show like this, or it's a smaller event. Um, and so they gotta be here. Uh, and I think the, the, the other thing was the ransomware study. What I really liked about Veeam is they not only just talked about it, they not only talked about their solution. They sh they did deep dive surveys and shared a ton of data with guys that knew data. Um, Dave Russell and Jason Buffington, both former analysts, Russell was a Gartner very well respected top Gartner analyst for years. Jason buff, Buffington at ESG who those guys did always did some really good, still do deep research. So you had them representing that data, but sharing it with the community, of course, it's, it's gonna be somewhat self-serving, but it wasn't as blatant. It that wasn't nearly as blatant as I often see with these surveys, gender surveys, I'll look at 'em. I can tell within like, seconds, whether it's just a bunch of marketing, you know, what, or there's real substance. Yeah. And this one had real substance to >>It. Yeah. And it's okay. When substance supports your business model. >>Yeah. Cool. >>It's great. Good >>Marketing. But yeah, as an best marketing, I'm not gonna use it. The whole industry can use this and build on it. Yeah. I think there were a lot of unanswered questions. I, what I love about Vema is they're going back and they, they did it in February. They, they updated it just recently. Now they're going back and doing more cuz they want to get it by country. So they're making investments. And then they're sharing that with the industry. I love that. >>It'll be interesting to see if they continue it over time, how things change if things change. Um, one of the things that we really didn't talk a lot about is, uh, and you know, it's, I know it's talked about behind closed doors, um, this idea of, uh, stockpiling day zero exploits, and the fact that a lot of these, these >>Things, >>A lot of these problems arguably could have been headed off, had our taxpayer funded organizations, shared information with private industry in a more timely fashion. Um, um, we had, um, uh, uh, was it, uh, Gina from AWS who gave the example of, uh, the not Petia, uh, experience in the hospital environment. And that came directly out of frankly a day zero exploit that the NSA had identified years earlier within Microsoft's operating system. And, uh, somehow others got ahold of that and used it for nefarious means. So the intent to stockpile and hang onto these things is always, um, noble, but sometimes the result is, uh, less than desirable. So that's, it'll be an interesting conversation. >>We'd be remiss if we didn't mention the, the casting acquisition, the, the, the container data protection, small piece of the business today. Uh, but strategic in the sense that, yeah, absolutely. If you want to appeal to developers, if, if, if, if, if you want to be in the cloud, you know, you better be able to talk containers generally in Kubernetes specifically. So they gotta play there as well. >>Well, they, they, they hit virtualization cloud containers. Maybe I'm missing something in between, but they seem to be >>Ransomware >>Catching waves effectively. Yeah. Ransomware, uh, catching waves effectively, uh, again, not in an artificial buzzword driven way, but in a legitimate disciplined business growth approach that, uh, that's impressive. >>And I, and I think Danny mentioned this, we, he said we've been a PLG product led growth company. Um, and I think they're evolving now. We talked about platforms versus product. We still got still a product company. Uh, but they're bill wants to build out a Supercloud. So we're watching that very closely. I, I think it is a thing. You got a lot of grief for the term, super cloud. Some people wince at it, but it's, there's something brewing. There's something different. That's not just cloud public cloud, not hybrid cloud, not private cloud it's across cloud it's super cloud. All right, Dave, Hey, it was a pleasure working with you this week. Always kind of funny. I mean, we're, the crew was out in, uh, in Valencia, Spain. Yeah. Uh, they'll in fact, they'll be broadcasting, I believe all the way through Friday. Uh, that's an early morning thing for the, uh, for the west coast and, but east coast should be able to catch that easily. >>Of course you can all check out all the replays on the cube.net, also YouTube, youtube.com/silicon angle go to wikibon.com. There's some, you know, research there I publish every week and, and others do, uh, as well, maybe not as frequently, but, uh, we have a great relationship with ETR. I'm gonna poke into some data protection stuff in their survey. See if I can find some interesting, uh, data there. And don't forget to go to Silicon an angle.com, which is all the news. This is the cube, our flagship production we're out at VEON 2022. