[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Stu minimun with wiki bond and welcome to another wiki bond the cube digital community event this one sponsored by Dell EMC of course it's a big week in the industry VMware is having their big European show in Barcelona VMworld and while we are not there in person we have some news that we want to dig into with Dell EMC so like all of our digital community events we're gonna have about 25 minutes of video and then afterwards we're going to have a crowd chat we're gonna have a panel where you have the opportunity to dig in ask your questions give us your viewpoint and talk about everything that's going on so it's important to pay attention think about what questions participate in the crowd chat afterward and thanks so much for joining us talk about the business issues of the day to help us frame this discussion I'm happy to welcome back to the program Pete manka who's the senior vice president with converged infrastructure and solutions engineering at Dell MC Pete great to see you great see you Tuesday all right so Pete converged infrastructures come a long way you and I have a lot of history in this space you know more than a decade now we've been in here so but from a customer standpoint you know this has matured a lot I wouldn't want you to start out give us the customer perspective you know what was convergent restrictor designed to do how is it living up to that and you know what's the state of it today sure well as you said we've got a long history in this and ten years ago we started this business to really simplify IT operations for our customers and we tried to remove the silos between storage compute and networking management and we're doing that we created this market called converged infrastructure by converging the management of those three siloed operations in doing so we added a tremendous amount of value for our customers fast forward now over the years earlier this year we come up with a product that the BX block 1000 that allows us to scale considerably greater within a single environment adding more value to our customer we're very customer driven at Dell EMC as you know and so we talked to our customers again and said what else do you want what else do you want and they pushed us for more automation in more monitoring support for the product and that's really what we're here to talk about today is how we get from simplifying IT operations for customers through allowing scale architectures to eventually automating the customers environment for them yeah when you talk about simplification that the the industry has really been really galvanized gotten really excited at hyper-converged infrastructure and I hear simple that's kind of what HCI is gonna do Dell of course has both converged and hyper-converged we've talked a lot as to how they both fit maybe now you know give give us the update as to you know the relevance of CI today while HCI is still continuing to grow really that sure yeah HDI is a hot market obviously and it is growing fast and customers should be excited about HDI because it's a great solution right it enables the customers get an application up and running very quickly and it's great for scale out architectures you want to add symmetric type nodes and skill oh you're at your application your architecture it's great for that but like all architectures it doesn't fit all solutions or all problems for the customers and there's a place for CI and there's a place for HCI the end you think about HCI versus CI CI is great for asymmetrically scaling architectures you want to have more storage more networking more memory inside your servers more compute you can do that through a CI portfolio and for customers who need that asymmetrical scaling for customers who need high availability very efficient scale type storage environments scale of compute environments you can do that through a CI platform much more efficiently than you can through other platforms in the market alright Pete you mentioned that there was announcement earlier in the year that the VX block 1000 so for those that don't have hauled of history like us that followed from the V block of the BX block and now the 1000 helped remind us what was different about this from things in the past sure when we first started out in the conversion structure business we had blocks that were specific to storage configurations if you wanted a unity or v-max you had to buy a specific model of our of our VX block product line that's great but we realize customers and customers told us they wanted a mix environment they wanted to have a multi-use environment in their block so we created the VX block 1000 announced in February and it allows you to mix and match your storage sand bar along with your compute environment and scales out at a much greater capacity than we could through the original block design so and we're providing the customer a much larger footprint managed by within a single block but also a choice allowing them to have multiple application configurations within the same block all right so people now what what's Del DMC doing to bring converged infrastructure for it even more how are we expanding you know what it's gonna do for customers and the problems they're looking to solve yeah right so again we went back to our customers that said ok tell us your experience with block you tell us what you like tell us what you don't like and they love the product it's been a very successful product they said we want more automation we want more monitoring you want the ability to see what's happening as well as automate workflows and procedures that we have to do to get our workloads up and running quicker and more automated fashion so what we're gonna talk about today is how we're going to do that we're going to provide more automation capabilities and the ability to monitor through our VM work you realize suite toolset alright great Pete I appreciate you helping kind of lay the groundwork we're gonna be back in a quick second one of your peers from Dell MC to dig into the product so stay with us we'll be back right after this this quick break [Music] vx block system 1000 simplifies IT accelerates the pace of innovation and reduces operating costs storage compute networking and virtualization components are all unified in a single system transforming operations and delivering better business outcomes faster this is achieved by five foundational pillars that set Dell EMC apart as the leading data center solutions provider each VX blocks system 1000 is engineered manufactured managed sustained and supported as one welcome back joining me to dig into this announcement is Dan Mita who's the vice president of converged infrastructure engineering at Dell EMC damn thanks for joining us thanks for having me all right so Pete kind of teased out of what we're doing here talked about what we've been building on for the last ten years in the converging infrastructure industry please elaborate you know what this is and shuttle from there yeah absolutely so to your point we know customers have been buying VX blocks and V blocks for the last ten years and there's lots of good reasons behind all of that we also know that customers been asking us for better monitoring better reporting and more orchestration capabilities we this announcement we think we're meeting those challenges so there's three things that I'd like to talk about one is we're gonna help customers raise the bar around awareness of what's going on within the environment we'll do that through health checks and dashboards performance dashboarding real-time alerting for the first time the second thing we'll talk about is we talked about a different level of automation than we've ever had before when it comes to orchestration we'll be introducing the ability to set up the services necessary to run orchestrated workflows and then our intention is to bring to market those engineered workflows and lastly would be you know analytics deeper analytics for customers that want to go even further into why their system is drifted from a known good state we're gonna give them the capabilities to see that great so Dan I think back from the earliest days that you know Vblock was always architected to you know transform the way operations are done what really differentiates this you know how important is there are things like the analytics of you're doing yeah sure so you're right today our customers use element managers to do most of that what this tool will allow them to do is kind of abstract a lot of the complexity folk in the element managers themselves if you think about an example where our customer wants to provision an ESXi host add it to a cluster and you say a Power Max bulan we know there's about a dozen manual steps to do that it cuts across four element managers and that also means you're going to be touching your administrators across compute network storage and virtualization with this single tool that will guide you first by checking the environment taking you through an orderly set of questions or inputs and then lastly validating the environment we know that we're going to help customers eliminate any undue harm that might do to an environment but we're also gonna save them time effort and money by getting it done quicker ok so Dan it sounds like there's a new suite of software explain it exactly what is it and how do all these pieces fit together yeah so there's three pieces in this week foundational is what we call the X blocks central so the X Box central is going to go out mandatory with all new VX blocks we're also going to make it available to our customers running older 300 500 and 700 family the X blocks and we'll provide a migration path for customers that are using vision today that's the tool that's going to allow them to do that performance health and RCM compliance dashboarding as