(upbeat electronic. music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with Keith Townsend and you're watching theCUBE's broadcast of VMworld 2017. One of our guests earlier this week called this set the punk rock set and one of my guests here in a preview said that this is going to be the battle of the baldies (laughter) so I'm really happy to bring two leaders of two of the hottest topics being discussed this week, welcoming back to the program Dom Delfino of course representing NSX and Security at NSBU and Lee Caswell from the vSAN Team. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, how are you, buddy? >> I'm doing phenomenal. Dom, are you making network great again, yet? >> It's fantastic again now. We're making network fantastic again. >> Yeah and I expected you to show up a little more bling because we were talking Silicon Valley. Your group is reaching the three commas of a billion dollars. >> Dom: That's right. >> So let's start there, NSE when it was bought a few years back, over a million dollars. SDN was something that we all in the networking world was talking about and things have changed. I don't hear SDN talked at this show, it's real customers, real deployments, pretty good scale. The interconnected fabric if you will for VM's cloud strategy. >> Yep, absolutely. So Stu, these major transformational shifts in the industry take time, right? You know, you're not going to undo what you've done for the last 25, 30 years in a month or a quarter or a year and I think what you saw initially was adoption of NSX or automation of network provisioning. Then what you saw second to that was microsegmentation as a defense in depth strategy for our customers and now you see the multi data center moving into the hybrid cloud. vRNI is a service, NSX is a service, App Defense, layering additional security capabilities on top of that and as our production customers sort of adopted it in the beachhead methodology operationalized it, you see additional follow on adoptions. We've got one customer running 18 data centers on NSX today so this is becoming more and more mainstream and as you look at our approach moving forward in terms of where we are and the software defines us in our journey, how that connects to our strategy for VMC on AWS or VMC on Blue Mix. You saw Agredo Apenzeller yesterday demonstrate crossed into Microsoft Azure. When was the last time you thought you'd see that at VMworld, huh? >> Hey Lee, I got to bring you in here. (laughter) It's funny, I've lived in the storage world. >> I thought this was a storage show. >> And now we're tech people throwing all these acronyms. >> I know, they're so excited. >> And you know because come on, NSX is not simple. Who's the one that's saving customers money so that they can buy all of these? >> NSX is a great value, but vSAN pays for the ride, right? >> Here we go, right? >> They do. We'll happily accept it. >> I mean, we're consolidating storage in a way that basically brings back the magic of consolidation, right? The first time you consolidated, people called it magic because you consolidated servers, bought shared storage and had money left over, right? Now we're doing the same thing again, right, with now storage, right? What's interesting is is this is a huge career path gain for the virtualization administrator. >> Wow, so talking about being disruptive, vSAN. You know, I've got to rib you guys a little bit at the dodge ball tournament benefiting Unoria, the vSAN team lost to the Dell EMC team, so. >> Can you imagine? And did you see how valiant we were? >> Dom: You guys fall hard. >> You fall hard. (laughter) >> You looked like you could have used a little youth on that team, by the way, Lee. >> So a lot of competition, you walked the show floor. >> Lee: Yeah. >> This, we usually call this storage world. I think it's fair to say it's HCI world now. >> Lee: It's amazing, right? >> How is vSAN fitting into the larger ecosystem? >> You know, we announced, Pat said we have over 10,000 customers now, right? And yet VMware has hundreds of thousands of customers right? So we're just getting started here and what you're finding is the two assets to bring to this party are a hypervisor or a server. >> Keith: Right. >> Right, you don't have either one of those, it's going to be very difficult because if you go back and you'll appreciate this, right? You remember a Type 2 hypervisor? >> Yep, vaguely. I almost wrote about it, like wait, they don't even exist anymore, do they? >> Well, Workstation still, right? If you start thinking, right, that was a hypervisor on a guest, right? And so what happened though, as soon as these XI came out, right, integrated the compelling performance advantages, the resource utilization and then the idea that hey, I got a common management through vCenter, right? That's what's playing right now is users are trying to find leverage and scale, how do I do that and that's where we've just seen a massive adoption of ECM. >> Alright, one of the reasons we brought the two of you together though is because while peanut butter and chocolate are great on their own, the cloud foundation. >> Dom: I have the whole sandwich now, Stu. >> Yes, yes, so you know Cloud Foundation, NSX might be the interconnective fabric between all of them. Cloud Foundation