(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome to the special CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the evolving capabilities of VCF on VxRail. VCF being VMware Cloud Foundation. as VxRail from Dell Technologies. Samuel Niemi is their Product Manager of VCF on VxRail. He's got the keys to the kingdom. He is going to give us the update on what's going on, obviously with all the major IT operational conversations going on with cloud native, how to get the best excellence out of the organization as we come through the pandemic, big stuff happening. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, happy to be here. >> In June, you guys announced some major updates that's coming on to VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail that would allow customers to extend their capabilities and their ability to innovate in the landscape and with external storage. Can you take us through what's new what's the situation and tell us what's happening? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off if you're, for those who might be watching who are not familiar with VCF on VxRail, VxRail is our hyperconverged infrastructure system that allows for massive data centers scaling at, from node to node to node. VCF on VxRail specifically is the VMware SDDC software suite that allows us to create a private cloud with VxRail deployments. So instead of saying, I want to manage this cluster and this cluster, and this cluster VCF allows us to manage VxRail clusters and deployments at a big scale. So VCF on VxRail, we've gone from in the last two and a half years or so that we have been available as a product we've gone from nothing to tens of thousands of nodes deployed across the world. And it has been a rollercoaster of a ride. And we're just thrilled with the success that we've had so far. >> And what's been new since the release in June but what's new? >> Absolutely. So, one thing that we've realized from a VxRail perspective is that, as we grow and as our data center and enterprise scale customers continue to grow their VCF on the VxRail environments VCF on VxRail has to evolve as well. And in June we announced an ability for VCF on VxRail to consume external storage. Now, hyper-converged means no storage, networking, network virtualization I should say and your server all in one box. External storage gives us the ability to utilize your existing Dell EMC storage arrays and use that data centric kind of storage deployment with your existing or net new VCF on VxRail deployments. It's really exciting stuff. And we're really looking forward to be able to even better provide solutions for our customers at that big enterprise scale. >> So a lot of change happening scale is a big word here, right? We're seeing scale, modern applications looking for environment. You talk about hybrid private cloud. I mean, essentially cloud operations is private cloud if you will. I got to ask you on this big product that you have VCF on VxRail, what are the drivers behind making this option viable for customers, what are they looking for? Why are they consuming it this way? What are the key aspects of drive in this force? >> Absolutely. So, what we found is that with vSAN which has been wildly successful on the VxRail, it's fantastic for general purpose workloads. And we don't see that changing. What we see is an ability for our customers to leverage the extreme speed of our PowerStore T, our PowerMax and our Unity XT storage arrays so that you can get that sub millisecond latency that you're used to out of those storage arrays and have the same benefits in say another workload domain of your existing vSAN deployment. Now, my favorite example of a use case for that is when you have sub millisecond latency, that's something like a PowerMax can provide. Let's say you're standing at the gas pump. It's cold, I'm here in Minnesota it was three degrees here yesterday. When I'm standing at the gas pump, swipe my card. I don't want to wait and wait and wait for that database kit. Put my card to go through I want it now. PowerMax and our PowerStore T, unity XT with those crazy low latencies, they allow our VCF on VxRail customers to not have to wait at the pump. So when our enterprise customers have those things deployed with that crazy low latency for database hits, you're not standing at the pump. You're not waiting awkwardly at the grocery store for your card to go through. You really get that extreme speed that those big storage arrays can provide. >> Yeah, so the weather in Minnesota, and so my brother lives in that area too. He was complaining about it on the family text, but this is an edge case, whether you're swiping your credit card on the pump, this latency discussion, the edge is really a key conversation because that's what you're, you're going to get cold waiting, but still you could be, key data store for say some equipment in a manufacturing operation, or on a farm or somewhere. So again, this brings up the whole edge. >> True. >> That an area is that the driver, one of the drivers, or is it also just in general the performance? >> You know I would say it depends on what you need out of your storage array. If you need that performance at the edge, VCF can deploy remote clusters in a metro distance within 50 milliseconds. So you can have your center and you can have your edges, you can put storage arrays behind those edges. You can have that kind of, speed from place to place, to place to place, or you can use traditional vSAN storage. So it really comes down to what your storage use case is. Maybe you have a need of the data replication that PowerMax can provide from one site to the other, and that's your backup for your edges. Those kinds of things can all be utilized with VCF on VxRail and remote clusters at the edge. >> What a similar customer use case? Can you just walk me through some examples of customers that you have and what they're interested in, what kind of advantages they're seeing with the capability? >> Certainly. So we have a number of customers who have high level of data resiliency requirements that we have that 99 point lots of nines resiliency that the PowerMax, and it's forebears, VMX have provided for 20 something years now, those customers say at our financial institutions where they have to have massive levels of resiliency. We have customers who frankly have separate buying cycles, where they buy their compute one year, and then maybe two years later, that's when their storage comes up for renewal. So those customers are able to leverage both VCF on VxRail and their external storage. I'm not going to drop customer names. I've got a couple that come to mind, but I'll say in the financial institution and in healthcare especially is where we see. >> What problem are they solving? You don't have to name names because I know it's probably the company, everything, but you know what all the reference stuff, but what's the anecdotal, what's the main problem, let's say kind of the use cases that jump out and people, if people are watching might think that they should be using this. What signals and