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

(upbeat music) >> 10 years ago, a group of industry storage veterans formed a company called INFINIDAT. The DNA of the company was steeped in the heritage of its founder, Moshe Yanai who had a reputation for relentlessly innovating on three main areas, the highest performance, rock solid availability and the lowest possible cost. Now these elements have historically represented the superpower triumvirate of a successful storage platform. Now as INFINIDAT evolved it landed on a fourth vector that has been a key differentiator in its value proposition and that is petabyte scale. Hello everyone and welcome to this Cube Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm pleased to welcome in two long time friends of the cube, Phil Bullinger is newly minted CEO of INFINIDAT and of course, Lee Caswell, VMware's VP of marketing for the cloud platform business unit. Gents welcome. >> Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to be here Dave. >> Yeah. Great to be here Dave. Thanks. >> Always good to see you guys. Phil, so you're joining at the 10 year anniversary, Mark, congratulations on the appointment. What attracted you to the company? >> Yeah that's a great question Dave. I spent a long time in my career at enterprise storage and enjoyed many of the opportunities through a number of companies. Last fall when I became aware of the INFINIDAT opportunity and immediately captured my attention because of frankly my respect for the product. Through several opportunities I've had with enterprise customers in selling cycles of different products, if they happen to be customers of INFINIDAT they were not bashful about talking about their satisfaction with the product, their level of delight with it. And so I think from the sidelines I have always had a lot of respect for the INFINIDAT platform, the implementation of the product quality and reliability that it's kind of legendary for. And so when the opportunity came along it really captured my interest and of course behind a great product is almost always a great team and as I got to know the company and the board and some of the leaders and learned about the momentum and the business it was just a very, very compelling opportunity for me. And I'll have to say just 60 days into the job everything I hoped for is here not only a warm welcome to the company but an exciting opportunity with respect to where INFINIDAT is at today with growth of the business, the company has achieved a level of consistent growth through 2020 cashflow, positive, even thought positive and now it's a matter of scaling the business and it's something that I have had success with at several times in my career and I'm really, really enjoying the opportunity here at INFINIDAT to do that. >> That's great. Thanks for that. Now, of course Lee, VMware was founded nearly a quarter century ago and carved out a major piece of the enterprise pie and predominantly that's been on prem but the data centers evolving, the cloud is evolving and this universe is expanding. How do you see the future of that on-prem data center? >> I think Satya recently said, right? That we've reached max consolidation almost right. You pointed that out earlier. I thought that was really interesting, right? We believe in the distributed hybrid cloud and the reasons for that actually turn out to be storage led in there and in the real thinking about it because we're going to have distributed environments. And one of the things that we're doing with INFINIDAT here today, right? Is we're showing how customers can invest intelligently and responsibly on prem and have bridges in across the hybrid cloud. We do that through something called the VMware Cloud Foundation. That's a full stack offering that... And interesting here, right? It started off with a HCI element but it's expanded into storage and storage at scale. Because storage is going to exist we have very powerful storage value propositions and you're seeing customers go and deploy both. We're really excited about seeing INFINIDAT lean into the VMware Cloud Foundation and VVol has actually a way to match the pace of change in today's application world. >> Yes, so Phil you see these trends, I mean building bridges is what we called it. And so that takes a lot of hard work especially when you're doing from on-prem into hybrid, across clouds, eventually the edge, that's a non-trivial task. How do you see this playing out in market trends? >> We're in the middle of this every day and as you know Dave and certainly Lee, data center architecture is urban flow from centralized to decentralized but clearly data locality I think is driving a lot of the growth of the distributed data center architecture, the edge data centers but core is still very significant for most enterprise. And it has a lot to do with the fact that most enterprises want to own their own cloud when a Fortune 15 or a Fortune 50 or a Fortune 100 customer, when they talk about their cloud they don't want to talk about the AWS cloud or the GCP cloud or the Azure cloud. They want to talk about their cloud and almost always these are hybrid architectures with a large on-prem or colo footprint. The reason for that number of reasons, right? Data sovereignty is a big deal among the highest priorities for enterprise today. The control, the security, the ability to recover quickly from ransomware attacks, et cetera. These are the things that are just fundamentally important to the business