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas it's theCube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Howdy from Austin, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante we are on day one of our coverage of Pure Accelerate 2019. Welcoming a couple of guests to theCube. One is an alumni, Nathan Hall, VP of America's Systems Engineering from Pure, Nathan welcome back to theCube. >> Thanks, thanks very much. >> Lisa: And you brought a buddy from Cisco. We have Tom Sutliff, director of systems engineering and the America's data center, welcome to the Cube Tom. >> Thanks for having me. >> Dave: It's howdy you all. >> Howdy you all, okay. Thank you, it took the wicked smart guy from Boston to figure that out. >> A local. >> All right, so you all, let's talk about Cisco and Pure, you guys have been partners now since, Nathan we were chatting, since about the IPO, about four years ago. Let's start with you Nathan, our Pure guy. The Cisco, Pure partnership evolution, better together? What have you done over those last five years that sets you up for another first that you're going to share with us today? >> Sure, so it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels. It starts with the executive alignment and think about Charlie Giancarlo from Cisco we've got a lot of just common, cross pollination there. But now it extends, certainly the field level, Tom and I are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases. But now it extends to engineering as well, we had a UCS director plugin that we've had for some time now but Pure is now first in terms of having integration into Cisco intersight, so we are first and only to have storage integration of the Cisco intersight so that Cisco and Pure customers can really manage their environment from one console, so a lot of simplicity, just single SaaS interface for managing everything. >> Tom why Pure, why first with them? >> Well you know Nathan he articulated it well, we can look at the executive level, we talked about Charlie, but even, you know all of our Cisco executives but also to the engineering. We started really strong with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides, use cases. We churn them out with Pure as our top ecosystem partner, more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done, our customers see that and it's really helped drive our goal to market together it's really a very strong strategy. >> So there's a CVD around this is that right? >> Yeah there's many there's 22 right now and we're churning them out about one or two a quarter. With some vendors we might put out some initially we might do one or two things well, we do a lot of things well I guess you could say we do 22 things well with the CVD's but more than that. >> So this really started in the field if I understand correctly is that right? [Nathan] - Yes. >> So I always look for these deals and say is it a Barney deal, you know Barney deal I love you, you love me. And if there's real engineering going on then you say okay it's beyond a Barney deal. So it starts in the field with what, hey we should you know a customer wants us to work together and then how does the partnership evolve into where you're putting engineering resources and what does that look like? >> I think a lot of it evolves from just showing progress and showing success. If you look at, we just have a lot of common goals and from a portfolio perspective we fill in a lot of each others gaps so that's really where it started was having the success in the field and that drove, we should actually make greater investments in terms of engineering development, those 22 CVD's, the intersight integration, et cetera. >> So we were talking earlier about CI, HCI for audience members who it's kind of nuanced, how do you guys look at the intersection of those two? >> I say it's another better together story, for example we have a recent joint customer win where essentially across their entire SAP landscape we have Cisco hyper flex the HX managing the database portion, we have FlashStack with Pure Storage managing the Hanna portion, and really it all comes down to single console which is intersight. So we're really able to provide the best type of infrastructure for the right workload at the right time but all make it look like one single experience to the customer. >> So from a customer conversation perspective let's go back to you know we've talked about now this exciting new first engineering alignment. Going back to the field where customers have a multitude of workloads, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, FEEdi, and there's FlashStack like 31 flavors of FlashStack right. What's that conversation like in terms of CI versus HCI when you guys come into play? Obviously FlashStack being I mentioned a number of flavors of that have been around for awhile, how do you help the customers determine what infrastructure is optimal for their workloads and their business objectives? >> You know there's a clear delineation between a hyper convergence, our HX platform, a hyper flex platform, and the converged infrastructure that we have with FlashStacks. If you look at a FlashStack it's an all in one solution, compute, fabric, storage. It's more for tier one apps, something that's you know scalable, something that's a highly dense tier one application. Latency obviously plays into this you know, I'd say it's a little less with the hyper flex platform and hyper convergence, much easier to stand up, much quicker to stand up within a half an hour. It's a storage play it does many of the similar same things but you know we're kind of closing the gap on both of them because even what you would call that smaller platform that started off at more tier one, excuse me tier two and tier three is now moving into the tier one space so. But it's really about scalability, ease of use, some of them are stronger in some markets like maybe a higher enterprise. But we can sell them across anywhere whether it be public sector, commercial, mid market, smaller customers. But they each have use cases that they fit in very well. >> This morning in the key notes we heard a lot about API's, I want to get into Multi Cloud