>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. Please welcome Puneet Dhawan, the Director of Product Management, Hyper-converged infrastructure for Dell Technologies. Puneet great to see you today. >> Thank you, for having me over. >> And we've got a customer that's going to be articulating all the value that Puneet's going to talk about. Please welcome Greg Altman, the IT infrastructure manager from Swiff-Train. Hey, Greg, how are you today? >> I'm doing well. Thank you. >> Excellent. All right guys. So Puneet, let's start with you, give us a little bit of an overview of your role. You lead product management, for Dell Technologies partner aligned HCI systems. Talk to us about that? >> Sure, absolutely. Um so, you know, it's largely about providing customers the choice. My team specifically focuses on developing Hyper-converged infrastructure products for our customers that are aligned to key technologies from our partners, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, et cetera. And that, you know, falls very nicely with meeting our customers on what technology they want to pick on, what technology they want to go with, whether it's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, we have to source from the customers. >> Let's dig into Microsoft. Talk to us about Azure Stack HCI. How is Dell Tech working with them to position this in the market? >> Sure, um, this is largely about following the customer journey towards digital transformation. So both in terms of where they are in digital transformation and how they want to approach it. So for example, we have a large customer base who's looking to modernize their legacy Hyper-V architectures, and that's where Azure Stack HCI fits in very nicely, and not only our customers are able to modernize the legacy architectures using the architectural benefits of simplicity, high performance, simple management, scalability. (Greg breathes heavily) For HCI for Hyper-V, at the same time, they can connect to Azure to get the benefits of the bullet's force. Now on the other end, we have a large customer base who started off in Azure, you know, they have cloud native applications, you know, kind of born in the cloud. But they're also looking to bring some of the applications down to on-prem, or things like disconnected scenarios, regulatory concerns, data locality reasons. And for those customers, Microsoft and Dell have a department around Dell EMC Integrated solutions for Azure Stack Hub. And that's what essentially brings Azure ecosystem, on-prem so it's like running cloud in your own premises. >> So you mentioned a second ago giving customers choice, and we always talk about that at pretty much every event that we do. So tell me a little bit about how the long standing partnership that Dell Technologies has with Microsoft decades. How is that helping you to really differentiate the technology and then show the customers the different options, together these two companies can deliver? >> Sure, so we've had a very long standing partnerships, actually over three decades now. Across the spectrum whether we talk about our partnership more on the Windows 10 side, and the modernization of the workforce, to the level of hybrid cloud and cloud solutions, and helping even customers, you know, run their applications on Azure to our large services offerings. Over the past several years, we have realized how important is hybrid cloud and multicloud for customers. And that's where we have taken our partnership to the next level, to co-develop, co-engineer and bring to the market together our full portfolio of Azure Stack Hybrid Solutions. And that's where I've said, meeting customers on where they are either bringing Azure on-prem, or helping customers on-prem, modernize on-prem architectures using Azure Stack HCI. So, you know, there's a whole lot of core development we have done together to simplify how customers manage on-prem infrastructures on a day-to-day basis, how do they install it, even how they support it, you know, we have joined support agreements with Microsoft that encompassed and bearing the entirety of the portfolio so that customers have one place to go, which is Dell Technologies to get not only the product, either in US or worldwide, to a very secure supply chain to Dell EMC, at the same time for all their support consulting services, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. We offer all those services in very close partnership with Microsoft. >> Terrific. Great. Let's switch over to you now, probably we talk about what Swiff-Train is doing with its Azure Stack HCI, tell our audience a little bit about Swiff-Train what you guys are what you do. >> Well, Swiff-Train is a full covering flooring wholesaler, we sell flooring across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, even into Florida. And we're an 80 year old company, 80 plus. And we've been moving forward with kind of hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense. And when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old, well five, six years old, running Windows 2012 2016, it was time to upgrade. And when we look at doing a large scale upgrade, like that, we called Dell and say, you know, this is what we're trying to do, and what's the new technologies that we can do that makes the migration work easier. And that's where we wound up with Azure Stack. >> So from a modernization perspective, you mentioned 80 plus year old company, I was looking on the website 1937. I always like to talk to companies like that, because modernizing when you've been around for that long it's challenging, it's challenging culturally , it's challenging historically, But talk to us a little bit about some of the specifics, that you guys were looking to Dell and Microsoft to help modernize. And was this really to drive things like, you know, operational simplicity, allow the business to have more agility so that it can expand in some of those other cities, like we talked about? >> Absolutely. We were dealing with a long maintenance window five or six hours every week patching, updating. Since we moved to Azure Stack HCI, we have virtually zero downtime. That allows our night shifts or weekend crews to be able to keep working. And the system is just bulletproof. It just does not go down. And with the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center, and Dell's OpenManage Plug-in, I log into one pane of glass in the morning, and I look and I say, "Hey, all my servers are going great. Everything's in the green." I know that that day, I'm not going to have any infrastructure issues, I can deal with other issues that make the business money. >> And I'm sure they appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the the actual implementation and the support as, as Puneet talked about all of the core development, the joint support that these two powerhouses deliver. Tell us about that implementation. And then for your day to day, what's your interaction with Dell and or Microsoft like? >> Well, for the implementation, we worked with our Dell representative. And we came up with a sizing plan. This is what we needed to do, we had eight or nine physical servers that we wanted to get rid of. And we wanted to compress down. Now we're definitely went from eight or nine to you servers down to three rack units of space with an edge, including the extra switches and stuff that we had to do. So I mean we were able to get rid of a lot of storage space or rack space. And as far as the implementation was really easy. Dell literally has a book, you follow the book and it's that simple. (Puneet chuckles) >> I like that I think more of us these days, can you somewhat write a book that we can just follow? That would be fantastic. One more question, Greg for you, before we go back to Puneet. As Puneet talked about in the beginning from describing his role, that you know, Dell Technologies works with a lot of other vendors. Why Azure Stack HCI for Swiff-Train? >> Well, it made sense for us. We were already moving, several of our websites were already moved to Azure, we've been a Hyper-V user for many years. So it was just kind of a natural evolution to migrate in that direction, because it kind of pulls all of our management tools into one, well you know, a one pane of glass type of scenario. >> Excellent. All right Puneet back to you. With some of the things that you talked about before and that Greg sort of articulated about simplifying day-to-day. Greg, I saw in my notes that you had this old aging infrastructure, you were spending five hours a week patching maintain, that you say is now virtually eliminated, Puneet, Dell Technologies and Microsoft had done quite a bit of work to simplify the operational experience. Talk to us about that, and what are some of the measurable improvements that you guys have made? >> Sure. It all starts with neither on how we approach the problem, and we have always taken a very product-centric approach at Azure Stack HCI. You know, unlike, some of our competition, which had followed. There is a reference architecture, you can put Windows Server 2019 on it and go run your own servers, and the Hyper-converged Stack on it, but we have followed a very different approach where we have learned quite a lot, you know, we are the number one vendor in HCI space, and we know a thing or two about HCI and what customers really need there. So that's why from the very beginning, we have taken a product-centric approach, and doing that allows us to have product type offers in terms of our Kx notes that are specifically designed and built for Azure Stack HCI. And on top of that, we have done very specific integration to the management Stack, we've been doing Admin Center, that is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage, both on-prem, Hyper-converged infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VM's that you're running on Azure, to provide customers a very seamless, you know, a single pane of glass for both the on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services. And in doing that, our customers have really appreciated how simple it is to keep their clusters running, to reduce the maintenance windows, based on some of our internal testing that we have done. IT administrators can reduce the time they spend on maintaining the clusters by over 90%. Over 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself. And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state. So you don't have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right founder from 10 different places, making sure whether they are qualified or not when running together, we provide one single pane of glass that customers can click on, and you know, see whether their questions are compliant or not, and if yes go update. And all this has been possible by a joint engineering with Microsoft. >> Can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution, which is what you're delivering, versus competitors that are only delivering a reference architecture? >> Absolutely. So if you're running just a reference architecture, you are running an operating system, systems Stack on a server, we know that when it comes to running HCI, that means running also business critical applications on a clustered environment. You need to make sure that all the hardware, the drivers, the founder, the hard drives, the memory configuration, the network configurations, all that can be very complex very easily. And if you have reference architectures, there is no way to know, but then running certified components in my note are not. How do you tell then? If a part fails? How do which part to sell or send, you know, for a replacement? If you're just running a reference architecture, you have no way to say the part the hard drive that failed, the one that was sent to the customer to replace whether that is certified for Azure Stack HCI or not? You know, what, how do you really make a determination, what is the right firmware that needs to be applied to a cluster of what other drivers that apply to be cluster, that are compliant and tested for Azure Stack HCI. None of these things are possible, if you just have a reference architecture approach. That's why we have been very clear that our approach is a product-based approach. And, you know, very frankly this is how we have... that's the feedback we've provided the Microsoft to, and we've been working very, you know, closely together. And you see that, now in terms of the new Azure Stack HCI, that Microsoft announced at Inspirely this year, that brings Microsoft into the mainstream HCI space as a product offering, and not just as a feature or a few features within the Windows Server program. >> Greg, I saw in the notes with respect to Swiff-Train that you guys have with Azure Stack HCI, you have reduced Rackspace by 50%, you talked about some of the Rackspace benefits. But you've also reduced energy by 70%. Those are big, impactful numbers, impacting not just your day-to-day but the overall business. >> That's true, >> Last question for you, Greg. If you think about how can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution versus a reference architecture. For your peers watching in any industry. what's your... what are your top recommendations for going with a validated all in one solution? >> Well, we looked at doing the reference architecture's path, if you will, because we're hands on we like to build things and I looked at it and like Puneet said, "Drivers and memory and making sure that everything is going to work well together." And not only that everything is going to work well together. But when something fails, then you get into the finger pointing between vendors, your storage vendor, your process vendor, that's not something that we need to deal with. We need to keep a business running. So we went with Dell, it's one box, you know, but one box per unit and then you Stack two of them together you have a cluster. >> You make it sound so easy. >> Let us question-- >> I put together children's toys that were harder than building the Stack I promise you, I did it in an afternoon. >> Music to my ears Greg, thank you. (Greg giggles) >> It was that easy >> That is gold >> Easier to put together Azure Stack HCI than some, probably even opening the box of some children's toys I can imagine. (all chuckling) >> We should use that as a tagline. >> Exactly. You should, I think you have a new tagline there. Greg, thank you. Puneet, well last question for you, Would Dell Technologies World sessions on hybrid cloud benefits with Dell and Microsoft? Give us a flavor of what some of the things are that the audience will have a chance to learn. >> Yeah, this is a great session with Microsoft that essentially provides our customers an overview of our joint hybrid cloud solutions, both for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Azure stack HCI as well as our joint solutions on VMware in Azure. But much more importantly, we also talk about what's coming next. Now, especially with Microsoft as your Stack at CIO's a full blown product. Hyper hybrid, you know, HCI offering that will be available as, Azure service. So customers could run on-prem infrastructure that is Hyper-converged but managed pay bill for as an Azure service, so that they have always the latest and greatest from Microsoft. And all the product differentiation we have created in terms of a product-centric approach, simpler lifecycle management will all be applicable, in this new hybrid, hybrid cloud solution as well. And that led essentially a great foundation for our customers who have standardized on Hyper-V, who are much more aligned to Azure, to not worry about the infrastructure on-prem. But start taking advantages of both the modernization benefits of HCI. But much more importantly, start coupling back with the hybrid ecosystem that we are building with Microsoft, whether it's running an Azure Kubernetes service on top to modernize the new applications, and bringing the Azure data services such as Azure SQL Server on top, so that you have a consistent, vertically aligned hybrid cloud infrastructure Stack that is not only easy to manage, but it is modern, it is available as a pay as you go option. And it's tightly integrated into Azure, so that you can manage all your on-prem as well as public cloud resources on one single pane of glass, thereby providing customers whole lot more simplicity, and operational efficiency. >> And as you said, the new tagline said from, beautifully from Greg's mouth, "The customer easier to put together than many children's toys." Puneet, thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on with Azure Stack HCI, what folks can expect to learn and see at Dell Tech World of virtual experience. >> Thank you. >> And Greg, thank you for sharing the story, what you're doing. Helping your peers learn from you. And I'm going to say on behalf of Dell Technologies, that awesome new tagline. That was cool. (Greg chuckles) (Lisa chuckles) >> Thank you. 'Preciate your time. >> We're going to use it for sure. (Greg chuckles) >> All right, for Puneet Dhawan and Greg Altman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>> Voice over: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Mittleman, and welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe for 2020. Get to talk to the participants in this great community and ecosystem where they are around the globe. And when you think back to the early days of containers, it was, containers, they're lightweight, they're small, going to obliterate virtualization is often the headline that we had. Of course, we know everything in IT tends to be additive. And here we are in 2020 and containers and virtual machines, living side by side and often we'll see the back and forth that happens when we talk about virtualization in containers. To talk about that topic specifically, happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Steve Gordon. He's the director of product management at Red Hat. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much Stu, it's great to be here. >> All right, as I teed up of course, virtualization was a wave that swept through the data center. It is a major piece, not only of what's in the data center, but even if you look at the public Clouds, often it was virtualization underneath there. Certain companies like Google, of course, really drove a container adoption. And often you hear when people talk about, I built something CloudNative, that underlying piece of being containerized and then using an orchestration layer like Kubernetes is what they talk about. So maybe stop for a sec, Red Hat of course, heavily involved in virtualization and containers, how you see that landscape and what's the general conversation you have with customers as to how they make the choice and how the lines blur between those worlds? >> Yeah, so at Red Hat, I think we've been working on certainly the current iteration of the next specialization with KVM for around 12 years and myself large portion of that. I think, one thing that's always been constant is while from the outside-in, specialization looks like it's been a fairly stable marketplace. It's always changing, it's always evolving. And what we're seeing right now is as people are adopting containers and even constructs built on top of containers into their workflows, there is more interest and more desire around how can I combine these things, recognizing that still an enormous percentage of my workloads are out there running in virtual machines today, but I'm building new things around them that need to be able to interact with them and springboard off of that. So I think for the last couple of years, I'm sure you yourself have seen a number of different projects pop up and the opensource community around this intersection of containers and visualization and how can these technologies compliment each other. And certainly KubeVirt is one of the projects that we've started in this space, in reaction to both that general interests, but also the real customer problems that people have, as they try and meld these two worlds. >> So Steve, at Red Hat Summit earlier this year, there was a lot of talk around container native virtualization. If you could just explain what that means, how that might be different from just virtualization in general, and we'll go from there. >> Sure, so back in, I think early 2017, late 2016, we started playing around this idea. We'd already seen the momentum around Kubernetes and the result the way we architected OpenShift, three at a time around, Kubernetes has this strength as an orchestration platform, but also a shared provider of storage, networking, et cetera, resources. And really thinking about, when we look at virtualization and containers, some of these problems are very common regardless of what footprint the workload happens to fit into. So leveraging that strength of Kubernetes as an orchestration platform, we started looking at, what would it look like to orchestrate virtual machines on that same platform right next to our application containers? And the extension of that the KubeVirt project and what has ultimately become OpenShift virtualization is based around that core idea of how can I make a traditional virtual machine to a full operating system, interact with and look exactly like a Kubernetes native construct, that I can use from the same platform? I can manage it using the same constructs, I can interact with it using the same console, all of these kinds of ideas. And then on top of that, not just bring in workloads as they lie, but enable really powerful workforce with people who are building a new application in containers that still need some backend components, say a database that's sitting in a VM, or also trying to integrate those virtual machines into new constructs, whether it's something like a pipeline or a service mesh. We're hearing a lot of questions around those things these days where people don't want to just apply those things to brand new workloads, but figure out how do they apply those constructs to the broader majority of their fleet of workflows that exist today. >> All right, so I believe back at Red Hat Summit, OpenShift virtualization was in beta. Where's the product that solution sets till today? >> Right, so at this year's KubeCon, we're happy to announce that OpenShift virtualization is moving to general availability. So it will be a fully supported part of OpenShift. And what that means is, you, as a subscriber to OpenShift, the platform, get virtualization as just an additional capability of that platform that you can enable as an operator from the operator hub, which is really a powerful thing for admins to be able to do that. But also is just really powerful in terms of the user experience. Like once that operator is enabled on your cluster, the little tab shows up, that shows that you can now go and create a virtual machine. But you also still get all of the metrics and the shared networking and so on that goes with that cluster, that underlies it all. And you can again do some really powerful things in terms of combining those constructs for both virtual machines and containers. >> When you talk about that line between virtualization and containers, a big question is, what does this mean for developers? How is it different from what they were using before? How do they engage and interact with their infrastructure today? >> Sure, so I think the way a lot of this current wave of technology got started for people was whether it was with Kubernetes or Docker before that, people would go and grab, easiest way they could grab compute for capacity was go to their virtual machine firm, whether that was their local virtualization estate at their company, or whether that was taking a credit card to public Cloud, getting a virtual machine and spinning up a container platform on top of that. What we're now seeing is, as that's transitioning into people building their workloads, almost entirely around these container constructs, in some cases when they're starting from scratch, there is more interest in, how do I leverage that platform directly? How do I, as my application group have more control over that platform? And in some cases, depending on the use case, like if they have demand for GPUs, for example, or other high-performance devices, that question of whether the virtualization layer between my physical host and my container is adding that much value? But then still wanting to bring in the traditional workloads they have as well. So I think we've seen this gradual transition where there is a growing interest in reevaluating, how do we start with container based architectures? To, okay, how has we transitioned towards more production scenarios and the growth in production scenarios? What tweaks do we make to that architecture? Does it still make sense to run all of that on top of virtual machines? Or does it make more sense to almost flip that equation as my workload mix gradually starts changing? >> Yeah, two thoughts come to mind on that. Number one is, are there specific applications out there, or I think about traditional VMs, often that Windows environments that we have there, is that some of the use case to bring them over to containers? And then also, once I've gotten it into the container environment, what are the steps to move forward? Because I have to expect that there's going to be some refactoring, some modernization to take advantage of the innovation and pace of change, not just to take it, containerize it and leave it. >> Yeah, so certainly, there is an enormous amount of potential out there in terms of Windows workloads, and people are definitely trying to work out how do they leverage those workloads in the context of OpenShift and Kubernetes based environment. And Windows containers obviously, is one way to address that. And certainly, that is very powerful in and of itself, for bringing those workloads to OpenShift and Kubernetes, but does have some constraints in terms of needing to be on a relatively recent version of Windows server and so on for those workloads to run in that construct. So where OpenShift virtualization helps with that is we can actually take an existing virtual machine workload, bring that across, even if it's say Windows server 2012, run it on top of the OpenShift virtualization platform as a VM, And then if or when you start modernizing more of that application, you can start teasing that out into actual containers. And that's actually something, it is one of our very early demos at Red Hat Summit 2018, I think was how you would go about doing that, and primarily we did that because it is a very powerful thing for customers to see how they can bring those, all the applications into this mix. And the other aspect of that I'll mention is one of our financial services customers who we've been working with, basically since that demo, they saw it from a hallway at Red Hat Summit and came and said, "Hey, we want to talk to you guys about that." One of the primary workload, is a Windows 10 style environment, that they happened to be bringing in as well. And that's more in that construct of treating OpenShift almost as a pool of compute, which you can use for many different workload types with the Windows 10 being just one aspect of that. And the other thing I'll say in terms of the second part of the question, what do I need to do in terms of refactoring? So we are very conscious of the fact that, if this is to provide value, you have to be able to bring in existing virtual machines with as minimal change as possible. So we do have a migration solution set, that we've had for a number of years, for bringing our virtual machines to Linux specialization stacks. We're expanding that to include OpenShift virtualization as a target, to help you bring in those existing virtual machine images. Where things do change a little bit is in terms of the operational approaches. Obviously, admin console now is OpenShift for those virtual machines, that does right now present a change. But we think it is a very powerful opportunity in terms of, as people get more and more production workloads into containers, for example, it's going to become a lot more appealing to have a backup solution, for example, that can cater to both the virtual machine workloads as well as any stateful container workloads you may have, which do exist in increasing numbers. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up a stateful discussion because as an industry, we've spent a long time making sure that virtual machines, have storage and have networking that is reliable in performance and the like. What should customers be thinking about and operators when they move to containers? Are there things that are different you manage bringing into, this brings them into the OpenShift management plane. So what else should I be thinking about? What do I need to do differently when I've embraced this? >> Yeah, so I think in terms of the things that virtual machine expects, the two big ones that come to mind to me are networking and storage. The compute piece is still there obviously, but I think is a little less complicated to solve just because the OpenShift and broader Kubernetes community have done such a great job of addressing that piece, and that's really what attracted us to it in the first place. But on the networking side, certainly the expectations of a traditional virtual machine are a little bit different to the networking model of Kubernetes by default. But again, we've seen a lot of growth in container based applications, particularly in the context of CloudNative network functions that have been pushing the boundaries of Kubernetes networking as well. That's resulted in projects like Motus, which allow us to give a virtual machine related to networking interface that it expects, but also give it the option of using the pod networking natively, for some of those more powerful constructs that are native to Kubernetes. So that's one of those areas where you've got a mix of options, depending on how far you want to go from a modernization perspective versus do I just want to bring this workload in and run it as it is. And my modernization is more built around it, in terms of the other container based things. Then similarly in storage, it's an area where obviously at Red Hat, we've been working close with the OpenShift container storage team, but we also work with a number of ecosystem partners on, not just how do we certify their storage plugins and make sure they work well both for containers and virtual machines, but also how do we push forward upstream efforts, around things like the container storage interface specification, to allow for these more powerful capabilities like snapshots cloning and so on which we need for virtual machines, but are also very valuable for container based workloads as well. >> Steve, you've mentioned some of the reasons why customers were moving towards this environment. Now that you're GA, what learnings did you have during beta? Are there any other customer stories you could share that you've learned along this journey? >> Yeah, so I think one of the things I'll say is that, there's no feedback like direct product in the hands of customer feedback. And it's really been interesting to see the different ways that people have applied it, not necessarily having set out to apply it, but having gotten partway through their journey and realized, hey, I need this capability. You have something that looks pretty handy and then having success with it. So in particular, in the telecommunications vertical, we've been working closely with a number of providers around the 5G rollouts and the 5G core in particular, where they've been focused on CloudNative network functions. And really what I mean by that is the wave of technology and the push they're making around 5G is to take what they started with network function virtualization a step further, and build that next generation network around CloudNative technologies, including Kubernetes and OpenShift. And as I've been doing that, I have been finding that some of the vendors are more or less prepared for that transition. And that's where, while they've been able to leverage the power of containers for those applications that are ready, they're also able to leverage OpenShift virtualization as a transitionary step, as they modernize the pieces that are taking a little bit longer. And that's where we've been able to run some applications in terms of the load balancer, in terms of a carrier grade database on top of OpenShift virtualization, which we probably wouldn't have set out to do this early in terms of our plan, but we're really able to react quickly to that customer demand and help them get that across the line. And I think that's a really powerful example where the end state may not necessarily be to run everything as a virtual machine forever, but that was still able to leverage this technology as a powerful tool in the context of our broadened up optimization effort. >> All right, well, Steve, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations on going GA for this solution. Definitely look forward to hearing more from the customers as they come. >> All right, thanks so much Stu. I appreciate it. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Stu Mittleman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