continuity and enterprise risk management plan for these companies. But I think one thing that has changed the on-prem data center is the fact that it's the core operating characteristics have to take on kind of that public cloud characteristic, it has to be a transparent seamless scalability. I think the days of CIOs even tolerating people showing up in their data centers with disk trays under their arms to add capacity is over. They want to seamlessly add capacity, they want nonstop operation, a hundred percent uptime is the bar now it has to be a consolidation, massive consolidation, is clearly the play for TCO and efficiency. They don't want to have any compromises between scale and availability and performance. The very characteristics that you talked about upfront Dave, that make INFINIDAT unique I think are fundamentally the characteristics that enterprises are looking for when they build their cloud on prem. I think our architecture also really does provide a set it and forget it kind of experience when we install a new INFINIDAT frame in an enterprise data center, our intentions are we're not going to come back. We don't intend to come back to help fiddle with the bits or tweak the configuration and as applications and multi tenant users are added. And then of course, flexible economic models. I mean, everybody takes this for granted but you really really do have to be completely flexible between the two rails, the cap X rail and the objects rail and every step in between. And importantly when an enterprise customer needs to add capacity they don't have a sales conversation. They just want to have it right there already running in their data center. And that's the experience that we provide. >> Yeah. You guys are aligned in that vision, that layer that abstracts the complexity from the underlying wherever cloud on prem, et cetera. >> Right? >> Let's talk about VMware and INFINIDAT their relationship, I mean, every year at VMworld up until last year, thank you COVID, INFINIDAT would host this awesome dinner, you'd have his top customers there, very nice Vegas steak restaurant. I of course, I always made a point to stop by not just for the food. I mean, I was able to meet some customers and I've talked to many dozens over the years Phil, and I can echo that sentiment, why is the VMware ecosystem so important to INFINIDAT? And I guess the question there is, is petabyte scale really that prominent in the VMware customer base? >> It's a very, very important point. VMware is the longest standing alliance partner of INFINIDAT. It goes back to really almost the foundation of the company certainly starting with the release one, the very first commercial release of INFINIDAT, VMware and a very tight integration where VMware was a core part of that. We have a capability we call the host power tools which drives a consistent best practices implementation around our VMware integration and how it's actually used in the data center. And we built on that through the years through just a deep level of integration and our customers typically are at scale, petabyte scale or average deployment as a petabyte and up and over 90% of our customers use VMware. I think I can safely say we serve the VMware environment for some of VMware's largest enterprise footprints in the market. >> So Lee It's like children, you love all your partners but is there anything about INFINIDAT that stands out to you, a particular area where they shine from your perspective? >> Yeah, I think so. The best partnerships won are ones that are customer driven it turns out, right? And the idea that we have joint customers at large-scale, I must say storage is a tough business to go, right? Right, it takes time to go and mature to harden a code base, right? And particularly when you talk about petabyte scale right now, you've basically got customers buying in for the largest systems. And what we're seeing overall is customers are trying to do more things with fewer component elements. Makes sense, right? And so the scale here is important because it's not just scale in terms of like capacity, right? It's scale in terms of performance as well. And so, as you see customers trying to expand the number of different types of applications and this is one of the things we're seeing, right? Is new applications which could be container-based, Kubernetes orchestrated, our Tansu portfolio helps with that, right? If you see what we're doing with Nvidia, for example we announced some AI work, right? This week with vSphere. And so what you're starting to see is like the changing nature of applications and the fast pace of applications is really helping customers say, listen I want to go and find solutions that can meet the majority of my needs. And that's one of the things that we're seeing and particularly with the VVol'sintegration at scale that we just haven't seen before, INFINIDAT is setting the bar and really setting a new record for that. >> Yeah. Let me comment on that a little bit, Dave. We've been a core part of the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab, which is a very very exciting engaging investment that VMware has made. A lot of people have contributed to in the industry but in the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab we recently demonstrated on a single INFINIDAT frame over 200,000 VVols on a single system. And I think that not only edges up the bar I think it completely redefines what scale means when you're talking about a VVol implementation >> So lets talk about both those things. Not to geek out here but VVols they're kind of a game changer because instead of admins having to manually allocate storage to performance tiers, an array that is VASA certified, VASA is VMware or actually the storage API for storage awareness, VASA, anyway with VVols you can dynamically provision storage that matches, the way I say it as matches device attributes to the data and the application requirements of the VM. So Phil, it seems like so much in VMware land harkens back to the way mainframes used to solve problems in a modern way, right? And VVol is a real breakthrough in that regard in terms of simplifying storage. So how do you guys see it? I presume you're sort of VVol certified based on what you just said in the lab. >> Yeah. We recently announced our VVols release and we're not the first to market with VVols but from the start of the engineering project we wanted to do it. We wanted to do it the way we think. We think at scale in everything we do and our customers were very prescriptive and the kind of scale and performance and availability that they wanted to experience in VVols. And we're now seeing quite a bit of customer interest with traction in it. As I said, we redefined the bar for VVol scalability. We support on a single array now a thousand storage containers. And I think most of our competition is like at one or maybe 10 or 13 or something like that. So our customers are again at scale, they said if you're going to do VVols we want it at scale. We want it to embody the characteristics of your platform. We really liked VVols because it helps separate kind of the roles and responsibilities between the BI administrator and the storage system administrator. If you're going to put the majority of your most critical bits on INFINIDAT in your data center you're going to want to have control over how that resource is used, the at the VVols in rotation and the tools that we provide with that deep level of integration give the BI administrator all of the flexibility they need to manage applications and VVols of course gives the BI administrator the native use of our in minute snapshot technology. And so it makes it incredibly easy for them to administrate the platform without having to worry about the physical infrastructure but yet the people worried about the physical infrastructure still have control over that resource. So it's a game changer as far as we're concerned. >> Yeah. Storage has come a long way hasn't it Lee? If you could add some color here it seems in talking needs so VASA that's interesting you had a hand in the growth of VASA and very successful product but he chose INFINIDAT for that higher end application. It seemed like VVols are a key innovation in that regard. How's the VVol uptake going from your perspective. >> Yeah, I think we're in the second phase of VVol adoption, right? First phase was, hey, it technically interesting, intriguing but adoption was relatively low I think because you know up until five years ago applications weren't actually changing that fast. I mean, think about it, right? The applications, ERP systems, CRM systems, you weren't changing those at the pace of what we're doing today. Now what's happening is every business is a software business. Every business when you work, when you interact with your healthcare provider right now it's about the apps. Like, can you go and get your schedules online? Can you email your doctors, right? Can you go and get your labs, right? The pace of new application development, we have some data showing that there will be more apps developed in the next five years and then the past 40 years of computing combined. And so when you think about that what's changed now is trying to manage that all from the kind of storage hardware side was just actually getting in the way you want to organize around the fastest beat rate in your infrastructure, today that's the application. So what VVOls helps you do is it allows the vSphere administrator who's managing VMs and looking at the apps and the changing pace and be able to basically select storage attributes including QoS, capacity, IOPS and do that from the V center console and then be able to rectify things and manage them, right? From the console right next to the apps. And that provides a really integrated way. So when you have a close interaction like what we're talking about today or integration that the INFINIDAT has provided now you've got this ability to have a faster moving activity. And consolidation is one of the themes you've heard from time to time from VMware, we're consolidating the management so that the vSphere administrator can now go and manage more things. What traditional VMs, yes, VMs across HI sure put now plus storage and into the hybrid cloud and into like containers, it's that consolidated management which is getting us speed and basically a consumer like experience for infrastructure deployments. >> Yeah. Now Phil mentioned the solutions lab. We've got a huge ecosystem. Several years ago you launched this, the VMware, I think it's called the VMware Cloud Solutions Lab is the official name. Explain what it does for collaboration and joint solutions development. And then Phil, I want you to go in more detail about what your participation has been but Lee why don't you explain it? >> Yeah. We don't take just any products that because listen there's a mixing, what we take is things that really expand that innovation frontier. And that's what we