welcome back everyone to thecube's live coverage in san francisco for vmware explorer 2022 formerly vmworld i'm john furrier david live dave 12 years we've been covering this event formerly vmware first time in west now it's explore we've been in north we've been in south we've been in vegas multi-cloud is now the exploration vmware community is coming in john siegel svp at dell cube alumni dave mccraw vp at vmware guys thanks for coming back both cube alumni it's great to see you very senior organizations senior roles in the organizations of vmware and dell one year since the split great partnership continuing i mean some of the conversations we've been having over the past few years is that control plane the management layer making everything work together it's essentially been the multi-cloud hybrid cloud story what's the update what's how's the partnership look yeah i you know i just to start off i mean i would say i don't think our partnership's been any has ever been any better um if you look at you mention our vision very much a shared vision in terms of the multi-cloud world and i don't think we've ever had more joint innovation projects at one time i think we have over 40 now dave that are going on across multi-cloud ai cyber security uh modern applications and and uh you know here just at you just vmworld vmware explorer we have over 30 uh vmware sessions that are featuring dell um and this is i think more than we've ever had so look i think um there's a lot of momentum there and we're really looking forward to what's to come so you guys obviously spent a lot of time together when vmware was part of dell and then you've been it's been a year since the spin and then you codified i think it was a five-year agreement you know so you had some time to figure that out and then put it into paper so you just kind of quantified some of the stuff that's going on but now we're entering a yet another phase so that that that that agreement's probably more important than ever now i mean list in terms of getting it documented and an understanding right yeah that agreement really defines a framework for solution development and for go to market so we've been doing it and refining it for the last five years so now you know putting and codifying it into a written signed agreement it basically is instantiating what we've been doing that we know works uh where we can drive uh solution development we can drive deep architectural co-innovation together as well and as john said across multiple you know project and solution areas so we we've been talking to years to you know a lot of these strat guys guys like matt baker about things like you know you see aws do nitro and then of course project monterey and and i know that you guys have had a you know a big sort of input into that and so now to see it come to fruition is is huge because you know from our view it's the future of computing architectures how do you handle you know data rich applications ai applications that's what are your thoughts on here i couldn't agree more uh project monterey is a great example of how we're innovating together we just talked about i mean first of all it's all so we have vxrail which let's let's start there right we have over 19 000 joint customers right now we continue to innovate more and more on the vxrail architecture great example of that as our partnership with project monterey and taking essentially vsphere 8 and running it for the first time on an hci system directly on the dp used itself right on the dpus ability now to offload nsxt from from the cpus to the dpus uh hope you know in the short term first of all great benefits for customers in terms of better performance but as you just mentioned it's game changing in terms of laying the foundation for the future architectures that we plan on together helping out customers there's one other dynamic for you on is um and it's not unique to dell but dell's the biggest you know supply supplier partner etc but you're able to take vmware software and drive it through your business and and that enables you to get more subscription revenue and makes it stickier and that's a really important change from you know 10 years ago yeah and it's it's a combination as you know of dell software and vmware software together absolutely and i think what's with this is a game-changing innovation that you can run on top of our joint system vxrail if you will um and now what our customers can expect is life cycle automation of now you know the dpus as well as tanzu as well as everything else we layer on top of that core foundation that we have over 19 000 customers running today so i mean like that 19 000 number i want to get back up to the vx rail and you mentioned vsphere that's big news here this year vsphere 8 big release a lot of going on what's the hci angle you mentioned that what's in it for the customer what does that mean for the folks here because let's face it the vsphere aids got everyone in that they've all the v-sections are going going crazy right another vsphere release getting training they have the labs here what's it mean for the customers what's the value there with that hci solution with the gpus well first of all vsphere 8 as we know it has a lot of goodies in it but you know what what i think to me what's been most powerful about this is the ability to run vsphere 8 uh and and specifically on the dpus now you can run it it is open up all new possibilities now and so that nsxt that i mentioned you know running that on gpus opens up a whole new uh architecture now for our customers going forward and now really sets us up for modern distributed architecture for the future so like edge okay yeah and vsphere 8 brings in you know cloud connectivity as well so you know customers can run in a cloud disconnected mode they can run in a cloud connected mode so you know that's going to bring in the ability to do specialized things on security cycle management there's a whole series of services that can now be added as well as you know leveraging you know vcenter management capabilities so what's happening at the edge we had i think it was lows on hotel tech world right okay good not the other one um but so so that's got to be exploding now with that with that because it just changes the game for for these stores there's i mean retail uh manufacturing maybe you can give us an update on there's so much happening on the edge side as you know i mean that's where most of the a lot of the innovations happening right now is at the edge and a lot of the companies we talked to 8x right 8x expectation of increase in uh edge workloads over the next and the data challenge too and the data challenge is huge so you heard about the innovations with vsphere 8. in addition to that we just introduced today as well the smallest vx rail for the edge ever this thing is it's like think picture a couple eight and a half by 11 notebooks not much not much you know maybe a little wider than that but not much more um you know these these are stacked on top of each other these are you can rack and stack and mount these things anywhere and it also is the first aci system that has you know a built-in hardware witness so this helps set it up for environments that are you know network bandwidth constrained or have high high latency no longer an issue next gen app is going to want to have a local data server at the edge right and with compute there right high performance right right so now you're getting it across the wire yes you get racket stack a couple of these small things i mean they can they can fit into like a you know clark kent's briefcase right these things are so small um you want to do the analytics on site and return responses back you don't want to be moving massive data payloads off the egg so you got to have the right level of compute to run machine learning algorithms and and do the analytics type work that you want to do to make local decisions yeah i mean we just had david lithimon who was one of the keynote speakers here at the