well as do metrics based in real-time alerting one loved one step up from that one layer up from that is what we call the X block orchestration so this this product is being built underneath the V realize operations or excuse me orchestration tool and it's essentially like I said it's going to provide those all of those tools for setting up the services to run the workflows and then we'll provide those workflows so that example that I gave just a minute ago about provisioning that host will have a workflow from that right out of the gate ok so you mentioned the the vir ops thing you know VMware has always been a you know a very important piece of the whole stack there's yeah be in front of everything in the product line while you're announcing it this week at you know vmworld your and you know explain a little bit more that integration between the VMware pieces so you mentioned V Rob's and that's the third piece in this suite right so that is that it's going to provide us the dashboarding to provide all of that detailed analytics so if you think about it we're using V realized opera orchestra ssin as a workflow engine we're using V ROPS for that intelligent insight into the operations as a framework for the things that we're doing but essentially what we've given customers at this point is a framework for a cloud management or a cloud operations model sitting on top of a converged infrastructure alright Dan thanks for explaining all that now we're gonna throw it over to a customer to really hear what they think of this announcement when we started to talk about the needs to innovate within business technology and move forward with the business we knew we had to advance our technology offerings standardize our data center and help bring all our technology to current date vs block allowed us to do that in one purchase and also allowed us to basically bring our entire data center ten years forward with one step the benefits we've seen from the X block from my side of the house I now have that sleep at night capability because I have full high availability I have industry-leading technology the performance is there their applications are now more available we now have a platform where we can modernize our entire system we can add blades we can add storage we can add networking as we need it out of the box all knowing that it's been engineered and architected to work together it has literally set it and forget it for us we go about our daily business and now we've transitioned from a maintenance time set and a maintenance mindset to now we can participate in meetings to help drive business innovation help drive digital transformation within our company and really be that true IT strategic partner the business is looking for with the implementation of VX blocks central upcoming we should be able to get a better idea of what's going on in our VX block through one dashboard we're very sensitive about the number of dashboards we try to view do the whole death bi dashboard situation especially for a small team we really believe yes block central is going to be beneficial for us to have a quick health overview of our entire unit encompassing all components as we discussed additional features coming out for the VX block one of the more interesting ones for me was to see the integration of VMware's be realized product into the VX block most importantly focused around orchestration and analytics that's something that we don't do a lot of right now but as our company continues to grow and we continue to expand our VX block into additional offerings I can see that being beneficial especially for our small team being able to you know or orchestrate and automate kind of daily tasks that we do now may benefit our team in the future and then the analytics piece as we continue to be a almost a service provider for our business partners having that analytic information available to us could be very beneficial from a from a cost revenue standpoint for us to show kind of the return on investment for our company one of the things that we kind of look forward to that the opportunities of VX block is going to give us given the feature set that's coming out is the ability to use automation for some of our daily business tasks that maybe is something as simple as moving a virtual machine from one host to another that seems pretty mundane at this point but as our company grows and workloads get more complex having the automation availability to be able to do that and have VMware do that on its own it's going to benefit our team always love hearing from customers I'm Peter Burris here in our Palo Alto studios let's also hear from a very important partner in this overall announcement that's VMware we've got OJ Singh who's a senior vice president and general manager the cloud management business unit at VMware with us AJ welcome to the cube thank you Peter of that to be here so Archie we've been hearing a lot of great new technology about you know converged infrastructure and how you do better automation and how you do better you know discovery and whatnot associated with it but these technologies been for around for a while and VMware has been a crucial partner of this journey for quite some time give us a little bit about the history absolutely you know this is a as you rightly pointed a long history with a VMware and Dell EMC goes back over a decade ago I started with Vblock in those days and we literally defined the converged infrastructure market at that point and and this partnership has continued to evolve and so this announcement we are really excited to be here you know to continue to announce our joint solutions to our common customers you know in this whole VX blocks 1000 along with the vitalife suite well the VX block Hardware foundation with VMware software foundation was one of the first places where customers actually started building what we now call private clouds tell us a little bit about how that technology came together and how that vision came together and how your customers have been responding to this combinations partnership for a while absolutely if you think about it from a customer standpoint they love the fact that it is a pre engineered solution and you know they have to put less effort and doing the lifecycle management maintenance of the solution so as part of kind of making it a pre engineered solution what we've done is you know made it such that the integrations between the VX block and visualize are out of the box so we put some critical components you know are of course the vSphere and NSX in there but in addition to that for the virial I set we have vro Orchestrator already built in there we have a special management pack that gets into detail dashboards that are related to the hardware associated with the X block also pre integrated in there so that if via ops runs in there it'll automatically kind of figure that as a dashboard out and can configure them and then finally we have VRA or you know an industry-leading automation platform that allows you self-service and literally build a private cloud on top of the X block so the VX central software has been letting or is now allows a customer to make better use of VMware yes similarly some of the new advancements that you're making within VMware are going to help VX bar customers get more out of their devices as well tell us a little bit about some of the recent announcements you've made that are very complimentary absolutely you know to some extent you know the V realized journey has been a journey about at the end of the day in enabling our customers to set up a self-managed private cloud and do large extent we're heading in the direction of what we say self-driving operations using machine learning technologies and all of that so in that kind of direction in that vision if you may we've actually now released with a great integration between VRA and via ops that for the first time closes the loop between the two solutions so that you can start to do intelligent workload placement right depending upon if I'm trying to optimize for cost I'm trying to optimize for tier of service you know whether it's bronze silver gold tier service I'm trying to optimize for software license management you know Oracle license is only going on Oracle tier etcetera this closed-loop with policy ensures you do that and that's the first step in this direction of self-driving that's a very important direction because customers are gonna try to build more complex systems based on or support more complex applications without at the same time seeing that complexity show up in the administration side now that leaves the last question I have because ultimately the two of you are working to make together to make customers successful so tell us a little bit about how your track record your history and your direction of working together in support in service to customers is going and where you think it's gonna go absolutely so we continue to work very closely in partnership and as partners we are committed to support our customers through thick and thin you know to make sure that they can have these engineered pre-engineered clouds set up so they can get the benefits of these clouds lower cost to serve you know in terms of highly efficient workload the fact as much as possible in the you know let me tell about of hardware that's available and at the same time the automation and the self-service that enables the agility so the development teams can build software quickly I think provision software really fast so those are the kind of benefits lower cost agility but in partnership jointly serving our customers RJ Singh senior vice president general manager of the VMware cloud management business unit thanks again for beyond the cube thank you Peter glad to be here Stu back to you all right thanks Peter for sharing that VMware perspective to help understand