saw with INFINIDAT was expanding the frontier on like large capacity for many many different mixed workloads and a commitment, right? To go and bring in not just VVol support, of course all the things we do for just normal interaction with vSphere but bringing VVOls in was certainly important in showing how we operate at scale. And then importantly as we expanded the vSphere or cloud foundation to include store systems, fair customer for example, right? Who has storage and HCI, right? And it looks for how to go and use them. And that's an individual choice at a customer level. We think this is strategically important now as we expand a multi-cloud experience that's different from the hyperscalers, right? Hyperscalers are coming in with two kind of issues, maybe, right? So one is it's single cloud. And the other one is there's a potential competitive aspect from some right around the ongoing underlying business and a hyperscaler business model. And so what VMware uniquely is doing is extending a common control plane across storage systems and HCI and doing that in a way that basically gives customers choice. And we love that the cloud lab is really designed to go and make that a reality for customers strip out perceived and real risk. >> Yeah. Phil to Lee's point, it's not dozens and dozens and dozens of logos on the slide for the lab. I think there's like 10 or 12 from what I saw and INFINIDAT is one of them. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about your participation in the program and what it does for customers. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I would agree it's, we like the lab because it's not just supposed to be one of everything I can do it, it's a purpose-built lab to do real things. And we like it because we can really explore some of the most contemporary workloads in that environment as well as solutions to what I centered as some of the most contemporary industry problems we're participating in a couple of ways. I believe we're the only petabyte scale storage solution in the cloud solutions lab at VMware. One of the projects we're working on with VMware is their machine learning platform. That's one of the first cloud solutions lab projects that we worked on with INFINIDAT. And we're also a core part of what VMware is driving from at but we call it data for good initiative. This was inspired by the idea that tech can be used as a force for good in the world. And right now it's focused on the technology needs of nonprofits. And so we're closely working in the cloud solutions lab with the VMware Cloud Foundation layers as well as the Tansu and Kubernetes environments and learning a lot and proving a lot. And it's also a great way to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform. >> Yeah. So Lee, I was just the other day I was under VMware analyst meeting virtually of course and Zane and Sanjay and a number of other execs were given the update. And just to sort of emphasize what we've been talking about here this expansion of on-prem, the cloud experience, the data especially from our survey data we have a partner at ETR they do great surveys on quarterly basis. The VMware cloud on AWS do great for sure but the VMware Cloud Foundation, the on-prem cloud, the hybrid cloud is really exploding and resonating with customers. And that's a good example of this sort of equilibrium that we're seeing between the public and private coming together. >> Well, VMware Cloud Foundation right now with over a thousand customers but importantly over 400 of the global 2000, right? It's the largest customers. And that's actually where the Venn diagram between the work that VMware Cloud Foundation is doing and INFINIDAT, right? This large scale actually the interesting crossover, right? And listen for customers to go and take on a new storage system we always know that it's a high bar, right? So they have to see some really unique value, like how is this going to help, right? And today that value is I want to spend less time looking down at the storage and more time looking up at the apps, that's how we're working together, right? And how VVols fits into that with the VMware Cloud Foundation, it's that hybrid cloud offering really gives customers that future-proofing, right? And the degrees of freedom they're most likely to exercise. >> Right. Well, let's close with a kind of a glimpse of the future. What do you two see as the future of the data center specifically and also your collaborations Lee? Why don't you start? >> So I think what we hope to be true is turning out to be true. So, if you've looked at what's happening in the cloud not everything is migrating in the cloud but the public cloud for example and I'm talking about public cloud there, the public cloud offers some really interesting unique value. And VMware is doing really interesting things about like Dr as a service and other things, right? So we're helping customers tap into that at the same time, right? We're seeing that the on-prem investment is not stalling at all because of data sovereignty because of bandwidth limitations, right? And because of really the economics of what it means to rent versus buy. And so partnering with leaders in storage, right? Is a core part of our strategy going forward. And we're looking forward to doing more, right? With INFINIDAT as we see VCF evolve, as we see new applications including container-based applications running on our platform, lots of futures, right? As the pace of application change doesn't