absolutely build on some of Ben's comments because I think what he articulated is one of the killer use cases of VMware cloud on a to us that I think is driving that momentum right which is we think it's one of the best solutions in the marketplace and customers have told us this to enable them to migrate and modernize right so let's talk about the migrate piece first right you have customers that have these tremendous enterprise class applications running on vSphere and their data centers they're built on top of that platform they depend upon it for performance availability everything else with VMware Club a native us we can migrate those applications with zero downtime no refactoring no additional cost in a matter of weeks or months as opposed to if you had to refactor everything to take years and millions of dollars right so that cloud migration use case I would say is that is the killer for us and that's you know exactly what Ben was we're definitely seeing that and I think that's the thing that really got me excited about a year ago was watching enterprises make that transition and say you know what the center of gravity has gone from architectures inside the on-prem data center is now moved to in the cloud I mean that shift has happened it happened to people talked about it five years ago but they didn't mean it and now when you talk to enterprises they are actually moving into the cloud not just talking about it and they're saying where that is the center of gravity and what's interesting to me was I think even just the tone of Andy Jesse today and what he was talking about was it's once you define what your architecture is you push it everywhere so cloud 1.0 and 2.0 was really more about taking my architecture that was on prem and pushing it into the cloud so let me take virtual appliance a virtual router basically my hardware router packaged it up put it on the cloud that's not cloud native it's cloud naive as we talk right and so what's the chase has happened is now everybody realizes the center of gravity is in the cloud and you start seeing things like outposts you see things like wavelength you see things like you know tgw network manager things getting pushed out the architecture of the cloud now actually pushing out and extending out into on-premises I've been at it for a couple of decades so in the beginning there was a lot of evangelism that this is safe it's consumable by the enterprise it's not some kind of crazy idea to bring open-source you're not going to lose your intellectual property or things like that those days I mean I I'm sure you can find an exception but those days are largely over in this in the sense that open-source has gone mainstream so I would say open-source is one most large enterprises have an open-source strategy they consider open source as critical to not only how they source software from vendors but also how they build their own applications so the world has really really evolved and now it's really a question of where are you partnering with vendors to build infrastructure that's critical to your business but not your differentiator and where are you leveraging open-source internally for your to differentiate your business I think that's a more sophisticated view it's not the safety question it's not is it is it legally you know that you're bringing legal concerns into the picture it's really a much different conversation and people in the enterprise are looking how can we contribute to these projects so that's really it's pretty exciting actually both are a great place for startups right they're not meters cluesive so I think if you go horizontal the amount of data being created by your applications your infrastructure your sensors time series data ridiculously large amount right and that's not going away anytime soon I recent did investment ain't chronosphere did you guys covered over at coupon a few weeks ago that's talking about metrics and absorbedly data time series data so they're gonna handle that horizontal amount of data petabytes and petabytes how can it query this quickly deeply with a lot of insight that's one play right cheaper better faster at scale the next play like you said is vertical it's how do I own data or slice the data the more contacts they know as can have we talked about like the virtual cycle of data right this the system of the tile well bye own set of da to be healthcare government or self-driving car data that no one else has I can build a solution and to end and go deep and so either pick a lane or pick a geography you can go either way it's hard to do both though it's hard for start-up any big company it's very few companies can do two things well starves especially succeed by doing one thing very well I'm impressed they got two CEOs the CEO of goldman sachs david solomon the CEO of Cerner coming to the show that's kind of rare that the CEO of your customer comes to the show I guess the second thing I'd say is you know Amazon is not a rinse and repeat company at these shows although they are when it comes to shock and awe so they ticked the Box on shock and awe but you're right John they're talking a lot about transformation I would sort of think of it as a disruption here's what I would say to that Amazon has a dual disruption agenda one is its disrupting the horizontal technology stack and two it's disrupting industries it wants to be the platform of which startups in particular but also incumbents can disrupt industries and it's in their DNA because it's in Amazon's DNA and I think it's the last thing I'll say as Amazon is the retai Amazon retail is the you can buy anything here store and now to your point Justin Amazon Web Services is you can get AWS anywhere at the edge and a little mini data centers that they're built on outpost and of course in the cloud absolutely you know I'd say primarily were most kind of pleased with the variety of workloads and these cases the customers are bringing us into you know I think when we started out on this journey we saw a tremendous promise for the technology to really improve the aw psycho system and customer experience for people that wanted to consume block storage in the cloud what we learned as we started working with customers is that because of the way we've architected the product brought a lot of the same capabilities we deliver on our flash arrays today into AWS it's a lot of customers to take us into all the same types of workloads that they put flush arrays into right so that's their Tier one you know mission-critical environments there VMware workloads their Oracle workloads or safety workloads they're also looking at us from everything from you know to do lifts and shifts test and dev in the cloud as well as dr right and and that again i think you know speaks to a couple things it speaks to the durability the higher level of service that were able to deliver in AWS but also the compatibility with which we're able to deliver the same sets of features and you know have it operate in exactly the same way on prime in the cloud because it's look if you're gonna dr the last time you know the last point in time you want to discover that there's a caveat hey this feature doesn't quite work the way you expect is when you have a dr failover and so the fact that we set out with this mission in mind to create that exact level of sameness you know it's really paying dividends in the types of use cases the customers are bringing us into I think we're delighted you know Mike obviously and I've been friends for years he's had some connections with VMware in his past that that that certainly helped in setting up this partnership so we're grateful to Mike and Andy and the team for that and it's you know two and a half to three years now since we announced it tremendous amount of customer interest listen you know we said at the beginning of this when you take sort of the king of the public cloud and the king the private cloud together and don't force customers to say these have to be separate doors you can do them both together customers like that message and what we've been really doing over the course the last 12 18 months is perfecting use cases for this platform I think to us the key word is migrations cloud migrations when people are moving their workloads of an app off vmware vsphere or our cloud foundation we want this to be the best place for it to land we are more cloud and AWS for migration opportunity and anything short of that refactoring app would be you know not something that would be a good use of people's time and money because they should be then modernizing with all the wonderful services that Amazon's built once they've migrated so we've really perfected our message in the course the last six 12 months to two ms migrated and modernized migrated modernized so we could migrate you into this avenue and then modernized with a set of container and other services so that mess is working we put on stage at VMware and there are many of them here too big Amazon customers VMware cloud and Amazon Freddie Mac and IHS market and they were telling are tens of thousands customers at those shows and similarly many of them here that that's the best option to be able to do things yeah so if you know public sector public sector actually has a lot of Windows or Microsoft workloads in it and so we're seeing a lot of public sector customers looking to modernize their Windows workloads in fact we made several announcements just yesterday around helping more public sector customers modernize for example one is Windows Server 2003 and 2008 will go out of support and so we have a great new offering with technology that can help them to not refactor but actually abstract those layers and move quickly to 2016 and 2019 because both of those will go out of support in January and Dave mentioned you know cloud first strategies but we're also seeing a lot of movement around data you know data is really powerful Andy mentioned this as well yesterday but for example in our partner keynote where I just came from we had on stage Avis yeah hey this not public sector customer but what they're doing is the the gentleman said you know your car can now talk to you and that data is now being given to local state officials local city officials they can use it for emergency response systems so that public and private use of data coming together is also a big trend that we're seeing it's all about breaking down I mean if devops is all about breaking down silos between Devon operations and in other parts of the business Deb sack ops or secure dev ops or whatever we want to call it is just bringing more people into the fold and helping security join that party and get at things earlier in the cycle so we can catch it before it you know before before there's a breach that's in the news so you know I think there's going to continue to be convergence between Amazon business in AWS over time and in the marketplace we offer kind of a goods marketplace they offer a software marketplace and a services marketplace and so I think we're still working on how do we harmonize that experience better and we've got a lot of work to do there we have a saying at Amazon that it's always day one and that's a great example where we still have a lot of work to do but one of the things that is another one of our partners Koopa which is a procure-to-pay a platform and a longtime Amazon business partner we've done some pretty creative things to improve the user experience and make it easier for customers use both Koopa and Amazon business and in concert together Koopa announced a couple months ago they've built an integration to the AWS marketplace and so that's a pretty exciting opportunity where people who are provisioning services via AWS be a Dobis marketplace can have that that transaction flows seamlessly into their prepare to pay solution and let you know the user who's provisioning that focus on what they want to do which is developing new solutions to serve customers I mean the spectrum is massive so the our biggest challenge is keeping up with everything and continuing to innovate with all the things that are happening but again the benefits of the platform that we have enables us to do that and the enhancements we weight made this year this year now that our platform is is more open we can connect a collect data from multiple entities not just the New Relic agents that we've that we were built on so the concept of observability and being able to observe the entire application environment it is built on the fact that data's got to come from all these different places then we need to turn that around and curate it into the right experience in the right use case that the customer is looking for so all I can say is that our company's built on innovation we try and stay on the cutting edge of all that trying to stay current with that and meet the customers needs as as everyone here is innovating like crazy at scale well I mean there's a lot of a lot of the technology we build comes from things that we're doing ourselves you know and that we're learning ourselves it's kind of how we started thinking about microservices serverless - we saw the need we know we would have we would build all these functions that when some kind of object came into an object store we would spin up compute all those tasks would take like three or four hundred milliseconds then we spin it back down and yet we'd have to keep a cluster up in multiple availability zones because we needed that fault tolerance and it was we just said this is wasteful and that's part of how we came up with lambda and you know when we were thinking about land that people understandably said well if we build lambda and we build this serverless event-driven computing a lot of people were keeping clusters of instances aren't going to use them anymore it's going to lead to less absolute revenue for us but we we have learned this lesson over the last 20 years at Amazon which is if it's something it's good for customers you're much better off cannibalizing yourself and doing the right thing for customers and being part of shaping something and I think if you look at the history of technology you always build things and people say well that's going to cannibalize this and people are gonna spend less money what really ends up happening is they spend spend less money per unit of compute but it allows them to do so much more that they ultimately long-term end up being you know more significant customer look I mean the the SHA this show estate Volante says amazon always delivers with the shock and awe you know broadest and deepest so many pieces here you know I took a selfie with many people and the biggest celebrity of the show AWS outpost the rack it's over in the corner there and people asking me about all the gear inside I said you should stop asking about that because you will never touch it only AWS will so put a curtain around it it's managed as a service and that's what I think people are still trying to understand we've been talking about cloud for what 15 years now but Amazon's positioning on cloud is still different than everyone else's when I think back to some of the waves there's that buzzword and there's one or two that really architectural er different in deliver and Amazon laid out their strategy even more and through the geeky pieces and transformation was the theme you [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube. Covering AWS re:Invent 2019 brought to you by Amazon Web Services and Intel, along with it's ecosystem partners. >> Hello there and welcome back to theCube's live coverage here in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2019. This is theCube's seventh year covering re:Invent. They've been doing this show for eight years, we missed the first year, I'm John Furr, and my co-host David Vellante. We're here extracting the signal from the noise, and we're here with an amazing guest, our friend, she's been here with us from the beginning of theCube, since inception. Always great to get to comment with her. Sandy Carter Vice President with Amazon Web Services. >> Thank you. >> Now in the public sector handling partners. Great to see you, thanks for coming on again and sharing your content. >> So great to see you guys, so dressed up and looking good guys, I have to say. (laughs) >> You're looking good to, but I can't help but stare at our other guest here, the IoT suitcase. >> First, tell us-- >> Yes. >> About the IoT suitcase. >> Well we, in public sector we have a partner program, and that program helps entrepreneurs. And we're really keen on especially helping female entrepreneurs. So one of our entrepreneurs created this suitcase, that's an IoT based suitcase, you can put your logo's and that sort of thing on it, but more importantly for public sectors, she created this safety ring, John. And so, if I touch it I've de-activated it, but if I touch it, it will call the police for me, if I'm being assaulted. Or if I'm having an emergency, I can touch it and have an ambulance come for me as well. And the really cool thing about it is she worked backwards from the customer, figuring out like how are most people assaulted, and if you have an emergency and you fall, what's the best way to get ahold of someone. It's not your phone, because you don't always carry it, it's for a device like this. >> Or a bigger device that you can't, or you leave on the table somewhere, but that's you know it's attractive. >> It's awesome. >> And it's boom, simple. >> And it's pink. (laughs) >> What I love fast about re:Invent as an event is that there's so much innovation going on, but one of the areas that's become modernized very rapidly is the public sector. Your now in this area, there's a lot of partners, a huge ecosystem going, and the modernization effort is real. >> It is. >> Could you share some commentary on what's going on. Give people a feel for the pace of change, what's accelerating? What are people doubling down on, what are some of the dynamics in public sector? >> Yeah, so if you know public sector, public sector actually has a lot of Windows or Microsoft workloads in it. And so we're seeing a lot of public sector customers looking to modernize their Windows workloads, in fact we made several announcements just yesterday around helping more public sector customers modernize. For example, one is Windows Servers 2003, and 2008 will go out of support, and so we have a great new offering, with technology, that can help them to not re-factor, but actually abstract those layers and move quickly to 2016 and 2019, because both of those will go out of support in January. >> A lot of people don't know, and I've learned this from talking with Andy Jassy in the keynote, as well as hearing from some other folks, is that you got, Amazon runs a lot of Windows. >> Oh, we have 57% Windows workloads on AWS in terms of market segment share. Which is 2x the next nearest cloud provider, 2x. And most customers choose to run their Windows workloads on us, because we are so innovative, we move really fast. We're more reliable. The latest public data from 2018 shows that the nearest cloud provider had seven times more downtime. So if your in public sector or even commercial, who can afford to be down that long, and then finally, we have better security. So one of the things we've been focused on for public sector is FedRamp solutions. We know have over 90 solutions that are FedRamp ready. Which is four times more than the next two cloud providers. Four times more than the two combined. >> That's interesting, so I got to ask the question that's popping up in my mind, I'm sure people are curious about. >> Yeah. >> I get the Windows working on Amazon, and that makes a lot of sense, why wouldn't you want to run on the best cloud. The question I would have is, how would the licensing work, because, that's seems to be lock-in spec, Oracle does it, Microsoft does it, does license become the lock-in. So, when something expires, what happens on the licensing side. Licensing is really tricky, and in fact, October 1st, Microsoft made some new licensing changes. And so, we have some announcement to help our customers still bring their own licenses, or what we call fondly, BYOL over to AWS, so they don't have to double invest on the license. >> So you can honor that license on AWS. >> Yeah, and you have to do it on a dedicated host. Which at midnight madness, we announced new dedicated host solution, that's very cloud-like. Makes it as easy to run a dedicated host instance as it is an EC2 instance. So, wicked easy, very cost effective if your moving those on-premises workloads over. >> I just want to point out John, something that's really important here is a lot of times, software companies will use scare tactics, to your point. They'll jack up the cost of the license, to say, ah you got to stay with us, if you run on our hardware or our platform, you pay half. And then they'll put out, "Oh, Amazon's twice as expensive." But these are all negotiable. I've talked to a number of customers, particularly on the Oracle side, and said, no, no, we just went to Oracle and said look, you got a choice, I either give us the same license price or we're migrating off your database. Okay, all right. But some of it is scare tactics, and I think you know increasingly, that's not working in the marketplace. So I just wanted to point that out. >> So what's the strategy for customers to take, I guess that's the question. Because, certainly the licensing becomes again like they get squeezed, I can see that. But what do customers do, is there a playbook? >> Well there is, and so the best one is you buy your license from Microsoft, and then using BYOL, you can bring that over to AWS. It's faster, more performance, more reliable, that sort of thing. If you do get restricted though John, like they are doing for instance with their end of support, you could run that on Azure, and get all the security fixes. We are trying to provide technical solutions, like the ability to abstract Windows Server 2003 and Server 2008 as it goes out of support. >> I mean certainly in the case of Oracle, it used to be you know 10-15 years ago, you didn't have a choice. Instead of one RDBMS, and now it's so much optionality in databases. >> And I will also tell you that we have a lot of customers today, who are migrating from SQL server, or Oracle over to Aurora. Aurora, is equally as performant, and a tenth of the cost. So we actually have this team called the database freedom team that will help you do that migration. In fact I was talking to a very large customer last night, and I was explaining some of the options. And their like, "Let's do the Aurora thing." Let's do it two-step. Let's start by migrating the database over, Oracle and SQL and then I want to go to Aurora. It's like database built for the cloud, it's faster and its cheaper. So why wouldn't you do that? >> Yeah, and I think the key is, to my question about a friction. What's frictionless? How can they get it done quickly without going through the trip-wires of the licensing. >> Certain workloads are tough, right. You know if you're running your business on high transaction volume. But a lot of the analytics stuff, the data warehouse, you know look at Amazon's own experiences. You guys are just ticking it off, moving over from Oracle to Aurora, it's been fun to watch. >> I want to get you guy's perspective Dave, you and Sandy, because I think you guys might have good insight on this, because everyone knows that I'm really passionate about public sector, I've been really enamored with Teresa's business from Day one, but when she won the CIA deal, that really got my attention. As I dug into the Jedi deal, and that all went sideways, it really jumped out at me, that public sector is probably the most transformative market, because they are modernizing at a record pace. I mean this is like a glacier moving market. They don't really have old ways, they got the beltway bandits, they got old procurement, old technology, and like literally in a short period of time, they have to modernize. So they're becoming more enterprise like, can you guys, I mean pros in the enterprise, what's your take? It just seems like a Tsunami of change in the public sector, because the technology is driving it. What do you guys think about this? Am I on or off base? What are some of the trends that are going on? >> I mean I have a perspective, but please. >> No, okay. So I'll start. So I see so much transformation regardless of what industry your looking at. If you're looking at Government for example working with SAP NS2, we just actually took 26 different flavors of SAP ERP for the Navy, and helped them to migrate to the cloud. For the US Navy, which is awesome. Arkis Global, did the same thing for the UK. We actually have Amazon Connect in there, so that's like a cool call center driven by Machine Learning, and the health care system for the UK. Or you can even look at things, like here in the U.S. there's a company that really looks at how you do monitoring for the children to keep them safe. They've partnered up with a National Police Association, and they are bringing that to the cloud. So regardless of education, non-profits, government, and it's around the world, it's not just the US. We are seeing these governments education, start-ups, non-profits, all moving to the cloud, and taking their own legacy systems to Linux, to Aurora, and moving very rapidly. >> And I think Andy hit on it yesterday, it's got to start with top-down leadership. And in the government, if you can get somebody whose a leading thinker, CIO, we're going cloud first. Mandate cloud, you know you saw that years ago, but today, I think it's becoming more mainstream. I think the one big challenge is obviously the disruption in defense and that's why you talked about Jedi, in defense it's very high risk, and it needs disruption, it's like healthcare its like certain parts of financial services are very high risk industries, so they need leadership, and they need the best platform underneath in a long term strategy. >> Well Jedi actually went different. It was actually the right call, but I reported on that. But I think that what gets me is that Cerner on stage yesterday, on Yaney's keynote highlights that it's just not inefficiencies that you can solve, there's multiple win-win-win benefits so in that health care example, lower the costs, better care, better, the providers are in better shape, so in government in public sector, there's really no excuse to take the slack out of the system. >> Yeah. >> Well, there's regulation though. >> Yeah, and Dave mentioned cloud first strategies, we're also seeing a lot of movement around data. You know data is really powerful. Andy mentioned this as well yesterday, but for example in our partner keynote where I just came from. We had on stage Avis. Now, Avis, not public sector customer, but what they're doing is, the gentleman said, was that your car can now talk to you, and that data is now being given to local state officials, local city officials, they can use it for emergency response systems. So that public and private use of data, coming together, is also a big trend that we're seeing. >> I think that's a great example, because Avis I think what he said is a 70 year old company, I think the fleet was 18 billion dollar fleet. >> 600,000 vehicles. >> 600,000 vehicles, 18 billion dollars worth of assets, this is not a born in the cloud start-up, right. That's essentially transformed the entire fleet and made it intelligent. >> Right, and using data to drive a lot of their changes. Like the way they manage fuel for 600,000 cars, and the way they exchange that with local officials is helping them to you know not just be number two, but to start to take over number one. >> But to your point, data is at the core, right. >> Yeah. >> If you are the incumbent and you want to transform, you got to start with the data. >> Sandy, I want to get your reaction to two memes that have been developing on theCube this week. One is, if you take the T out of Cloud Native, and it's Cloud Naive. (Sandy laughs) The other one is, if your born in the cloud, that's great, your winning, but at the price of becoming re-born in the cloud. This is the transformation. Some are, and they're going to not have a long shelf life. So there's a real enterprise and now public sector re-birth, re-borning in the cloud, the new awakening. This is something that is happening. You're an industry veteran, you've seen a lot of waves, what's the re-born, what's this getting back on the cloud, really happening. What is going on? >> It's really interesting, because now I'm in the partner business, and one of our