a little bit more some of the customer implications we're back with Dan and Pete Pete we talked about there's new management there's a few different software packages is this exclusively for the new generation of VX block 1000 or you know who the existing customers will be able to use this sure I mean obviously advanced management features are important to all of our customers so we specifically designed the Xbox central to run both on existing VX block customers and of course in our new VX blocks that were a lot of the factor as well alright so Dan we've talked about the progress we've made the the you know great maturation in these solutions set what's next what customers expect and what should we be looking for from Dellums in the future so this the thing with us is always data center operations simplification if you think about it what we're introducing today is all about simplifying and provisioning and management of the existing system within the system we've heard also from customers what they look for us next to do is to try to improve the upgrade process simplify that as well so we've already got some development efforts working on that we'll be excited and news for later this year or early next year janna follow-up went dance that we always talked to our customers about what they're looking for in addition to more automation and we're monitoring support they want to go to consume their resources in a more agile environment cloud like a farm and even on-premises so that combined with the be realized suite of products we're going to be providing more cloud live experience to our customers for their yeah walks in the future alright Pete and Dan thank you so much for sharing this news we're gonna now turn it over to the community so you've heard about the announcement we've been talking for quite a long time at wiki bond about how automation and tools are gonna hopefully help make your job easier so want you to dig in ask the questions what do you like what do you want to see more of and so everybody let's growl chat great

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you my Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeaamOn. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman, Duncan Epping is here, Chief Technologist, Storage and Availability at VMWare and the world's number one blogger in virtualization, Yellow Bricks, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much coming to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> No problem, my pleasure, it's been a while. I actually hoped to be on the show probably six, seven, eight years ago, I don't know how long it is, but I've watched many episodes. So it's great to be part of it. >> Well great, Duncan one of the biggest problems is you're so busy, every year at VM World you were totally booked up, so no thanks so much we're so glad we could do this. >> So Stu and I remember the peer insight we did many many years ago back when we had Boonyon on recently, and he was talking about when VMWare sort of created virtualization, it pushed the bottle neck around. It created a lot of stress on the storage systems. And WMWare for years dealt with that through API integration and the like and very well sort of covered. But I wonder if you could take us through your perspectives of the journey of storage at VMWare and generally, or specifically, and virtualization generally. >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think everyone that has been part of the community has faced all of the different challenges from a storage perspective. I mean, Stu, you now what kind of problem EMC had when VMWare first started doing virtualization. And I think the key reasons for these were fairly straightforward. When we started virtualization and we started leveraging shared storage systems, those shared storage systems were never designed with virtualization in the back of their minds. They were designed for physical workloads, maybe one or two machines connected to it, you know in larger volume it may be 10 or 15, but not 10 or 15 physical hosts with hundred of virtual machines. So we started noticing is that from a performance perspective systems were lagging, we were doing all sorts of things to the storage systems that they weren't expecting, virtual machine snapshots. They were seeing IO patterns that they had never seen before. Instead of sequential IO we had a lot of random IOs so we had to start doing different things from a storage perspective so as you said, we started with APIs, we had the vSPhere APIs for IO filtering, we have the Divi APIs, the array integration, so that we can offload some of the functionality, but of course on top of that what we started doing within VMWare is we started exploring what we could do smarter from a storage point from our stance. So not just looking at how we can help the ecosystem, but also what we can do from our perspective, so there were two main efforts over the past couple of years. The first one is virtual volumes. It has taken a while before the adoption ramped up. I think part of that is mainly because a lot of our customer base was still on vSphere 5.5. Now that we're starting to see broader adoption of vSphere 6.0 and actually 6.5 and 6.7, we're starting to see the adoption of stuff like virtual volumes go up as well. That is also due to the fact that our partners like Pure Storage, Nimble, HP with 3PAR has been pushing or have been pushing VVols tremendously. So they've done a great job, and we're starting to see a lot of customers adopting VVols, and that way we're getting around some of the limitations that we have from a traditional storage perspective. >> Explain that, what are customers telling you about the benefits that they're getting out of VVols and VVol and VVol adoption? >> Well, there's two main things. It kind of depends on what kind of problems you're facing, but a lot of customers come to us with management issues and scalability issues. From a scalability perspective we have larger customers that literally have thousands of volumes. If you look at an E6 cluster today you're limited in terms of the numbers of volumes you can connect to a cluster. So that's one thing. As soon as they start moving to VVols now they're not managing those individual volumes anymore but they're managing the storage system as a whole, and they start creating policies, and that's where the management aspect comes into play. So it becomes a lot easier to manage, because instead of having thousands of volumes to select from, they don't normally have to look at a spreadsheet, for instance, to figure out where to place a virtual machine, now they simply make a policy and the policy engine will figure out where to place that virtual machine. >> Dave: It sounds like cloud. >> It actually is, you know, the cloud version of, cloudified version of storage I would say. But it brings a lot of benefits. And the funny thing is that we've been talking about policies and policy engines for a long time, even in the cloud, but try to come up with one cloud that actually has a decent policy engine. Hardly anyone has that today. From a storage perspective I think storage policy based management framework that VMWare has is quite unique. Well now we're starting to see that popping up in other areas, and that's the strange thing about it. >> Always back to the software mainframe Stu. >> Yeah, and Duncan one of the things we've really seen, a transition for, it took us about a decade to try and fix storage in a virtualized environment, and today most things are built either understanding virtualization, or at least that's part of the puzzle, and then of course VVols led us into was the ability for vSANs. Help us kind of transition that threshold as to how that's just kind of a given underneath for vSAN and other solutions like it. >> Yeah, if you look at vSAN it has been around for a while. The beta was in 2013, as you guys know. We have a large adoption, at least we saw a large increase over the last couple of years, I would say the last two years. You guys have spoken with Yangbing before, so you know about the business side of vSAN, I'm not going to cover that, but if you look at it from a technology perspective we stared developing this 2008, 2009, that's when we started thinking about what we could do different from a storage perspective. There were already some companies doing something in the hyperverge space and we figured we could do something significantly different than they were doing. They had a storage solution that sat on top of the hypervisor, we own the hypervisor so we can create something that sits within the hypervisor, and that's when we started looking at including these different technologies, so we started looking in how can we introduce things like deduplication and compression? What can we do with for ROBO solutions? Can we do something like stretch clustering in an easy way? There are a lot of stretch cluster solutions out there, but if you look at a stretch clustering solution today it typically takes weeks to implement that. If you look at something like vSAN, it was our aim to actually to be able to deploy something like that from a storage perspective within hours instead of weeks, right? And we've been able to achieve that, and it has been a huge undertaking, but I think it's fair to say that it has been rather successful. >> All right, Duncan, help connect the dots to where we are here at VeeamOn. It's funny, I think Veeam started out heavily in virtualization, still heavily involved in virtualization, they've got a v in the beginning of their name. When I hear the keynote this morning, a lot of hyper, reminded me of before we had, before hyperconverge fully took over, VMWare tried to call it a hypervisor converge system around VMWare, so talk to us a little bit about data protection, the Veeam relationship and how that fits into things