is that solution, there's a whole business unit, put that together and drive that, so talk about how you feed that solution, how that changes the way you think about it. >> Probably the most interesting thing and I've only had the vSAN team for six months but I think the most interesting thing for me and vSAN is it scales downmarket very well as well, so we have massive enterprise customers, right, who have large global deployments of vSAN but you can take vSAN, put it on three nodes and see value out of that, right? And I think when you look at, you know, this is the year of cloud reality I'm calling it now, Stu, right? That's what's happened here this weekend at VMworld. When you look at that I think the most fundamental thing the customers are taking out of this week is my private cloud has to be as good as the public cloud offering, okay? Now if you're a Fortune 1,000 customer you certainly have a lot of resources, a lot of talent, a lot of expertise, a lot of history, and potentially a lot of budget to throw at that problem. But if you're a mid-market customer, right? And you look at I need to build a private cloud that's fast and easy, right? Which was the two primary reasons to adopt public cloud, you have a good place to start with Cloud Foundation and I think it's just the beginning so you get vSphere, you get NSX, you get vSAN, and you get SDDC Manager to do life cycle management, certainly you could layer vRealize on top of that for automation, orchestration, provisioning and self service as well and it really allows everybody to start to take advantage of the capabilities that only existed in the major cloud providers before on-prem and their own data center so I think as you look at Cloud Foundation and I'm working very closely with John Gilmartin on this, moving forward, it is going to become the basic foundational element, pun intended, right, for many of the VMware offerings moving forward as we turn into next year, that we'd look at this very closely and we have a lot of plans as that being the base to build off of in terms of how we help our customers get to this private cloud. >> Lee, I need to hear your perspective because some of this Cloud Foundation, there's got to be some differences when you talk about some of the deployment models whether where I'm doing it, how I'm doing it, VMC, the VMware managed cloud I guess on AWS, VMware on AWS something getting a lot of buzz. You know, everybody's digging into to it. What's it do today, what's it going to do in the future? >> Well, you know I thought it was really impressive when Andy Jassy got up and basically said, "We've been faced with a minor choice." Customers want these to be integrated, right? And the second day was Google, right? Talking about how we're taking developer tools, right, and making them common, so that element. Now storage people think that the strategic engagement with the cloud is about data, right? >> Stu: Right. >> Putting a VM in the cloud, I mean that's a credit card transaction, but once you put your first byte of data into the cloud, now you take on sovereignty issues, you think about performance and where you're going to get guaranteed ihovs out of it. You start thinking about how am I going to move that data? It's not fast or free or as anyone who has emailed a video knows, right, so you start thinking that it's the data elements and now what's really powerful and we saw some of this in the demos in general session. Once you have a common data structure, we call it dSAN, right, all the way from the edge into the data center of virtual private cloud then into the public cloud, now I've got the opportunity to have this really flexible fluid system, right? All virtualized, it's so powerful, right? About how I can manage that and we think, it'll be interesting, does the virtualization administrator then become the cloud administrator, right? >> So then, let's expand that one, vSAN everywhere. vSAN in the AWS, vSAN in vCAN, vSAN in my own data center. How do I protect that data? That seems just, is this where NSX comes in? How do I protect that data? >> Can we let Lee talk the security first? >> Where's the security, is the security in vSAN? >> Cause I know Dom >> We'll let Lee go first and then I'll correct him, okay? (laughter) >> Well, I mean you start with a security like encryption on the data, right? I mean one of the things why vSAN's so portable is because there is no hardware dependency. I mean, we're using like all, we support all different servers, there's no proprietary cards or anything, right, to stick in these servers so we can go run that software wherever. Now, we're also then as a result doing software encryption with our latest release on 6.6 software encryption allows us to use common key management partners, right, and so we use those partners including iTrust, Vales, FlowMetric, and others and now you can have key management regardless of where your data resides, so we start there but then what customers say really quickly, right, is if I start moving something, they say, "NSX help me out, right?" >> So I think Lee took to a very critical part of it, the ability to encrypt that data at rest and you know, as it transits, there's really three elements to this, it's the data itself, which we say that 6.6 introduced, right, the