most successful programs is called our partner transformation program. And what that does, is it's a hundred day transformation program to get our partners drinking our own champagne, which is to be on the cloud. And one of the things, we know we first started testing it out, we didn't have a lot of takers, but now, those partners who have gone through that transformation, they're seeing 70% year to year growth, versus other apion partners, even though they're at an advanced layer, they're only seeing 34% growth. So its 2x of revenue growth having transformed to the cloud. So I think, you know back to your question, I think some of this showing the power. Like, why do you go to the cloud, it's not just about cost, it's about agility, it's about innovation, it's about that revenue growth, right. I mean 2x, 70% growth, you can't sneeze at that. That's pretty impactful. >> And you know this really hits, something of passion for me and Dave and our team is the impact on a society. This is a real focus across all generations now, not just millennials, and born in the web, into older folks like us, who have seen before the web. There's real impact, mission driven things. This is a check for good, shaping technology for good. Educate you guys have. This is a big part of what you guys are doing. >> Absolutely, this is one of the reasons why I really wanted to come work in the public sector, because it's fun helping customers make money, and we still do that. But it's really better, when you can help them make money and do great things. So you know, making with the Mayo clinic, for example, and some of these non-profit hospitals, so they can get better data. The GE example that Andy used yesterday, that data is used in public sector. Doing things, like, I know that you guys are part of re-powered tech. You know we brought a 112 unrepresented minorities and women to the conference. And I have to tell you I got goosebumps when one person came up to me and he said, it's the first time he stayed in a hotel, and he's coming here to enhance his coding. You don't realize when I go back to my country, you will have changed my life. And that's just like, don't you get goosebumps from that, versus it's great to change a company, and we want to do that, but it's really great when you can impact people, and that form or fashion. >> And the agility makes that happen faster, its a communal activity, tech for good is here. >> Absolutely, and we just announced today, right before this in the partner's session, that we now have the public safety and disaster response competency for our partners. Because when a customer is dealing with some sort of disaster or emergency they need a disconnected environment for a long periods of time. They need a cloud solution to rally the troops. So we announced that, and we had 17 partners step up immediately to sign up for that. And again, that's all about, giving back, helping in emergency situations, whether it's Ebola in Africa or Hurricane Dorene, right. >> Well, Sandy congratulations, not only have you a senior leader for AWS doing a great job. >> Thank you. >> Just a great passion, and Women in Tech, Underabridged Minorities, you do an amazing job on Tech for Good. >> Thank you. Well it's such an honor to always be on the show. I love what you guys do. I love the memes, I'm going to steal them, okay. >> Can I ask you another question? >> Absolutely. >> Before you wrap. You've had an opportunity to work with developers, you've experienced other clouds. Now you're with AWS and a couple of different roles. Can you describe, what's different about AWS, is it cultural, is it the innovation, I mean what's tangible that you can share with our audience in terms of the difference. >> I think it's a couple of things, the first one the way they we hire. So we hire builders, and you know what it really starts from that hiring. I actually interviewed Vernor the other day, and he and I had a debate about can you transform a company where you have all the same people, or do you need to bring in some new talent as well. So I think it's the way we hire. We search for people that not only meet the leadership criteria, but also are builders, are innovators. And the second one is, you know when Andy says we're customer obsessed, we're partnered obsessed. We really are. We have the mechanisms in place, we have the product management discipline. We have the process to learn from customers. So my first service I launched at AWS, I personally talked to 141 customers and another 100 partners. So think about that, that's almost two hundred almost fifty customers and partners. And at most large companies, as a senior executive you only spend about 20% of your time with customers, I spent about 80% of my time here with customers and partners. And that's a big difference. >> Well we look forward to covering the partner network this year. >> Awesome >> Your amazing, we'll see Teresa Carson on theCube here at 3:30. We are going to ask her some tough questions. What should we ask Teresa? >> What to jest Teresa? Where did you get those red pants? (everyone laughs) >> She's amazing, and again. >> She is amazing. >> We totally believe in what you're doing, and we love the impact, not only the technology advancement for modernizing the public sector across the board. But there's real opportunity for the industry to make, shape technology for betterment. >> Yeah. >> You're doing a great job. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. I think we should start another hashtag for theCube too, is #technologyforgood. >> Awesome. >> What do you think? >> Let's do it. >> I love that. >> But Jonathan been doing a lot of work in that area. >> I know he has. >> We love that. #technologyforgood, #techforgood. This is theCube here live in Las Vegas for re:Invent. I want to thank Intel and AWS, this is the big stage. We had two stages, without sponsoring our mission we wouldn't be here. Thank you AWS and Intel. More coverage after this short break. (dramatic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by, Cohesity. >> Good morning everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. We are here in the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. Stu, this is Microsoft's Big Show. 26,000 people from around the globe, all descending on Orlando. This is the big infrastructure show. Thoughts, impressions, now that we're on day two of a three day show. >> Yeah, Rebecca. Last year I had this feeling that it was a little bit too much talking about the Windows 10 transition and the latest updates to Office 365. I could certainly want to make sure that we really dug in more to what's going on with Azure, what's happening in 6the developer space. Even though they do have a separate show for developers, it's Microsoft build. They actually have a huge partner show. And so, Microsoft has a lot of shows. So it's, what is this show that is decades old? And really it is the combination of Microsoft as a platform today. Satya Nadella yesterday talked about empowering the world. This morning, Scott Hanselman was in a smaller theater, talking about app devs. And he came out and he's like, "Hey, developers, isn't it a little bit early for you this morning?" Everybody's laughing. He said, "Even though we're kicking off at 9:00 a.m., Eastern." He said, "That's really early, especially for anybody coming from the West Coast." He was wearing his Will Code For Tacos shirt. And we're going to have Scott on later today, so we'll talk about that. But, where does Microsoft sit in this landscape? Is something we've had. I spent a lot of time looking at the cloud marketplace. Microsoft has put themselves as the clear number two behind AWS. But trying to figure out because SaaS is a big piece of what Microsoft does. And they have their software estate in their customer relationship. So how many of those that are what we used to call window shops. And you had Windows people are going to start, Will it be .NET? Will it be other operating systems? Will it come into Azure? Where do they play? And the answer is, Microsoft's going to play a lot of places. And what was really kind of put on with the point yesterday is, it's not just about the Microsoft solutions, it is about the ecosystem, they really haven't embraced their role, very supportive of open source. And trust is something that I know both you and I have been pointing in on because, in the big tech market, Microsoft wants to stand up and say, "We are the most trusted out there. And therefore, turn to us and we will help you through all of these journeys." >> So you're bringing up so many great points and I want to now go through each and every one of them. So, absolutely, we are hearing that this is the kinder, gentler Microsoft, we had Dave Totten on yesterday. And he was, as you just described, just talking about how much Microsoft is embracing and supporting customers who are using a little bit of Microsoft here, a little bit of other companies. I'm not going to name names, but they're seemingly demanding. I just want best to breed, and this is what I'm going to do. And Microsoft is supporting that, championing that. And, of course we're seeing this as a trend in the broader technology industry. However, it feels different, because it's Microsoft doing this. And they've been so proprietary in the past. >> Yeah, well, and Rebecca, it's our job on theCUBE actually, I'm going to name names. (laughs) And actually Microsoft is-- >> Okay. >> Embracing of this. So, the thing I'm most interested in at the show was Azure Arc. And I was trying to figure out, is this a management platform? And at the end of the day really, it is, there's Kubernetes in there, and it's specifically tied to applications. So they're going to start with databases specifically. My understanding, SQL is the first piece and saying, it sounds almost like the next incarnation of platform as a service to our past. And say, I can take this, I can put it on premises in Azure or on AWS. Any of those environments, manage all of them the same. Reminds me of what I hear from VMware with Hangzhou. Vmworld, Europe is going on right now in Barcelona. Big announcement is to the relationship with VMware on Azure. If I got it right, it's actually in beta now. So, Arc being announced and the next step of where Microsoft and VMware are going together, it is not a coincidence. They are not severing the ties with VMware. VMware, of course partners with all the cloud providers, most notably AWS. Dave Totten yesterday, talked about Red Hat. You want Kubernetes? If you want OpenShift, if you are a Red Hat customer and you've decided that, the way I'm going to leverage and use and have my applications run, are through OpenShift, Microsoft's is great. And the best, most secure place to run that environment is on Azure. So, that's great. So Microsoft, when you talk about choice, when you talk about flexibility, and you talk about agility cause, it is kinder and gentler, but Satya said they have that tech intensity. So all the latest and greatest, the new things that you want, you can get it from Microsoft, but they are also going to meet you where you are. That was Jeremiah Dooley, the Azure advocate, said that, "There's, lots of bridges we need to make, Microsoft has lots of teams. It's not just the DevOps, it's not just letting the old people do their own thing, from your virtualization through your containerization and everything in between microservices server list, and the like. Microsoft has teams, they have partners. Sure that you could buy everything in Microsoft, but they know that there are lots of partners and pieces. And between their partners, their ecosystem, their channel, and their go-to-market, they're going to pull this together to help you leverage what you need to move your business forward. >> So, next I want to talk about Scott Hanselman who was up on the main stage, we're going to have him on the show and he was as you said, adorned in coder dude, attire with a cool t-shirt and snappy kicks. But his talk was app development for everyone. And this is really Microsoft's big push, democratizing computing, hey, anyone can do this. And Satya Nadella, as we've talked about on the show. 61% of technologist's jobs are not in the technology industry. So this is something that Microsoft sees as a trend that's happening in the employment market. So they're saying, "Hey, we're going to help you out here." But Microsoft is not a hardware company. So how does this really change things for Microsoft in terms of the products and services-- >> Well right, >> It offers. >> So really what we're talking about here, we're talking about developers right? 61% of jobs openings for developers are outside the tech sector. And the high level message that Scott had is your tools, your language, your apps. And what we have is, just as we were talking about choice of clouds, it's choice of languages. Sure they'd love to say .NET is wonderful, but you want your Java, your PHP, all of these options. And chances are, not only are you going to use many of them, but even if you're working on a total solution, different groups inside your company might be using them and therefore you need tools that can spam them. The interesting example they use was Chipotle. And if there's a difference between when you're ordering and going through the delivery service, and some of the back-end pieces, and data needs to flow between them, and it can't be, "Oh wait, I've got silos of my data, I've got silos of all these other environments." So, developer tools are all about, having the company just work faster and work across environments. I was at AnsibleFest show earlier this year. And, Ansible is one of those tools that actually, different roles where you have to have the product owner, the developer, or the the operations person. They all have their way into that tool. And so, Microsoft's showing some very similar things as to, when I build something, it's not, "Oh, wait, we all chose this language." And so many of the tools was, " Okay, well, I had to standardize on something." But that didn't fit into what the organization needed. So I need to be able to get to what they all had. Just like eventually, when I'm picking my own taco, I can roll it, bowl it, soft or hard shell-- >> It was a cool analogy. >> And choose all my toppings in there. So it is Taco Tuesday here-- >> Yes. >> At Microsoft Ignite and the developers like their choices of tools, just like they like their tacos. >> And they like their extra guac. So going back to one of the other points you made at the very opening. And this is the competitive dynamic that we have here. We had David Davis and Scott Lowe on yesterday from a ActualTech Media. Scott was incredibly bullish about Microsoft. And saying it could really overtake AWS, not tomorrow, but within the next decade. Of course, the choice for JEDI certainly could accelerate that. What do you make of it? I mean, do you think that's still pie in the sky here? AWS is so far ahead. >> So look, first of all, when you look at the growth rates, first of all, just to take the actual number, we know what AWS's, revenue is. Last quarter, AWS did $9 billion. And they're still growing at about a 35% clip. When I look at Microsoft, they have their intelligent cloud bucket, which is Azure, Windows Server, SQL Server and GitHub. And that was 10.8 billion. And you say, "Oh, okay, that's really big." But last year, Azure did about $12 billion dollars. So, AWS is still two to three times larger when you look at infrastructure as a service. But SaaS hugely important piece of what's going on in the cloud opportunity. AWS really is more of the platform and infrastructure service, they absolutely have some of the PaaS pieces. Azure started out as PaaS and has this. So you're trying to count these buckets, and Azure is still growing at, last quarter was 64%. So if you look at the projection, is it possible for Azure to catch up in the next three years? Well, Azure's growth rate is also slowing down, so I don't think it matters that much. There is a number one and a number two, and they're both clear, valid choices for a customer. And, this morning at breakfast, I was talking to a customer and they are very heavily on Microsoft shop. But absolutely, they've got some AWS on the side. They're doing Azure, they've got a lot of Azure, being here at our Microsoft show. And when I go to AWS, even when I talked to the companies that are all in on AWS, " Oh, you got O 365?" "Of course we do." "Oh, if you're starting to do O 365, are there any other services that you might be using out of Azure?" "Yeah, that's possible." I know Google is in the mix. Ali Baba's in the mix. Oracle, well, we're not going to talk about Oracle Cloud, but we talked about Oracle, because they will allow their services to run on Azure specifically. We talked about that a lot yesterday, especially how that ties into JEDI. So, look, I think it is great when we have a healthy competitive marketplace. Today really, it is a two horse race. It is, AWS and Azure are the main choices for customers. Everyone else is really a niche player. Even a company like IBM, there's good solutions that they have, but they play in a multi cloud world. Google has some great data services, and absolutely a important player when you talk about multi cloud for all they've done with Kubernetes and Istio. I'm going to be at Kube Con in a couple of weeks and Google is front and center there. But if you talk about the general marketplace, Microsoft has a lot of customers, they had a lot of applications and therefore, can they continue to mature that market and grow their environment? Absolutely. AWS has so many customers, they have the marketplace is stronger. It's an area that I want to dig in a little bit more at this show is the Azure Marketplace, how much we talked about the ecosystem. But, can I just procure through the cloud and make it simpler? Big theme we've talked about is, cloud in the early days was supposed to be cheap and simple. And it is neither of those things. So, how do we make it easier, so that we can go from the 20% of applications in the public cloud, up to 50% or more? Because it is not about all everything goes to the public cloud, but making customers put the applications and their data in the right place at the right time with the right services. And then we haven't even talked about edge computing which Microsoft has a big push on, especially with their partners. We talked to HP, a little bit about that yesterday. But really the surface area that this show and Microsoft covers is immense and global. >> It is indeed, and we are going, this is our second day of three days of coverage and we're going to be getting into all of those things. We've got a lot of great guests. We have Cute Host, Keith Townsend, Dave Cahill, a former Wikibon guy, a lot of other fantastic people. So I'm excited to get it on with you today, Stu. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Great stuff. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music`)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I am your host Rebecca Night, hosting, co-hosting along side Stu Miniman. We are joined today by Steven Rosenthal. He is the senior product specialist at QTS Data Centers. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> You're welcome, thank you. >> So let's start by finding out a little bit more about QTS, based in Kansas City. What do you do? What are you all about? >> Yeah, so QTS is based in Overland Park, Kansas. We have our operations based in, actually right outside of Atlanta in Suwanee, Georgia where actually I'm from. And we have 16 data centers across the United States, about six million square feet of data center floor. We cater to everybody from hyperscalers, the hyperscalers of the world that everybody, I think, knows about, to enterprises, to federal customers. We have product lines that cover, again, hyperscale, co-location, private cloud; which I think we'll talk about today and mannered services around that private cloud offering. >> I know Stu is dying to talk private cloud with you but-- (Stu Laughs) Can you just tell us a little bit about how you fit in precisely with the Microsoft Ecosystem? >> Yeah, so, we fit in because we will offer Azure Management, so for customers that will have work loads up on Azure, we can help manage that and we also have dedicated connections through our connectivity products that will get you to Azure from our data centers. So, that's how we kind of fit into this ecosystem. >> Alright, so, just to geek out on that one little bit, when I talk to a lot of service providers, things like AWS direct connect, and Azure Express Route are one of the things we're seeing just massive adoption on being able to take my own stuff and plug it in or use services from the public clouds. Do you offer all of those? >> So we have AWS Direct Connect in our Chicago data center that we can cross connect to you, to that via our other data centers. We're also utilizing the software to find networks as back-up fabric and megaport to get you to those direct routes into Azure and AWS. >> Okay, great. So you do have the way to, 'cause the discussion has been, for a few years it went from hosting to service providers and, oh wait, public cloud is the enemy. And now I think we've matured a lot. It's like, yes, of course there's competition there, but as SoftDel and Microsoft said, look we're going to compete against people, we're going to partner with a lot of people. And, of course, your customer's are using everything. >> Yeah, I don't think it's just a line. We definitely partner with the public cloud offerings. It's not if you can't beat them join them, there is a workload for public cloud, there's workloads for private clouds and we can get into that into detail, but there is absolutely a partnership that we can have there and not a competitive partnership. >> Yeah and I actually, let's bridge that discussion over to the private cloud discussion. You know, I will give you the one there is no answer for it, but how are customer's sorting this thing out? How are you dealing with it? What do they put where? How do you help them with that discussion? >> You know, what we're finding is customers are anywhere from all into public cloud, to I'm kind of just dabbling in it and maybe putting my toe into it. And we can go in and help them along their cloud journey. So, because of the integrative products that we have within QTS, we can help you from just being a co-location customer to kind of dipping your toe in a little bit with some public clouds. Getting you that direct access via AWS Direct Connect or via software to find networking, helping you manage that, but there is workloads out there that customers just want to know where their data is. Where is my data? When you go to a public cloud, I'm not saying it's not safe, it's not secure, but we all know there's issues that sometimes they go down and there's customers, for compliancy reasons, for whatever reason they have, they want to know my data is in Suwanee, Georgia and due to the private cloud, and we know it's always there, we can provide that to the customer. >> Do you think that customer anxiety of where is my data will always exist for certain clients or do you think we will actually get to a point in the cloud computing evolution where people feel really secure? >> You know, I think if you look over the last few years, people are a lot more secure today than they were three years ago, two years ago or even one year ago. So, if I had a crystal ball, I think people will get a little bit more comfortable, but I think customer's in finance-- >> Healthcare. >> Healthcare. They're all going to really be nervous about where that data is, so there's always going to be that need for that. Certain workloads, I want here. The rest of it, yeah, we can put up in public cloud, but I want to know that this data resides in this data center. >> Yeah. I mean, governance and compliance is obviously going to play into that. So, let's talk about the private cloud. In our research, we started a few years ago, we said, what customer's need is true private cloud. And we said that because cloud should really be an operating model and the public cloud really set the bar as to, how I consume, how I manage, how I don't have to get into some of the pieces, so, to do that, you really need to kind of modernize the platform. Maybe bring us through your journey as to how you've seen it versus just kind of, I had a bunch of servers in Iraq, versus how do you define what is private cloud for your environment today? >> Yeah, so at QTS, we define the entire stack is dedicated to a customer. That's everything from the Nutanix hardware that we use and we decide to use as our infrastructure base for this. All the way up to the Cisco 9K's that we support. Everything is dedicated to that customer. So, there's no multi-tendency at all within that. So, there's no noisy neighbors, there's nobody next to you that you may not know what they're doing. Our journey started about a year ago, maybe a little bit more. Where we saw that, as everyone probably did, the evolution of the customer going to that true hybrid model. That not everything is going to public. They, again, not to repeat myself, but there are some workloads that stay within the private cloud and they needed somewhere to put that. Customers also were looking for more of an optics model than a capics model. We can host that for them within our data centers, provide all the data center services that we provide to our COLO customer's around duplicate power and the security that we provide and allow them to host that within our data centers. So that's what we're seeing in our customers and that's what is really driving that. >> Alright. When Nutanix positions the enterprise, it really is about that simplicity that they can offer. Service providers often have different metrics as to how you determine. What lead you to the Nutanix solution? How does that fit in your over all operations? >> Yeah. Honestly, we did, for lack of better terms, a bake off. We looked at competitors out there but Nutanix, by far, they have a right to be in that Gartner Magic Quadrant because, one, their support is just excellent, that we have found from them everything that we needed from them. They were right there and helping us. Up until now and we don't think they're going anywhere either, right? Nutanix has been one of our best technology partners that we've brought on board. And we see the benefits of the hyper-converged environment, allowing us, you talked about people want that cloud experience >> Right. >> The loud experience is, I want to be able to swipe my credit card and have a server running in five minutes. That's not what dedicated private clouds are, but they might want it less than 30 days, less than 60 days. Having hyper-converged there, we can provide that to the customer, get them up and running in a matter of weeks, not a matter of months. You know with their traditional architecture. >> One of the things we're hearing a lot at this conference is the importance of having the right kinds of partners and making sure that there is a lot of trust embedded in the relationship. >> Right. >> You just described, choosing Nutanix, having this bake off, how else do you walk through the, can you walk our viewers through the process of how you choose the right people that you want to do business with, from sort of a business mindset stand point, but also, complimentary functionality? >> I think a couple things. One, we obviously look at the technology. Technology for us is, if not number one, it's up there as pretty close to number one. Does the technology meet the needs of our customers? Can we provide the service with the service level agreements that we have in place? Around our hosted private cloud, we have 100% SLA around that, so we want to make sure that we can meet that for the customer. So, the technology has to be there. Then, outside the technology, the support. This is technology, technology's going to have issues. If we can make sure we have the support to back that up, so if a customer or we have an issue with the infrastructure, we can bring that back online as quick as possible. Then we look at, how closely they can do, you know, co-market with us, especially Nutanix. We do a lot of things co-marketing with Nutanix. We put on panels within our data centers. We've been doing this for the past, almost a year now, with Nutanix, ourselves, maybe we'll have AWS sit on it, we'll have Cohesity sit on it, and bring in customers or prospects into our data centers and have different topics around there, so all of that kind of mixed together, provides a really good partnership for us. >> Great. >> Steve, we talked a little bit about how Azure on the public cloud fits in. How does Microsoft fit in on the private cloud discussion? >> So, most of our customers are running Windows. I mean that's really where it fits in. >> Of course. >> Currently, our hosted private cloud runs VMRS as a hypervisor-- >> Right. >> But most of the customers are running Windows as their operating system. >> Absolutely. Still, I mean, from the early days until today, the applications sits on top. Microsoft has all the business apps up there. Been a lot of announcements at the show. Windows Server 2019, talking a lot about the shift to SaaS. How are you seeing, is that still a big driver for your customers, the generational shifts of Windows and what about the changing workloads? I'm curious about how those impact you. >> Yeah, absolutely. The changing workloads definitely drives our business and as you pointed out, a lot of those are going to either Office 365, going up to Azure. We're getting a lot more customers asking us for Azure these days. I don't want to put AWS against Azure, but we are at the Microsoft show, obviously. We're getting a lot of customers who are driving their business up to Azure and to be able to support that within our community is really important to be able to support that customer, so we are definitely seeing that drive towards those types of workloads. >> You're an industry veteran. You've been in IT for 25 years. I wonder if you could talk about this point in time that we're at now. It feels like an inflection point, but maybe I'm wrong. Can you sort of paint this point in time, in the greater context of the cloud computing revolution. >> I think hybrid is the word. Right? I know it's a marketing word. I know a lot of people use it, but I think it really has hit today. Where you have companies that say, hey, we are all in on public cloud and I think that's a great marketing term, but if you really look at all of their workloads, they don't have everything up there, but even if they have 90%, 10% of their workloads are Legacy applications that they would have to re-write to be able to really work in the public cloud and these applications are running just fine where they are, they don't want to touch them. So, I think that hybrid model is where we are