like vSAN and vSphere? >> Yeah I think, I talk to a lot of customers as a Chief Technologist, it's part of my role to talk to customers and have discussions about what's on top of their mind. Data protection is always one of those things that comes up. I would say it's always in the top three. Whenever you talk to a CIO, a CTO, protection of the data, availability of data, resiliency, reliability, it's fairly important. Veeam of course, for us, is a great partner. Primarily because of the simplicity of the features and the products that they offer. Whenever I talk to a customer and they explain how difficult it is to manage their backup and recovery solutions I always point them to a partner like Veeam simply because it's going to make their life a lot easier if you ask me. And I can see that Veeam is slowly transitioning. As you mentioned, the v is in front of the name. The v is in front of our name as well, but we know that it's not, the whole world isn't just VMWare and the whole world isn't just virtual. There's a lot of other different solutions out there, and actually Veeam's looking at other revenue streams as well. I would argue, though, if you're looking at something like the edge space which I think that more or less exploring at looking at things like IoT, there's going to be some form of virtualization within that, whether that's VMWare based or another solution of course is going to be the question. That is something that we'll need to figure out in the upcoming years, but I think there's a big opportunity out there. If you ask me, the keynote was really interesting. I kind of missed the end of details. I'm hoping that the closing keynote is going to give some more details on what they will be doing in the IoT space, how they see their solution evolving from that point of view because it's a market that's still being developed, but that's definitely going to be interesting. >> So Duncan it's interesting to hear you say that when you talk to customers data protection is in the top three, even amongst CIOs. It used to not be that way. Data protection was always a bolt on, it was an afterthought, it was kind of one size fits all. What's changed? >> Well I think the importance of the data has changed. If you look over the last 10 years whenever you talk to any company out there that has lost any significant amount of data they understand what the value was of the data that they were hosting. I think the big difference over the past 10 years is in the past we had applications like email, maybe some file services and that's it. But now everything revolves around applications, and that's also the shift that I'm seeing in the industry. Also from an IT perspective, right? In the past, over the past decade I think everyone has been focused on the infrastructure layer. If you look at something like VBlock, very much infrastructure focused. If you look at something like hyperconverged solutions, very much infrastructure focused. But now whenever we talk to customers, customers are more and more interested in what we can do for the application layer. What kind of benefits do we have for Exchange, for Oracle, for SAP, you name it? I think that's also a big change that's happening in the industry right now. One of the things from a technical perspective, and there may be others, but when VMWare really became prominent it was wonderful but we were reducing the number of physical resources, and the one workload that took a lot of physical resources was backup, and then sort of Veeam swept in and took advantage of that sea change. What's the technical constraint now when you think about things like multi cloud and SaaS and IoT, data's much more distributed, it's out of the control necessarily of a single platform. So from a technicals perspective, what's the big challenge and sort of the gate to architectures today? >> Well as you said, the distribution of data is the big challenge as it stands right now from a technical perspective. I think the biggest challenge that most of the players in this space, and not just Veeam, some other players as well, will have is trying to figure out how to control and manage their data. Other platforms are facing similar challenges. And no one really has solved this problem yet. We're starting to see some players in this space that have solutions that sit out in Azure, that sit out in Google Cloud, but it's a very challenging solution, and I think if you ask me, and this is something that I've said internally as well, the company that is capable of managing and owning the data is the company that's probably going to be most successful in the cloud war that's now happening. I think that's the most critical aspect. Workloads can move around, but data is very difficult to move around and own as well. >> Duncan one of the discontinuities we see in the marketplace that you mentioned earlier, wondering if you can talk to, in the enterprise in the data center, how do we get them to get to that next version? Comfortable with it, it's stable, it works. I look at the cloud, I'm running Microsoft Azure or AWS I'm running the version that they want. How do we help close that gap? Because from a security standpoint, from a features standpoint, we need to move there, but you know it seems to be just one of the greatest disconnects we see between kind of my data center and somebody else's cloud. >> That is a great question. I think we had a lot of challenges in the past. I think it's fair to say with vSphere 5.0 it was a great release, 5.5 among great releases. But the challenges that we have from an upgrade perspective was typically V centered and all of the components connected to it. It's not just the vSphere platform but if you look at the vSphere platform, the challenges that we had were all of the components integrating with it, whether that's something like vROps, VRA's, or VREalize Automation, but it could also be something like Evermar or maybe Veeam. So there were so many different components we had to take into account. So what we started doing within VMWare was simplifying the architecture from a vSPhere perspective. If you look at vSAN for instance, it used to be a solution where we had multiple functions spread out across different virtual machines. I'm now trying to bring that back into a single virtual machine again. Actually dumbing it down, making it easier to upgrade. So that is something that is actively happening within VMWare, and it is something that we started with 6.0, and that's also the reason why we see the adoption from 6.0 to 6.5 and 6.5 to 6.7, is at a must faster pace than 5, in the 5 code stream, so 5 to 5.1, for instance, took a lot longer for a lot of customers or 5.1 to 6.0, took extremely long for a lot of customers. It's the key reason is complexity from our infrastructure stand. While we're changing that, we're evolving that in the upcoming years. >> Duncan it's the last question here, but as the technologist, things that you're looking at that are exciting to you, that you know, get your juices flowing? >> Yeah, that's an interesting one because it's something that I've been thinking about recently. I've been doing vSphere for the last, well wasn't even called vSphere back then, but I've been doing this for the last 12 years, virtualization. Thirteen years maybe something like that. At least as a consultant and then as a technologist and technical marketing, but recently I'm starting to look more and more at the edge space. For computing, IoT, I think that's a really interesting space, especially because there isn't really significant market. Well, there is a significant market out there, but there isn't really one player out there that really stands out. No one has really figured out what customers would like to do with it and how our customers are going to use it. So the edge computing space and IoT's a really interesting thing and especially because of the distributed aspect is one of the things that I've been always been passionate about, vSphere clusters, which is a distributed mechanism. So distributed computing is definitely something that has my interest. >> All right if you care about virtualization, VMWare, follow the yellow brick road, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat tech music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with my co-host Justin Warren, And we're at vmworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE worldwide leader in tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Juan Gaviria who's with ADP, and he's the senior director of technical systems engineering. Juan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So vmworld, it's my 8th year coming to the show. I've been part of the community for a long time, but one of the things that people love at this show, about 20,000 maybe a little north of that, it's peers talking to peers. People that dig into the technology, find out what works and how to do things better and everything. Tell us a little bit about your role. I think most of us know ADP. We've gotten checks with the logo on it, or lots of areas of other services. But what's you're role inside the org? >> Yeah, sure. So really quick about ADP to your point, the logo is pretty well known. We actually pay one in six people in the United States, so over 25 million employees we pay. We have over 650,000 clients, and our mobile app, which is really the way I recommend you look at your pay stubs, 401K, benefits, etc., has been downloaded over 12 million times. So the ADP brand is doing well. It's a healthy business. My role specifically is that I manage all computer at ADP, so think about servers, server operating systems, and server virtualization; that's my role. >> Yeah, you brought up mobile, so maybe start there. Pat Gelsinger this morning was talking about kind digital transformation. We look at financial services, how do you reach those users? What