in a second but before I do we talk a lot about infrastructures code, DevOps, we heard a lot about Kubernetes, a little bit about Kubernetes this morning. And the Cisco DevNet I've often said on theCUBE that they're the only large established company that's figured out how to do something for developers. Now does your partnership extend into sort of infrastructures code, how does that all sort of go through? Is DevNet a play here or even on the roadmap? >> Nathan: So from DevNet can you take that one? >> Well I can say yes it is a play, if you take a look at all of our solutions, primarily the compute and the fabric solutions, programmability is really a key function that we have and the customers can go in and they can actually working with our API's, API's that we work with separate with other vendors too that are dedicated to other vendors. It is a key thing and DevNet became to the forefront probably about five years ago and it was really built off of that development effort so that's critical for us going forward here there's a lot that we're doing I know we're going to talk about intersight and some other things where that was a key element of it. >> Yeah so this is important. You were at Cisco Live. >> And Cisco DevNet. >> And we were in the DevNet zone and you remember, you had many many booths, very specialized, then you have CCIE's learning python, learning how to program infrastructure for new use cases, edge comes in. Anything you'd add Nathan to sort of programmability? >> So I think just from day one from Pure Storage just having our restful API interface, having code.purestorage.com we've tried to make it as much automatable as possible, as easy for to really create a community of developers that can create these integrations very quickly, and honestly evidence of that is in intersight itself. How quickly we got that integration happening is because of that restful API interface. We were able to take the kind of AI Ops of Pure One and bring it into intersight, be able to get intersight to talk to Pure Storage very easily because of that strength of API first. >> What do we need to know about intersight? Add some color there, what is it, how's it work, what's the kind of history and how do you guys turn what you're doing in integration into customer value? >> So if I look at, going back to your comments around why converge versus hyper converge, it's often really a story of simplicity right? Customers want something simple for the data center, they know they can get it out in the Cloud but they can't always run their workloads out in the external Cloud. So simplicity is for intersight, no matter what it is, if it's converged or hyper converged, if it's Pure Storage, being able to have single interface to monitor your infrastructure, lifecycle it, to get really specific imagine a VMware administrator is able to in that single console, provision storage from Pure to a UCS server, format it for VMware ESX and VMFS, and in that single console so doesn't have to go to a bunch of different consoles, gets that Cloud like experience and that's what intersight delivers. So you get that simplicity whether its converged or hyper converged with intersight. >> Whether it's in the Cloud, it's the Edge, it's the Branch, Hybrid Cloud, instead of having to manage it I think that Nathan just hit on these single clusters of storage, compute, what have you. These can all be managed from one single console world wide no matter where they sit. >> So I want to talk about Multi Cloud if we can. So if I look at the players in Multi Cloud, the big whales, VMware, Red Hat, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco, you partner with all of those pretty much I think. AWS is not on the list but you figure they're kind of the facto part of the Multi Cloud scene but they're not going after Multi Cloud, Cisco was a relatively new entrant there. You got companies that have a Cloud like Microsoft and Google that want to participate, you've got companies that don't have a Cloud like Cisco that want to participate, where does Pure fit in to that Multi Cloud opportunity and how does it relate to the partnership? >> Well I think where we found a solid partnership with Cisco and Multi Cloud is the same approach to Multi Cloud and that is I'd call it open Multi Cloud. As opposed to having, forcing a single type of hyper visor on one side or a single Cloud, external Cloud on the other side, how do we make certain that our customers can run any app, anywhere? How do we appear and provide the data fabric having the most efficient amenity of fabric out there to kind of get around the data gravity problems of moving workloads, and we do that now with Pure Flash right on premises, Cloud block store out in the Cloud, our ability to Cloud snap to Azure, to AWS, and that's part of the story. The other part of the story is the fabric and the compute. So with ACI anywhere really that compeletes the any workload anywhere story, and keeping it open so it's not just one hyper visor or one Cloud provider on the other side. >> So you be the data plane in that equation, with the management of that data plane, and Cisco is the overall management framework the control plane I guess we could call that. Is that the right way to think about it? >> I'd say part of the control plane and the network fabric as well, and we're part of essentially the consistent data services no matter where you go. So really upleveling for example EBS to an enterprise grade of storage that it wasn't