today and it's only going to grow. >> Steven, I'm curious, we watched for a while, public cloud polled on the data center apps, but now we have the Edge out there. You talk about IOT, you talk about what machine to machine type technology is going to push things back out, not going to be in some central location. Is that having an impact yet on your business, how would you play in some of these IOT environments? >> Yeah, we are constantly looking at the new technologies out there, especially the autonomous cars is something that we are looking at very heavily and they require, there's something like six terabytes of data that gets passed back and forth between that car and whatever service is running that car and that's got to be somewhere on the Edge, but I think if you look back at how people were defining private cloud a couple years ago, how are people are defining Edge is very different. And over the next year or two, we will get more common, how people are defining Edge Computing will become a lot more common. So, we're looking at how do we plan that market? Do we have to have data centers closer to the Edge, wherever that edge is, in cities that you typically don't see data centers. You're probably going to have a different type of data center within that city too. >> Oh, yeah. Absolutely. The edge is very different if you are a telecom provider versus an enterprise, what you said. That data center is going to be a pop, is it going to be something in a wireless tower-- >> Is it going to be in a closet somewhere that supports it? >> It's all going to be something that just fits on a wrist at some point in the future, right? (all laughing) >> Yeah. It's going to fit right there. >> Yeah, check on my data. So, getting back to the cities that you don't necessarily think of. I mean, you're a tech, a cutting edge tech company, based in Kansas City, the Heartland. >> Right. >> How do you find, is it difficult to recruit talent because frankly even the companies in Silicone Valley and Washington and Boston, they're having trouble recruiting talent. Where do you come down? >> I think it's not only recruiting the talent, it's keeping the talent; which QTS is very good about keeping the talent. I think if you look at our attrition rate, it's probably some of the lowest in the industry 'cause we have a culture that people want to stay in, but even though our headquarters are in Overland Park, Kansas, again, our, really our operations headquarters are outside of Atlanta, Georgia in Suwanne which is probably just about 30 miles north. So, we have Georgia Tech that we can pull from, you have Emory that you can pull from and, you know, the entire Georgia University system. I don't want to leave anybody out that we can pull from. And we have data centers around the country, even in Silicone Valley, we have Santa Clara, which we can pull from the Silicone Valley individuals. Dallas has a lot of tech companies, so we're not just pulling from one market, we're pulling from 16 different markets across the country, which helps us a lot not just to dry up a single market. >> You said that QTS has a culture that people want to stay and Microsoft is touting its culture as collaborative, inclusive. Describe QTS's culture. >> Our culture, a lot of people ask me that and it's like, you got to live it. It's very, very family-oriented. I know a lot of people say that, but we live it. We care about each other. Nobody walks around going, it's not my job. Everybody is there to support the customer. We are very customer-focused, you can see that in our NPS scores. Our NPS scores are very high in the industry, probably some of the highest out there. So, and that goes back to just how we take care of our customers. And we look, goes back to your question about, what do we look for in partners, Nutanix probably has a very high NPS score and we want to make sure that our partners are treating our customers as we want to treat our customers. >> Great. Well, Steven, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from Microsoft Ignite, coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, we are wrapping up day three of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. CUBE's live coverage, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman, my esteemed cohost for these past three days, it's been fun working with you, Stu. >> Rebecca, it's been a great show, real excited. Our first time at a Microsoft show and it's a big one. I mean, the crowds are phenomenal. Great energy at the show and yeah, it's been great breaking down this ecosystem with you. >> So, three days, what do we know, what did you learn, what is your big takeaway, what are you going to to go back to Boston with? >> You know, it's interesting, we've been all talking and people that I know that have been here a couple of years, I've talked to people that have been at this show for decades, this is a different show. There's actually a friend of mine said, he's like, "Well look, Windows pays the bills for a lot of companies." There's a lot of people that all the Windows components, that's their job. I mean, I think back through my career when I was on the vendor side, how many rollouts of Exchange and SharePoint and all these things we've done over the years. Office 365 been a massive wave that we watched. So Microsoft has a broad portfolio and they've got three anchor shows. I was talking with one of the partners here and he's like, "You know, there's not a lot of channel people "at this event, at VMworld there's a lot of channel people." I'm like, "Well yeah because there's a separate show "that Microsoft has for them." You and I were talking at an earlier analytics session with Patrick Moorhead and he said, "You know when I look at the buy versus build, "a lot of these people are buying and I don't "feel I have as many builders." Oh wait, what's that other show that they have in the Spring, it's called Microsoft Build. A lot of the developers have moved there so it's a big ecosystem, Microsoft has a lot of products. Everything from, my son's excited about a lot of the Xbox stuff that they have here. Heck, a bunch of our crew was pickin' up Xbox sweatshirts while they're here. But a lot has changed, as Tim Crawford said, this is a very, it feels like a different Microsoft, than it even was 12 or 24 months ago. They're innovating, so look at how fast Microsoft moves and some of these things. There's good energy, people are happy and it's still trying to, you know. It's interesting, I definitely learned a lot at this show even though it wasn't the most sparkly or shiny but that's not necessarily a bad thing. >> Right, I mean, I think as you made a great point about just how integral Microsoft is to all of our lives as consumers, as enterprise, the Xbox, the Windows, the data storage, there's just so much that Microsoft does that if we were to take away Microsoft, I can't even imagine what life would be like. What have been your favorite guests? I mean, we've had so many really, really interesting people. Customers, we've had partners, we're going to have a VC. What are some of the most exciting things you've heard? >> Yeah, it's interesting, we've had Jeffrey Snover on the program a couple of years ago and obviously a very smart person here. But at this show, in his ecosystem, I mean, he created PowerShell. And so many people is like, I built my career off of what he did and this product that he launched back in 2001. But we talked a little bit about PowerShell with him but then we were talking about Edge and the Edge Boxes and AI and all those things, it's like this is really awesome stuff. And help connecting the dots to where we hid. So obviously, big name guest star, always, and I always love talking to the customers. The thing I've been looking at the last couple of years is how all of these players fit into a multicloud world. And Microsoft, if you talk about digital transformation, and you talk about who will customers turn to to help them in this multicloud world. Well, I don't think there's any company that is closer to companies applications across the spectrum of options. Office 365 and other options in SaaS, all the private cloud things, you start with Windows Server, you've got Windows on the desktop, Windows on the server. Virtualization, they're starting to do hyperconversion everything, even deeper. As well as all the public cloud with Azure and developers. I talked to the Azure functions team while I was here. Such breadth and depth of offering that Microsoft is uniquely positioned to play in a lot of those areas even if, as I said, certain areas if the latest in data there might be some other company, Google, Amazon, well positioned there. We had a good discussion Bernard Golden, who's with Capital One, gave us some good commentary on where Alibaba fits in the global scheme. So, nice broad ecosystem, and I learned a lot and I know resonated with both of us, the "you want to be a learn it all, not a know it all." And I think people that are in that mindset, this was a great show for them. >> Well, you bring up the mindset, and that is something that Satya Nadella is really such a proponent of. He says that we need to have a growth mindset. This is off of the Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth research that talks about how important that is, how important continual learning is for success. And that is success in life and success on the job and organization success and I think that that is something that we are also really picked up on. This is the vibe of Microsoft, this is a company, Satya Nadella's leadership, talking to so many of the employees, and these are employees who've been there for decades, these are people who are really making their career, and they said, "Yeah, I been here 20 years, if I had my way, "I'll be here another 30." But the point is that people have really recommitted to Microsoft, I feel. And that's really something interesting to see, especially in the tech industry where people, millennials especially, stay a couple years and then move on to the next shiny, new thing. >> Yeah, there was one of our first guests on for Microsoft said that, "Been there 20 years and what is different about "the Satya Nadella Microsoft to the others is "we're closer and listening even more to our customers." We talk about co-creation, talk about how do we engage. Microsoft is focusing even deeper on industries. So that's really interesting. An area that I wanted to learn a little bit more about is we've been talking about Azure Stack for a number of years, we've been talking about how people are modernizing their data center. I actually had something click with me this week because when I look at Azure Stack, it reminds me of solutions I helped build with converged infrastructure and I was a big proponent of the hyper-converged infrastructure wave. And what you heard over and over again, especially from Microsoft people, is I shouldn't think of Azure Stack in that continuum. Really, Azure Stack is not from the modernization out but really from the cloud in. This is the operating model of Azure. And of course it's in the name, it's Azure, but when I looked at it and said, "Oh, well I've got partners like "Lenovo and Dell and HPE and Sysco." Building this isn't this just the next generation of platform there? But really, it's the Azure model, it's the Azure operating stack, and that is what it has. And it's more, WSSD is their solution for the converged and then what they're doing with Windows Server 2019 is the hyper-converged. Those the models that we just simplify what was happening in the data center and it's similar but a little bit different when we go to things like Azure and Azure Stack and leads to something that I wanted to get your feedback on. You talk business productivity because when we talk to companies like Nutanix, we talk to companies like Cohesity who we really appreciate their support bringing us here, giving us this great thing right in the center of it, they talk about giving people back their nights and weekends, giving them back time, because they're an easy button for a lot of things, they help make the infrastructure invisible and allow that. Microsoft says we're going to try to give you five to ten percent back of your business productivity, going to allow you to focus on things like AI and your data rather than all the kind of underlying spaghetti underneath. What's your take on the business productivity piece of things? >> I mean, I'm in favor of it; it is a laudable goal. If I can have five to ten percent of my day back of just sort of not doing the boring admin stuff, I would love that. Is it going to work, I don't know. I mean, the fact of the matter is I really applaud what Cohesity said and the customers and the fact that people are getting, yes, time back in their day to focus on the more creative projects, the more stimulating challenges that they face, but also just time back in their lives to spend with their children and their spouse and doing whatever they want to do. So those are really critical things, and those are critical things to employee satisfaction. We know, a vast body of research shows, how much work life balance is important to employees coming to their office or working remotely and doing their best work. They need time to recharge and rest and so if Microsoft can pull that off, wow, more power to them. >> And the other thing I'll add to that is if you, say, if you want that work life balance and you want to be fulfilled in your job, a lot of times what we're getting rid of is some of those underlying, those menial tasks the stuff that you didn't love doing in the first place. And what you're going to have more time to do, and every end user that we talked to says, "By the way, I'm not getting put out of a job, "I've got plenty of other tasks I could do." And those new tasks are really tying back to what the business needs. Because business and IT, they need to tie together, they need to work together, it is a partnership there. Because if IT can't deliver what the business needs, there's other alternatives, that's what Stealth IT was and the public cloud could be. And Microsoft really positions things as we're going to help you work through that transition and get there to work on these environments. >> I want to bring up another priority of Microsoft's and that is diversity. So that is another track here, there's a lot of participants who are learning about diversity in tech. It's not a good place right now, we know that. The tech industry is way too male, way too white. And Satya Nadella, along with a lot of other tech industry leaders, has said we need more underrepresented minorities, we need more women, not only as employees but also in leadership positions. Bev Crair, who was on here yesterday, she's from Lenovo. She said that things are starting to change because women are buying a lot of the tech and so that is going to force changes. What do you think, do you buy it? >> And I do, and here's where I'd say companies like Lenovo and Microsoft, when you talk about who makes decisions and how are decisions made, these are global companies. Big difference between a multi-national company or a company that's headquartered in Silicon Valley or Seattle or anything versus a global company. You look at both of those companies, they have, they are working not just to localize but have development around the world, have their teams that are listening to requirements, understand what is needed in those environments. Going back to what we talked about before, different industries, different geographies, and different cultures, we need to be able to fit and work and have products that work in those environments, everything. I think it was Bev that talked about, even when we think about what color lights. Well, you know, oh well default will use green and red. Well, in different cultures, those have different meanings. So yeah, it is, it's something that definitely I've heard the last five to ten years of my career that people understand that, it's not just, in the United States, it can't just be the US or Silicon Valley creating great technology and delivering that device all the way around the world. It needs to be something that is globally developed, that co-creation, and more, and hopefully we're making progress on the diversity front. We definitely try to do all we can to bring in diverse voices. I was glad we had a gentleman from Italy shouting back to his daughters that were watching it. We had a number of diverse guests from a geography, from a gender, from ethnicity, on the program and always trying to give those various viewpoints on theCUBE. >> I want to ask you about the show itself: the 30,000 people from 5,000 different organizations around the globe have convened here at the Orange County Convention Center, what do you think? >> Yeah, so it was impressive. We go to a lot of shows, I've been to bigger shows. Amazon Reinvent was almost 50,000 last year. I've been to Oracle OpenWorld, it's like takes over San Francisco, 60 or 70,000. This convention center is so sprawling, it's not my favorite convention center, but at least the humidity is to make sure I don't get dried out like Las Vegas. But logistics have run really well, the food has not been a complaint, it's been good, the show floor has been bustling and sessions are going well. I was talking to a guy at breakfast this morning that was like, "Oh yeah, I'm a speaker, "I'm doing a session 12 times." I'm like, "You're not speaking on the same thing 12 times?" He's like, "No, no it's a demo and hands on lab." I'm like, "Oh, of course." So they make sure that you have lots of different times to be able to do what you want. There is so much that people want to see. The good news is that they can go watch the replays of almost all of them online. Even the demos are usually something that they're cloud enabled and they get on live. And of course we help to bring a lot of this back to them to give them a taste of what's there. All of our stuff's always available on the website of thecube.net. This one, actually, this interview goes up on a podcast we call theCUBE Insights. So please, our audience, we ask you, whether it's iTunes or your favorite podcast reader, go to Spotify, theCUBE Insights. You can get a key analysis from every show that we do, we put that up there and that's kind of a tease to let you go to thecube.net and see the hundreds and thousands of interviews that we do across all of our shows. >> Great, and I want to give a final, second shout out to Cohesity, it's been so fun having them, being in the Cohesity booth, and having a lot of great Cohesity people around. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean, so much I wish we could spend a little more time even. AI, if we go back to the keynote analysis then, but you can watch that, I can talk about the research we've done, and said how the end user information that Microsoft can get access to to help people when you talk about what they have, the TouchPoint to Microsoft Office. And even things like Xbox, down to the consumer side, to understand, have a position in the marketplace that really is unparalleled if you look at kind of the breadth and depth that Microsoft has. So yeah, big thanks to Cohesity, our other sponsors of the program that help allow us to bring this great content out to our community, and big shout out I have to give out to the community too. First time we've done this show, I reached out to all my connections and the community reached back, helped bring us a lot of great guests. I learned a lot: Cosmos DB, all the SQL stuff, all the Office and Microsoft 365, so much. My brain's full leaving this show and it's been a real pleasure. >> Great, I agree, Stu, and thank you so much to Microsoft, thank you to the crew, this has been a really fun time. We will have more coming up from the Orange County Civic Center, Microsoft Ignite. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will see you in just a little bit. (digital music)

(digital music) >> Live, from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Bev Crair. She is the vice president data center group product development and quality at Lenovo. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Rebecca, thanks Stu. >> So, Lenovo is a longstanding partner of Microsoft. Why don't you just sent the scene for our viewers, and talk a little bit about the history of the partnership and where you are today. >> So, Lenovo and Microsoft have had a partnership of about 25 years, which is a long time in this industry. And we work really closely together on both innovation, but also making sure that anything that Microsoft is building runs best on Lenovo. >> Great, and what about, here at this conference, what are you hearing, what are you seeing in terms of this partnership? >> We have actually six things that we're really talking about here at the conference, which is a lot if you think about it. But the first is the announcement of our ThinkAgile MX, which is that integrated WSSD system. It's pre-certified, you just buy it as itself. There's four or five different sizes of it, if you will. The second one is our Azure Stack, but also our Azure services. So we're now doing both on prem Azure Stack and Azure services, which is really about customer choice. Because a lot of data center customers are really struggling with how do I build a hybrid cloud infrastructure, and what do I do with that. The third thing that we're doing, oh my gosh, I'm not going to remember them all. The third thing that we're doing is our SQL Server performance. We continue to be the best in performance for all of our SQL Server efforts. Our two-socket systems are best performing. Our four-socket systems are best performing, and so are eight-socket systems are best performing. In addition to that, we have, when we're proud to work with Microsoft on the launch of Windows Server 2019. Again, that's part of that 25 year partnership. It's just something you got to do. And we're really proud of that. The other thing that we've announced here is what we're calling the buy back program. And a lot of companies have buy back programs where you can actually buy back equipment, and you buy back your competitors equipment in order to build your stuff up, but the one thing that's kind of different about what Lenovo's doing is something I call Zillow for systems. So, you actually can go online and put in the systems that you have or the equipment that you have and we give you an automatic, instant quote back. Nobody else is actually doing that. So, it's kind of a Zillowish system where you can see what's my stuff really worth. >> I want to click in a little bit. So, I know the partnership for a long time. I think about PCs, you think about servers, obviously. Lenovo has the gear, Microsoft has the OS and various pieces that go on there. When I look at solutions like WSSD and Azure Stack, Microsoft has a number of partners, maybe help us understand what that partnership means, how Lenovo differentiates from some of the other players out there. >> So, that is one of the things I forgot. One of the things that we've announced today, and that we showed today, and actually Jeff Wosley talked about it in his talk earlier today, is an integration of Microsoft's Windows Admin Center for WSSD, and Lenovo's Xclarity system management system. So, via a single pane of glass from your Windows Admin Center, you can actually not just look at Windows Admin in the Window's infrastructure, but you can actually dig down and really understand what's actually happening with the hardware itself that WSSD is running on. And that's part of that really close partnership and relationship that we have. >> Can you talk a little bit about the approach to the partnership just because we had a Microsoft Executive on here earlier today, and he said that "our partnerships, we have this, we're able to have "a collaborative and collegial partnership "with our competitors." So, it's sort of part of their DNA." How does Lenovo think about when it partners and how it partners with a competitor? >> Well, but Microsoft isn't actually a competitor of ours. Right? And this is the thing I think that Lenovo, as a company, really is focusing on offering to our customers is choice. Right? We have a co-located lab up in Seattle with Microsoft. We have had for years. We do innovation summits with them, we look at where the technology is going and what is it that we can do together in order to make that more effective for our shared customers and how they deliver in the long run. And so it really is a very strong collaboration. We don't build operating systems. We don't build all of the SQL Server. We don't build the Azure Stack, and the Cloud, and all the rest of that. So, the partnership with Lenovo, Microsoft gets to take advantage of all of our supply chain goodness, all of our services goodness, as well as all the platform stuff that we do as well. >> Now, if you look, HCI is one of the things that we've been talking a little bit more about here. Obviously, it makes sense for Lenovo to partner here, but Lenovo also has a number of other solutions. How do you look at it? What are you hearing from customers when it comes to that kind of solution and how Microsoft-- >> It really is about choice. Right, it really is about choice. Customers have different kinds of problems in their environments, and they're seeking partners to help them solve those problems in their environments. And that, and those choices are actually really critical for them. So, when you're working with somebody like Lenovo, where we also offer Vmware, we also offer some of the other solutions that are out there in the market, that, you work with a partner like Lenovo, where we have all of the services and the infrastructure to back that up, plus the long standing relationships that we have with our partners, enables us to offer that kind of choice that allows our end customers to solve their customer's problems. And that's really the core piece that we're looking at. >> Yeah, Microsoft, of course, partners with a lot of companies. I heard in some of the technical key notes, I heard that get mentioned quite a bit. Of course, Rebecca and I were with your team at Lenovo Transform in New York City recently. And maybe for our viewers that might not have caught that show, give us the update, what you're hearing from people about the big partnership -- >> So, we announced a partnership with network compliance, NetApp, at our Transform show last week, I guess it must have been. We've been working on it for awhile, so, just the fact that the announcement happened was really cool. And it's kind of a three-part partnership. The first part is that Lenovo will be branding NetApp's a couple of the sets of systems that NetApp has. And it allows us to fill out our storage infrastructure. Last year, when we launched our largest portfolio of servers, we launched eight all in a single day, and the rest of the Purley platforms followed from my team in the next quarter. This year, with NetApp, we actually launched the largest storage portfolio in the market. And so, this partnership actually allows us to do that very, very collaboratively. Then the second part of the relationship is joint venture that we're starting with NetApp in China. Given the depth of work that Lenovo does in China, it allows NetApp to actually build their market, and their infrastructure. And I think, some of the customers in China are actually really looking for the kinds of solutions that NetApp has available. And then the third is moving forward to build innovative solutions together. Taking the innovation and the 25 years worth of innovation that my team has done over the years, and all of the work we do in performance, all the number one on client satisfaction, all the number one on reliability for the fifth year in a row, and bringing that into our NetApp alliance. >> One of the themes at this conference, and also frankly at Lenovo Transform, is about company culture and about this idea of the importance of collaboration and creativity and teamwork, and inclusivity. Can you describe a little bit for us how you think the Lenovo culture is similar to the Microsoft one that Satya Nadella is a proponent of and also how it's different? >> How is is similar and how is it different? That's a really interesting question. The thing that I have found about the Lenovo culture that I think surprised me the most, one year in, is how committed Lenovo is to really understanding how people think and bringing that in to how we build effective solutions together. It is by far the most diverse organization that I've worked in. In lots of lots of ways, but if you look at the senior leadership level, right? You would expect it, given that the company is actually headquartered in Beijing and the United States, and we're on the Hong Kong stock exchange, you would expect it to be Chinese. But it's not. The leadership team is actually incredibly diverse. Way more diverse than I expected. But even on my team, and further down in the organization, a lot of our engineers have spent multiple years overseas. They've raised their kids overseas. They've gone to school overseas. And so the have a very inclusive perspective on how do we solve problems. And they also understand that the way in which we solve problems, isn't necessarily the best way. So, in our conversations with Microsoft and the culture that we create with them together, it becomes very collaborative. 'Cause we go back to what's the customer problem we're really trying to solve. How are we actually helping our customers in their intelligent transformation? How do we become their trusted partner? And how do we actually help solve humanity's greatest challenges? And that's a together statement, right? With Microsoft and just kind of peeling back the onion on what are the real problems that we need to get to to solve together. >> You mentioned how diverse a company Lenovo is, and that's actually at a time where the technology industry is not known for its diversity. In fact, it's really known for its bro culture. It's the dearth of female leaders. I'm wondering if you could just give me your thoughts on how technology, sort of the state of affairs today is it as bad as the newspaper headlines make it out to be? And (Rebecca and Bev laugh) what we need to do to move forward. >> So, I think in part, there's two answers to that. One of them is that the participants in technology are changing. So, if you look around the room and you watch who's here, what you're seeing is that there's a whole generation of new people coming in who've always had technology at their fingertips. And so they think differently and assume differently about what that technology is supposed to do for them. And so just age diversity starts to come into play. But also the people that buy our stuff, right? 65 to 75% of commercial electronics are bought by women. That's a stunning figure when you really think about it 'cause it's very different from the people that actually create or have in the past created that technology. So when you start to see who's buying and why they're buying, you actually have to start to understand that they're buying for very different reasons than perhaps you were creating the technology for. So, an example of this is the new Hub 500 or the Hub 700. Have you seen this? So, it's a link connected system that sits on the table and you push a button and you're automatically connected with everybody that's going to be in your Lync meeting or everybody that's going to be in your Skype meeting. And we had to do a fair amount of work to really understand how people were going to interact with the system or not interact with the system. And even colors like red and green, and the fact that they mean different things in different cultures, and how are we going to display those colors, right? But that's where the diversity of participation in solving a problem really comes into play. >> Great. Well Bev, it was a pleasure having you on the show. It was really fun talking to you. >> Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat digital music)