signs should they be looking for? >> Absolutely. I would say first off data resiliency, and I'm just in love with PowerMax. So that's the first thing that jumps to mind. I'm extreme performance, whether it's databases or having a need to get data out to their customers as quickly as possible. Replication comes to mind. Those are the big three. And then of course, where you maybe need a little bit of compute and a lot of storage are dynamic nodes and VCF on VxRail means that we can sell our nodes without any storage. And that really gives us an ability to just say, I need a lot of compute, I need a little compute, whatever it might be, I'm going to scale my nodes and my storage independently of one another. >> Where can people get more information to find out? >> Sure, absolutely. So for more information, you can always go to dell.com. You can reach out to your sales team and talk to your VMware sales team as well, who are well-versed in VCF on VxRail deployments, but we're always here dell.com and we're always just an email away. >> So while I've got your here, say, I want to ask you about this notion of simplifying the IT operational experience. >> Sure. >> In your view, as you look out on the horizon from your perspective, being the product leader on this area, what's on the mind of the customer. What's the psychology out there? What's some of the environmental conditions that they're facing (indistinct) their landscape. Is it do more with less, the classic cliche? Is it actually a replatformin, is it refactoring? Is it application developers? what's some of the big drivers there in terms of the customers that you're seeing? >> So as a customer today, I have so many options for where to put my data and where to put my VMs and my development. I want to look at what is the best route for my business? Is it a hybrid cloud offering? And if yes, what's the easiest way to manage that because at the end of the day, if I'm spending money on maintenance spending money on staff who are not accelerating the business, but just keeping the thing going, what's the best way to do that? And VCF on VxRail today really allows our customers to deploy a private or a hybrid cloud rather, and maintain the entire thing through one interface. That interface being SDDC Manager. When we look at the benefits of it, VCF for on VxRail today provides Tanzu. So for customers who need to have a development platform in their hybrid cloud Tanzu is that the easy option or the easy answer for that. So, it is a big answer. What's driving this, lots of things, but really it's data center modernization. It's moving from a traditional servers with virtual machines on them into the hybrid cloud. >> Yeah, you were missing resilience here on the data. I think that's awesome because I mean, at the end of the day it's data driven. Everyone wants more data. Database has been around for a while. So making that go faster is really critical. Awesome, awesome conversation. And now on the VCF on VxRail, what's the bottom line, if you had to summarize the evolution capabilities that are coming on, they're evolving, you're the Product Manager, you got the keys to the kingdom, what's next, what's happening? >> If I'm looking at VCF and what's next and what's on the way, really lifecycle management. So, when our customers talk about what it looks like to lifecycle their systems without VCF on VxRail and the complexity of doing that without VCF it's lifecycle management is the reason for being. We look at the, from everything we lifecycle from the hardware of the VxRail nodes, including disc firmware, HPAs, NIC drivers, etc to the VCF SDDC software suite, all of those components they're in vSphere, VCenter ESXi. I'm going through the checklist in my head here. The V realized components, getting all of that lifecycle to a good continuous revalidated state is really, really tough. And then your add storage, that's one more thing. So I want to be able to just have a single click that will go through LCM my entire hybrid cloud environment from hardware to software stack, so that I can manage that external storage that I just added to my system without adding more pain. So really with VCF on VxRail, it's the only jointly engineered solution from an HCI vendor like VxRail and VMware to deliver that single click soup to nuts hardware to software suite LCM. LCM is the name of the game. And we're going to continue to make that innovate on that and new ways that I can't even say yet. >> I can't wait to hear the innovation is a great model. Putting that out there, getting the environmental all scaled up. Sam Niemi, Product Manager, VCF VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail with Dell Technologies. Thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Absolutely thanks, John. >> Okay, it's theCUBE here in Palo Alto. I'm John for your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, Lisa Martin with theCUBE, live day three of theCUBE's double set coverage of Dell Technologies World 2019 I am with Stu Miniman. We've got one alumni back. We've got Gil Schneorson, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Vxrail. Gil welcome back. >> Thank you nice to be back. >> And it's show and tell you brought Niv Raz CTO of Harel Insurance one of your successful customers, Niv it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you and great to be here. >> So Niv let's start with you. Give our audience an understanding of Harel Insurance where you're located, what it is that you do and then we'll get into why think Dell EMC is so fantastic. >> Harel Insurance is a insurance company doing a life, now life insurances very wide portfolio of business products in the insurance and investments in Israel. More than 5000 employees and three million customers managing around 240 billion shekels in 2018. So it's very innovative company to work in. >> So Niv interesting. Dell has a podcast and I'm just given a little plug here 'cause at the gym this morning the latest episode by Walter Issacson talks about transformation going on in the insurance business. Some people think, oh insurance has been around a long time, I mean heck to the Roman Era when they had some of this but today Insurance is changing fast. Can you give us at a macro level, give us what are some the changes and stresses on the company and how's that impact your job. >> It's funny you mentioning that. In 2015 our CEO has declared innovative program named Recalculating Routes. The purpose of the program the strategic plan was to take a role from traditional insurance company to more digital transform, data transform. We Israel has the brokers. The brokers are our sales person but once the customer and the sales part, the onboarding part, you want a more innovative service after that. The post service part is very hard in insurance and we investing a lot to make the post service customer experience very advantaged. >> We talk a lot about customer insurance at every, oh sorry, customer insurance, well that's important too, customer experience is the word I was going for. It's essential right because in 2019 customers of