before, now we have something that whether you're on hardware on premises or in the cloud, you can run that monolithic application in places you couldn't do it before. >> So let's look at this in the real world in a customer environment, talk to me about whatever kind of whether it's a bank or an airline or what have you, what are the business benefits that, we'll use delta Airlines as an example, what would they get out of this if they think of all of the things that they need to achieve internally and be able to deliver to their customers? What's that you know TCO, ROI, what are all those sexy things that you guys are delivering? >> So I'd say they get essentially a lot of the barriers to getting the TCO you want for a given workload are based on compatibility. Maybe you want to run it out in Amazon but you can't get it there because it's this massive monolithic gap, the sync would take days, the SLA out there isn't quite what you want. Now being able to provide a consistent experience no matter where that data plane is, you get that choice. You can go and evaluate AWS or Azure and say that's ultimately the right TCO for my application and I know it could run out there because I've essentially standardized my data fabric anywhere, and it's the same story essentially now with ACI anywhere as well. So the ability to keep essentially the fundamental elements of the application, the infrastructure around it consistent no matter where it is, freeze that IT decision maker to put it in the right place. You don't have to be constrained by compatibility anymore. >> So internal operations can be dialed way up which means those folks are free to resources to work on other higher value projects, and the customer on the other end who doesn't know any of this stuff is under the hood is getting what they need when they want it. >> Exactly, yeah you can manage if you look at ACI you can manage the automation of the applications across the network fabric again wherever it may be, and there's robustness there, there's telemetry, there's measurements. So instead of just looking at the application you look at the robustness of that on the network and the network here us absolutely critical, none of this is going to run I think as Nathan hit on that it could be in the Cloud, it could be in the Branch, you still want the same level of performance the SLA, the five nines and that's where the network comes in that's what's critical. >> Well and the security piece as well. >> Absolutely. >> You guys are largely coming at the Multi Cloud from of course the network strength that you have but you've also got a security angle there because you can go deep packet inspection and that's a sweet spot for you guys. >> Tom: Absolutely. >> Talk about security and it's importance and so on. >> Well I think the security I mean one of the big plays that we have with ACI and with Tetration is being able to look in literally billions of packets a second and being able to track and make realtime decisions on any type of threat, threat defense that's built right in. So normally obviously you have firewall and you try to keep everything out but a lot of what will happen a lot of the penetration security hack happens inside. So this is able to look at all of the flows, at every single packet the flow of the application and the information to see if there's a threat in real time. It takes a lot of processing power a lot of storage and a lot of capacity but you know that's a Tetration product and it's a huge play, our security team is actually out selling that in addition to the data center teams. >> So is Wallingford Yankee's country or Red Sox country? >> Oh it's right on the border so I've got my in laws Yankee's, my parents Redsox, so it's very difficult at home. >> You're a Pat's fan of course, did you feel dirty watching the game on Sunday or? >> Tom: No not at all. >> Oh you felt good? >> Maybe 19 and O this year we'll see. >> And you're Switzerland in this whole debate? >> I try to be it's hard. >> Well you know this company is Warrior's so we can talk NBA too. >> You bet! >> There's a really interesting NBA season coming up now. Not so much for our team but. (laughter) >> Lisa: You never know! >> You never know. >> I had to try to be Switzerland too cause I was the West Coaster with the East Coaster boss, you know how it goes. So Tom last question for you, whole bunch of announcements that came out of Pure today as we look at all of the partnerships that Pure has we talked about that, that Cisco has as well, what are some of the things that as a partner as a valued strategic partner, that Cisco hears when they hear Pure talking about delivering everything as a service and what they're doing with AI and dialing up things there, what is Ciscos reaction to that news? >> Well the thing with Pure and it preceded this conference but you know I really heard it with the new announcements and Nate and I we have a lot of things we're going to work with our systems engineers on in the Americas, it's just the innovation which is pretty incredible. You know you kind of have the big four products here but primarily with the Flash arrays the CI platforms, the Flash blades, what's going on with Pure one, that's going to be critical going forward and we have very similar messages with Multi Cloud. We talked about the validated designs, this is really going to lead us to almost like it's kind of funny when you have an innovative partner you can do reboots every year and people don't think you're just throwing work at them or what have you. It's like now we really innovated again, 12, 15 months later we're going to hit this again and come at it. And so Pure is probably one of the only partners we have that type of relationship with. >> Alright well guys thank you so much for joining Dave and me on theCUBE today we appreciate it. We look forward to following the evolution of this Cisco Pure partnership, thanks for your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE ya'll from Pure Accelerate in Austin, Texas. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional Ecosystem as support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by John Troyer. This is Silken Angle Media's production of the Cube at OpenStack Summit. We're the world wide leader in tech coverage, live tech coverage. Happy to welcome back to the program someone we've had on so many times we can't keep track. He is the creator of the term Pets versus Cattle, he is one of the OG of The Cloud Group, Randy, you know, wrote about everything before most of it was done. So good to see you, thank you for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, so Randy, coming into this show we felt that it was a bit of resetting expectations, people not understanding, you know, where infrastructure's going, a whole hybrid multi-cloud world, so, I mean you've told us all how it's going to go, so where are we today, what have people been getting wrong, what's your take coming into this week and what you've seen? >> Well, I've said it before, which is that the public clouds have done more than just deliver compute storage and networking on demand. What they've really done is they've built these massive development organizations. They're very sophisticated, that are, you know, that really come from that Webscale background and move at a velocity that's really different than anything we've seen before, and I think the hope in the early days of OpenStack was that we would achieve a similar kind of velocity and momentum, but I think the reality is is that it just hasn't really materialized; that while there are a lot of projects and there are a lot of contributors the coordination between them is very poor, and you know it's just not the, like architectural oversight that we really needed isn't there. I, a couple years ago at the Openstack Silicon Valley gave a presentation called The Lie of the Benevolent Dictator, and I chartered a course for how we could actually have more of a technical architecture oversight, and just that really fell on deaf ears. And so we continue to do the same thing and expect different results and I just, that's a little disappointing for me. >> Yeah. So what is your view of hybrid cloud? You know, no disagreement, you look at what the public cloud companies, especially the big three, the development that they can do, Amazon, a thousand new features a year, Google, what they can do with data, Microsoft has a whole lot of applications and communities around them. We're mostly talking about private cloud here, it was a term that you fought against for many years, we've had great debates on it, so how does that hybrid play out? Cause customers, they're keeping on premises. Edge fits into a lot of this too, so it's, there's not one winner, it's not a zero sum game, but how does that hybrid cloud work? >> Yeah so, I didn't fight against private cloud, I qualified it. I said if it's going to be a private cloud it's got to be built and look and smell the way that the public cloud was. Alright? If it's just VM ware with VM's on demand, that's not a private cloud. That was my position. And then in terms of hybrid cloud, you know, I don't think we're there yet. I've presented on this at many different OpenStacks, you can see it in the past, and I sort of laid out what needs to happen and that didn't happen. But I think there's hope, and I think the hope comes in the form of Kubernetes, and to a certain degree, Helm. And the reason that Kubernetes with Helm is very powerful is that Kubernetes gives us a computive traction, so that you don't care if you're on the public cloud, or you know OpenStack or Vmware or whatever, and then what Helm gives us is our charts, so ways to deploy services, not just software, and so what we could think about doing in the future is building hybrid cloud based off of Kubernetes and Helm. >> Yeah, so Randy since last time we talked you've got a new role, you're now with Juniper. Juniper had done a Contrail acquisition. You know, quite a few years back you wrote a good blueprint on one of the Juniper forums about the OpenContrail communities. So tell us a little bit about your role, your goals, in that community. >> So OpenContrail has been a primarily Juniper initiative, and we're going to press the reset button on the OpenContrail community. I'm going to do it tonight and call for people to sort of get involved in doing that reset, and when I say reset I mean, wipe the operating system, reload it from scratch, and do it really as a community, not just as a Juniper run initiative, and so people inside Juniper are very excited about this, and what we're trying to do is that we believe that the path forward for OpenContrail is ubiquitous adoption. So rather then playing for just the pieces that we have, which we've done a great job of, we want to take the world's best SDN controller and we want to make sure everybody uses it, because we think aggregate that's good for not only the entire community but also Juniper. >> So, love