>> Live, from Orlando Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Carmen Crincoli. He is the Senior Program Manager for Strategy and Ecosystem here at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on the show Carmen. >> Thanks for having me, really excited to be here, thank you. >> So, before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about, we're going to talk tech in this interview. But right now we're going to talk about solutions and really explain what the problems are that you are solving for your customers. So, talk about the customer pain points that you and your group are looking to solve. >> Yeah, so, the WSSD program when we conceived it was to address a problem that I think a lot of people who have worked with Microsoft technology are familiar with. We have some really great technology. It's very easy for users to dive in and start using it. But to really be successful requires an additional level of expertise that not every IT shop is going to have. And as it gets more and more complex and we start bringing more and more IT functionality into the stack with software defined technologies, that challenge grows. So we feel like we've had very, very great advances in what our tech can do. And we were watching our customers struggle with it. And we decided that the best was to fix it is to create a solution program and work with our partners who have that expertise to take them, bundle them together with a set of best practices, some additional testing and validation, to ensure that customers are selecting the right hardware for the tasks that they need, and then offer that as a solution instead of as build your own, which is a little more traditional in the Windows world. >> Explain how it works. So, there's a frazzled IT person who's saying "I don't know where to begin, but I have these issues," Can you give us some examples of how you hold a customer's hand through this and walk them through the process? >> Sure, sure. So, I would say the way we approach it right now is if a customer is going to get on board the HCI train, which more and more of them are, right, we're watching the industry shift in that direction pretty rapidly now. And they say, you know, I've heard about the Microsoft technologies, I've heard about storage spaces direct and your software defined networking capabilities, and I want to pursue that. You say, well, don't just go buy some servers or recycled servers off the shelf. We want you to contact some of our partners and talk to them about their solution catalog and say look, this is the kind of workload I'm going to consolidate on it, right. I'm consolidating virtual machines from multiple environments and it's going to be a mix of traditional line of business apps and SQL and I think I'm going to have about this I/O profile. They'll help you size a solution and then deliver it on site and integrate it into your business environment, right. It lets you get something that is more tailored to what you need rather than trying to piece it together. >> I want to hear a little bit more about HCI. But before we do, you got ecosystem as part of what you work on. I think most people understand that Microsoft has a huge ecosystem. Some things are really simple to understand. Server, you guys don't make servers. Operating system sits on top of that. The storage piece of it, I've worked in the storage industry for a number of years, worked with Microsoft. Obviously a huge player in the software layer. But that was back before we called it things like software defined storage and the software defined data center. And, heck, pre-cloud and all that stuff. So, you've been there 21 years at Microsoft. Give a little bit about, you know, where Microsoft thinks they need to play, how you partner with the ecosystem out there, and then we'll get into some of the new pieces. >> Yeah, we've always viewed storage as part of the air you breathe when you're computing, right. So we always partnered with the storage ecosystem to make sure that SANS and NAS devices work inside general IT environments. The shift to a software defined mentality involved some new learning, from a Microsoft perspective. We're taking on some of the integration responsibilities that storage vendors typically had. And that's part of what birthed WSSD as a solution program, was if we have to take on all of the integration work, how do we ensure that that's good quality, right. Just buying some disks off the shelf and plugging them into the motherboard does not result in an enterprise quality solution. So we had to define some parameters and then work with OEMs and partners who know how to do the integration work as well. Put some testing parameters around it, and turn out solutions, software defined solutions, that worked as well as the highly integrated, tested SANS and NAS devices of the last generation. >> Great. I think back, you know, like most people probably know Microsoft for SNB. You had protocols that help people with NAS devices. Help bring us up to speed when things like HCI. So, HCI, technology that's been around for a number of years. Many companies partner with Microsoft. Nutanix is a nearby partner of Microsoft. VMWare partners with Microsoft on some things but is a big player with their Vsan technologies. What do we call the Microsoft HCI solution and how would you compare and contrast it to the existing solutions out there? >> The traditional strength of Microsoft, right. We're very good at partnering, even with people we're competing with. We're very serious about it. Part of our core DNA is partnership and competition at the same time. So, our HCI stack is really about integrating the functionality that's there. I would say, the way we talk about it, there are three main components. There's the storage layer, which is storage spaces direct. There's the networking layer, which we just called software defined networking, which includes a network controller and network virtualisation capabilities. And then there's the computer layer, which is Hyper-V and the additional capabilities we layer in Hyper-V where we think we add a lot of value. Things like secured VMs and security capabilities that we add on. You layer those technologies together and integrate them into a solution with validated hardware, tested hardware, a network controller, network switch, and you get something that you can integrate into a business environment. These are all capabilities that are in Windows Server 2019 Datacenter, right. This is not an additional add-on. It's not a component. It's not a thing that you download. The solution program is really about taking the stuff that's in the box and making sure customers succeed in it without having to bring in all of the expertise into their IT staff from day one. >> Thanks for the explanation. The one piece, if I understand right, Azure stack also has storage space direct in it. So should I look at this as a spectrum of how Microsoft puts the pieces together and the WSSD is just one of the storage fundamental components that plays a few places along the stack? Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, it's kind of a foundational technology. Just like Windows Server is the host layer for all of the upper, higher level workloads, Storage Spaces Direct is the foundational layer for building our storage for all of these hyperconverged solutions. Azure stack's business goals are different, right. They're looking for Azure consistency and really giving an Azure experience to customer on prem. WSSD is more for the traditional IT shop that's used to running their own virtual environments and they're just looking for some infrastructure hosting of virtual workloads. So, we're covering different ends of, I would say, the IT maturity spectrum, with the two solutions. But the underlying pieces are very much the same, right. The plumbing that powers Azure stack and the plumbing that powers WSSD, and the plumbing that powers Azure, is built on a lot of the same core Windows technologies. >> So what are the outcomes of this solutions department? How have you seen changes in customer behavior, and helping them understand the best practices that have emerged as they implement and deploy different kinds of technologies. >> I'd say the biggest thing we've noticed is we get customers to be more successful when they work with our vendors, right. WSSD launched, the origninal version of the program for 2016, launched about nine months after we RTM'd. In that nine month gap, we had a lot of customers who were excited for the technology. We had been talking about it. Our engineering teams do a great job of making people excited for the technology. We get our lovely core IT geeks pumped for this stuff. And they were going out and implementing it on their own, right. Buying hardware that they thought conformed, trying to implement, and we were having a lot of struggles, right. It was generating more sport than we'd like. Customers weren't having the experience we wanted them to have with it. Since we've started the program, and we've been getting customers pointed at our hardware partners that deliver these solutions, we've had a lot more success, right. They're much happier with it. We have multiple stakeholders bought into the success of that customer solution, so the OEMs are just as invested as we are. As opposed to if you buy a server off the shelf, they're like the server's working fine, that's not my problem. So were just seeing a lot more customer success out of it and we want to keep driving that forward with the 2019 version of the solution program. >> Carmen, anything? there are so many announcements that were made at the show. Anything in your space that you want to make sure, kind of highlight that people might have missed? Everybody knows Windows Server 2019's coming, but what does that mean for your area, or anything outside of that one announcement? >> I think the most exciting thing is some of the tech improvements that I know really land with this IT Pro crowd that is here at Ignite. So, yesterday during Erin Chapel, our CVP of Windows Server, during her Windows Server 2019 intro session, she announced a number that we achieved on Windows Server 2019 with Intel scalable persistent memory. I forget what the name of it is. Anyway, it was a crazy IOPS number- >> Scalable optane stuff if I remember because we had Jake on yesterday from Intel. And he was like "Your mind will be blown when "you hear about this". >> It was like 13.8 million IOPS on a 12 node cluster right? We're continuing our engineering focus. We're an engineering company. We love making the tech better. And we're getting people excited for it. And then we're following up with the, by the way, if you want this kind of thing in your environment, or you need it, if you need to deliver it, these are the partners you work with. We partner with them. We engineer with them, right. This is a co-engineering program. Get the solution from them. So, I would say that's the new thing from my space, right. I get to piggyback on all of this great engineering announcement and work and excitement, and say this is how you succeed with the technology. Don't go do it yourself, go to these people. >> And we're here to help you. >> Yes, yes. That's why I'm really grateful that you guys had me on, right. One of the early things I've been told since I took over the program was I didn't even know Microsoft did HCI, and I definitely didn't know that you had a solution program. And I'm like, I know, I will work on fixing that. >> Well Carmen, look, HCI, we understand the virtualisation layer is critical there. Microsoft obviously, one of the top players in that industry. So, we've been waiting to hear a broader story from Microsoft in this space, so congrats on all the progress. >> Thank you, thank you. This has been a really fantastic show so far. We actually have hyperconverged expo in the application infrastructure area, where I have six of the WSSD partners just showing off their solutions in one tight space, along with the engineers who work on the HCI stack at Microsoft right nearby. So if anyone to come check it out, talk to the engineers who wrote the software, talk to the-- >> It's a really small space, you hyperconverged it, right? (Rebecca laughs) >> Yes, it is a hyperconverged space, yes. >> Well, Carmen, thank you so much and I encouage anyone who's here at Ignite to go check out that booth and see what it's all about. >> Great, thank you so much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Raphael Meyerowitz, he is the VP Office of the CTO at Presidio, And Jake Smith, who is the Director Data Center Solutions and Technologies at Intel. Thank you both so much for coming back on theCUBE. You're both CUBE alums. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's great to be back. >> So, I want to start by laying out for our viewers, why you're here, and if you're part of the Microsoft ecosystem: Intel, Cisco, Dell and others. Can you explain a little bit, to our viewers, the roll you play in this ecosystem. >> Well, for us, Microsoft is a long time partner. I mean, it's pretty well documented, we don't want to go there today, but at this particular event we're announcing a bunch of new product solutions. We're announcing new technology capabilities. And at four PM we're going to announce some world record results, for performance with an operating system in an application environment. So it's a very exciting time for Intel to be a part of this event. >> Well, this is quite a tease. (giggles) Can you give us a little-- >> You're going to have to wait 'til four PM. I will say, it has to do with Windows Server. It has to do with Xeon scale of a processor family. And, our future Optane products. >> Well, so, these are all great lead ins. And, before the cameras were rolling we were talking about all of these things. You want to go through, a little bit, where we are with each of those businesses? >> Yeah, at Presidio, we've mostly been partnering with Intel for a long time. And one of the things that we've seen also, is how Intel has developed their ecosystem of partners. The software, like today, if you look at today what was in our today with desktop as a service with citrix. That's something that we have been involved in, probably, for about 10 years. And now we actually seen that come to market. We're not just, the control plane is in the cloud. But, the actual, virtual desktops are in the cloud. And, we think that that's going to be a really good viable options for our customers with Office 365. >> Raph, maybe expand on that a little bit for our audience. You know, one of the things I always say is you talk in this multi-cloud heterogeneous world. You want to follow the apps. You want to follow the data. Well, you know, the desktop is part of where those applications and data live. So, how does that, you know, tie into all the cloud stuff we've been talkin' about, the last few years? >> So, for a lot of customers, one of the reasons they move to cloud is really for simplicities sake, alright. When you look at the desktop, the desktop is really not necessarily being the most simple thing in the world. Whether it's virtual, or whether it's physical desktop. By having the control plane in the virtual desktop in the cloud, where you can consume it with Office 365. And also through Microsoft. And you can buy it through a single entity. Customers are already going to see a lot of value in that. And we think it's really going to play in the market really, really well. Upper Enterprise customers and some Healthcare customers may take a little bit more time to adapt to. >> Jake, one of the things we talk, for years, we talked about people did their upgrades based on the tick-tock of the Intel fees there. >> Correct. >> Now we're talkin' about things like, you know, Windows as a service, going Evergreen. Maybe, how does that relationship, the old traditional Wintel versus the cloud era. Upgrades. You're talkin' about the new latest generation. How do we think about that? >> You know what, I'm not going to use that, the merged term, because that's, you know. The work that Windows does on Xeon scalable processor family has been amazing. But, typically, we've done a two to three year cycle on a server release. With our new road map, which we announced in August, which you were there for, so thank you. We're actually going to release a new CPU every year. We're releasing a new CPU every year because we have to deal with the fact that cloud customers, in Azure, want to have the availability to the latest and greatest technology, right now. And partners, like Presidio and Raph's team, have developed technologies, like Concierge, which he'll talk about, that give customers the ability to manage their hybrid cloud environments, both in the cloud and on premises. When you start giving customers that flexibility they want the choice to say, I want to deploy your latest Xeon scalable processor family, Skylake processors this year, and next year, I'm going to maybe skip a year before I deploy your next version. >> Yeah, thanks Jake. One of the things that we've done at Presidio, we've tried to innovate ourselves, and we listen to our customers, and we know where our customers pain points are. So, Presidio Concierge is something that we developed from the ground up, that provides both shared space applications, provides customers with the usage on their shared space applications, how they're consuming their licenses, and also provides them with an allessor sign, so the infrastructure's a service. A lot of customers, when you talk about multi cloud, it doesn't always necessarily always mean the Harper scalers, right. It could mean shared space products, as well. So, we developed this product from the ground up in combination with Intel, and it's something that our customers are starting to use a lot, and we think that there's going to be a great grow in their first product. Some of the features that we actually give to our customers are actually for free, because we know that our customers are really battling with figuring out their usage patterns, internally. >> Well, I want to hear about those pain points. What were the problems that you were trying to solve with Concierge? >> So, some of the pain points, you know, we have customers today that get invoices from some of the public cloud companies or their service providers or with their infrastructures service. And the invoices are 50 pages long. They can never actually figure out what their true costs are. So we, through a shared space platform, that we developed from the ground up, we can provide customers with all of those metrics around their licenses. Plus, also, their usage around infrastructure as a service, as well. >> And, what has demand been like? >> The demand's been really good. Actually, when we launched product about two, three months ago, we were already at 20 customers. And we've seen a lot of interest. Presidio has about 7700 customers nationally, that we call on today. And we've grown tremendously, we have about a three billion dollar infrastructure partner today that provides both on premises and public cloud services. >> Yeah, I like, you brought up the fact that customers are looking for simplicity. Unfortunately, today, cloud is no longer simple. You know, I would say if you said, okay, If I went to my server vendor of choice and wanted to configure something, versus I went to my cloud vendor of choice and try to configure something, cloud might even be more challenging for somebody to do. But, one of the areas that we're trying to help customers get some simplicity back, is if you look at solutions like Azure Stack. So, Rebecca and I interviewed Jeffrey Snover earlier today, and that was the goal they had, was to give, kind of, that operational model and even some of the services from Azure and put them in my data center. Was wondering if Intel and Presidio are both partnering with Microsoft on this. What are you seeing, what are you hearing from customers? Any proof points as to how the roll outs are going, on there? >> We at Presidio, we are one of the first Azure Stack partners. Probably, about a year and a half ago, when it was actually announced and when it went, yeah, I think it was June of last year, and we partnered with Cisco, Dell, and also HP in the space, and we seen demand from our customers creep up. Single node solutions. We've seen demand with Single node PLC solutions are being deployed today. And then, in the public sector, we're also starting to see customers that are interested in it because it will provide them with a gateway to the public cloud in the future. >> Yeah, we're seeing the exact same thing. Obviously, we've been partnering together for some time. The beauty of Azure Stack is it's optimized for Xeon scalable processor family, as well as Intel Optane technologies, both the SSDs and in the future, our persistent memory capabilities. What we like in our work that we've done on Azure Stack and Azure Stack development, is that customers have had a lot of releases to begin to determine where Azure Stack's going to fit in their overall portfolio. And that's how you really have to look at Azure Stack, is how do you manage your portfolio between the cloud and on premises. Azure Stack is a great tool for that. >> You know, leading up to the release of Azure Stack, I talked to a number of service providers that had pent up demand. Leading up to this show, I was hearing a lot of non-North American interest. Can you give us any characterization as to how the roll out's going? >> Yeah, I think when you look at non-North American interest, there's a lot of localization, that has to take place in a lot of those countries. Maybe there's not actually an Azure, a public cloud Azure in those countries today, which is something that Microsoft is building towards. So, customers want to get used to their API's, they want to keep their data local. And when they're the same API's, on premises versus in the public cloud for all of their applications. And that's why I think you see, especially in Europe, as an example, a lot of countries in Europe where actually, data sovereignty's a big issue, alright. The data's not allowed to leave the country that they're actually in. And the demand, I think will, I always say, Microsoft, version two or version three. They always get it right. I mean, we've seen this time and time again. They've proven to us, they get this right all the time. >> I want to follow up on something you were just talking about, though with, sort of, risk management being a really big, hot opportunity. The next generation of risk management and mitigation. Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing there, and what you're hearing from customers? >> Yeah, so, Presidio developed the next generation risk management framework, called NGRM. So, we found we do a lot of security with Cisco, Palo Alto. We have a lot of security vendors out there that we deal with, but what our CIO's were really looking for is they were looking for a single dashboard that could actually provide them with a scorecard: Green, Yellow, or Red. Basically saying this is where we're at in our security strategy and this is what we need to remediate right away. They can take that to their board, they can also use that internally for all of their CSO's and also all their internal IT infrastructure personnel that they have. So, it's something that we've seen customers adopt, because it provides that analysis and the remediation and it's not necessarily tied to a specific product. Again, this is a shared space platform that we developed from the ground up, because our customers are always saying, "Well, there's always security vulnerabilities. "How can we constantly check on this?" Right? And it doesn't matter whether you're running Azure, whether you have on-premises solutions, or whether you have some other cloud provider, we can provide that holistic view for customers today. >> One of the announcements that I think surprised everyone. I mean, things like Server 2019, we all expect. The open data initiative, the commentary that we had is if you talk about digital transformation. I mean, Microsoft, Adobe and SAP. Two companies at the center of it. What does it mean? When will customers see the benefits of this? And any commentary of digital transformation in general would be great. >> Well, typically, we've been involved in a lot of these open standards, and they typically take three to five years to work their way all the way through the system and build the proper ecosystem and standards. And then work their way into the product lines. I think, in this particular instance, there is a driver. We talked about the driver of cloud and why we, we Intel, are now producing chips every year, and you're not waiting for the three year release cycle. Well, the open data initiative, I think, falls into that camp. I think you're going to see an escalated transition to the open data initiative, because people have to be able to move their workloads. Presidio recognized it very early on in the process. We've been working with them for some time. But that's one of the values that they bring to customers, is their ability to do that. But, more and more customers and more and more data are being stretched and there has to be compatibility between file systems, file format, and data classification. The open data initiative is a start in that direction. >> Yeah, I mean, one of the examples that I could give you also is we always talk about IT transformation. We have a large customer that's actually a fleet truck company that underwent IT transformation, and they came to us and they said that they actually needed telematics on the trucks in the fleet of trucks. And the reason was because a lot of these trucks are breaking down and they would send it to a mechanic and the mechanic would diagnose it. So, we actually created, in partnership with Intel and with Microsoft, this telematic platform that actually can provide the customer, in real time, with what issues they actually have with the truck. And it saves the customer a lot of money. That's the type of information that customers are looking for. This customer has on premises data, plus, also in the public cloud, and I think stretching it and providing analytics around that is really important. >> And is it possible to take away the silos? I mean, you seem to be an optimist here. >> I'm very optimistic that we can take away the silos, but I'm also realistic. The only way to take away the silos is to develop new applications, new capabilities. And as my friends in Windows Server Team will tell you, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out, how do we use virtualization and container technologies to take old legacy data and carry it forward onto new modern IT infrastructure. And when you can do that, then you can extract value from the data. If you can not take it from an old, antiquated infrastructure to a new infrastructure as Presidio has done, you stranded the data. And that's where you have those silo breakdowns. So, I think we're developing the tools, but we're not all the way there. >> Yeah, you look at Windows 2019 coming out, there's Linux support in Windows 2019. Who would ever think that Microsoft would be releasing Linux support. >> Microsoft loves Linux. >> Microsoft loves Linux now, right? >> And they will in get it. >> And they'll get it now as well. Microsoft is really developed their ecosystem. Our partners also around the open API's and what they've been doing over the past few years. And I think customers are really starting to embrace that. And you look at even another feature that's coming with Windows 2019 with Storage Spaces Direct. Right, I think Microsoft, this is really going to be their entry into the Apple convert space. Customers are going to start building, they'll have to converge platform based on Windows 2019 Data Center. >> Wondering if you can give a little more color here, Raph. You and I lived through, kind of converged and hyperconvergence, when we wrote our original research at Wikibon, it was VMware is the one that's going to get everybody talking about it, but the one eventually that will be very important here is Microsoft. 'Cause, Microsoft owns the apps. They've got the operating systems, so absolutely, they can be critical in the HCI space. What are they doing and how does Presidio and partners go to market with this? >> So, I mean, when you look at Windows 2016, Windows 2016 was really the first iteration of Storage Spaces Direct. Windows 2019 has really improved upon that, and we're starting to see customers become more interested in that. The reason is because customers want a single platform that they can easily manage with a single operating system. So, there used to be the war, as you mentioned Stu, between VMware and Harper-V. ESXi and Harper-V. I don't really see that being talked about anymore. It's more around the features and the robust features that customers can actually get on as quickly as possible. I don't know if you have anymore. >> Well Raph, you're absolutely right on. I think people have taken virtualization for granted. We added virtualization technology in Xeon in 2006 and they've sort of taken it for granted. Obviously, VMware is a big partner for both Microsoft and Intel, but the reality is is that in a hyper convergent environment, you need a file system, you need an operating system, and you need apps. And Microsoft has all that capability. As you'll hear at four o'clock, we announce world record numbers and it's spectacular. And the reason for it is in our last version of Windows Server 2016, we delivered 16 million IOP's in a hyper converged environment. That got Raph and his team off the table saying, okay, you guys are legitimate. You have a legitimate platform now. But it's not good enough. We think this new instantiation that we've already started to announce in Windows 2019, and Jeff Wolsey announced it earlier today and started talking about the features in Project Honolulu. We think those kind of transitions are what it's going to take for Enterprise customers to begin to break down those silos that you discussed, and really start to look at their data holistically, build data lakes that can scale, and build frameworks that are, I don't even want to use the term convergent anymore, but hyper scalable. >> Yeah, I mean, to tie into that, right. You look at what Intel has developed around Optane and some of the storage platforms that they've come out with. 10 years ago? Intel wasn't really known as a storage company, right? But, you look at all the storage vendors out there today, they really are putting Intel aside. And when you start looking at what Storage Spaces Direct is going to deliver and some of the robustness around Optane, we really think that it's going to be something our customers are going to embrace with Windows 2019 and future versions and sequels. >> So, Raph, I got to give Presidio a lot of credit, though. We launched a program called Intel Select Solutions, and it really allowed us to take Windows and Storage Spaces Direct and create a solution that included both the CPU, the networking, the SSD's and the memory. And Presidio has led that. And so because we have these Intel Select Solutions for Storage Spaces Direct with Presidio, we have the flexibility now to give customers package solutions that are pre-configured. >> Great. Well, Jake and Raphael, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up just in a little bit. 