slow down. >> So Phil, what do you see for the next 10 years for INFINIDAT? >> Yeah, well, I appreciated your introduction because it does speak to sort of the core characteristics of INFINIDAT. And I think a company like us and at our juncture of evolution it's important to know exactly who you are. And we clearly are focused in that on-prem hybrid data center environment. We want to be the storage tier that companies use to build their clouds. The partnership with VMware we talked about the Venn diagram, I think it just could not be more complimentary. And so we're certainly going to continue to focus on VMware as our largest and most consequential alliance partner for our business going forward. I'm excited about the data center landscape going forward. I think it's going to continue to ebb and flow. We'll see growth and distributed architectures, we'll see growth at the edge. In the core data center I think the old days where customers would buy a storage system for a application environment, those days are over it's all about consolidating multiple apps and thousands of users on a single platform. And to do that you have to be really good at a lot of things that we are very good at. Our strategy going forward is to evolve as media evolves but never stray far from what has made INFINIDAT unique and special and highly differentiated in the marketplace. I think the work that VMware is doing in Kubernetes is very exciting. We're starting to see that really pick up in our business as well. So as we think about not only staying relevant but keeping very contemporary with application workloads, we have some very small amount of customers that still do some bare metal but predominantly as I said 90% or above is a VMware infrastructure. But we also see Kubernetes, our CSI driver works well with the VMware suite above it. So that that complimentary relationship we see extending forward as the application environment evolves. >> It's great. Thank you. Many years ago when I attended my first VMworld the practitioners that were there you talked to them, half the conversations they were complaining about storage and how it was so complicated and you needed guys in lab coats to solve problems. And VMware really has done a great job publishing the APIs and encouraging the ecosystem. And so if you're a practitioner you're interested in in how VVols and INFINIDAT and VMware, we're kind of raising the bar and on petabyte scale there's some good blogs out there. Check out the virtual blocks blog for more information. Guys thanks so much. Great to have you in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much, Dave. >> All right. Thank you for watching this cute conversation, Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, Covering VMWorld 2018. Brought to you by VM Ware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas Mandalay Bay. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante at VMWorld 2018 Day One. Dave, this has been an awesome day. >> Yeah, jam-packed and almost 1/3 of the way through, 94 guests, I think our biggest show ever. >> I think I'm going to say, I'm going to make up a word and say it's going to get awesomer because we have one of our distinguished alumni, Vaughn Stewart, >> Wow. VP of Technology Alliances and Strategy at Pure Storage, Vaughn, great to have you here. >> Lisa, Dave, thanks for having us back. >> Great to see you again. >> Yes, ditto. >> We had a blast hosting the CUBE at Pure//Accelerate just a couple months ago. >> We got T-shirts. >> But we were sporting our, yeah, in the context of the Bill Graham Civic. I feel too dressed-up actually for talking to Pure Storage. So some great momentum you guys had when we were there a few months ago, great momentum continues, quarterly revenue earnings just announced, 37% year-over-year growth, almost 400 new customers. Gartner, fifth year in a row, you guys are a leader in the Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays, wow! >> Yeah a lot was shared last week with the financial results, right? Couple more just points of color-commentary, if you will. 309 million dollars, 27% of quarter-over-quarter, 35% of penetration of the Fortune 500, roughly 30% of the revenue comes from the cloud providers, say like clouds number eight through 500, on the Magic Quadrant, right, five years in a row being in that upper-right quarter, quadrant. And if you look back on it historically, just the players that have come and gone and their positions have changed and we've kind of been the foundational element in that corner, I think speaks to, how well we know the length of market, on top of all that, right, Pure Storage's first acquisition, right, StorReduce. >> Congratulations. >> For those of you who maybe haven't heard of StorReduce, start-up, their focus is on providing data deduplication across object stores, born in the cloud, Pure software play, I think we're going to continue to leverage that within it's current focus in market area as well as expand our, it's part of our cloud strategy and even maybe bring some of it into the current on-prem product portfolio. Lot's of opportunities available to us with that IP. >> So, you know, when you look back at the sort of, well first of all, flash, Solid-State, upper right. But there's life beyond flash arrays, right. So if you look at some of the early guys, you remember Astec, if that's even how you say it, Fusion, and a lot of people predicted, oh you know, same thing, everybody's going to catch up to Pure, but