any type of product or service have so much choice. So talk to us Niv from looking through that lens of delivering an outstanding customer experience obviously your sales folks need to have innovative technology to deliver that outstanding customer experience. But when a company says we've got to transform digitally we've got to stay ahead of the market, delight our customers Where do you start? Talk to us about maybe a phased approach that you're taking to digital transformation. >> Digital transformation is all about how customer experience feel like in your environment. So if a person entering your website and trying to do some post service and running into some old fashionable process that is very hard to him and its really frustrating to do that. And actually if I look about what our approach about it, we're thinking about the digital transformation, we're thinking about how to take the onboarding part for our brokers, the post service for our customers, to make the process, the services we are offering to our customers easy as possible to just can submit. >> All right so Gil let's bring you into the discussion here. And I think back Converge Infrastructure, Hyper-converge Infrastructure you've been riding the rocket ship that is Vxrail, digital transformation wasn't the leading use for that when we started. It was simplification driving that wave of virtualization, we've heard Vxrail everywhere in the discussion this week. It was like all of these different cloud pieces, what's underneath them, VxRail. Help us connect the dots, the transformations that your customers are going where VxRail and the new solutions built with VxRail help enable your customers. >> Yeah thanks Stu. We talk about a digital transformation a lot. Reality is that many of the customers, not all of them are transformative like Harel Insurance right. Many of them look at ATI and VxRail as the next simple tech refresh. They see the agility, they see the economical benefit but there's a growing majority of customers who look to this is as transformational. And so that's where you see ATI and VxRail specifically in our case starting to grow beyond being an infrastructure for workloads to be an infrastructure for their hybrid cloud and multi cloud environment. So what is so exciting about this show is because we've been very successful we're growing very fast, but by putting this building block in many of our customers' data centers they've made the choice that will enable them to now embark on a more transformational strategy. And I think we demonstrated in the last two days that hybrid cloud is here and it's sellable, operational and with VxRail and the integration with VML cloud foundation and the ability to add and burst into a cloud move workloads It's here and its now, I thinks that's what's nice about this whole thing. >> All right so Gil it's great for you to say it even as an analyst as a media organization for us to say it but what we love is that you brought a customer here to tell us the reality as to where cloud fits into your overall discussion. And I would love your feedback as to what Gil's saying. What's the reality in your world and the impact on your work >> I would connect the previous question this one because it's like a very rolling on questions about it. So you as the customers your expectations about the company is to do every operation from everywhere very easy way and the mobility and the digital transformation itself all the mobile applications, all the things that's taking the customer experience to the next level will took the organization to a phase that I need understand how to scalable the systems. So in this journey when you're looking about digital transformation you must have a infrastructure that support the scalability, the elasticity, the availability that the customer demands. You don't think to yourself that you are enter some E-commerce customer and they will send you on application. sorry Sir, we currently offline the management reasons or maintenance reasons. That thing in 2019 you will not think about and it's not be acceptable. So to do a scalability our multi cloud strategy in Harel is to have infrastructure free environment to focus on the service applications and not to focus on the infrastructure management part. That's the big concerns of our IT teams was how to care about support and matrix's and compatibility and maintenance and when you go into the private cloud environment, the private cloud environment, that's VxRail on the bottom and VML cloud foundation on the top allow Harel is to start the journey to a phase that said okay we're going to our infrastructure free road map. >> Tell us about the outcomes that for example go back to, what we were talking about your brokers who need to be able to deliver any service. I imagine they're out in the field sometimes with customers depending on the types of services that they need to deliver. What has been some of the feedback or maybe the outcomes for the brokers. Are they able to do their jobs faster, deliver quotes faster to customers. What are some of the exciting outcomes that you're seeing as a result of the infrastructure that Dell EMC is helping you to establish. >> Part of digital transformation we're talking about micro servicing a lot of old virtual machines I'm saying that. So service applications on the password virtual machine now your micro services, why you micro servicing it because in 8:00 a.m, perhaps there is 20 persons that's selling your policies but perhaps on the 11:00 after some TV show said something about Harel you can have thousands of customers entering to your website. So how you can support that? So again brokers need the tools to support the operation, the sales operations and the customers need the tools to support the post service for themselves, how to claim, how to do claims how to do more preventives aspects of insurances. So basically again when you're looking about what exciting is, is the reality that I'm seeing a process of a customer and is saying, wow that was easy. So taking the digital transformation to make our customer experience better. >> All right Gil help us zoom out a little bit. We talked to one customer here but the business overall joint product development between Dell EMC and the VMware teams is something that we think was transformational and helped accelerate the HTI growth. What are some the big drivers what's changed in the business. Give us the overall update. >> Yeah look, I think that when we discovered that working together pays off through our joint leadership through examples like VxRail and others we started looking at every part of the business and how collaboration could enable us to add even more value and any value transfer to finances and there's a very strong interest in so this recent innovation we've introduced with integration with cloud foundation, people don't realize how much work goes into integrating two products regardless, even between 1 company you're talking about engineers co-location, you're talking about joint sprints you're talking about test fests, design workshop, customers