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(electronic music) >> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Jeffrey Snover. He is the technical fellow and chief architect for Azure Storage and Cloud Edge at Microsoft. Thanks so much for coming, for returning to theCUBE, I should say, Jeffrey, you're a CUBE alum. >> Yes, I enjoyed the last time. So can't wait to do it again this time. >> Well we're excited to have you. So before the camera's were rolling, we were talking about PowerShell. You invented PowerShell. >> Yeah, I did. >> It was invented in the early 2000's, it took a few years to ship, as you said. But can you give our viewers an update of where we are? >> Yeah, you know, it's 2018, and it's never been a better time for PowerShell. You know, basically the initial mission is sort of complete. And the mission was provide sort of general purpose scripting for Windows. But now we have a new mission. And that new mission is to manage anything, anywhere. So we've taken PowerShell, we've open sourced it. It's now running, we've ported it to macOS and Linux. There's a very large list of Linux distributions that we support it on, and it runs everywhere. And so, now, you can manage from anywhere. Your Windows box, your Linux box, your Mac box, even in the browser, you can manage, and then anything. You can manage Windows, you can manage Linux, you can manage macOS. So manage anything, anywhere. Any cloud, Azure, or AWS, or Google. Any hypervisor, Hyper-V or VMware, or any physical server. It's amazing. In fact, our launch partners, when we launched this, our launch partners, VMware, Google, AWS. Not Microsoft's traditional partners. >> That's great to hear. It was actually, one of the critiques we had, at the key note this morning, was partnerships are critically important. But felt that Satya gave a little bit of a jab towards, the kind of, the Amazon's out there. When we talk to customers, we know it's a heterogeneous, multi-cloud world. You know, you work all over the place, with your solutions that you had. There's not, like, Azure, Azure Stack, out to The Edge. The Edge, it is early, it's going to be very heterogeneous. So connect the dots for us a little. You know, we love having the technical fellows on, as to, you go from PowerShell, to now this diverse set of solutions that you work on today. >> Yeah, exactly. So basically, from PowerShell, they asked me to be the chief architect for Windows Server. Right, because if you think about it, an operating system is largely management, right? And, so, that's what I did, resource management. And, so, I was the chief architect for that, for many years, and we decided that, as part of that, we were developing cloud-inspired infrastructure. So, basically, you know, Windows Server had grown up. You know, sort of focused in on a machine. Azure had gone and needed to build a new set of infrastructure for the cloud. And we looked at what they were doing. And they say, hey, that's some great ideas. Let's take the ideas there, and put them into the general purpose operating system. And that's what we call our software-defined data center. And the reason why we couldn't use Azure's directly is, Azure's, really, design center is very, very, very large systems. So, for instance, the storage stamp, that starts at about 10 racks. No customer wants to start with 10 racks. So we took the inspiration from them and re-implemented it. And now our systems can start with two servers. Our Azure Stack systems, well, so, then, what we decided was, hey, this is great technology. Let's take the great cloud-inspired infrastructure of Windows Server, and match it with the Azure services themselves. So we take Azure, put it on top of Windows Server, package it as an appliance experience, and we call that Azure Stack. And that's where I have been mostly focused for the last couple of years. >> Right, can you help us unpack a little bit. There's a lot of news today. >> Yes. >> You know, Windows 2019 was announced. I was real interested in the Data Box Edge solution, which I'm sure. >> Isn't that crazy? >> Yeah, really interesting. You're like, let's do some AI applications out at the Edge, and with the same kind of box that we can transport data. Because, I always say, you got to follow customers applications and data, and it's tough to move these things. You know, we've got physics that we still have to, you know, work on until some of these smart guys figure out how to break that. But, yeah, maybe give us a little context, as to news of the show, things your teams have been working on. >> Yeah, so the Data Box Edge, big, exciting stuff. Now, there's a couple scenarios for Data Box Edge. First is, first it's all kind of largely centered on storage and the Edge. So Storage, you've got a bunch of data in your enterprise, and you'd like it to be in Azure. One flavor of Data Box Edge is a disk. You call us up, we send you a disk, you fill up that disk, you send it back to us, it shows up in Azure. Next. >> A pretty big disk, though? >> Well, it can be a small disk. >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah, no, it can be a single SSD, okay. But then you can say, well, no, I need a bunch more. And so we send you a box, the box is over there. It's like 47 pounds, we send you this thing, it's about 100 terabytes of data. You fill that thing up, send it to us, and we upload it. Or a Data Box Heavy. Now this thing has a handle and wheels. I mean, literally, wheels, it's specially designed so that a forklift can pick this thing up, right? It's like, I don't know, like 400 pounds, it's crazy. And that's got about a petabyte worth of storage. Again, we ship it to you, you fill it up, ship it back to us. So that's one flavor, Data Box transport. Then there's Data Box Edge. Data Box Edge, you go to the website, say, I'd like a Data Box Edge, we send you a 1u server. You plug that in, you keep it plugged in, then you use it. How do you use it? You connect it to your Azure storage, and then all your Azure storage is available through here. And it's exposed through SMB. Later, we'll expose it through NFS and a Blob API. But, then, anything you write here is available immediately, it gets back to Azure, and, effectively, it looks like near-infinite storage. Just use it and it gets backed up, so it's amazing. Now, on that box, we're also adding the ability to say, hey, we got a bunch of compute there. You can run IoT Edge platforms. So you run the IoT Edge platform, you can run gateways, you can run Kubernetes clusters on this thing, you can run all sorts of IoT software. Including, we're integrating in brainwave technology. So, brainwave technology is, and, by the way, we'll want to talk about this a little bit, in a second. It is evidence of the largest transformation we'll see in our industry. And that is the re-integration of the industry. So, basically, what does that mean? In the past, the industry used to be, back when the big key players were digital. Remember digital, from DEC? We're all Massachusetts people. (Rebecca laughs) So, DEC was the number one employer in Massachusetts, gone. IBM dominant, much diminished, a whole bunch of people. They were dominant when the industry was vertically integrated. Vertically integrated meant all those companies designed their own silicone, they built their own boards, they built their own systems, they built their OS, they built the applications, the serviced them. Then there was the disintegration of the computer industry. Where, basically, we went vertically integrated. You got your chips from Intel or Motorola. The operating system, you got from Sun or Microsoft. The applications you got from a number of different vendors. Okay, so we got vertically integrated. What you're seeing, and what's so exciting, is a shift back to vertical integration. So Microsoft is designing its own hardware, right? We're designing our own chips. So we've designed a chip specially for AI, we call it a brainwave chip, and that's available in the Data Box Edge. So, now, when you do this AI stuff, guess what? The processing is very different. And it can be very, very fast. So that's just one example of Microsoft's innovation in hardware. >> Wow, so, I mean. >> What do you do with that? >> One of the things that we keep hearing so much, at this conference, is that Microsoft products and services are helping individual employees tap into their own creativity, their ingenuity, and then, also, collaborate with colleagues. I'm curious about where you get your ideas, and how you actually put that into practice, as a technical fellow. >> Yeah. >> How do you think about the future, and envision these next generation technologies? >> Yeah, well, you know, it's one of those things, honestly, where your strength is your weakness, your weakness is your strength. So my weakness is, I can't deal with complexity, right. And, so, what I'm always doing is I'm taking a look at a very complex situation, and I'm saying, what's the heart of it, like, give me the heart of it. So my background's physics, right? And so, in physics, you're not doing, you're looking for the F equals M A. And if you have that, when you find that, then you can apply it over, and over, and over again. So I'm always looking at what are the essential things here. And so that's this, well, you see a whole bunch of confusing things, like, what's up with this? What's with this? That idea of there is this narrative about the reintegration of the computer industry. How very large vendors, be it Microsoft, or AWS, are, because we operate at such large scales, we are going to be vertically integrated. We're developing our own hardware, we do our own systems, et cetera. So, I'm always looking for the simple story, and then applying it. And, it turns out, I do it pretty accurately. And it turns out, it's pretty valuable. >> Alright, so that's a good set up to talk about Azure Stacks. So, the value proposition we heard, of course, is, you know, start everything in the cloud first, you know, Microsoft does Azure, and then lets, you know, have some of those services in the same operating model in your data center, or in your hosting service provider environment. So, first of all, did I get that right? And, you know, give us the update on Azure Stack. I've been trying to talk to customers that are using it, talking to your partners. There is a lot of excitement around it. But, you know, proof points, early use cases, you know, where is this going to be pointing towards, where the future of the data center is? >> So, it's a great example. So what I figured out, when I thought about this, and kind of drilled in, like what's really, what really matters here? What I realized was that what the gestalt of Azure Stack is different than everything we've done in the past. And it really is an appliance, okay? So, in the past, I just had a session the other day, and people were asking, well, when are you going to, when is Azure Stack going to have the latest version of the operating system? I said, no, no, no, no, no. Internals are internal, it's an appliance. Azure Stack is for people who want to use a cloud, not for people who want to build it. So you shouldn't be concerned about all the internals. You just plug it in, fill out some forms, and then you use it, just start using it. You don't care about the details of how it's all configured, you don't do the provisioning, we do all that for you. And so that's what we've done. And it turns out that that message resonates really well. Because, as you probably know, most private clouds fail. Most private clouds fail miserably. Why? And there's really two reasons. There's two flavors of failure. But one is they just never work. Now that's because, guess what, it's incredibly hard. There are so many moving pieces and, guess what, we learned that ourselves. The numbers of times we stepped on the rakes, and, like, how do you make all this work? There's a gazillion moving parts. So if any of your, you have a team, that's failed at private cloud, they're not idiots. It's super, super, super hard. So that's one level of failure. But even those teams that got it working, they ultimately failed, as well, because of lack of usage. And the reason for that is, having done all that, they then built a snowflake cloud. And then when someone said, well, how do I use this? How do I add another NIC to a VM? The team that put it together were the only ones that could answer that. Nope, there was no ecosystem around it. So, with Azure Stack, the gestalt is, like, this is for people who want to use it, not for people who want to build it. So you just plug it in, you pick a vendor, and you pick a capacity. This vendor, four notes, this vendor 12 or 16 notes. And that's it. You come in, we ask you what IP range is, how do I integrate with your identity? Within a day, it's up and running, and your users are using it, really using it. Like, that's craziness. And then, well what does it mean to use it? Like, oh, hey, how do I ad a NIC to a VM? It's Azure, so how does Azure do it? I have an entire Azure ecosystem. There's documentation, there's training, there's videos, there's conferences. You can go and put on a resume, I'd like to hire someone with Azure skills, and get someone, and then they're productive that day. Or, and here's the best part, you can put on your resume, I have Azure skills, and you knock on 10 doors, and nine of them are going to say, come talk to me. So, that was the heart of it. And, again, it goes back to your question of, like, the value, or what does a technical fellow do. It's to figure out what really matters. And then say, we're all in on that. There was a lot of skepticism, a lot of customers like, I must have my security agent on there. It's like, well, no, then you're not a good candidate. What do you mean? I say, well, look, we're not going to do this. And they say, well you'll never be able to sell to anyone in my industry. I said, no, you're wrong. They say, what do you mean, I'm wrong? I say, well, let me prove it to ya, do you own a SAN? They say, well, of course we own a SAN. I said, I know you own a SAN. Let me ask you this, a SAN is a general purpose server with a general purpose operating system. So do you put your security and managing agents on there? And they said, no, we're not allowed to. I said, right, and that's the way Azure Stack is. It's a sealed appliance. We take care of that responsibility for you. And it's worked out very, very well. >> Alright, you got me thinking. One of the things we want to do is, we want to simplify the environment. That's been the problem we've had in IT, for a long time, is it's this heterogeneous mess. Every group did their own thing. I worry a multi-cloud world has gotten us into more silos. Because, I've got lots of SAS providers, I've got multiple cloud providers, and, boy, maybe when I get to the Edge, every customer is going to have multiple Edge applications, and they're going to be different, so, you know. How do you simplify this, over time, for customers? Or do we? >> Here's the hard story, back to getting at the heart of it. Look, one of the benefits of having done this a while, is I've stepped on a lot of these rakes. You're looking at one of the biggest, earliest adopters of the Boolean cross-platform, Gooey Framework. And, every time, there is this, oh, there's multiple platforms? People say, oh, that's a problem, I want a technology that allows me to bridge all of those things. And it sound so attractive, and generates a lot of early things, and then it turned out, I was rocking with this Boolean cross-breed platform. I wrote it, and it worked on Mac's and Windows. Except, I couldn't cut and paste. I couldn't print, I couldn't do anything. And so what happens is it's so attractive, blah, blah, blah. And then you find out, and when the platforms aren't very sophisticated, the gap between what these cross-platform things do, and the platform is not so much, so it's like, eh, it's better to do this. But, over time, the platform just grows and grows and grows. So the hard message is, people should pick. People should pick. Now, one of the benefits of Azure, as a great choice, is that, with the other guys, you are locked to vendor. Right, there is exactly one provider of those API's. With Azure, you can get an implementation of Azure from Microsoft, the Azure Public Cloud. Or you can get an implementation from one of our hardware vendors, running Azure Stack. They provide that to you. Or you can get it from a service provider. So, you don't have to get, you buy into these API's. You optimize around that, but then you can still use vendor. You know, hey, what's your price for this? What's your price for that, what can you give me? With the other guys, they're going to give you whatcha give ya, and that's your deal. (Rebecca laughs) >> That's a good note to end on. Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for coming on theCUBE again. It was great talking to you. >> Oh, that was fast. (Rebecca laughs) Enjoyed it, this was great. >> Great. I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, stay tuned to theCUBE. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with David Floyer, and Dave and I are here, day three, David, of our VMworld 2018 coverage, if you can believe it. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE, for the first time, a couple of gentlemen from Micron. We have Eric Caward, business development manager, and Greg Kincaid, ecosystem enablement program manager. Welcome guys. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> Thank you very much. >> So day three, you still have voices, that's impressive, your feet are doing okay? >> Yes, yeah. >> Pretty good, pretty good. >> Good, so Greg, tell us a little bit about your role and specifically what some of the new exciting announcements from Micron with respect to flash. >> So my role is to find deployments where SSDs can improve the performance significantly. Also, any case where you can have simplicity for the system administrator. So, with the new version of VMware 6.7, we've got, we've implemented, using NVMe as our cache layer, and set as our capacity layer to get tremendous performance across the spectrum of reads and writes. >> So can you give us some examples of how good that performance is? What sort of impact have you had? >> So, take for instance using NVMe as the cache layer and as data and a capacity layer, you can get small block random reads of 500,000 for a new cluster. >> That's very impressive. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So can you make some savings in terms of the improvements in the VM density and things like that that you can achieve-- >> Absolutely, so almost all of these, well, all of the SSDs are in a two and a half form factor, and so you can get much better density per U with those kinds of SSDs, as opposed to a hard drive where you have to go to a three-inch to get that kind of density. >> So performance density, tons of data, what are some of the things in your opinion, Greg, that differentiate Micron Solution here, versus all those other guys out there? >> Well, we don't just put together a solution. We actually do considerable amount of testing, both in benchmarking, we also do a quite a bit of application testing as well. And we publish a very thorough reference architecture that's available on our website to act as a pragmatic blueprint for those who want to implement those kinds of solutions. >> Excellent, excellent. So, Eric, you're a part of the NVDIMM brigades. >> Yes. >> Tell us what is NVDIMM. Why is it important? >> Well, NVDIMM is very exciting. It's basically a memory that doesn't forget. So it's on the memory bus, it's comprised of DRAM, a controller, and NAND, and when the power is catastrophically lost, all your data is retained. >> So you go up to, what is it, 32 gigabytes on the DIMM? >> Actually, yes we're releasing our 32 gig NVDIMM in production next month, which is right around the corner. >> Wow, and and how many DIMMs can you have in a? >> You can have up to, typically in a 24 socket system, you can have up to 22 of those can be NVDIMM should you wish to. >> That's a lot of memory. >> It is a lot, and it's very, very fast. >> Very, very fast OK, so, tell us some of the changes that need to be made in order to exploit this. This is this is different, isn't it? So, can you give some examples of how you're working with the ISVs, for example? >> Certainly, certainly. From the operating system standpoint, Microsoft Windows Server 2016 supports, natively supports persistent memory. So does the Linux kernel version 4.2 and newer. Along with that, not only that, but you also have applications that are written from the ground up to support to be persistent memory aware. You have Exchange Server, you have SQL Server 2016, and with those applications they can actually access the persistent memory in byte mode, which is much faster than block mode, but you also can more legacy applications can get benefit from block mode, also. >> Wasn't, sorry Dave, I was just going to say let's dig into a customer example. I always love to hear how are these technologies, one, being co-developed as in collaboration with the end-users, right? And two, how are you seeing them in the, in the field actually helping customers transform their businesses from the inside out? >> Well, so one example that comes to mind, actually VMware just did a study with Oracle licensing, and they took a 12 core solution, and they put the redo log onto traditional storage, and they were able to get a certain amount of performance. Let's just call it a hundred units of performance. They did the same thing with the same workload, but they only used nine cores. So, that's actually a reduction in 25% course, but because the redo log was actually put on persistent memory, which again you're accessing that storage at DRAM like speeds, it kept the CPU much, much more busy, much more active, and they actually saw about a 2% increase in performance, but because the licensing costs are tied to your core count; actually, you could potentially save on licensing cost, even though you purchased a NVDIMM to have faster persistent storage. >> What about other benefits like to a data center in terms of energy efficiency? One of the things that Pat Gelsinger said on Monday was that VMware and their Green Charter, if you will, has saved 540 million, I think, tons of CO2 emissions. What I'm hearing Eric, what you're saying, are customers seeing pretty significant like power savings, and that were like roll into cost savings with the performance in this speed that you're able to deliver? >> Yes, if you look at it one of the other use cases for the NVDIMM, persistent memory, is that they used to NAND storage to write these logs, but because of the endurance, it ends up that they would have to replace the SSDs on a three month cadence. Because of the NVDIMM, the endurance it has just natively comes with DRAM, they were able to replace the SSDs with the NVDIMM, and then continue to use that for many, many quarters. >> It's a big cost savings. >> Definitely. >> So, can I go back to the what we were talking about before in terms of implementation of this? >> Yes. >> So, what's necessary? You need the software, the ISV software. You obviously need the Micron and the DIMM. >> That is correct. >> Anything else that you need? >> Yes, the actual, the hardware that you have to have, you have to have, not necessarily a specific CPU, but if you have to have the BIOS that basically goes in and is aware of NVDIMM. >> Right. >> And, one of the reasons why is when a system boots up, that supports NVDIMM, it goes out and looks and sees, is there a valid image set to true? If so, it will load that image from the NAND, through the controller, into the DRAM. Then when it's completed, it will go on to booting up the OS. The OS is none the wiser that that data wasn't sitting in DRAM the entire time, but as you can see if your, if your bios support isn't there from the start with that, that process would never happen. >> But, you can have that BIOS is available on most, most system. >> On multiple, multiple OEM systems. Yes, that is supported. >> Great. So, that there's no requirement for anything special with other than that? >> Other than that, correct. >> That's amazing. So, you've got a pretty, are you going through other ISVs as well? Are you. >> Yes, there are multiple ISVs that we're working with to enable that, basically the performance benefit and the endurance and the low latency of NVDIMMs. >> And people like SAP, for example? >> Yes. >> Perfect. Okay, that's very excited, very, very exciting indeed. Are you doing the same thing with your, class? >> Yes, we actually work with many partners. We work with not just Vmware, but all of the enterprise partners. We do case studies, and we do cost analysis as well. So, for instance we found that if you statistically, strategically add an SSD to a 200 node cluster for Hadoop, you can get the same performance there that if you had added 80 additional nodes for the entire cluster. So, that's quite a bit of a savings of 80 nodes versus an additional 200 NVMe SSDs. >> Yeah, that's great. >> What's some of the feedback on these new advancements that you're hearing from some of the people that are coming by to visit the Micron booth here at VMworld? >> Well, I think people are a little surprised that we are so focused on systems, and making sure that they work on the performance with SSDs. I think people, sometimes they think of Micron in the early days when we were just simply a commodities broker with DRAM, but we're much, much more than that. >> So, customers are reacting to what sounds like an evolution of Micron? >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> Eric, what are some of your-- >> And to be honest, my favorite is when people come by, and they look at the numbers, and they're just like oh my gosh. (laughing) The performance is really outstanding when you look at an NVDIMM, and it's just, it's simply because it is DRAM acting as a storage device. It's sitting on the memory bus. It's sitting on the memory channel, right next to the CPU. The latency is absolutely fantastic. There are certain workloads that are really, really gain a lot of benefit by low latency for quality of service. Then you have just the raw bandwidth, and this is only with two NVDIMMs in this particular demo system. We could have, excuse me, we could have gone up to six in a CPU. So, we could have tripled our performance just with one CPU on one node. So, it's pretty exciting when when the people that are coming in the booth, they get excited too. It makes, it makes this show really fun. >> I think people also don't understand that there's more than one kind of SSD, and we just announced that QLC, a NAND based SSD, that for write once read many could actually supplant many of the hard drives that are used in secondary storage or archives. >> So, it also must be kind of fun to educate people on, hey guess what? There's not just different flavors, but look what Micron is doing. >> Right. >> Evolving our technologies and enabling them to you know, learn about things that they didn't know about. I imagine that must also be a pretty cool. >> I'm working with a software developers as well, so closely, so this is exciting. >> I mean the applications are just innumerable. I mean we're working with artificial intelligence. We're working on machine learning. Applications are other than just the standard database that most people think of accelerating with SSDs. >> Excellent. >> And, to be honest, I'm very passionate about technology, just, I love to geek out, if you will. >> I can tell. >> And, I love seeing the light bulbs come on in people that I'm talking about. It's just very rewarding. >> So we're gone, more than halfway through 2018, scary. September 1st is Saturday. (laughing) So, going towards the end of the of the calendar year, this excitement that I'm getting from both of you, what are you excited about Micron, you know going into early part of 2019, being able to surprise and delight your customers with? >> All right. >> Well, we're going to continue to, to do all of the performance testings that were done. We're going to, as we bring new SSDs to the market, we're going to continue to add tuning advice, and detailed deployment instructions for our customers. We're going continue to partner with the major players to make sure that our SSDs, their performance and their applications. >> And I think with the fact that we're releasing our 32 gig NVDIMM, actually in September. The ecosystem, as it solidifies, it becomes more robust. There's just going to be use cases that our engineers and our team haven't thought of yet. And, so it's going to be really exciting to see what new use cases are out there for super, very fast NVDIMMs. >> Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by and talking with David and me about-- >> Thanks for having us. >> The evolution of Micron, and the excitement that you get from from hearing that validation in the field, and we look forward to hearing what's coming out shortly. So, we'll have to have you back on. >> Sounds great, thanks Lisa, thanks David. >> Love to be back. >> Excellent. Greg, Eric, thanks for your time. For David Floyer my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, live from Vmworld 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guests. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World from Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, and we're joined by two Cube alumni. We've got Paul Galjan, Senior Director of Microsoft Hybrid Cloud for Dell EMC, and Claude Lorenson, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Cloud and Enterprise Platform, from Microsoft. Hi Guys. >> Combined Voices: Hi, how are you? >> Welcome back. >> Voice 1: Thank you. It's really great to be here. >> So, we've had almost two full days of talking with customers, partners ... We want to talk to you guys about what's next, what is next, well, we'll get there ... What's new? How about that? With Dell EMC and Microsoft? >> Yeah, so we shipped toward the end of last year, fourth quarter of last year. We went GA, and what's happening is there's an amazing amount of momentum in the enterprise now. We're seeing a lot of interest from the financial sector, from manufacturing, oil and gas. People are really interested in exploring use cases for Azure Stack and also government. Government is also spending up. And we're spending the week here with a ton of great customers and exploring how we can extend their IT business. >> Yeah, we've been very happy with the number of new customers that have joined this platform with Dell EMC. As Paul mentioned, we're seeing some focus on a few verticals in manufacturing, financial services, and, for Microsoft, working with Dell EMC has been a natural because we've worked on a solution like this for quite a few years so it makes the making the sausage part easier when work we work with Dell EMC because we're a trusted partner for quite a while in these solutions. >> We've been making sausage with Microsoft for a long time. (laughter) >> That is a Cube meme for sure. (laughter) So, it's been nine months, there's the ideal of what a product is, and then customers get it, and they start to use it. What have been some of the surprises? Has it been exactly what you guys thought it would be? Or have the customers kind of stretched the imagination to using Azure Stack instead. >> So the thing that surprised me the most is how much our portfolio, at least from a Dell EMC perspective, is how much our portfolio really plays into the decision. And, I'll give you an example, our ISO LAN attach rate with Dell EMC Azure Stack is tremendous, and it's because the inherent the storage density of a hyper-converged infrastructure is what it is, and when you have a multi-petabyte data set that you want to process using cloud types of technologies having an ISO LAN sitting right next to it makes sense. That has surprised me how quickly people have jumped to that with production use cases. >> Keith: It is an interesting concept. >> For Microsoft, the thing that surprised us a lot is the customer that actually get the platform as an enabler of digital transformation the amount of things that they want to do on it is just like mind boggling, so we are constantly asked to add different things to the base services. And, of course, we're doing our best to triage this and prioritize what makes the most sense, but there are the people who gets it, they have tremendous use case very specific for them that Azure Stack enables, so we're on our toes to keep improving the different services that we can offer for Azure Stack. >> Lisa: And you mentioned a number of verticals that seemed to be kind of early adopters here. Are there common use cases among government, financial services, or are you seeing specific use cases to those industries? >> I can talk to that. Gas and mining industry, we see a lot of interest in the disconnected scenarios because of poor latency with the internet. They want to run some of their application that they usually run on Azure, but they want to run it in the mine shaft, for example, or they want to run it in a drilling platform in the ocean. So Azure Stack is an extension of Azure for this so in these kind of industries, the disconnected scenario is very, very big. If you can think of Defense also, if they want to use something in moving vehicle Azure Stack is a great platform for that. >> And it's not just latency, it's just simple data gravity. You know if you have, if you're generating pentabytes of data on a daily basis out on an oil rig, you're not going to be able to get that into W Azure, GPC, or Azure. So you can process it, upload results, filtered results back to Azure for further processing. It's a really common use case. And the federal space is quite big for defense actually. >> So what are the most common services on Azure Stack taking advantage of the petabytes of ISO LAN right next to it as opposed to shipping it back to ... on a truck back to the Azure data center? >> So you want to talk about some of the recent developments for all that? >> You go ahead with all that. >> So what we're seeing a lot of initiatives around is IoT, and those are, that's that very typical data gravity type issue, and it also has it also has compliance implications particularly in the EU. Being able to control where the data is and being able- >> Staying within the border of the country so you don't move it in a data center that is not in your country so Azure become Azure in your country if you don't have your own Azure data centers. And the banking industry in Europe is pretty particular about this, so that's a big vertical for us in Europe. >> Yeah, a lot of finance. >> What about? >> I'm sorry go ahead. >> Oh thank you, sir. I wanted to talk, Claude, to you about what differentiates Dell EMC as an OEM for Microsoft with Azure Stack. >> Well, one thing that differentiates Dell EMC is the fact that they have a broad portfolio of server storage, they have great backup solution, for example, and that's needed in Azure Stack, And, also, let's face it, familiarity. We have been building these integrated systems together for a long, long time. So we know their engineering team, we have a well-oiled machine in terms of testing, so it's easier in some ways there. There's a familiarity in how we work that's quite well-known, and we can take advantage of their portfolio. Like I said, backup is a huge thing for Azure Stack. I mean it's hard to find a better partner for backup than Dell EMC, for example. So, we have a long experience in selling product together. And the client side, the laptop side, we have a long experience of selling Windows Server together, I mean, for years, they've been one of our biggest reseller of Windows Server. So, all this knowledge about Microsoft and how Microsoft works makes Azure Stack simpler to develop with a partner like Dell EMC. >> Okay, can you guys expand upon the advantages of the relationship when it comes to support? Nine months in, there's going to be stumbling blocks, there's going to be challenges, there's just going to be a lot to learn. What has been been a typical customer support experience with two companies? >> So, this really speaks to the learnings that we've had over the years working together. We have jointly, we have worked together on what we call 'Case Exchange API' which allows for ... it goes well above and beyond kind of the typical TSA net case exchange, with that sites, logs. This is API level access into mutual case management systems where we can get visibility into Microsoft's status with a given case and Microsoft can give visibility into Dell EMC's status with the case. And so it makes it so that the customer experience is completely seamless, and they can call, it doesn't matter which number you call for support, it ends up, you end up with a completely seamless experience. It's great. >> And we had years to improve that process and now we have an electronic, automatic ticket exchange and Dell EMC was one of the first partners to really implement this with us, and it's helped tremendously for the customer experience, and, luckily, so far, support hasn't been a big issue on Azure Stack. (laughter) As numbers grow and grow, I'm sure it'll change. >> So, you've been partners for a long time, we've talked about this well-oiled sausage factory (laughter) partners, collaborative ... (laughter) >> That can tweet. You will get tags. >> It is a tweetable moment. So collaboration, visibility, talk to us about the two cloud strategies, Dell EMC's cloud strategy, Microsoft's cloud strategy, how do they align? >> Okay, well, from a Dell EMC perspective, it's a no-brainer, of the big public clouds, Microsoft is really unique in their hybrid cloud approach. There's the Mware approach with AWS and bringing the workload to the cloud. Microsoft is the only major cloud vendor right now bringing the cloud to the work. And it's just a no-brainer from that perspective amongst most cases. >> And for Microsoft? >> Well, our cloud strategy is pretty clear- it's Azure, (laughter) but that part you said. Azure Stack is an extension of Azure. It brings Azure in different scenarios that would not be possible before, and we rely on our trusted, secure and hybrid, hybrid across the board not only with Azure, but with SQL Server, with identity, with security are pillars on these key functions our hybrids across, on premises, and in the cloud. Azure Stack brings this all up for different workloads. So, Azure, we're all in, and it's going well. And Azure Stack as an extension of that bringing in to the customer data center. >> Keith: So, let's talk about this Azure inside of a customer's data center. This is public cloud inside of a customer's data center, expectations change, operations change, technical capability changes, what have been some of the key learnings as customers start to to assume public cloud in their private data center? Like you said, this is a unique approach, this is hybrid cloud like no other model, instead of going inside out, you guys are going outside in. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I think the biggest the biggest perception change that needs, that customers, it helps that customers learn it early, is that Azure Stack is cloud. Simply because it's residing on your data center floor doesn't mean that it's virtualization and all those concepts go along with it. I'll give you a perfect example, if you have a workload that has some sort of unbalanced, you know, you need a lot of RAM but a little CPU, a lot of IOPs but not a whole lot of capacity, those are things that you capture as part of the re-platforming, the refactoring process, if you're going into public Azure or AWS. That same process needs to be followed for going into Azure Stack because from an operating model perspective it's an identical process. >> So let's talk about what's next. I talked to Jeff Snover again about nine months ago and one of the things he said, one of the advantages of Azure Stack is that it is new, and in being new, you can bring in new services, so customers are there to talk, looking at the cloud, they're going to look at things such as containers, functions as a service, et cetera. What's next for Azure Stack and Dell EMC? >> Claude: I'll talk a little about ... Well, we have a roadmap. It's a public roadmap. You can find it on Azure dot com. So what's next is extending the platform with more and more services. So one thing we have to tell customers is that not all services in Azure run in Azure Stack today. There's a subset. We're expanding that subset. We take input from our partner and customer and prioritizing what we are going to do, but also what's next is things like increased scalability, for example, increased efficiency in terms of virtual density, virtual machine density. Increase the number of regions that you can support, so making it from a one off to a true scale product is one of the things we're focusing on. We're making, we're putting a lot of emphasis on making sure that our customers are happy, so when they deploy Azure Stack, we want to make sure that their experience is good, so we're expending effort on making sure that there's a good way for them to reach out to us, but basically expanding the number of services on the platform is is what's new and what's next. >> So, Claude, last question for you, from Microsoft, we're at the first Dell Technologies World, right, last year with Dell EMC, 14 thousand people here, That's a huge, loads of partners, what are some things that you're looking forward to hearing tomorrow in your session from the Dell Technologies customers? >> I'm interested in learning about their use case, how does it fit their data centers? Because every customer is a little bit different, I had some customer meeting today, Dell EMC has invited me to quite a few customers and hearing what they want to do is really interesting because it can guide which next services, for example, we should implement, so hearing the specific is a very important thing. My experience I've talked at Dell, Dell EMC World for quite a few years, very often, the people who come in these session, they are kind of like rookie. They want to know, they want to learn. The experienced folks, we get to talk to them in the booth, but in the session, we get a lot of rookies, like what is thing, what it is, you got to be conscious of that too. >> Well, thanks, guys, for stopping back by the Cube and sharing what's new with Microsoft Hybrid Cloud and Dell EMC, we appreciate that. >> Thank you. We appreciate the time, look forward to it next year. >> Absolutely! >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube. We are live on Day Two of Dell Technologies World. I am Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (music)

(mellow music) >> Announcer: Live, from New Orleans, it's theCUBE, covering Veeam ON, 2017, brought to you by Veeam. >> We're back at the big easy, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage Dave Valente with Stu Miniman, Jason Buffington, long time CUBE guest and lead analyst at ESG, Jason, great to see you again. >> Thanks for having me >> @JBuff you're welcome, it's always a pleasure. You are an icon in this business. Ratmeyer today on theCUBE brought you up, said my friend, Jason Buffington, made an observation about the industry, and it's great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> So, you got some good play in the keynotes this morning, you guys just recently did a study that you spearheaded, talking about the availability gap, tell us about that research. >> So, 24 countries, a little under 1100 enterprises. So all organizations, over 1000 employees, and what we wanted to look at was how often are you down, how much does it cost when you're down, what are the differences between what the business expects of you, versus what you can actually deliver. Right, and by the way, that's the definition of the gap. Right, so the business expects that we cannot tolerate more than 30 minutes of downtime, and yet your fail over window is two hours. You have the availability gap. If the business says I cannot tolerate more than an hour of data loss, but you only backup once per night, you have a protection gap, right. So, looking at those gaps between the business expectations, and what IT can deliver, via whatever tools they're using, it was an unbiased panel, is what we went off and quantified. There were some really interesting numbers in there. >> Were you able to go to the same firm and ask of business people and IT people at the same firm? >> No, in this case what we did is we looked for IT decision makers who were familiar with the data protection processes they were using, and as well as being able to speak to business issues. So kind of look for the director IT, VP IT, someone who already has the business grade conversation. Probably the person who is being held accountable by the business units when IT fails to deliver. >> Do you think that, we've had a bunch of conversations with the practitioners today about what's the business conversation like, "well we go to the business" "and say how much data are you willing to lose." "Well none!" and then they go back and say >> There's a price for that >> There's a price for that, right. And most are not doing charge backs, some are doing show backs, so it's up to IT to say okay, look, we know they can't afford it. We can't afford it, so this is the level of service that we're going to give them. Do you think that's where the availability gap exists? Or is it because people have the wrong architecture, the wrong processes? >> I think it's more the former than the latter. I did a breakout session on this report earlier today. There was a great question in Q & A, why is it backup is still broken? Why is it no one can fix these gaps? And, what I offered them was that there's a lot of folks that just underestimate backup. They think of it as a cost center. They think it's always broken. Well, backup is not broken, the problem is if we were all still using Windows server 2003 physical boxes and exchange and sequel were still on pram and file was just that, we'd have solved backup ten years ago, right. But every time that you modernize production, it forces a modernization of protection. If you do it reactively, it's because you put in this brand new shiny flex pod or v-block or whatever, and figured out oh that legacy backup doesn't work. If you do it proactively, then you're catching up with things. But the problem is if you underestimate the importance of that, you get these gaps, right? So, what I counseled to the room that I was in was the first thing you have to do is you have to stop talking about data protection, even availability as an IT problem. It is a business impact cause, period. Right, so the first thing you want to do is you want to get all the tech out of the conversation. So, I offer a formula up, I published a book back in 2010, and there's a free chapter. I'll get it to you, so you can put in online, but I basically breakdown the cost of downtime into four values. There's the cost of lost data, there's the cost of lost productivity, right. So there's time down and time you have to repeat. And you can equate those to R2 and RPO. But a parentheses around those and times what's the human cost plus the profitability cost. And that's overly simple, but the point is if you know how long you're down, if you know how much data you will have lost, multiply that times how many butts and seats are sitting idle and how much did the inside sales department not sell that hour, right. That tells you cost of outage. And then all you have to do at that point, and there's no tack in that, right. It's just what is your RPO in real, what's your RTO in real, how much do your humans cost, how much does your department lose? If you have those four things, you know how much the problem is. Then, all you have to do is just go back to your system log and say how many times did that happen this year. If you do that, you've turned an IT problem into a business problem. Anytime I get a hold of C-level executives, the first thing I talk to them about availability is downtime is not in your budget, right. The idea of doing nothing costs you money. That's not in your budget and I guarantee of you did a data protection and availability solution, that will cost you less to your bottom line than the downtime that's unplanned that you have not budgeted for. >> Jason, Ratmere in the keynote this morning talked about the last ten years and they launched a new logo, talked a lot about cloud and physical and the next 10 years. What's your take on the message? Veeam just changed the leadership up a little bit. Are they in a transitional phase? Where are they positioned for kind of that next wave? >> So, the whole market's kind of in a transitional phase. So, I've been in data protection for 28 years. The only thing I've done since before getting out of school. Every time that we've had a major IT platform shift, the leaders in data protection have not made that jump, right. I started when we were doing mid-range, going to netware and over to Windows. >> That was what Ratmeyer was saying today. I didn't want to steal your thunder, so I'm glad you've brought this up. He noted that you had observed this, so carry on. >> Yeah so in times passed, we went went from physical to virtual servers, those leaders didn't make the jump and Veeam did, right. Veeam kind of took the crown on that for this whole last run. Our platform is shifting again, right. Now the difference this time around is and by the way the reason that most people don't make the jump is because whatever made you great from a technology perspective the last time around, doesn't apply to the new platform, right. So, NLMs didn't apply to Windows, agents didn't apply to hosts. We're now moving into cloud, but it's not a cloud, right. Some folks want IS, some want SAS. Neither of those use the same approaches that Veeam's secret sauce for host-based protection will carry for. So, the industry is in kind of a flux, and the other thing which is different this time around is when I was helping people move on to Windows NT, the presumption was we we're going to shutdown all the netware when we were done, right. For most of us, as we move into virtual machines, the presumption was we'd get rid of the metal on the way out. In this case though, cloud is not necessarily the end state, the end state is hybrid. Some data will be on pram, most of that data will be virtualized, some of it will still be physical. Right, the data that's in the cloud. Some of it will just be cloud stores, some of it will be the IS hosted VM, some of it will be SAS. But that's not because it's a prolonged transition, it's because we shouldn't be talking about migration, we should be talking about agility, where some data starts in the cloud and comes home. Other data starts on pram and moves, or from cloud to cloud. Because of that multi-cloud hybrid architecture, if that's the new end state for what IT is going to be delivering on, then the rules change. There is no secret sauce that carries from the last generation over. Certainly, Veeam's going to continue to be thought of as the virtualization data protection solution. But, if you think about they've added agents for physical, they've added cloud-based support on the back end. They announced more support for Office 365 and SAS. They're not a virtualization only play anymore. So, the market is going to have to take a reset, where everybody is unified, the difference is you've got the legacy folks that are unified and trying to catch up on virtualization features. And you've got Veeam, who is unified, where their virtualization is their strong suit, and cloud hosted and physical are the catch ups. So they're flying in opposite directions. >> So, you're saying that Veeam's secret sauce doesn't and virtualization doesn't necessarily carry over, however, they're making moves that will allow them to bridge, is that right? >> Absolutely, so unlike everyone else, who is in that virtualization wave, who solved the end protection and then happily got sold for their IP and you don't know those brands anymore. In this case, Veeam has continually looked at what else do people need, let's go do that. So, 4 or 5 years ago they added snapshot support, which wasn't necessary, but added more scenarios. Then, they added tape, who adds tape in 2015? Right, but they did because they recognized that people needed tape out, and since then they've added cloud, a couple different versions of cloud. This week they announced continuous data protection. Now, I'm glad no one from SNIA is around, cause they have a very prescriptive definition of what CDP is supposed to look like, and this isn't exactly that, so it's really more like KCDP, Kind of CDP, kind of thing. But, they continue to arrow the edges. They added physical support, those agents walls will allow them for IS hosted. They're not unified anymore, and that forward motion, but the moment they've got coming off of the first strategy, that's what's going to keep them moving forward for the next ten years. >> What makes is not KCDP, and makes it pure CDP? Just an infinite granularity or? >> Well, if you ask SNIA folks, they would tell you it's not just about infinite granularity on the protection, it's also infinite recoverability on the way back. So every single microsecond, so-- >> Stu: That's CRR isn't it? >> Yeah, think more like sequel does with every given transaction, could we go back to a given point. >> You need a data base to be involved, to actually get there. >> Yeah, but again, what I think is interesting is it's not just about backup, so in the availability report we talked about the gap between how little downtime that an organization can tolerate, versus just backup can't meet that goal. You can't recover fast enough if the only thing you're going to do is restore from backup. So, being able to integrate snapshots, being able to have replication, which shrinks down that data loss window considerably, that's how you meet the rest of the story, that backup alone can't do. And kudos to Veeam for doing it. >> Jason, how should we think about some of these emerging players who are actually in Veeam's ecosystem? Like Rubric or Cohesity, or Datos. Datos is not here, These sort of new, emerging, they don't want to call themselves backup players, they want to call themselves data protection or availability. How should we think about those emerging players? >> So, I have a category in a slide. I put them all in the category that I lovingly call the disrupters, right, because it forces you to reconsider the conversation. If you kind of step back and I could put Veeam and some of the other legacy unified enterprise class data protection products in one category, and what all of them are saying is let's take the backups that you know and trust us with. We're going to add indexing, we're going to add orchestration, we're going to help you do more with your data along the way. The end result is what the industry is calling copy data management. What else can you do with that data, which is otherwise dormant, sitting away in a store. What the disrupter category would tell you, is instead of starting with backup, and trying to evolve it forward, start with new storage. Think of the things you could do with a new paradigm for storage. >> So, the storage that would automatically know where the footprints are, that would automatically back you up along the way, that would automatically allow for copy data management type scenarios. So, again, it's two ways to get there. There's the backup first approach, and building on who you trust, then, there's the, if you want to start over again, have I got a deal for you. And that's going to be really interesting. For the rest of 2017 and 2018, the whole space of copy data management, copy data virtualization, copy data fill in the blank, that whole idea of good, better, best. Good, keep all your data as long as you need. Better, and get rid of it a moment longer. Then best, what else can you do with it. Analytics, testing, reporting, et cetera. That'll be an interesting market to watch, and one that now that Veeam is broad enough, will start to play in now as the year moves forward. >> Jason, like us, you go to a lot of these conferences. You've been to the Veeam on trail, which was our first one here. For the audience it's not here. What differentiates this show from some of the other ones you go to. What excites you about the community, the show itself, anything surrounding it? >> Sure, Veeam has a wonderful sense of community that most of the other vendors have just not been able to capitalize on. You know, there's certainly, there are many many thousands of IT professionals that have made their career out of this storage platform, or that backup software platform, et cetera. And, they're all good for support. Veeam has somehow cracked that code like Microsoft MVPs. The difference between a post-sale's we'll help you if you want, to a pre-sale's advocates. They literally have a green army walking around on this floor, who is delighted to tell anybody who will listen how Veeam saved their bacon, gave them back their weekend, et cetera. That energy of community, that's what's different about not only Veeam ON, it's also what's different about like a Veeam party at Vmworld or a Microsoft event. That culture and community, they've tapped something special there, and it shows in their results. >> Alright, we've got to wrap there, but I'll give you the last word, any upcoming research we should be paying attention to, or you want to promote a little bit? >> Sure, my blog within ESG is technicaloptimist.com. I do primary research on a whole bunch of things. Next ones coming out are on data protection modernization. So, why are people staying put or changing. If so, why or why not, and then what features matter most. So that's the next one that'll come out for me, and then over the summer I'm going to look at appliances as form factor, there's a lot of those to look at this week. What the affect of the DVA and the VM are having in the market, and then also more on the availability study. What we did for Veeam was so interesting ESG is going to go and take a few other angles and look at it some more. >> Awesome, great research agenda you've got upcoming. We will be looking for that, so, Jason, thanks very much, it was a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, alright, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back, with our next guest at theCUBE. We're live from Veeam ON, 2017 in New Orleans, We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