you guys kept innovating, cloud is now a fly wheel for you guys, you really went hard after it. So I wonder if you could talk about the evolution and sort of phases as you guys see them of the company? >> Yeah so for your audience, I think one way to look at this with a start-up is when your founders have an idea of bringing a product to market, you have to be very laser-focused which means there's trade-offs, right, there's a lot of things that you can't do so that you can bring your technology to bear, your product, you've got to you know be able to gain market share, right. Customers' revenue is kind of like the lifeblood early on. And we've evolved past that, right, there's been the passing on the torch last year with our change in CEO from Scott who moved on to be chairman of the board, bringing in Charlie, and I think we're really at this phase of the beginning of what I call Act II, along the way, flash array which is our flagship and our initial product, has helped customers adopt technologies through different business models, right, the Evergreen Storage play, us introducing non-volatile memory express into all of our products, you know, half of our customer shipments in Q2 were all NVMe, right, so. Allowing customers to adopt technologies in new models that they didn't have before that aren't rip and replacements has been a key to our success beyond the tech. Flash blades often up and running in net new areas of business opportunities for us like AI and ML. And now you get StorReduce, right, this cloud component. I would say that the legacy of Pure, that Act I that Scott built is going to continue to run for the next couple years kind of on auto-pilot. And that's not to be dismissive of the field that's got to go out and execute every, you know, every day, every quarter, but Charlie's vision about what we're going to evolve into, I mean we're really if, to use a baseball analogy because someone was talking Sox before the cameras went on >> Who could that have been? >> Yeah, yeah. (laughs) You know, we're in the beginning of the first inning, you know, StorReduce is just, I think the tip of what we're going to do. We got 1.1 billion in the bank, you know, we've got a little bit of capital to continue to invest in the portfolio. So right now the focus is on still, I think there's two ways to look at this. What I find most enterprise customers want to talk about is how do I merge three modern technologies, right? All-flash, hyper-conversion, and cloud? Give me a strategy that unifies them, not one that divides. And we can have a whole conversation on that. Then there's this whole other segment around analytics and AI which, you heard it here in the keynote this morning with Pat. Focus area, you know for VM Ware, AI is the modern version of what analytics were six years ago. And so this is something that I don't think all the practitioners here are aware of. It comes from a data science or the application side into the infrastructure, and we're trying to help people make a turnkey AI-ready infrastructure through the RE product within video so there's just a lot to talk about. >> And you can see those worlds coming together with, take cloud, take AI, take data, which is what you're all about. >> Yup. >> That's kind of the innovation sandwich of the next 10 years. It ain't Moore's Law anymore, right? It's AI, applying machine intelligence to the data and scaling a cloud. >> You know one of the things that Silicone Angle I think may have been at least the largest analyst firm that I saw jump on this early, was around the notion of bringing your data to the infrastructure. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And then you guys pushed in, you guys leaned in really hard about three or four years ago on that the world is a hybrid model. It's not one or the other, it's all hybrid. And you even talked about the differences in the type of data sets and it's computational requirements and where it may or may not be placed, as well as you really leaned in on the interop requirements to cross the different silos. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So kudos to your research. >> Yeah, thank you, and we've quantified that. It's actually that whole idea of bringing the compute to the data, for example, wherever it resides. I mean that's a big, big business. If you look at the size of the market of those folks trying to replicate substantially cloud on-prem, it's 30 billion dollar businessing growing very, very rapidly. And you guys play in both sides of that, I mean that's what's impressive, you're not just on-prem, you're not just in cloud, you're hybrid. >> Here's a good example of how cloud evolves. We're really proud of our net promoter score, right. It's 86.6, top 1% of B2B businesses, right. I look at external points of validation whether it's a net promoter score, what an analyst firm ranks you at in their Magic Quadrant or others, as are you delivering to your customers your promise to them, right, you're marketing material. Part of why our score is so high is the product's reliability is there and it delivers. Underpinning that is we've got a predictive analytics technology that helps the arrays achieve greater than Six Nines availability, right? That component, that's Pure One, that was born in the cloud. That was born in AWS, and we talked about this in a session at our Accelerate conference, which is we've got greater than nine petabytes up there. Every time we do a new, we're working a new algorithm