interaction and so, but you know what I mean, it pays off. You deliver a new outcome that didn't exist before now with VCF and VxRail you can have a full life cycle management of the entire VMX stack and the entire hardware stack drivers, framework everything life cycled together, it's a very, very impressive outcome and it's ready now and I'm really thinking that shift is going to be more than just ATI, people are going to start embracing the full stack because they can, because we're simplifying it. In addition to that Stu I think it's important to understand or I'd like the people to know that the other way we're taking the ATI stack and the full stack is into much more intelligence so machine learning and predictability all the way eventually to remediation and so in this show we introduced the analytical consulting engine for VxRail and we put it out there as a field trial, as an early access. The thought process is we have a very large amount of intelligent customers that could tell us where they need this to take them. What's exciting about it is that every product these days is trying to be intelligent because we have a full stack we have a lot of context, a lot of things we could correlate. So we're very excited about this and we're hoping that our customers will participate in that design, I'm sure Harel will as soon as we can give it to them, the access and, not only full stack but make it much more intelligent, I think it's going to be very exciting year til next time we speak. >> Harel you have? >> Something to say about it. We are customers, us as an organization understand the public cloud allowed us to be infrastructure free and now they said okay some workloads are good for public cloud some workloads are good for private cloud and the multi cloud approach that VMcloud Foundation gives us the infrastructure free to just focus on the services. You need to understand the manageability of traditional infrastructure is very costly. Why? You need to manage it, you need to support it, you need to upgrade the frameworks, the buyers, the drivers and all the time to be concerned about if everything is supportable, how you do that all the job and again once you taking the VxRail as a hardware platform for that and the VMcloud foundation the software you getting a complete life cycle that assist you to just focusing about to be a service broker just add new services to the exist environment. >> Well Niv, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing with Stu and me where you guys are on this digital transformation journey, the successes you've achieved so far with Dell EMC, Gil again always great to have you on the program and we can't wait to hear more next year maybe Ace is going to give us some really insightful insights that will be groundbreaking. >> I believe so. Thank you very much. >> For Stu Minneman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on theCUBE, live from day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat Techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live day two of VMworld in Las Vegas, Mandalay Bay. It's apparently very hot outside but we're in here getting all the exciting scoop. I'm Lisa Martin with my esteemed co-host John Furrier. Hey, John. >> Great to see you, welcome back to the set. >> Thank you so much. John and I are pleased to be joined by a Fortinet customer, Ken Busby, Keith Busby, excuse me, the executive director of information technology and security at the school district of Philadelphia. Keith, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, the school district of Philadelphia, eight largest public school district in the United States. You've got over 134,000 students. >> Yes. >> Over 18,000 staff. If only your IT budget was enormous, right? >> Yes. (laughing) >> So you guys, something also interesting, this morning Malala Yousafzai was speaking with Sanjay Poonen. Very intriguing, on the whole spirit of education, let's talk about that. You guys gave Chromebooks to over maybe half the students, about 50, 60 thousand? >> Well it's not one to one, so they're shared resources, they have carts throughout the school. We have between 50 or 60 thousand Chromebooks on our network right now. >> So I imagine great for the students and the education, the firewall security maybe a bit challenged? >> As we started transitioning to the Chromebooks, it overwhelmed our legacy internet firewalls so we had to go out and do proof of concepts and test multiple vendors. >> Talk about the security, we had Pat Gelsinger sit in theCUBE, I think four years ago, Dave Vellante, co-host, asked him, "Is security a do over?" And he's like, "Yes, it's a do over, "we need to do a do over." I said mulligan, used all kinds of terms, resetting. How have you guys set up your security architecture because I've heard stories of fishing attacks just to get the bandwidth to do Bitcoin mining, to crazy things on the security front. How are you guys laying out your network security? >> Honestly, it changes on a day to day basis, right? Because as new vulnerabilities come out, you always have to adjust your posture. Over the last year and a half we redesigned to wear we're not, we were routing through web proxies, we're required to do web filtering for the students by the CIPA, Children's Internet Protection Act. When we replaced our legacy firewalls, we were able to transition everything over to that and just use the Fortinet firewall to do web filtering, intrusion prevention, anti-virus and traditional firewalling. >> How virtualized are you guys? >> Pretty much completely virtual. We still have a few legacy physical servers but pretty much all. >> One of the things that came up in keynote, today was Sanjay Poonen but yesterday Pat Gelsinger, referred it to, was the bridging of the ways, connecting computers together but he mentioned BYOD, bring your own device as one of the ways and that was really the iPhone kind of generation. Obviously kids got Instagrams and they're on all kind of devices these days, how is that impacting your IT? Is it up and running, is it solid? What are some of the details? >> We don't have a traditional BYOD policy. It's more teachers get devices and they bring them in and we just have to find ways to support it so it stretches us, we're a small staff so we can't always help the end user with their devices so if they bring their own device, we have issues, they're trying to use applications that we can't support for whatever reason so it's an issue. >> Obviously all the devices that come in to the school in addition to the 60,000 Chromebooks, needing to rethink your security architecture, what were some of the technical requirements that you were looking for that made Fortinet the obvious choice? >> Performance and cost, right? As we spoke about, we have budget constraints. They have an extremely high performing firewall at a reasonable price. After we did proof of concept with five different vendors, and theirs just out performed them all. >> How about automation? A big talk in cloud is automation. How are you guys handling automation? Are you micro