does that kind of ripple through to all of the things that you manage? How long have you been there, and what changes have you been seeing? >> I've been there 15 years, and I've seen a lot of changes. >> Stu: 15 years ago they probably weren't even virtualized so... >> No, no, in fact, I remember rolling out ESX2.X and using the good ole mooey, so we've come a long way. And mobile has just been explosive. Ya know, from a product perspective the goal now, it's mobile first, right? So even now if you think about your benefits, when you go enroll in your benefits every year, the goal is to make that experience translate to mobile, and that's a little harder than it seems, but that's the goal for ADP. It's everything mobile. >> Bring us in. What's kind of the scope of what you manage? You said ADP globally what you handle, but what's kind of the team size? How many devices or VMs or however you manage, what are you listed in? >> Sure, so my team is responsible for computers, I mentioned, so think of everything from demand management through operations. We have globally about 50 associates that are responsible for that. We have over 3000 ESXI hosts deployed across seven global data centers with well over 40000 VMs. So it's a pretty good size infrastructure. >> And bring us inside VMware. How long have you been using it? What pieces of VMware in the ecosystem have you been using? >> We have been using VMware, again, since the early days of server virtualization. We're a VROPS customer, a VRA customer, in fact, VRA, we're leveraging it for infrastructure as service to our deaf community. We have, for ADP, thousands and thousands of developers, so just the amount of churn in our private cloud is tremendous. Airwatch, we're a big Airwatch customer, as well. >> Expand a little bit on the developer piece. What do they look for? How does that impact what you're doin? >> Yeah, sure. I don't know what they're looking for cause it's always changing to be honest with you. But we have somewhere around 6000 developers, and they're obviously developing ADP's next generation products. So they're just looking for us to get out of their way, right? They want VMs; they want 'em now. They want containers; they want 'em now. And every day I turn around they want bigger VMs, bigger containers, and it's getting harder and harder. So through VRA, we provide those pools of capacity and then they're able to spin up, tear down, rebuild VMs as needed. On a monthly basis what I see through VRA just in the developer community lab is about 3000 or so actions a month. So it's pretty high amount of change in that environment. >> Based on what was announced in the Kali, particularly around the partnership with AWS, do you thing that's going to resonate with the developers? >> Yeah, absolutely. Most of our, not most, but a fair amount of our next generation products are being developed on AWS, right? So everyone wants to be on AWS. In fact, we're bringing in a lot of college hires, and as soon as they come in they say, "I want to work on AWS." So for us it resonates because what ADP does, security is key, and we want to have a hybrid cloud, so we were actually part of the Lighthouse Program. So we were an early customer. Got to see the logo during the KeyNote which was nice. So, yeah we plan on leveraging that relationship to help us. For example, burst in that DevCloud. >> Unpack that for us. One of the things we look at, when I hear hybrid cloud I need you to explain that because every customer I talk to, it means different things to me, especially, you mention things like bursting that's a little scary sometimes. So maybe explain what that actually means in your environment. >> Yeah, so, in the Dev environment specifically, what it means is, as I mentioned, we get requests that come out of left field, right? I need a 300 gig memory VM and 10 terabytes of storage. You're just like, "Where, I don't have this," right? I don't have hundreds of those. So we can put that capacity out on AWS much faster, and as those projects materialize, we can then bring that back in. So that's what I mean by hybrid cloud for us. >> So you're using the VMware on AWS, you've been testing that out, you said? My understanding is you're also using Vsan, is that separate from that? Cause Vsan's part of the VMware Cloud or cloud foundation suite, a piece of it, so what's your interest been in Vsan, and how does that fit into the entire picture? >> So it is different. For us, the AWS relationship is going to be more of a manage service, obviously. We're actually going to become a consumer. So we're going to feel like our own customers. To answer your question on Vsan, yeah, we've made a huge investment in Vsan, so all of our VM storage, which again is 40000 VMs worth, which is well over 4+ petabytes of storage, we're moving that all to Vsan. >> What's happenin to all those arrays? >> They're going to be gone. >> Yeah? >> They're going to be gone. >> That's a really big move. Can you, you got to take us back, ya know. How did you is this a top-down or, ya know, bottoms-up walk us through some of that. >> Yeah what started that? Like how did you come to even begin contemplating replacing all of your storage? >> So it's been both to answer your first question. Both top-down and bottom-up. We've been looking at the technologies for a while, and just kind of keepin close to them. At this point, they're mature enough that we feel they can run our business-critical products. And it's been a journey, right? For the last year, we've spent looking at all the different market leading technologies and figuring out which ones make sense in an environment our size. How do we operationalize this thing? So it's been a journey and this is the beginning for us, so we're actually, as I speak, we're starting to deploy our first Vsan clusters in production and we're deploying it in hundreds of servers at a time so it's exciting and interesting times for the team and I. >> Yeah, one of the interesting things, some people look at Vsan and they're like "Oh well it's kind of small deployments," but we had some of the VMware people on earlier today, and they're like, "We're deploying internally," but it's lots of clusters because if you tell me hundreds of servers, I'm like, "Well that's not a single cluster that's lots of clusters." How do you carve that up? How do you manage that? How do you roll that out? What does that look like? >> That's the trickiest part, right? And, by the way, as we look at different solutions, the cluster size became one of the reasons why we chose Vsan. >> Okay. >> A lot of the other solutions that are out there will limit you to about eight node clusters, and to your point, we have thousands of hosts. That's hundreds of clusters. So Vsan gives us the ability to have slightly larger clusters. Today we're going to look at about 16 node clusters to start. That seems to be where VMware is going as well, so we'll follow their lead. We figure they know what they're doin'. And we'll manage that using Vroms as well. >> Yeah I was curious as to what was actually driving the change to Vsan, and what was it about Vsan that said, "Yes! This is great! "This is the one that we're going to pick." You've mentioned cluster size, were there other things that made you sort of decide that Vsan was the right choice for you? >> So to me, the way I look at Vsan from a Vsphere perspective is that they've made storage a feature. And our Vsphere administrators, they know how to run Vsphere and now they just have another feature. So that was one of the main reasons, just the operational efficiencies from a team perspective. There are a lot of other reasons as well. Security: some of the other competitors out there, for example, didn't have encryption when we were looking at it, which is, everything we do revolves around security, so that was another key reason for Vsan for us. And what drove us at first was really, with the traditional models, we found ourselves to not be very agile. Because our business is growing so fast, we're building about six months of capacity at a time, and if you can think about the cost of that much capacity at a shot it's millions of dollars, it's kind of sitting idle. So with HCI technologies and Vsan, specifically, we think we're going to be much more modular in our approach and closer to just in time. So we expect significant capital benefits from that. >> So if I hear you right, it's the pooled nature of what you're doing and that the building blocks are small enough that you're not getting to what people usually have is like, "Oh yeah, I have all this capacity and I'm three years in "and I'm still not using a lot of what I run into, "ya know, I overbuy so much because of that." >> Exactly, and think about that first purchase. You've got to sit with finance and say, "Hey I've got to go buy an array "and I've got to go buy a couple hundred servers." Now I don't have to buy that much up front so it's a huge benefit for us. >> And it sounds like it's going to be cord deployments as well, cause there are a lot of like the HCI deployments, traditionally, have been for remote office things, or just particular work loads like VDI will be one thing that it runs on, but it sounds like this is going to underpin pretty much everything that you do. >> Pretty much everything, yeah. And in addition to VDI we have a very large VDI deployment that supports all of our customer support reps, and it's going to underpin that in addition to underpinning all of the business products that you use to view your pay statement. >> Alright, so you talked about the finance people, what about the storage people? I have to imagine you had storage admins, you look at it and you say, "Okay are they out of a job? "Are they going to work on new challenges?" Can you walk us through how you approach them? How they've looked at this whole migration? And what