ability to encrypt that data, microsegmentation and upcoming DNE to both protect and encrypt that data while it's in flight and now if you look at that App Defense strategy, right, it's to secure that data while it's being processed as well at the host level up at the application layer, so I think Stu this just continues to be a huge challenge for our customers. Particularly with the breeches, we saw what happened with Wannacry, with Pedia, with non-Pedia, the different versions of that, Electric Blue and all. >> Stop, you know, your boss who's on theCUBE on the other set right now said, "As an industry, we have failed you." Pat Gelson gave the keynote, so when we're solving it, you know we're going to have like next year I expect both of you to have this all fixed. >> One of these, you asked like with all the HCI enthusiasts that are out there in many companies, you know, how do we differentiate? Well, part of it is this is not just a drop in a little box, right, someplace, right? This is how do you go and modernize your data center, basically tie into the complete software stack and regardless of the timing in which you're going to go and deploy that, right, if you're going to deploy the full stack today, that's a VMware cloud foundation, awesome, if you want to go start with vSAN, great, and then add in other pieces, or you can start with NSX. In any event, the common management is the piece that we really think is going to go and set us apart, right, as a part of it's an infrastructure play, not just a point component. >> So? >> Hold on I want to let Don finish. >> Stu, I think three years ago if we sat down here and told you you're going to encrypt your software defined storage, in software, no hardware requirements, I probably would have said I was nuts for saying that and you definitely would have said I was nuts for saying that so this is critical and we are hyper-focused on solving this problem and what customers have to recognize is that you have to make some foundational architectural changes in order to fix this problem and if you don't it's not going away, it's only going to get worse. >> So, I took a peep in at FUTURE:NET. First off, VMware does an awesome job of this conference within a conference. >> Isn't it fun? >> It is fun, a little bit over my head at times, which we have to be getting that same reaction from the CIOs that this stuff even when we're taking stuff that we know very well, Vmware or vSphere, starting with that, adding on vSAN, again the conversation, Dom, we can encrypt at both network and compute and storage? That's a little deep, but now we're talking about this crosscloud conversation that FUTURE:NET is most definitely addressing. How is that conversation going with customers? Are they finally starting to get their arms around the complexity of the situation? >> Absolutely Keith, because when you look at our multi-data center functions of NSX that we introduced back in NSX 6.2 at VMworld two years ago, three years ago, I'm getting long in the tooth here, so I can't remember times anymore. Those were the foundational elements for the components of crosscloud today so many customers who started the NSX journey with one use case and one data center and expanded it horizontally and then down through a number of use cases and then across to another data center are already taking advantage of those crosscloud functionalities from private data center to private data center. Now we've just taken them and extended them into Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS as well. So the customers who've been on this journey with us from the beginning have seen this step by step and it doesn't really seem like a big leap to them already. Now obviously if you haven't been on that journey it seems like you know, hey can you guys really do this and yeah, we've been doing it from private data center to private data center, now we're just bringing that capability to public data center and certainly the partnership with Amazon is a tremendous help to that as well. >> Yeah, when customers are buying into these solutions, and I know you like to look at it as a platform, so let's look out a little bit. I want you to talk a little bit about what we should expect from the future, if it makes edge computing kind of IoT is a big one, I have to expect that both of you have a play there, so? >> I guess I'll touch on that in two pieces so you sort of see us extending this up a little bit initially with PKS with pivotal container services, with Kubernetes on BOSH and the ability to do rolling upgrades and NSX is embedded in that solution, right, it's not a built-on offering, it's natively part of that for all the reasons that we talked about earlier and we see a lot of opportunities as it relates to edge computing, right, and I think this is something that, wasn't it file computing like seven years ago, Stu? >> Your former employer was one that was pushing that. >> Dom: Oh okay, yeah what happened to that? >> Yeah I have heard it come back from data center to cloud. >> I'm just needling you Stu, we didn't need to get into that. >> But you know, terminology does matter, but I hear your point. >> So I think A. IoT is the biggest security challenge that we face, right? >> Stu: Yep. >> That's number one. If