segmenting? >> We're transitioning to the NSX and Fortinet VMX for our server firewall. That's going to allow us, since we're short staff, if our server team stands up a new server my policies automatically take effect, just through the use of their security tags. >> That's the Fortigate product, right? The VMX? >> Yes. >> How is that working for you guys? >> We just did the proof of concept, we haven't transitioned our live systems over to it. But so far all our tests have shown that it does what we expect it to do. >> What's it like working in such a huge school district? I mean it's basically like, it's probably like a case study in campus wide networking. (laughing) >> We look at it as we're an ISP, right? Every school comes through us. We always say that we're protecting the internet from our students. We have smart kids and they-- >> They're digitally native. >> Yeah. They find ways to do things and then next thing you know I'm getting a report by a website saying, "Hey, we got students coming and throwing attacks at us." >> I was talking to a guy in higher ed about the bandwidth, they have huge bandwidth so obviously people game, including gaming centers, have all kinds of IP management issues. Fortnite's pretty hot, I'm sure how many people are playing Fortnite on your-- >> Luckily we don't allow that, right? (laughing) >> But this is what kids want to do. They're like born hackers. >> It is. >> They're curious. >> Yes. >> And it's good thing but you also want to basically make sure they're safe. >> Yes, that's pretty much what my job is. I want them to learn but at the same time, don't use it for malicious purposes. >> Yeah, its' true. One of the things I liked about public sector is cloud really makes things more efficient. >> It does. >> What are some of the things that you've seen with virtualization and with cloud kind of on the horizon, how has tech helped you guys be efficient and be lean and mean, kind of the 10X IT kind of guy thing? >> Like you said, lean and mean, right? We have a very small staff. The school district's budget is 3.2 billion dollars and IT's operating budget is 20.8 million dollars so as you can see, we really have to be cost effective and that's where virtualization comes into play. >> What's some cool tech that you like on the horizon? We hear a lot about SDWAN, sure that might be something that's cool for you guys? >> I like the VPCs, right? AWS, virtual private clouds, where you can set up your own network out there in Amazon's world, attach it to your vSphere so you can have on premise virtualization and out in the cloud, I think that. >> One of things that Pat Gelsinger talked about yesterday we hear this a lot John, is tech for good. I liked how he described it as it's essentially neutral, it's up to us, VMware, everybody else, to shape it for good. I imagine that's challenging? We talked about the Fortnite explosion, which I have only heard of but you've got so many devices, I imagine there's some amount of security gaps that are probably acceptable. In terms of reducing the maliciousness of some of the things that happen in there, tell us about some of the things that you're achieving there, leveraging such things as the automation, how is that helping you guys to enable the Chromebooks and the BYOD for good? >> Well the automation frees up our time so that we can focus on the policies, the education, the different procedures for the district. This way we're not spending time hitting the keyboard, trying to review our traffic logs. >> You had a session yesterday which you were talking, a breakout session, and you were saying that there were some folks that were so interested in what you we had to say, you had limited time in your session. Give a little bit of an idea of some of the feedback or maybe even people that might be in your similar situation that want to learn from, hey, how did you guys tackle this huge problem? >> They were from a school district in Nebraska and they wanted to see how we were handling and they just became a Fortinet customer and they wanted to see what trials and tribulations we had implementing their equipment, any lessons learned and kind of, we just had a conversation about where we see our programs going. It was nice. >> What about compliance? One of the things that's come up is managing the laws of the land. >> Luckily, I don't have much compliance, right? So we're not PCI, CIPA's pretty much, and FERPA but the only reports that we really have to provide are for CIPA, we'll have to prove that we're doing web filtering. That's where the Fortinet analyzer comes into play. I'm able to just schedule the reports through there. Shows that I'm blocking based on categorization, and we're good. >> What's the biggest thing you've learned over the past couple years in tech and IT to be effective and to do your job, what's the learnings? (laughing) >> It's going to sound weird coming from a security guy but I think it's important to take the risk, right? Accept the risk. Most organizations won't try a piece of equipment live, right? I was the exact opposite, I put every firewall that we were going to try live and pushed our entire network through it. I mean, if it breaks some things, we figured it out but I think that's the only way to get a true test of whether or not it's going to fit your needs. >> One of the things that came up yesterday, I interviewed Andy Bechtolsheim, you know, legend, been called the Rembrandt of chips, Pat Gelsinger called him that down to Arista and other companies. He talked about how NSX has the security wrapped around the application, more around NSX, that's freed up his security teams from handling a lot of the network security which kind of like has been intertwined in the past. Are you seeing that same picture emerge? >> That's why I'm transitioning to that, to get out of the traditional IP base firewall rules. It's not really what it was designed for, it was more for a transport layer. So switching over to the NSX and the BMX, now we're basing it on the application, what it's purpose is. >> What's the impact to you guys? What's that mean for your operations and your benefits for staff, what's the impact? >> It frees us up. During the winter months when we're going to have a snow storm, our server team might have to deploy some more web servers to handle the traffic that's going to come in. Before they would have to reach out to my team, to get us to modify a policy because they have new device coming online, well now they just tag it as a web server and it's automatically in the roles. >> You know I love talking about this topic. I have four kids, two of them are still in high school, two are in college, so it's so funny how they all hacked their report cards because the sandbox was out there for testing the new curriculum so they all get it and they all share it and the school sends out a note, "Well, that's not actually officially updated yet." So the kids are smart, like you said, they're going to get what a sandbox is. They don't know why it's there, they know how to get to it, so you got student elections, all kinds of things