from the noise it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by VM world and its ecosystem sponsors now your host Stu minimun and Brian Grace Lee Patrick Shanna's on for a member of the technical staff for dr. Patrick saw you at the end of our spring tour and now you're here at the you know picking up the fall tour so thank you for joining us again hey thanks for having me alright so I mean last year you know containers with VMware I mean was a big discussion we kind of all had that you've got some background with Microsoft right and VMware yeah and VMware so you know there was kind of a joke of you know oh the old Microsoft you know extend embrace and we'll see how we go from there but you know it's been a year later so can you give us a little bit of the update of kind of you know how docker in VMware how do you guys see each other I could evm where is a great partner you so the announcement this morning VMware embrace containers so I'm super excited to be here some of the announcements that were made this morning is now this year is a control plane for containers there's this notion of native containers in this year one of the things that excites me the most is their project bonville that they talked about this morning it's actually been made by one of my friends on the ex-colleagues banchory and what they're doing in there that they are implemented the back end for the darker engine in terms of these fear primitives so when you're creating images it creates a set of vmdk layers and when you're creating when you want to create a container the isolation primitives are the ones of VMS as opposed to linux containers all right so that's a very good way of running container yes sir patrick last time we're in the cube you did a great job of helping us you know kind of walk the stack I don't know if you saw we actually did a research piece kind of layering the whole stack so here the announcement you mentioned this morning is the vSphere integrated containers and they've got photon and they've got Bonneville on and let me ask you am I looking at this right that we're VMware I mean VMware very much down at the infrastructure level yeah so when they build that photon layer you know whether they call it just enough virtualization as Kate kolbert said this morning when I heard him speak um but dr. sits on top of that am I getting that right yeah it's exactly right and actually one of my reasons for joining VMware I think four years ago was for them to go up stack and at that time it was with cloud foundry and I would argue that maybe with cloud foundry we were a little bit too much up stack compared to my vm worries at the bottom when I present the whole stack usually I talk about like the new hardware the new hardware today is your cloud provider it's a Amazon Microsoft Google and then the virtualization with VMware so that's the new hardware and that's where vmware is very strong so they manage networking storage and compute on top of that you have the OS layer and what really got me interested into moving to darker is that the whole landscape just changed when containers appear two years ago and the whole industry is reorganizing around that so what happened at the OS layer that all the OS providers starting with chorus initially who studied that friend started doing minimal release of their OS that are just designed to run containers so coral I started that trend but then very quickly read had followed with project atomic and then we went to with winter core the most interesting to me is Ranchero s where they run docker for everything so they have two darker system darker and userland occur and then VMware came out with photon I think twas last June or something like that and today I think they have a preview to of that coming out on top of that you have ducker so the rocker engine running and on top of the darker engine you have orchestration platforms and these are the ones that are replacing what used to be past platform as a service and when I was at Google I was doing google appengine at vmware i was doing cloud foundry now you see cloud foundry reinventing itself as a control plane for containers and so one of the announcement that excited me most in the keynote this morning is that now Cloud Foundry is running with photon they have an integrated distribution so finally vmware is going up stack with its own stack like vSphere at the bottom then on top of that you have photon and then on top of that you have cloud foundry yeah so really exciting times yeah I think for me one of the things that I always hear that feels like it's confusing or off the markets a lot of people want to kind of get into this containers replaces VMs or VMs versus container debate and as if they're both sort of infrastructure layer which if you think about them is something that holds that I could see you make the mistake but but Dockers is something that developers love they love to package their applications they love this idea of right on my laptop push it somewhere do you find that confusion a lot in the marketplace I mean oh yeah I find that a lot and I think it's tied to the rise of DevOps it really in the past five years the this new movement called DevOps like really took off and DevOps is a lot about people and processes a little bit about products as well and I think when docker appeared it was the right level of abstraction for DevOps to happen like the right packaging construct where developers can put all their dependencies in a container and then ups have all the right knobs to tweak for putting that in production but it's the same thing that you put in production that you have on your developer machine so to me a lot of the confusion assoc d2 docker is tied to that because it's a technology that you use both by developers and by ops I think vmware is doing a really good job of giving up so kind of control they need to put darker in production yeah so we're here at vmworld a lot of talk about vmware in containers you guys doing a ton of stuff with Microsoft like yeah talk a little bit about because you know for a long time people like to say what containers have been along for on for a long time Linux containers and but but windows and microsoft adopting this like what's going on there yeah so the partnership with Microsoft is super exciting so after a VMware I actually moved to Microsoft and at Microsoft my role was to help all the darker partners to get onto Azure and since I join I've seen all the work that happened with microsoft recently we've done tons of stuff we end many many different integration points to me the most important one is finally we have native windows containers that shipped with a Windows Server tv3 like literally I think two weeks ago so that's something that was pre announced that dark on and my croissan'wich came onstage with the ducati sure to do a demo now you can run it on Azure yourself what's exciting there is that the concepts that are at the heart of docker are based on using c groups and name spaces which are linux kernel features for isolation of your workloads the thing is these isolation primitive similar ones existed in windows server and especially the version of Windows Server that was running within Microsoft data center for to power Bing and things like that to have denser workloads in the data center where the Microsoft team has done is that they re implemented the darker back end in terms of windows containers primitives and so now you can create Windows net application running on windows server in windows native containers the beauty of it if you're a developer especially an enterprise developer in the enterprise basically you have half and half Java and.net very often like developers go from one to the other or they are developers who do Java others doing dotnet they have completely different tool chains now with darker they have a single tool chain that they can use to build a multi container application that use different technologies behind the scene so finally developers can use the best tools for the father father job yep so pattern one of the things we look at every year here at vmworld is how are we doing it kind of fixing the things that broke when virtualization went into both storage and networking yeah and it was big discussion point at dr. Khan this year you put up a beta of docker networking yep storage I'd say is even a little bit you know further behind there so you know what's the latest on how you guys think of that you know where are we along that maturity curve of you know storage and networking for for containers so I'm really glad you asked that because when i joined occur in march that was my first project to kick-start a project to do darker extensibility and the two extension points that we created based on ecosystem and customer demands were about storage and networking and so I'd acha kaun in June we announced to extension points for dr. a plug-in system one for networking and one for volumes and what I really love about what happened at vmworld today this morning in the keynote is that VMware implemented a networking plug-in based on NSX as well as a volume plug inning in collaboration with a cluster HQ who had built flutter and help us create that extension point four volumes so finally one of the big issues with containers is that when you were deploying it in a multi host set up especially with swarm and compose when you're stunning to the orchestration before June there was no way to to move one container when state full container with data to another machine with a volume plug-in now you can do that and with the networking aspect now you can refer to containers by instead of like doing links and there were some complicated ways to do that now you can use either the native networking driver that comes with ducker but as usual we use the philosophy of batteries included but replaceable and so you can plug networking plug-in coming from nsx if you're using this fear under the hood yeah so still we're we're going to be doing a panel tomorrow on on containers one of the things I want to dig into we're gonna have intel on the show and tells doing some neat things where they're they're calling it clear containers but in essence it's it's kind of the equivalent for the vm we're proud of you know VT technology right hardware isolation of processes talk about just what's the potential of that for containers ability to better leverage hardware to make containers a it's faster and yeah so that aspect of internal research is super exciting and it corroborates some of the things i see happening in the marketplace right now especially on the research side where you have both like Linux containers became super successful in the past two years now that we're going in production there will be lots of different type of isolation technologies applied to containers and so one of the first one I heard about West project banville where it's implemented in terms of this year primitives another one is the clear container by Intel another one that I heard about that that came through the oci project that will talk about that new standard that we announced a cocoon is called is called things of run V and it's based on the hyper SH container technology based on virtualization so I see more and more people using virtualization as an implementation for isolation in containers yeah talk about what's going on with run see so you know six months ago it was we had this you know are we gonna have diverging container standards you guys stood up with core OS and 20 other companies and said we're no we're going to have one standard what's going on with with oci and run c and that thing that's been super exciting so that was my second project that docker we announced it at Daka Connie you that we had a 20 of the biggest companies in the industry joining to create a standard container especially core OS joining as well as Google and Amazon and everybody and what blew my mind is that we're what were free month later less than three months later the team right now is preparing a first draft of the spec for September they've been working actively all throughout the summer we put out we started working on the spec just after dark on we had the darker contributor summit and the the working group for OC I was the largest we had like 15 people from different companies starting to iterate on the spec they continued throughout the summer and now we have something that's close to a first draft of the spec with a reference implementation that's runs in one of the most interesting development that happens there and that really speaks to the power of open source and open stone is is that once the specs started to mature we started to have already a second reference a second implementation of the spec that's called rungy that's been built by the hyper SH project based on virtualization and then why way contributed a test suite for compliance of the of the spec so that spec is advancing really fast yeah so I was having a conversation with Jim's emmalin who runs the Linux Foundation II week or so ago at linux con and we asked him we said you know it's hard because you love them all like your kids do you have a favorite project he said yeah no question oci is my favorite project right now just because of the promise of portability the sort of write once run anywhere so you're working on it it's an important product the Linux domain is really looking at you guys to make this work and and drive that portability yeah and the Linux Foundation has done a really great job at coordinating the work of all the maintainer Xin there it's really a neutral ground where we can advance so that all of us can innovate on top of it now a lot of the competition is happening at the upper layer of the stack like oci I think we all agree on the semantics of what a container runtime should be now at the higher level there are lots of discussions about how the orchestration should be done and there you have 15 different projects you have swarmed from darker this mess those this coup banaras which is very opinionated and one of the other development this summer is that Google and many others including us dr. with part of that announced an another foundation called the CNC F the cloud native computing foundation where the goal there is to create reference tax for orchestration that can interoperate together pretty much along the same line of the work that darker did with a mesosphere for having a swarm plugin for mezclas so Patrick boy there's been so much movement in this space we talked multiple foundations a lot going on one of the things we came out of dr. Khan that we were just I guess a little concerned about is how many people actually run an import and we know you know I mean live through the the VMware lived through the Linux you know adoption phases so is it fair to kind of gauge that piece of it you know what do you see when you know you're talking to the practitioners and the you pick users out there as to you know how should we be measuring you know that's a naturally occurring production yeah so I would say it's maturing a lot we see more and more users putting darker in production there are lots of holes still in the offering that needs to be filled and that's why I'm pretty excited to see VMware stepping in and saying hey for production use we have a lot of technology that you can use to put that in production some of the things that we've seen is a like networking and volumes so that was really needed now that there are lots of plugins I hope that people will have an easier time putting that into production the agreement on what orchestration should be so people are still asking a lot of question about which orchestrator should i use for my containers in production and so I've seen so people using measures others using coronary some are trying swarm there's still lots of questions out there about what the right stack should look like and I would say as usual in software project it kind of depends on what you're running well the one thing that concerns me and it's always there's so many good things going on around docker I've been doing some research over the last couple of months looking at all the different platforms so everything from you know dr. native to what hoshi corp is doing to what openshift is doing and we were we talkin to Adrian Cockroft he said you know dockers reached sort of plaid in terms of speed it moves so fast you guys are releasing some every two months how do you deal with that because you deal with the ecosystem how do they deal with the fact that you're now part of their core platform but you're releasing new stuff every two months I mean are we going to get into something where it's like well it's it's one dot six and two dot one and how do you deal with that yeah so ducker itself as a company is maturing addict Akane you one of the big things that we announced is a darker trusted registry and aqus yes so we have a version of docker that is supported where we're going to do backwards a porting of patches so for people who really want to run it in production we have an offering that supported for them so that they are not obliged to run on the tape every time some of the startups that I've seen out there like large startups with a more in the consumer space who have larger data center and a pretty mature ops team they some of them are running on tip or on the latest version of darker but in the enterprise you can assume that like the adoption of new versions will be slower and so we have that like support offering for for all the versions of darker now the darker open source project is continuing to fire I like to create lots of things and there are lots of poor request the project is more successful than ever I think in the last like recently the most prolific contributor was Microsoft in the project there are lots of torrid has a huge contributor that Google as well is sending lots of pull requests so there are not lots of new features coming with each new release but at the same time we're really working on a platform that everybody is going to use and that needs to mature that's why you have that really fast pace of innovation in that space yeah so I mean Patrick here you're you're in the weeds of some of this so the other one that comes up quite a bit of courses security so even just this last week there's a big back and forth on Twitter and a couple of blog posts talking about it you know what what your thought is to how how we should talk about kind of the maturity and where we're going with the container security discussion yeah so as you guess container security is one of our big focus abductor because that's one of the things that people are expecting from a platform especially to run in production my colleague yoga Monica did lots of blog posts recently about how to improve your security in production security is not only a factor of the software itself but on the all the processes that you put in place around it and basically around darker you have to put in place with some kind of processes you have for operating systems like getting the latest release of the official images I don't know if you saw that there's been a blog post like talking where they looked randomly at all the images in docker hub and evaluating them for security issues one of the things that they didn't look at is that the latest releases of operating systems that we have in there in blocker images are just tracking the upstream releases and people who have sound security practices internally I'll just pulling these latest releases all right last question I have for you Patrick it's it easy for people to come I come in here and be like oh well you know biggest threat to vmware is is docker what what I love talking to you is you know this is a real small community I over the last year a lot of former VMware people now working over a doctor and not that they're unhappy with VMware and you know Microsoft is is in the mix you know so I mean this whole community is pulling together and doing a lot of work a lot of contribution you know what do you see out there from the technology community to help mature this whole space yeah I'd say both VMware and Microsoft at the operating system an infrastructure level as well as Google at the orchestration layer VMware a red hat at the operating system layer like everybody is trying to make darker a sound platform to run in production so what I see in all corners is just darker getting solidified and getting part of most people's production infrastructure with all these efforts on the security and stability and processes as well as the development processes there are lots of innovation in the terms of CI CD integration with darker no no she saw the work that cloudbees has been doing for integrating jenkins with darker so doctor is both the platform for apps and for devs and in that in that qualification that the ecosystem is very broad both on the dev tools side as well as on the ops and platform side all right well Patrick unfortunately at a time is always great chatting with you thank you so much for joining us we'll be back with lots more coverage here from being real 2015 and thank you for watching you inseam six months you

welcome back to vmworld live 2010 live at the cube in san francisco california Moscone Center at vmworld 2010 please welcome this morning's press conference with VM ware compelling technologies and their customers Heineken from the Netherlands speaking today our Todd is Todd Nielsen's chief operating officer of VMware Phil sore and CEO of Compellent technologies and from Heineken the Netherlands microbrews virtualization team lead lucien de konak project manager and now please welcome Todd Nielsen the chief operating officer of VMware it's a it's great to be here we'd like to welcome you to the Compellent vmware operands and i want to say a couple words about compelling technologies in our partnership with them as vmware they've been a great storage partner of ours have a number of customers together a number and we really like work with them to drive value to our overall customer the solution said the that we did announced yesterday at vmware at vm for every dollar of license revenue that vmware cells we are partners or our ecosystem is able to add on or to drag with that fifteen dollars of ecosystem revenue and the compellent folks are a great example of a partnership with vmware where our solutions work well together and we do some exciting things we're going to hear from for the president and CEO of compellent and one of their customers but before we do one of my favorites twist of this press conference is a differentiation of compellent is the fluid data architecture and I think it's somewhat ironic after last night's beer crawls at vmworld 2010 that Heineken happens to be the customer on stage so I'm sure there's a story there and I would like to introduce Phil Soren the president and CEO of compellent to tell us about the company and about the Heineken beer crawls great Todd thanks a lot we're just thrilled to be up here on stage with you being participated in the fantastic show you have in operation here at moscone in San Francisco and we're thrilled to have a joint announcement our customer heineken here and to have them for from the Netherlands to share the excitement with us but let me tell you a little about Compellent we're a data storage company with the fluid data architecture we've been really the innovator if you look at primary storage innovation over the last decade things like thin provisioning sub lund automated tiered storage tiering disk platters flexible volumes portable volumes then provision you look at all those types of innovations over the last decade that storages come out and compellent has been the leader in that whole space and I think we'd be able to get ahead of some of the incumbent vendors with our innovation and we're in really fast growing we grew about thirty eight percent year-over-year last year we're the one of the fastest growing sandbenders in the world and we're hoping to keep that growing about 2,100 customers in 34 countries Heineken being a good example in the Netherlands of those customers there they're running their mission-critical enterprise applications on us for their worldwide operations and I would say of the 2100 about 2090 of them are also running some form of VMware so this partnership with vmware is very very important to us and we're real excited about it talk a little bit about our patented technology we call it the fluid data architecture and we thought no better customer to do a joint press conference with on our fluid data architecture than Heineken so the ultimate fluid data architecture is the combination of heineken and compellent and our system is so easy to use that you can actually enjoy a Heineken while you're about storage administrator so we like that they're so Heineken Nell lenders are our customer we have microbrews in Lushan nakonec and we're real excited to hear about their story they're part of a global enterprise of customers we talked about we have customers in all industries verticals geographic areas we're announcing actually this week we're announcing our expansion of our Australian operations where we have dozens of customers already but we're now seeing the expanse of our Australian operations and now let's take it back to the Netherlands and let's hear a real customer story about how vmware Compellent can really cut the the total cost of ownership in a data center by more than fifty percent with the combination of our two efforts and also improve the operational efficiency of those data centers and let's hear Mike and Lucien to tell us a little bit about it okay thank you very much feel I guess I don't have to introduce any cancer company itself because we all know with the core business or for companies brewing beer not only the beer we grade to brew great beers and great brands and that makes us the number one brewer in Europe and the number three in volume in the complete worldwide we have over 200 regional and local beers and ciders in total and when we look at our breweries we have almost in every country we have a brewery or its Hank is deliverable when we look at the International Anakin international we're very large company almost in every country as I just said before and we have 130 140 breweries in more than 70 countries which is good for a group beer volume of 200 million hectoliters of beer a year as includes insiders when we look at the the Netherlands we have only three breweries that's where it all started we have 18 million hectoliters of total supply but we're not drinking at all ourselves the domestic market is only about five million hectoliters and the rest of the volume is going to USA so as all export for us and that's where all your beers coming from and I strategies that we've introduced a Heineken Light several years ago is especially made for the USA market because we don't drink it okay when we take a look at the virtualization roadmap for hanukkah we started about six years ago in 2004 VMware was the only real player in the market at the moment we introduced it when we were consolidating our data centers in our main location suit about we came from about 12 server rooms to one major data center which we used storage from HP at the moment and we used HP blades infrastructure and we decided to go for it with VMware for our DTI environments or the test and acceptance environment after several years it we grew outgrew our storage capacity and we needed to upgrade so we we change te va with a forklift upgrade some to another EPA and we also introduced a new version of vmware again we're later we thought everybody was ready to go to use protection so everyone used the dta and i was confident it should work on production also so we start with the bronze service that our servers are not mission critical for us those are great success and last year we start a new project to virtualize every gold and silver system we have that means every mission critical and priority system we use for brewing packaging and distribution just the latest news is that last weekend we migrated one of the last warehouse management systems there's also virtualized now and is running perfectly where are we going we are looking at the end of the year we're going to vsphere for of course the main thing and last year we decided to choose for another storage storage solution we chose component well this is something where elution comes in you can tell about the choice you ate and why we did it okay thank you well well tell you something about the project itself the migration and why we choose component in the first place well we really needed to look for other solutions because especially in the two main sites suta wild and divorce we had some serious problems especially the support costs because after three years you pay an enormous amount of money for support from HB also we had our capacity problems and also experienced severe performance issues in suit about us so that meant that we had to take action fast also we had we were stuck on the AEV a 5000 which didn't allow us to upgrade to a newer version of vmware and also we couldn't use windows server 2008 which was very high on us on our priority list furthermore business continuity is on a plan for early next year so we wanted to have a solution which could provide us that and also because heineken is as called a new but it's not really a project but Sequoia the hunt for cash within itn Anakin element meant that we we want to you reduce IT costs as much as possible so in another point problem was that we had a major issue with reporting from our currents and infrastructure why did you choose for component well it opera it operates with every operating system it is very very important it's one for the solution that fits really everything that's what we experience as well during the migration we could start with replication early next year that's also very important and we needed a high high performance solution but it eventually meant why we choose chose for a component that it's excellent value for money the fluid data concept we really was consecrated what we can can use and give us high flexibility and one of the major pros is that the accident reporting facilities is I've never seen a better reporting functionality inside a project such as propellant and what is also very important that we got 24 7 proactive support and that's something you will never get for free so okay well as a result we have at least certain sixty percent virtualized and actually like my except last week we went to 61 percent because we virtualize to more FM machines and the speed we are going now it it really looks that we are in 2012 we are going to for ninety percent and I think it's a really feasible the number of disks we significantly reduced which meant lowers I decided lower on the power lower on low on the rec space for example the evi 5000 cost us one and a half 19-inch rack and right now it's about 12 views so it's a real big difference the performance we see on all layers not only on the only windows servers also on ax systems we see an enormous improvement regarding performance with yet we did have to do some optimization but with the support of copilot in the in the last month we had a excellent result and we even have a much better performance that we ever had so and because yeah we are finally using solar state drives because we really needed that for a sequel a reporting server which is very business critical and indio on the old evi we reached performance for about twenty thirty five minutes for a report which needed to be ready before a certain time and now we even cut times under 20 minutes so you see how fast it really is so we are next week actually the final and virtual machine will be migrated from the OTV a two component and that will finalize our migration on both breweries and so far no disruption whatsoever so we're very pleased perfect so that's a that's our part of the presentation thank you somebody talks out of the sky now right any questions uh well the question the question was with all the savings he's gotten his data center can you lower the cost of heineken beer for everyone I knew a new kind of heineken light right yeah how we go do that let us not up to me we really want to thank you guys for sharing that story I mean it just hit all our bullets about you know the future built in performance flexibility fluid data VMware compellent working together and we're just really really excited and we appreciate you sharing your story with our viewers and our customers and our prospects out in the audience here okay thank you guys yeah okay