happens to them versus the VMware people? The virtualization admins I should say. >> It's a funny question cause I've become a little bit more popular now with the storage scene. They've actually knocked on my door and said, "Hey, anything we can help you with?" But, no, it's a good partnership. My peer and I who run storage, we actually built a team together that's going to help us roll out Vsan so we know that there are skills in the storage team that we can leverage, and our vision of it is that we're no longer going to have Vsphere administrators or storage administrators. We're going to have cloud engineers, and they have to know, compute network storage really cause we view the skills as converging as well. It's not just the software and the hardware. >> How about the management of that though? Are you essentially going to be managing a team together rather than it being separate people managing different people? >> Correct it's one team. >> One team? >> It's really interesting, Juan, I'm just curious, in your kind of evaluation phase, what did you learn that if you had known it at the beginning might have either accelerated or you might have positioned things a little bit differently now that you're ready to kind of this massive roll out? >> I think I would have had maybe stricter entrance criteria. You think about a company our size and all the partners we have. We looked at a lot of different solutions. We spent a lot of time in the lab. Where in the end we knew that, for example, an eight node cluster, or not having encryption, were showstoppers, but yet we spent the time in the lab to do that, so my recommendation or advice to my peers out there is come up with good criteria that you know you have to have, and then from there, do the paper exercise and bring in the ones that you know will actually be able to get to production. >> What was that entire kind of evaluation phase? How long did that take? >> More than six months. >> And can I ask what underlying deployment you're going to use for Vsan? >> From a hardware perspective? >> Yeah. >> Sure, HP servers. DL360s. >> Okay, and what led you to choose that versus, ya know, the Dell people are all lined up to say, ya know, come on we own VMware, ya know, you should do VXrails? >> Vxrail to me is a little bit different than just Vsan, but yeah absolutely Dell was pretty interested in that business as well, and the beauty of Vsan is that it gives us the choice. We've been a long-time, happy HP customer, so for this first phase we'll continue to be with HP, and for some reason, if something changes we know with Vsan we have that flexibility. >> You've been with VMware for quite a while, I'm sure you've been watching Vsan. What are you still asking them for? They've had a very aggressive road map. I think they've got most of the basic check blocks done. I've heard a little bit about the road map, but what's on your to-do list for Vsan or any kind of the associated pieces? >> You mentioned VXrail as an example and the automation that they've brought with rail is significant. It's very valuable. I think they need to bring some of that same automation to Vsan's standalone. So as I think about patching thousands of hosts with Vsan and the drivers and that entire matrix of things. They've got to help us there. I think they've got some work to do in terms of improving the performance management of that because environments this size, managing that manually is too much work. So I think we've got some work to do there. But they've been a great partner. They've been listening to us, so I'm pretty happy about where they're headed. >> Earlier you mentioned deploying VMs and containers, is that like Docker or how do containers fit in? >> So Docker has been sort of a religious debate internally to be honest. Do you deploy it on bare metal? Do you deploy it on VMs? I think right now, we're settled on deploying Docker on VMs, but very large VMs. We're thinking 200 gigs, and the goal will be, we're going to try to do that on Vsan. So we're still in early development there, but that seems to be where we're finally landing on. >> Interesting, and I'm assuming that's Linux on top of the VMs to allow that. >> Yes. >> Alright, well, Juan Gaviria, really appreciate you sharing that really interesting use case. I wish ya best of luck on the rollout, and thank you for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Alright, for Justin, I'm Stu, and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partner. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my co-host John Troyer, and you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. We're the world-wide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program not only a first-time guest but a first-time for the company, Andrew Hillier, who is the CTO and co-founder of Densify, and not only the first time we've had Densify, we didn't even have Serva on so, I'm not sure what the problem was, but appreciate you joining us, and looking forward to learning about you and the company. >> Glad to be here, it's good. >> All right, Andrew, tell us a little bit about, you're a co-founder, so bring us back to the early days, what the idea was, and then there's some rebranding recently so I know that's relevant to the conversation. >> Sure, I'll tell you the story. So, we're all about analytics. I mean, we started off by looking at, with all the data that's available, and saying if you really do the math on it, you can make a lot of very important decisions, and not leave them to opinions or chance. So we built out a very powerful analytics engine, a lot of big customers adopted it, run on-prem, drive huge savings in virtual environments, de-risk. And what we found is that everybody's interested in those outcomes of the analytics, but not necessarily wanting to adopt software products. I mean, it's kind of the basis of all SaaS. So, we went and made a SaaS version of that product that runs, it's like a brain in the cloud, to give the same outcomes, and we've kind of really now taken that to the extreme where it's as a service now. And it's called Densify, we rebranded around that in the June timeframe to really capture the simplicity and the outcome of what we do. Which is to drive down cloud costs, drive down the amount of infrastructure you need on-prem, and make it all work better. >> Yeah, I'm wondering if you could give us just a little, from a macro standpoint, software. And the different consumption models you just walked through a little bit, but what are customers looking for, why has it been challenging before, and do we have it right this time? >> Yeah, well, I mean, from our perspective again, I think we get adopted, and traditionally in the past you would have to deploy the product, you would have to provision servers to run it on, a database server, train people, you know, have maybe a center of excellence around using it, and so that's worked really well. But I think that's, I think the novelty of running software has worn off for most organizations. They want to move on, and we see the cloud being adopted. People just want to get out of the business of running anything, really, and have it all done for them. And so we support on-prem model, and as many serve as on-prem, but really, this new model is where everybody's going because it's just so simple. It means, you can just adopt it and get results right away without reading any manuals or doing anything. >> Andrew, we've been talking about cloud for years now, right? It was almost a joke, it's much more real now. Your customers and the people you talk with, hybrid cloud, multicloud, how many, we have a choice of many different platforms. On-prem is not going away anytime soon, at least, I don't know, I'd love your opinion on that, but your customer base, the people you talk with, what kind of a, how many platforms are they on, what kind of platforms, and how does Densify pull all that together? >> Yeah, it's funny because it's a bit of everything, and that's IT, right? You always have one of everything you've ever had, plus all the new stuff, so, we support, these huge virtual footprints out there, a lot of companies have big VMware environments. But there's definitely a big focus on the cloud. So almost every customer we have is in some form looking, is really they see that as the future, the cloud containers, some mix of on- and off-prem. So I think it's going to be hybrid for quite some time. I don't think you're going to see the on-prem go away, that would just be unrealistic, but again, a lot of energy is being put into the public cloud, and it shows. So you know, one's almost a maintain mode in some cases, one's kind of the invest, we're investing in new technology, that's where a lot of the excitement is. So even our most conservative customers are looking at cloud in some way, and some of our newer customers are 100% cloud, there's no on-prem. >> Andrew, talk to us about the relationship with VMware that you've had and have today, and I guess one of the questions I looked, VMware announced like seven SaaS services, one which was Cost Insight. Does that compete at all against what you are doing? >> Well it's, it's a hugely complicated space with a lot of different, and a lot of the same words used for all the same thing. So we have a very good relationship with VMware. We integrate with all the product line, VRA, vROps, DRS, pDRS, we have integrations with all these things, and it works with that. But I think there's some confusion sometimes around all the people using the same words, like we optimize, or we do this or that. So what we find is that, in the core of what we do, is we analyze workload patterns. And it's like playing a game of Tetris. It's like saying, that workload's busy in the morning, that one's busy at night, we combine them together, we get a lot of efficiency. And nothing in the VMware product line