that go on in the academic world that have been digitized that are vulnerable, you have to handle that. How do you stay on top, does Fortinet help you there? Or what's the main way to keep the secure access? >> I mean that's why we're going with the VMX, NSX, the micro segmentation, it really takes the effort off of us and allows the appliances to do what they're intended to do. >> That's awesome, well it's a great case study. Any advice for practitioners out there who are in your seat in their world who might be looking at, okay I got to reset, I got to start rethinking things, I got to do more with less, I got to be lean and mean? It's kind of command and control but you got to manage it, you got a lot going on, it's the battlefield of IT is changing. >> Yes. >> So what's your advice? >> Take the risk. (laughing) Try it out. I just recently hired another engineer and on his first day I pretty much told him, "Go ahead and break something, it's alright, "we'll figure it out, we'll fix it." He has his own little lab and I'm like, "Just go mess around and figure it out." >> Play, do some R and D. >> Yeah. >> Kick the tires, yeah, it's the best way to do it. Keith, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. It's theCUBE live here in Las Vegas, stick with us for more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017 brought to you by VM ware and it's ecosystem partner. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back, we are here on the ground at the VM village live in Las Vegas at VMworld 2017. People buzzing around us here on the ground floor in the hang space, I'm John Ferrier, with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Craig Nunez, Chief VP of Marketing at Datrium, Andre Lebosi? >> Lebosi. >> VP Solutions and Alliances at Datrium. Welcome to The Cube, great to see you. >> I've been looking forward to this since I arrived in Vegas, man. (laughter) >> You guys are the hottest start-up right now on the track in Silicon Valley. A lot of people talking about you guys. Want to get this out there. Give you a minute to just talk about Datrium. You guys are a new model emerging, some real pros. David Doman everyone knows about your success with that. Frank's Loop and that went that way. You guys have a great team of XVM guys. >> Craig: Yes. >> So you're working on a really compelling unique thing but it's getting traction so give a minute to explain what Datrium is. >> In simple terms, we are a very different take on conversions. We were conversing VM ware and Linux virtualization even bare metal container hosts with your primary storage we leveraged host Flash for that with secondary storage and archived to cloud. All in one super simple system. And I mean, what a lot of our customers kind of tell us, wow you are a simpler more scalable kind of nutanix that meets rubrik. You're like this love child of nutanix and rubrik. (laughter) They just love it 'cause it's one thing that does it all, super simple. >> A lot of free love going around this generation. (laughter) You got AWS and VM ware bonding together. Google playing in here, it's like the 60's all over again. (laughter) >> Yeah, yeah, not that I remember. >> Tech B generation.6 >> Dave: Summer love 2017. Summer of love, that I'm going to use that. >> Okay love child between rubrick and nutanix. What specifically does that look like? Just clarify one from a product p6erspective. >> First of all there is absolutely zero Call it, HCI cluster administration and so you know growing is as simple as adding a server. Adding capacity, you add those independently as you need it, so it's super economic. Everything runs fast 'cause it runs right out of Flash in your server adjacent to your VM. Again no back up silo, you take care all of your protection and archiving to the cloud with the same console that you're running your business on. So it's in a nutshell what you get. >> So contrast that Andre with the classical hyper-converged infrastructure in terms of how it's scales and how it's managed. >> Yeah I know that's a good question. So if you think about hyper-convergence. It was great, it really changed the years. In many ways it simplified, you remove the no silos that san was creating complexity around scalability or configuring rate, lunz, zoning. All the things that you'd specialize as skill to manage, right? And as you know, as you move along in your journey in the data center, you end up with multiple different vendors. They have different skill sets to manage. So HCI really changed the game in that way. But it also created different challenges for the data center. And we were lucky enough that HCI's only starting, right? This whole thing about converging is only getting started. So one of the first problems that we are dress is being able to scale performance, independent of capacity. So we've hyper-converged for the most part. You know, if you might want more capacity you need to have a computer, if you need a computer, you need more capacity. So we enable customers to go in different directions as needed. We also enable customers to bring their own existing environment into the solution. With HCI generally speaking, you need to buy that specific appliance or that specific HCL and sort of like pour everything in that specific solution. Which kind of becomes a silo as well. So we enable companies to leverage the existing environments and get the same benefits that you'd get from a performance perspective that HCI is bringing. Data locality and relook or read IO's with ...... But at the same time, with your existing hardware. And allows you to use whatever you want. There are other benefits on the resilience side as well. A primary and secondary bad cops so all the primary data, leaves in the nodes in the servers but we have the copy of the data or the back up in what we call a data cluster. So, what that really makes is the solution is stateless on the server side. I don't know if you remember, it's the same timeframe. All the servers were stateless. If a server went down, you would just, no move. You restart the VM's or the workload in a different server. And it's great. With hyper-convergence, now it's always stateful. All the data is actually living on the server. So when you lose a server, you actually putting data at risk and to be cost effective with ACI, you need to do what they call IFTT1 or replication factor two which means I have two copies of the data across the cluster. But it's not very uncommon to have avoid this failure and the read error and then you down to back up and have to restore. You want to rely on the backup as your insurance-- >> Dave: Not as your-- >> Not as then we use it for a day today. >> Yeah. >> So there are a number of different things that we solved that we believe we solved well. That hyper-convergence was not able to solve in its first instance. But you know what? That said, hyper-convergence started this whole journey to convergence is starting. I think I heard Chad Sakeet saying that, there's 440,000 VMX out there. Those are all coming for renewal, no refresh cycles. And now customers that have been able to