the idea of kind of rebooting the community in the open, right, because you have to be transparent about these sort of things. >> Randy: Yeah, that's right. >> What are the community segments that you would like to see join you here in the OpenContrail? What kind of users, what kind of companies would you like to see come in to the tent? >> Well anybody's welcome, but we want to start with all of our key stakeholders that exist today, so first one, and arguably one of the most important is our competitors, right so we're hoping to have Mirantis at the table, maybe Ericcson, Huawei, anybody. Cisco, hey come join the party. Second is that we have done really well in Sass and in gaming, and we'd like to see all of those companies come to the table as well, Workday, Symantech, and so on. The third segment is enterprises, we've done well in financial services, we think that that's a really important segment because they're leading edge of enterprises typically, and the fourth is the carrier's obviously incredibly important for Juniper, folks like AT&T, Direction Telecom, all those companies we'd love to see come to the table. And then that's really the primary focus, and then anybody else who wants to show up, anybody who wants to develop in Contrail in the future we'd love to have there. >> Well with open source communities, right, there's always a balance of the contributors and developers versus operators, and we can use the word contributors in a lot of roles. Some open source communities, much more developer focused, >> Randy: That's right. >> Others more operator focused, where do you see this OpenContrail community starting out? >> So where it's been historically is more of our end users and operators. >> I think that's interesting and an interesting twist because I think sometimes open source communities get stuck with just the people who can contribute code, and I'm from an operator community myself, >> Randy: Right. >> So I think that's really interesting. >> We still want all those people but I think what has happened is that when people have come in and they wanted to be more sort of on the developer side, the community hasn't been friendly to them. >> John: Okay. >> Randy: And so we want, that's a key thing that we want to change. You know when we were talking, to certain carriers they came and they said look, it's great you're going to do this, we want to be a part of it, and one of the things we'd like to contribute is more advanced testing around VMFs. And I just look at that and I'm just like that's what we need, right? Juniper is not, can't carry all the water on having, you know, sophisticated test suites for VMFs and more advanced networking use cases, but the carriers are deep into this and we'd love to have them come and bring that. So not just developers, but also QA, people who want to increase the code quality, the architectural quality, and the aggregate value of OpenContrail. >> Okay, Randy can you help place OpenContrail where it fits in this kind of networking spectrum, especially, there's open source things, we've talked about about VPP a couple times on theCube here. The joke for many years was SDN still does nothing, NFV solutions have grown, have been huge use case, is really where the early money for big deployments have been for OpenStack. Where does OpenContrail fit, where does it kind of compare and contrast against some of the other options out there. >> I'm going to answer that slightly differently. I've been skeptical about SDN overlays for a long time, and now I am helping with one of the world's best SDN overlays, and what's changed for me is that in the last year I've seen key customers of Contrail's, of Juniper's actually do something very interesting, right. You've got an SDN overlay, it's complex, it's hard to void, you got to wonder, why should I do this? Well I thought the same thing about virtualization, right, until I figured out, sort of what was the killer app. And what we've seen is a company, one of our customers, and several others, but one in particular I can talk about publicly, Riot Games, take containers and OpenContrail and marry them so that you have an abstraction around compute, and an abstraction around networking, so that their developers can write to that, and they don't care whether that's running on top of public cloud, private cloud, or in some partner's data center globally. And in fact they're going to talk about that today at OpenContrail days at 3:30, and are going to present a lot more details, and that's amazing to me because by abstracting a way and disintermediating the public clouds, you actually have more power, right. You can build your own framework. And if you're using Kubernetes as a baseline you can do a lot more on top of that computing network abstraction. >> You talked about OpenContrail days, again my first summit, I've actually been impressed by the foundation, acknowledging there's a huge landscape of open source and other technologies around there, OpenStack itself doesn't invent everything. Can you talk a little bit about that kind of attitude of bringing, I mean we talk about Kubernetes and that sort of thing, but all the other CNCF projects, monitoring, even components like SCD, right, we're talking about here at this conference. So, can you talk a little bit about how OpenStack can interact with the rest of the open source and cloud native at-large community? >> That's sort of a tough question John. >> John: Okay. >> I mean the reason I say that is like