does that. So it really plugs in very nicely with DRS, and again vROps, but there is confusion in the words people use. You might think that that does that, and there's some cost, you know, there's a lot of products that do cloud costs. Every product that starts with the word Cloud does cloud cost, but that's not really where you get this cost-saving, it's really analyze the workloads in the cloud is where you get those cost-savings. >> Yeah, I'm curious, you must have a really good view as to utilization. So I think back, there's a lot of argument as to how much utilization we're actually getting, 'cause VMware in the early days, it was like, oh I'll consolidate servers, I'll get greater utilization. But we still kind of stink at utilization, and I have gear, even cloud today, I've seen lots of companies, right, that I can take huge amount of costs out of what you're doing, so how are customers doing, what are they good at, what do they suck at, and where are some of the things that you're helping really well? >> Well, I mean, you struck a nerve there, because I mean, people are doing a terrible job in the cloud but often it's, a lot of times they throw things up there, and they don't even really look at what they're doing. It's kind of primitive in terms of the data collectioning, and the tooling around that. So a lot of times, these people don't even know what the workload is or what the utilization is. So we see some pretty big opportunity to carve that down. I mean, on-prem, I think people have gotten better. I think when they run our product, they really, it's designed to get at the optimal utilization, and that might be at 90%, it might be 50%, it might be 30 depending on your requirements. And if you have a mission critical environment that is active-active, and redundant, and all these things going on, then maybe your utilization won't be very high, but that's as high as you can make it and meet all your obligations. If in that test environment, you can run it a lot higher. So, there is no one right answer for what the best utilization is, it kind of, it depends on your workloads and what the environment's supposed to be doing, but universally in the cloud, we find it's just terrible. 'Cause they rush things into the cloud without having all the maturity around it to figure out how to optimize it. >> Right, Andrew, does that mean then the common mistake is under-utilization? Are people just running a lot of instances without actually knowing what's running in them, or how it's costing them? >> Yep, there's underutilized, there's deadwood for starters. So there's, and that's kind of a different problem. It's not that they don't know what they're doing, somebody forgot them, so there's no process around that, there's no ITSM pros that can turn these things off, so we find a lot of that. And there's this stuff that's not utilized very well at all that you could just be running better, 'cause somebody setting's extra large, and they never revisited it. The other, last thing that we do, we find this quite a lot lately, is we call modernization. So, you look okay, but you're on an old instance. There's a newer one that's a lot cheaper. You know, you're on an R3, you could be on an R4 on Amazon, and so we find a ton of those. And it's because people deployed an app six months ago, a year ago, and it looked great, it still looks great, but they don't have the ability to analyze and use benchmarks to say I have a new instance that's as powerful as that one, that's cheaper. You need the benchmarks. >> That's something that really doesn't happen when you have hardware, right? It's not like the server vendor calls you up and says, I have a new version I can swap out if you just tell me. >> Yeah, I mean, in the cloud I give the analogy to a cell phone company. It's like, they don't phone you and tell you that they have a new plan that'll be cheaper for you. You've got to kind of do that on your own. And so we do that for customers, it's one of the things that we do, and we kind of do it for you. So, we just tell you that, just make this move, it's got a lateral move to a new instance, and save a ton of money, and customers are just, they're too busy to become experts, and read the news every morning to figure out if new instances come up, it's just too much, right? >> But wait, they haven't seen these 17 announcements that Amazon had today that might have affected them? Does your tool make the change, recommend the change, how does that kind of workflow work? >> Yeah, it depends on the platform, how it works, but we have a very high degree of automation that we enable, and there's a few reasons. One is that the analysis is so precise, that when it says do this, you can just do that. So, for example, on-prem, if we say move the VM, we know it's not supposed to go with those other ones for PCI compliance. We know that that won't drive up the over-commit, so there's, you know, our equation, there's a lot of terms. That means it's very precise. So that means when we say to do something, you can just do it, and that means you drive a very high automation as a result. >> What kind of granularity? Is this happening minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour, or day-by-day, or? >> Well, there's two levels of granularity. There's predictive and there's real time. So one of the main things we do is that we will kind of gather all the workload history, and kind of learn the patterns of that, and to come up with a strategic plan saying for tomorrow, do this, but the VM in these places. And then, leave DRS turned on, it'll do its thing, but it won't do very much, because we've anticipated all the workflow patters. So a lot of times, we will do the kind of daily optimization and DRS and vROps can do their things all day long. They just don't do as much. But we also have real-time, so if we see something getting hot, we will do a hot add on it, we can do that as well. So we kind of have the combination of both predictive and reactive at the same time. >> Okay, um. How do you handle kind of your pricing of the solution? I've heard some offerings out there that it's like, oh, we're going to save you millions, and we're just going to take a fraction of that, rather that, or are you more traditional licensing, how does that all work? >> It's funny, the gainshare we found on that is very hard to structure. It sounds great until you finally make the contracts for it. What we do is for on-prem, we do it by target, and that's a physical-virtual system, and that's worked really well. That's the way a lot of our customers go there. And in the cloud, that doesn't work, because an instance could be anything from a tiny docker container to a giant X1, so it's as a percentage of spending. That's kind of what a lot of vendors kind of sat along in the cloud world. But we kind of don't make it infinitely variable. We know people want, they want the predictability, so we kind of say, you're in this band, it's just going to cost this and you can do whatever you want. >> And what, did you have any kind of standard rule of thumb as to you know, if you're, have X kind of spend in the cloud we'll usually save you X percentage, or, and wait, if you save them a lot more, doesn't that mean you're pushing them down into a lower tier, and so, you know, how does that get sorted out? >> It's a great question, that's the hazard of it it. It is, I mean, it doesn't hold us back from wanting to optimize, so, what we find is if you just take, for example, right-sizing the cloud. If you say you're under-utilized, we can make you smaller in the same class, a lot of people would say, 15% you might save. We find that the ability to go between instance classes, so again, you're memory optimized and you're computer optimized, or vice versa, we found is 35 to 40%, pretty reliably in our customers. So it's a pretty, more than pays for the product, many times over, it's pretty compelling. And it's pretty easy to get to. And in fact, next month's bill, which is the biggest thing, you know, on-prem is some cost. You can optimize it a lot, but until the next refresh, may not realize the gains. But in the cloud, next month's bill will actually be smaller. So we find it's a lot of urgency to do it in the cloud. >> Um, I'm curious, what have you seen from customers these days between their on-premises environment and the public cloud? One thing that struck me for years is, you know, if I bought gear and I'm not getting the results, the utilization out of it, you know, that kind of got a lot of attention. When I go see the public cloud, there's plenty of customers like, oh, what do you know, I was overspending 3x more than I expected, haha, I guess I'll fix it later. And I was like, wait, if you were buying hardware, you would have fired somebody, and, like, beat up your sales rep and things like that, but public cloud seems to be less mature in that standpoint? Are you seeing that changing, or what are you seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think there is a realization, that kind of sticker shock for these people where it is kind of three times more than they thought it would be, but your point is also not really anybody whose problem that is, a lot of times. So we do see that becoming someone's problem. The cloud architects kind of seek out more roles that are financial optimization in the cloud, so people do care. I think that's a very positive thing. I think when a lot of dev ops groups start using Amazon for the first time, it's a bit of a Wild West, and they get agility, but nobody's really looking over their shoulder. I think that's starting to change pretty quickly. >> Yeah, I wonder. One of the problems I've heard, I've talked to plenty of customers that are like, I have to dedicate an engineer to pricing when it comes to the cloud. Do you solve that, do they still need to kind of have like a dedicated