see what HCI was doing the past three, four years. What worked and what was not working well and look at the use solutions and see how we are addressing those changes. >> Well what about the data protection side. You guys obviously have with Brian and Hugo, a lot of experience as a target. >> Voiceover: Yeah, yeah. >> But you're talking about more. You're talking about a software platform. >> Yeah from a data protection perspective, first of all you've got a platform that's totally unified with your primary storage environment. You then have this wonderful grandularity at VM and V dis level, container level. Great scale, I mean again the chops that the founders bring to that. But one of the things that you know, it think is really powerful. other platforms will talk about, hey we can snap VM's. We can replicate but then they will store them on expensive Flash in those nods and we have a separate device that is cost optimized, globally dedupped compressed on very low cost capacity. That is ideal for all that capacity you need to keep to protect the business. And so bringing that together with the great performance of Flash, this thing really does it all end to end And so it's a different way to think about it. And when we go in, we typically solving problems on the compute primary storage side. >> Voiceover: Uh huh. >> But when we then describe what we do from a backup or archived to cloud perspective, the lights go on and oh my gosh, I simply don't need-- >> John: I got a two for one here. >> Yes exactly. >> Your file system basically you're saying eliminates the need for any separate backup software, is that right, or? >> We do, I would say 80 or 90% of what most people need because the convenience of having your virtualization engineer do it all is so good. Now what I would say is, there are a lot of requirements in the world that we absolutely are going to turn to our pals at Zerto for and Cool Replication. Our friends at Veem, Rubert Cohesidi. All of those guys, we'll team up with because if you want you know back up off platform you know we're daydream to daydream. >> Voiceover: Yeah, right. >> We're not, going to sugar coat that. But there are specific requirements that those guys do that you need. We're going to give them a ring and bring them in. But what we're finding is, most of our customers are looking for ways to just do it all in one spot with a guy running the business, so. >> So I want to back up for a second. We had Brian's founder on Monday and this is an interesting story. I want you to take a minute to describe why you're doing this, because a lot of people, you come in, okay primary storage compute and then that's how I used to operate and then the next guy comes in with his solution. You guys have an interesting perspective with the data domain backup side. Why are guys taking this approach? Explain the uniqueness, why you guys are engaging in this way and what does it mean for the person the customer on the other end. >> Craig: Yeah. >> Is it all in one, is it optional? I mean, the approach is unique 'cause of the founder. >> Craig: Yeah. Just take a minute to explain that. >> Here's the world, the world is hard and getting harder, right? I mean it's just a morning, noon, night and weekend job to keep businesses running with the pace of this economy we're in, right? >> John: The economists are pulling their hair out, basically. >> And the, exactly and so the winner in the market is the one who can bring the simplest approach that gets the job done. And the problem is the bolt on, peace meal solution's that folks are tasked to live with, if you sit down and just draw all of the software stacks and consoles, then you need to put together to go from your virtualization environment. Flash, your backup environment. Replication DR, security, you want to blow your brains out. (laughter) >> John: Hang from the raftors. And again guys, they're trying to get the job done. They're forced to move fast and they're tight on budget. And so if you Ycan bring them the simplest possible solution that solves the problem today and future proofs it going forward, that's what folks are looking for. And there's a lot of nuanced edges to a lot of different solutions out there but at the end of the day show me simple and that wins. >> Alright so, now give me the reactions. That's important to buyers to understand what the (mumbles) is, thank you very much for that. Now the reactions. So you walk into that buyer and say, hey don't blow your brains out. Don't hang from the rafters, we got you here. This is beautiful for you, simple works. Cleans those lines up. What are they reacting to? Are they skeptical, they say you're full of you know what? Do they test the hell out of it? What goes on? >> When you walk them through it, and I'm going to let you take this too. You've talked to a ton of people already. When you walk them through it, they totally get it. Where should Flash be? Right next to the VM on the host. Makes perfect since, it's cheaper there, right? How should you scale, well stateless host. You know, servers that aren't storage nods. You know you lose two and you cluster down. That's not a great situation. >> Voiceover: No problem. >> Voiceover: Yeah. (laughter) >> And so stateless hosts. Any number of servers can fail, you're still going. People love that, they get that. Bringing all the backup capability into that one console. If you've got it, people get it and by the way, a quick demo is kind of icing on the cake. But I mean-- >> Share some color. >> Yeah, no, I've been traveling the last few weeks and talking to customers. I joined Datrium four months ago, and customers understand the proposition and they like. They like that we bring performers. They like that we bring resiliency. They like that it re-utilize the existing investments in the data center. And they like that we do primary and secondary backup. The customers that we're talking to they get it and they understand it and they want to do POC's and move on. >> So you're talking about a lot of VMX's out there. 400,00 plus, obviously that's been a target for hyper-connected verge. Clearly a target for your guys.6 But you're also talking about stateless. And when you think about these emerging cloud native apps, these stateless apps, certain IOT apps that are being developed. Do you see the emergence within your customer base yet? Of those type of emerging applications that aren't staple. >> Absolutely, I mean well first of all. If you look at the public cloud world. Architecturally what those guys have had to do to kind of get latency low and scalable, they think EC2 and S3, you know think of how Google cloud is architected with Kolassas. They have separated that persistent capacity from what's going on, effectively on the nods, the compute nods. And they've done that for exactly for that reason. To scale, low latency workloads as you need as you grow on demand. >> And to make that infrastructure invisible to the developer. >> Absolutely, absolutely and so the approach we're taking is fundamentally to give customers in kind of this hybrid world a way to bring that kind of infrastructure with the simplicity, scale, performance you need and kind of on prim. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And then it's a wonderful map when you take that in hybrid way to public cloud, 'cause you can very easily map that capacity layer to capacity layer, compute to compute. Instead of this kind of crazy dance you have to do with traditional infrastructure. >> That was actually part of it. You look at the VM ware and nowadays there's keynotes and embracing double ups and container. It's all over the place now. Now we're counting the days for how many store engineers or infrastructural engineers who actually need the data center moving forward. But the way system that we said was the architecture while in mind just support very medal containers and provide all of the performance benefits. And really finding a way to run containers and native apps, called native apps across data centers, across clouds. And we're moving in that direction more and more to support (mumbles) integrated and a few other architectural solutions. >> So I want to follow up with that. I mean, everybody talks about cloud. The show it's cloud, cloud, cloud and obviously the big wave. But the, you know this well John being all the time you spent with AWS, Reinvent and Jassie and so forth. The (mumbles) cloud is not VM's. >> Voiceover: Right. >> Right, and so is the conversation beginning to change? And your customer base around more of a developer mindset and what does that conversation look like. >> For the customers that I've been talking they still are very VM centric. There are some discussions about containers and developing, developers embracing containers. Off brand on the &cloud and on premise but they know VM is still pervasive in the prize. >> Dave: So that's where the money is? (laughter) >> That's where the money is, at least for the large majority of -- >> I'm sorry now on premise. And so cloud is just a different vernacular true but-- >> But the reality is though folks have that've got a VM environment. A lot of people we talk to are they have mason container development work going on. >> John: Right. >> And the challenge is though that those kinds of customers wind up having to silo out the infrastructure that supports those. You just don't have the bridge. >> Dave: And with you, you're saying-- >> And the point is yeah, you can have your ESX, VM's, your Linux VM's, your containers running in those VM's or you can have those containers running bare metal. >> Yeah. >> It's all one shared pool of resources like it ought to be. >> And to some extent when I talk to customers, what I figured out is they all starting using containers running VM's. But as soon as they figured out their frame of work, their management, their orchestration, they wanted to move to bare metal 'cause they wanted to have is that additional 10, 15% performance that they get running bare metal. And that I see constantly and talking to Docker and other companies, that's what they see on their customer base as well. >> Voiceover: Yeah. >> So you know where all that is going, I don't believe everything is going to be running in the cloud. I don't believe everything is going to be running in the data center. There'll be a mix of everything. You talk to two customers, they have different hyper-visors, they had red hat visualization, they have VM ware, they have hyperV. And large customers are embracing everything to some extent. >> Yeah, and you want to set it up in a way that you know, you set your policies and you don't care where it is, right? You set it up, and economical way that is lined with you service levels and who care if it's you know, a different prim site, the cloud, which cloud it doesn't matter. It's all your cloud, one cloud, right? >> Guys, thanks for coming on. Andre Leibovici. >> Andre: Yeah. (laughter) >> Got it right? >> Andre: You, got it. >> Greg Nunez, good friend congratulations on the start-up. >> Craig: Thanks. >> Quick, I want to give you the last word here. Talk about the company's status, what you guys are hiring for, where you guys are in the start-up journey. I see great validation with multiple rounds of funding. How many employees? How much revenue are you doing? Tell me the product cost? (laughter) Share! >> We are growing rapidly, 130% quarter of a quarter. We are hiring literally across the board. We can't hire fast enough to keep up with the demand. And for us the number one goal is just getting in front of customers looking for a way out from personal infrastructure. >> John: Sales people, field organization, channel? >> Channel we have a wonderful channel network and absolutely hiring guys to partner up with our channel. Both sales and marketing and yeah we just-- >> Alright, I'll put you guys on the spot because we love big fan of start-ups, certainly ones that have great pedigree in product that's unique again like Utonics in the early days, no one understood it, founders had stayed on course. You guys are on a similar track where it doesn't look like everything else but it's game changing so. Each of you take a minute to explain to the buyer, a potential customer out there, why they should work with Datrium and what you can bring to the table. We'll start with you. >> So first of all, if you are on a ray based infrastructure now, you're dealing with your performance constraints, managing lines, you've looked at a modern approach to convergence and it just doesn't scale, it's not right for your infrastructure, and enterpriser service provider has to take a look at this new approach to convergence we've got. It will change your world, literally. Your business and your personal world. And if you don't take a look, you're missing out. It is different from hyper-convergence. But fundamentally brings your that wonderful X86 based infrastructure that the whole planet is moving to. Got to take a look. >> Andre you can't say the same thing he's said but in your own words what would you say to the potential buyers that are out there. Potential customers, why should they look at you guys. >> Sure, I'll let you all in on the HCI in the simplicatiion of the data center. You know HCI was great simplying data center, removing a lot of the complexity. We do the same things. We do it in a different way. We remove all the nobs and buttons that you have in the data center as an example our infrastructure doesn't require any tuning on performance. So enable this duplication, enable compression, disable original recording. All those features that people, that when you're managing hundreds or thousands of yams, there's no way you know what needs to be enabled and disabled for each one of your workloads. So we lack from simplicity and that's where I met my pace CI peg, it's simplicity. And we do the same thing but we now solve different challenges that HCI also brought into the market. >> Datrium start-up, hot start-up in Silicon Valley and all around the world. Congratulations. It's The Cube coverage here at VMWorld 2017. I'm John Ferrier and Dave Vellante. We'll be be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)