you think it's bad now it's about to get a lot worse with the wholesale adoption of IoT. I think that when you look at the remote office, the branch office, what's going on with the transition with wide area networking right now, I think there's a tremendous opportunity there. Clearly we have a play where you can provide sort of a branch in a box with our technology but I think there's a lot of things you'll see coming from us in the near term as far as innovation that we can do there to really enhance edge computing as it relates to IoT and certainly our user computing platform with Horizon Air of the Legacy AirWatch venture, is an important part of securing those edge devices as well. >> Lee? >> On the vSAN side, this week we announced the HDI Acceleration Kit and that's basically a way to take advantage of single socket servers, right? And one of the things we're seeing for bandwidth reasons and economics you don't want to have everything centralized so the ability, particularly in an IoT environment, but also in retail or robo, if you've got hundreds of stores there's no way to put a sandbox and a fiber channel switch in separate storage and scale that, right? So what we're doing is we've got a very cost-effective license, right, incredible where you can get with hardware now, you can go and drop in a three node fully configured vSAN plus vSphere for under 25K. Drop it in, now you've got a virtualized environment, unlimited VMs, this sort of thing where we're helping basically bring the accelerating the adoption using HDI of enterprise modern infrastructure outside the data center. >> So last question around customer adoption and again, assessments of this model. The push, I think 816Z said that the edge is going to eat loud computing. Where do you guys see in the real world, the ground, is it a push towards the cloud or is it this combination of doing? >> In my experience, right and this is like an accordion, right, it goes in, it goes out it goes in, it goes out, why? Well it goes in and out based on economics and bandwidth. Right, so you start looking and saying, now until HDI came out, it just wasn't really feasible to put enterprise infrastructure at the edge, right? >> Keith: Right. >> So things were centralized, right? Well now, right, now we start distributing again, right? The cloud is an example of more centralized, right? But I think we're going to see both, right? And you're going to see this what's particularly interesting right now is right, the new advances in media, CPUS, low-latency networks makes it possible to use these I call it the serverization of storage, but really it's a serverization of the modern data center, right, and which by the way is common to how clouds are built. >> But does that mean the overall IT management or complex, as I build it out that control plane. >> I'll give you an example from this morning. I was meeting with one of the largest banks, right? And they were looking at HDI, they've used a lot of stance ORKS in the past and do you know what he asked at the end? "Could you give me the ORK charts of customers "in my scale who are using HDI?" >> Stu: Yeah. >> Because I want to go figure out how I hyper-converge my team. We'll never be fast until we go and get teams that are working more closely together where they start from the VM level and then they look at the network attributes and the storage attributes and the compute attributes. That's going to speed up everything. >> And I think Lee is 100% spot on there and every customer I've talked to this week, you have to make the transition to an infrastructure team, not a network team, a storage team, a security team, you're an infrastructure team, and this is why the app developers have been going around you, right? And this is why you have Shadow IT, it's because they want fast and simple and they don't want to have to deal with four different people, right? They don't want to have to deal with a serialization of a deployment that they're left waiting for the lag for and I think in terms of the edge computing, I think you related it to one of the conversations by Andreessen Horowitz. I think that might differ a little bit in the consumer space and in the enterprise space as well so it may be the case in the consumer space that it erodes some functionality from the cloud, particularly on the IoT side of things as well, driverless cars and things of that nature where it makes sense that if you get disconnected that you still need to have some computing capacity so you don't crash, right Lee? Crashing is not good. But I think the behavioral change, the people change, the mindset change is much more challenging than the technological change. Everything you haven't done before seems complicated until you actually do it, right? >> Alright well, we talked a lot to customers. Actually some of that organizational change is helping them to tackle things like those new architectures. Security is one that is I've been leaving it for too long and now absolutely front of the table. Don Delfino, Lee Caswell, always a pleasure to catch up with both you. >> Always a pleasure. >> Hope it lived up to your expectations that we brought the heat. Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. Thank you for watching the CUBE. (light electronic music)