the origins of OpenStack are very much NIH and there has been a very disturbing tendency to sort of re-invent the wheel. A great example is Keystone, still to this day I don't know why Keystone exists and why we created a whole new authentic standard when there were dozens and dozens of battle-tested, battle-hardened protocols and bits of code that existed prior. It's great that we're getting a little bit better at that but I still sense that the origins of the community and some of the technical leadership have resistance to organizing and working with outside components and playing nice. So, it's better but it's not great, it's not where it should be. Really OpenStack needs to be broken down into a lot of different projects that can compete with each other and all run in parallel without having to be so tightly wound together. It's still disappointing to me that we aren't doing that today. >> Randy, wonder if you could give us a little bit of a personal reflection, you've been involved in cloud many years, we've talked about some of the state of it, where do you think enterprises are when they think about their IT, how IT relates to business, some of the big challenges they're facing, and kind of this rapid pace of change that's happening in our industry right now >> Yeah well the pressures just increase. The need to pick up speed and to move faster and to have a greater velocity, that's not going away, that seems to be like an incredible macro-trend that's just going to keep driving people towards the next event. But what I see is that the tension between the infra-structure IT teams and the line of business hasn't really started to get resolved. You see a lot of enterprises back into using DevOps as a way to try to fix the culture change problems but it's just not happening fast enough. I have a lot of concerns that basically private cloud or private infra-structure for enterprises will just not materialize in the way it needs to for the next generation. And that the line of business will continue to just keep moving to public cloud. All the while all the money that's being reinvested in the public cloud is increasing their capabilities in terms feature sets and security capabilities and so on. I just, I don't see the materialization of private cloud happening very well at this point in time and I don't see any trendlines that tell me it's going to change. >> Yeah, what recommendations do you give today to the OpenStack foundation? I know that you haven't been shy in the past about giving guidance as to the direction, what do you think needs to happen to be able to help customers along that journey that they need? >> I don't give any guidance to the OpenStack Foundation anymore, I'm not on the Board of Directors, and frankly I gave a lot of advice in the past that fell on deaf ears and people were unwilling to make the changes that were necessary I think to create success. And even though I was eventually proven right, there doesn't seem to be an appetite for change. I would say that the hard partition between the Board of Directors and the technical committee that was created at the outset with the founding of the Foundation has let to a big problem which is that there's simply business concerns that are technical concerns and there are technical concerns which are business concerns and the actual structure of the Foundation does not allow that to occur because that hard partition between them. So if people on Board of Directors can't actually tell the TC that they'd like to see certain technical changes because they're business concerns and Technical Committee can't tell the Board of Directors they'd like to see business changes made because they're technical concerns around them. And I think that's, it's fundamentally broken until the bylaws are fixed. >> So Randy beyond what we've talked about already what's exciting you these days, you look at like the serverless trend, is that something that you find intriguing or maybe contrary view on it, what's exciting you these days? >> Serverless is really interesting. In fact I'd like to see serverless at the edge. I think it would be fascinating if Amazon webservices could sell a serverless capability that was actually running in the mobile carriers edge. So like on the mobile towers or in essential offices. But you could do distributive computation for IOT literally at the very edge of the network, that would be incredibly powerful. So I am very interested in serverless in that regard. With Kubernetes, I think that this is the future, I think I've seen most of the other initiatives start to fail at this point. Docker Incorporated just hasn't made the progress they need to, hopefully a change in leadership will fix that. But it does mean that more and more people are gravitating towards Kubernetes and that's a thing because whereas OpenStack is historically got no opinion, Kubernetes is a much more prescriptive model and I think that actually leads to faster innovation, a greater pace of change and combined with Helm charts, I think that we're going to see an ecosystem develop around Kubernetes that actually could be a counterweight to the public clouds and really be sort of cloud agnostic. Private, public, at the edge, who cares? >> Randy Bias, always appreciated your very opinionated viewpoints on everything that are happening here. Pleasure to catch up with you as always. John and I will be back will lots more coverage here from OpenStack Summit in Boston, thanks for watching the Cube.