>> 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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>> 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)