for AI to make our product better for our customers, we have to download a year's worth of historical data. That takes 45 days to download in stage. So we're moving it to a hybrid model. And what's it going to allow us to do? It's instantly going to help us reduce our cost and accelerate our AI initiatives by six X. And it's just a bridging of the technologies. Regardless of what you have, you have an all-flash array, you're a cloud provider, you're a hyper-converged. Sometimes your product teams look at the world with like, I got to hammer and that's a nail and what really provides sophisticated outcomes is when you can bridge the technologies based on results. >> Speaking of marketing messaging, some people, some companies like to say they are data-driven, or they will enable their customers to become data-driven. At Accelerate a few months ago, Pure Storage talked about data-centric architecture. Now we all hear data is the lifeblood, data is power, data is currency, it's none of those things unless an organization can harness it and extract the insights and act on them immediately. >> Right. >> Talk to us about the data-centric architecture. What is that, how have you seen that, we'll say, accelerate in momentum in the last few months? >> Great questions, so thank you for bringing that up. I think on the surface, one may look at a data-centric architecture message as being oh, that's what you would expect from a storage vendor to say, right? Sounds like something aligns to your products. And I think there was some inside baseball being shared, if you will, in that message, right? There was some telegraphing going on. Because at the core of the message, what we're trying to say is, your traditional applications tend to be more stove piped and siloed, right? What you see, and I'll take this through two levels, what you see with taking traditional applications or legacy apps and you virtualize them, and now you want this mobility where you can move the application around anywhere, all-flash or on-prem or into the cloud, that's one form of movement. Modern applications are distributed, right? There are a collection of processes, different data sets and the application's much more like a pipeline. And so when you look at data from a view of pipeline, you have to stop thinking about your silo that's wrapped around your one tool that you as a developer may have a responsibility for in the product or the code. >> Your God box, as it were, right. >> You got to figure out how does it work in a pipeline with others, how are you going to ingest data and hand off data? So in a data-centric architecture, we're trying to advocate that there's a value in shared architectures and in addition to this, there's been this whole market that's grown up over the last decade initially around analytics where their architectures were designed around DAS architectures. And you have to look back a little bit to get a understanding of where we are today which was, you go back ten or twelve years ago, it was really easy with the par of intel to bury a disc-based storage rate, no matter what size it was and which vendor put it out. You could saturate the IL bandwidth. Now we're at a day and age today, shared accelerated storage, fast network interconnect with non-viable memory express over fabric whether we're talking ethernet or fiber channel. I now have the latency that's within ten microseconds of direct attach storage. I get all the benefits of shared. And I get some new architectural models that may help me with costs and efficiencies. And so you're starting to see vendors in the software space follow in suit and so, for example, you've got Vertica releasing support for S3 on-prem. You've got VM Ware adding more fuel around VVOLS and interoperability between VVOLS, vSAN, and VM Cloud. There's more partners that have more activity going on that I can't share because they've got announcements coming through the second half of the year but vCloud Air just published in July a new paper on HDFS on remote storage regardless of the protocol so you're seeing all these DAS-centric vendors start to say, alright, our customer-base is telling us they need a shared model. So shared accelerated, flash, NVMe, NVMe over fabric, it's going to fuel new architectures that are more flexible. >> So I want to follow up with that because you're right, the data pipeline is elongating and it's getting quite complex. I mean if you're an AWS customer, which we are actually, if you use kinesics, DynamoDB, EC2, S3, you know Red Shift, etc. Those are all sort of different proprietary APIs. Sometimes you don't know what you should do where until after you get the bill. >> Right. >> Can you help solve that problem for customers and simplify that or are you just a piece of that chain? >> So we have a component within the chain but we're working with our field and our field technologists to help advise customers particularly around what I'd call like a cloud-first strategy. So, if we look outside of storage and you're looking in the cloud developers and it's function as a service, for example. >> Right. >> So we use our own case study, right, Pure One. We got hooked into function as a service within our provider. And what we've found was our ability to use multiple clouds, our ability to go hybrid-cloud, and our ability to actually take our analytics and be able to package it up and deliver it to dark side customers that, there's about a third of our customers that won't allows for their units