person, or part of a person, or is that part of the value that you offer? >> Well, and that's a good question. It depends on the customer's size, I think. So we see really small organizations, and again, the beauty of our new offering is that you, we can, you know, we can go to really small companies or really huge companies. We have customers with a hundred thousand systems, and some with 500. And the smaller ones, they may not have a big team, so they may not have those roles. So some of our smallest ones, we're just that role for them. They don't have a person that's dedicated to that kind of thing, they just wait for our advisors to try and make, 'cause we actually have a human advisor that's part of our service that gives you advice or insight into what's happening. So, for the small ones, that can be that person. For larger companies like the big banks that are customers of ours, we kind of become one of the team. So you probably still have people with lots of expertise, but maybe you don't need to rely on it so much, maybe you can not have it at all, but it's more like we're someone that makes their life easier. So they can go on and focus on what they should be doing, which is not looking at the cloud pricing every morning. >> Nice, I see that more and more, right, that you need, it's a service you're delivering, right? And it's not just bits and bytes, that's customer success, and you have people there that can help. This stuff is crazy complicated, especially if you are, say, a VMware admin just getting into Amazon. The pricing, like we just said right, the pricing is very complicated. So, can you talk a little bit about from the admin standpoint, the vRealize integration and some things like that, or is this, there's an admin-facing piece and then I suppose then there's a cost-facing piece, or? >> Yeah, I think there's several ways it can be used. You can use us almost like middleware and the admin doesn't necessarily need to interact. We, some of our customers, we run as an engine that just sits there, it's getting data, analyzing it and making changes. But, you're still using VRA for blueprints and VRO, and that kind of comes through us, but it's kind of behind the scenes. So it's a nice use case, because it just adds value without making anybody's life more difficult. We do have consols that are very powerful, so if you're a capacity manager or a data scientist, or a cloud architect you can actually start logging in and seeing workload curves and stuff. So we have some use cases where we are, our interface is used quite heavily, and some where it kind of sits behind the scenes. And so for administrators, again, it tends to make your life better without making it worse. You know, they're really busy as well, and they don't, they save time to look at that, so. >> If you have a big investment in vRealize, right? That's great, it just sits behind the scenes. Tools you already know. >> Exactly, we just pull data from it, and we push the rest back. We pull the rules from DRS, we push new rules down the DRS, it's all very clean, and so it just makes it all better without overlapping, and again, it makes your environment calmer. So, what we see in a lot of environments is you'll be able to fit a lot more work into it, and you don't have the vMotion activity during business hours. So we're starting to measure that in our customers, because volatility's an important thing. Like if vMotion at noon, at the peak of your app being busy, it's not good, right? So, we actually cause that to go away. >> Andrew, how much of your business is on-premises, and virtualized environment, versus cloud and any kind of line up as to where you spend the most time on the cloud? >> Well, I think for, I mean, we have lot of customers that are mostly VMware. I think a good portion of them are looking at cloud in some way. Some of our newer customers are 100% in the cloud, so that's kind of more because it's a newer offering, and Densify's quite new, I think that's a smaller number right now. But as far as what we're chasing down, it's big. It's very large portion of it. So I think it's really where we see where things are going. Again, it's, we usually do both, but the cloud stuff really captures our imagination. That's what they want to be doing. >> Yeah, any commentary on the VMware on AWS, you know, stuff that we've heard so far? >> Well I mean, I think it's cool, it's great. It's another option. What I like about is that what we find is when we analyze, there's technologies that over-commit and ones that don't. So I could take a workload and put it in the VMware environment and over-commit it, and the patterns match up, and get efficiency. If I put it in Amazon in like a large instance, I might be wasting my money 'cause I'm not using the whole instance, so. And I can't run a hypervisor in one of those. What we found is that for certain transactional applications it's much better to stack them together. For like batch workloads, it's better to run them in, rent a large for an hour. So I think it's a great offering, because for certain workloads it is quite efficient. For other workloads, it's not. And we have, you know, we're showing you here today, the ability to analyze and compare the two, saying if you took that app and put it in the new VMware on Amazon versus standard small, medium, and large, what's the cost difference? It's a cool analysis, 'cause it's different for each app, right? >> If I saw right, there are free trials available on your site. Is there anybody that ever comes up, tries your stuff, and then doesn't have something that saves them money? >> No, we have a very good success when you try it because it's a, partly because it's so easy. It's just, it's 15 minutes, you pull down a connector for VMware and you plug it into vCenter or vROps, and the data goes up and then we just do it all for you. And it'll always find something you didn't know or some savings, or some hidden risks in there. Usually a lot of savings, hardware savings or software savings. We will optimize the software licensing. And in the cloud it uncovers all kinds of stuff. We see all kinds of crazy stuff, utilization's very low, so it's a, yeah. >> I've run across people that do this similar sorts of thing, at least at a high level on the virtualized side and on the cloud side. I'm not sure that I've seen anybody that does it at both, is that one of your differentiators, how do you line up, what's the competitive landscape look like? >> Yeah, doing both is a big part. I think on each individual, we also do it much deeper. So like I said, in the virtual environments our ability to play Tetris with the workloads, there's nothing else really like it. We put a lot of R and D on that, and in the cloud there's a lot of focus on the cost. But not necessarily digging deeper into what's the cause of that cost? Or your Kubernetes environment, the utilization of those nodes, it requires deeper analytics than a lot of vendors actually have, so. >> Do you give any advice as to them saying I'm trying to decide if I want to do it on-premises or in the cloud, do you give any guidance that way? >> I don't think there's any standard answer. We don't try and take sides, like, the data talks. And it's not, in my opinion, it's not an area for opinion, it's just that numbers will tell you what's best for your app and everybody's different. >> You were talking certain, you know, I've got this batch application, oh well heck, I can run this in, you know, some extra large thing in the cloud, and therefore it would cost me this versus standing up some server farm. >> Yeah, and what we find is that the only real trick is that, absolutely, if you have something that's live for 12 hours and then off for a week, renting an instance for 12 hours is the way to go. But the other consideration, it goes back to one of your earlier questions, is multicloud, and how many providers do you want? 'Cause we'll analyze the environment and that app might be cheaper in Azure and that one might be cheaper in Google, but you're not going to put each app in each, so you're going to choose one or two and kind of send them all there. So, the analytics understand that as well. They're saying, well, you're not going to spread this stuff everywhere, we're going to find the best overall answer for your portfolio of workloads. And that's an important thing. >> Okay, so last question for ya. The virtualization admins out there, is there anything that they're still doing kind of very wrong that would make their environment more efficient? >> Well I think, I mean, it's funny that we still see an awful lot of spreadsheets out there. It's funny when people try and do the numbers, like to figure out where to put a new app. And they'll still kind of figure that out in a very rudimentary way, when again, science will tell you that. So you can make that happen automatically. So, there's still certain things people are doing manually that don't need to be done manually anymore, and it maybe it's their comfort zone. Maybe sometimes maybe it's other groups. But I think, again, our focus is saying that's great, let's take your policies and your rules, we'll just embed them, encode them, codify them, and then you can move on to better things than updating a spreadsheet or generating reports to send to your team every, you know, like, it's, we have very powerful reporting, so you can just make that happen automatically to people. And so, it's getting out of those kind of tasks that people have done for years and moving up the value chain and saying, now I'm going to focus on cloud, or on VSAN, or whatever it is people want to be doing next. >> All right, Andrew Hillier, appreciate you giving us all the updates on your company, and look forward to hearing more in the future. John Troyer and I will be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (cheerful music)