to phone home, okay? Three-letter acronyms that run in the federal space. Cloud-first meant that we just take that function as a service and instead of making the direct API call put it in a container. Now once you're containerized, I can run it on any cloud. Right, and now again, cross-public cloud, hybrid, into private, and it gives you a lot of flexibility. So we're working on architectures and educational conversations, not just about the data pipeline and how your data has to transform as it goes through these different phases, but also at the higher level, really going to be leaning in on containerization and so the customers can have greater mobility, and again, we'll use our own use-case and evolution of Pure One is the front and center message there. >> I'd love to get your perspective, kind of changing the topic, on the ecosystem evolution. You've observed the VM Ware ecosystem. You remember well, I mean it's just strange that EMC ended up with this asset, right? I mean it's kind of unnatural and all of a sudden, boom, it explodes, and you had this storage company somewhat controlling, you had the storage cartel kind of which, VM Ware wanted to placate, so that was good, that sort of was a bulwark against EMC having too much control. Now you see Del's ownership, you see the AWS relationship. As an ecosystem partner who's now reached escape velocity and beyond, what do you make of all this? >> I think you have to look across Pat's time and before Pat to Diane, right? Diane made it clear, right, when there was acquisitions in play for VM Ware, right, she said, we'll never be owned by a server vendor. And so storage vendor acquires EMC, and for all the blustering of EMC control, there was never anything that was proprietary towards EMC with VM Ware, right. >> Right. >> The focus was on the entire partner ecosystem. That's a good bat, right, let the harbor vendors go battle out for who's got best in class, just deliver the VM software to the market. Allow VM Ware to go innovate on different timeframe than the storage layer. Now that Del is in the ownership seat, you have the same answers from Pat, when he sits down with Charlie it's like, look, we're going to be independent, we're going to be agnostic, we're going to take you as a partner to help us build frameworks. So for example, we're one of the lead design partners on NVMe over fabric, we're doing technology previews with vSphere in the booth. We're the fastest growing VVOL partner. So I know I'm making plugs here but I don't think anything's changed, right. I think VM Ware's business model's been brilliant to not become tied to any hardware partner and focus on what you do better than anyone else which has been delivering virtualization and what I really like about this show, and tell me if you think so, right. AWS was shared last year, right? Containers have been shared at this show for about four years. This year was a focus, right, it was AWS, it was containers, it was automate everything, and then inherently it brings security in as an inherent component of the products, right? These are really bold, strong investments that they've made that are new, right. So you see the evolution of VM Ware, and we're partnering with them on a number of these initiatives and there's nothing to share now. That'll be next year. >> Well and you're right, Vaughn, the picture's getting clearer. I thought Pat's keynote was very good this year, and crisper and more cogent relative to the strategy than last year and previous years. It's really starting to come together. Now what about the AWS piece because that's also a company with whom you have a relationship. So does the VM Ware, AWS partnership, is that a tailwind for you guys? Or is it, hey, we're trying to get the attention of AWS, too. >> So I would say our, so we signed a formal VM Ware alliance relationship this year, and I would say it's progressing well. What we can share with the market right now is minuscule to what we'll be sharing, say later in the year, beginning of next year. But for right now where we're at is, so we're a direct-connect partner, gold-level sponsor for their conference, re:Invent. With VM Ware and AWS and Pure as a three-way alliance and partnership, VM Cloud, VM C, is going to add support for iSCSI, that's a second-half of the year initiative, or fourth-quarter initiative, and we'll be there as a lead development partner supporting that framework when it comes online. It's going to open a lot more flexibility for us and our joint customers about adopting either your own on-prem hardware or running it on the Amazon hardware. Make it fit your business model whichever way you want to roll but make it fully interoperable and move the data and the compute instances seamlessly and non-disruptively. >> Guys. >> It helps to be a hot company. >> I wish we had more time. I'm hearing accelerated momentum and maybe some teasers that Vaughn dropped, >> Yes. That maybe the CUBE needs to be, yeah. >> We'll stay in touch. >> We'll get some more interviews. >> Yeah. >> (Laughs) Vaughn, thanks so much for joining Dave and me and sharing all this exciting news that's going on, and like I said, accelerated momentum, pun intended by the way. >> Thank you, thanks guys. >> Great to see you. >> We want to thank you for watching the CUBE for Dave Vellonte, I'm Lisa Martin with the CUBE at VM World Day One from Las Vegas, stick around, we'll be right back. (funky music) >> Hi, I'm John Walls. I've been with the CUBE for a couple years.