event and we've been talking about super cloud and multi-cloud meta cloud all the different versions of what we see as this next-gen and this brings up a point of like his advice to young people learn how multi-cloud learn about system architecture because if you can figure out how to put it together you're going to have to make more money anyway that this whole edge piece opens up huge challenges and opportunities around how do you configure these next-gen apps what does the ai look like what's the data architecture this is not like get some training curriculum online and you get you know 101 and you're getting a job no this is more complicated but with the hardware you guys make it easier so where's the complexity shift between having a powerful edge device like the vxrail with the vsphere what's the ec button on that like how do you guys what's the vision because this is going to be a major battleground this whole edge piece yeah it's going to be huge well i think when you look at the innovation that dell is bringing to market with technologies like outlander and then designing that into vxrail and then you combine that with our tonzu capabilities to manage development and deployment of applications this is about heterogeneous deployment and management at scale of applications with technologies like tons of mission control then deploying service mesh right for security being able to use sassy to be able to secure you know with cloud security over the wire so it's bringing together multiple technologies to deliver simplicity to the customer the ability to go one to many you know in terms of being able to deploy and manage and update whether that's a security patch or an application update and do that very rapidly at a low cost so the benefit with this solution now just putting this together is i can ship a box small and or stack them and essentially it's done remotely it's that's provision the provisioning issues not a truck roll as they say or professional services enabled you can just drop that out there and this is where the customers need to be yeah that absolutely is that the vision don't get that right exactly you don't you don't need the you don't need the skills yeah you don't need the specialized skills you don't need a lot of space you don't need you know high network bandwidth all these things right all these innovations that we're talking about here um really combined into really enabling a whole new whole new future here for edge is are you doing apex now is that i think thickest part sure part of yours okay so um is apex fitting into the to the edge how does it fit yeah i mean well first of all you know a lot of what we talked with apex is really about a consumption a way to ensure there's a common cloud experience wherever the data is and where the applications are and so absolutely edge fits into this as well and so we have we have common ways to consume our infrastructure today our joint infrastructure whether it's in the data center at the edge um or you know uh in the cloud usain ragu when he was on i said it was great keynote loved it one of the things that i didn't think there was enough of was security and he's like yeah we only had so much time but vmware is a very strong security story we heard a really strong security story at dell tech world i mean half the innovations and the new you know storage products were security and the new os's and it was impressive what what's how are you guys working together on security is that one of those let me give you a few key things you know our teams are working together at the engineer to engineer level you know reference architectures for zero trust as an example being able to look you know hardware root of trust up into the application layer right so we're looking at really defense in depth here you know i mentioned what we're doing with sassy right with cloud security capabilities so you really have to look at this from the edge to the core with the you know from a networking perspective getting the network the insights on things that maybe anomalies that may be happening on the network so using our network insight technology you know uh nsx and then being able to ultimately uh have a secure development pipeline as well i mean you we all know about the supply chain attacks that happen right and so being able to have a you know secure pipeline for development is critical for both of our companies working together i think the tan zoo and you mentioned the developer self-service that experience combined with kind of the power of the dell you know let's face it the boxes are awesome hardware matters and software matters so bringing that expertise together michael daley always used to say on thecube better together in respect to vmware and dell a lot of fruit has been born from that labor right specifically around and now when you add the tan zoo and you get vsphere you got the operational excellence you got the you got the performance and scale with the dell boxes and hardware and software and now you've got the tan zoo what's missing or is it all there now i mean where how would you how would you guys peg the progress bar is it like it's all rocking right now or or i'd say you're never done first of all but i you know i look at some of the innovations that we've brought to market recently where we've are combining and stacking these technologies into a more defense in-depth like solution you know bringing nsx onto vxrail so that you can flip a switch easily and light up the firewall the new plug-in yeah that's a great example simple simple um carbon black workload another example where we're taking carbon black technology that was typically on endpoints you know on pcs bringing that into the data center right and leveraging all the analytics and insights around you know being able to identify anomalies and then remediate those anomalies so we're seeing very good traction with those and the cloud native developers containers they're all native container working with compute and container storage object store in the cloud kubernetes we've embraced it yeah i mean yeah containers running containers and vms on the same infrastructure common way to manage it all i mean that that's been a big part of it as well obviously a lot of the focus that dell's bringing here as well is is the inability to run that stack easily right you heard the announcement on uh tanzu for kubernetes operators right earlier today tko we call it uh you know that running on vxrail now is really targeted at the i.t operator in allowing them to easily stand up a self-service developer devops environment on vxrail going forward and then a piece that might be invisible to them is back to monterey isolation right encryption and data moving you know absolutely storage the security the compute right the management right that's that's a complete and it's about reducing attack services as well right the security perspective as well when you when you're moving nsxt onto a dpu you're doing that as well so there's it takes the little things right at the end of the day security is a mindset up across both companies in terms of how we approach our architectures um and it's the you know a lot of times it's the little things as well that we make sure right so shared vision working at the engineering levels together for many many years know that you guys are validating more of that coming what's next take us through okay we're here 2022 we got super cloud multi-cloud hybrid full throttle right now it's hybrid's a steady state that's cloud operations infrastructure as code has happened it's happening what's next for you guys in the relationship can you share a little bit that you can if you can what we can expect what you see uh with monterrey is the start of a re-architecting of i.t infrastructure not just in the data center but also at the edge right these technologies will move out and be pervasive you know across i think edge to colo to core data center to cloud right and so that's a starting point now we're looking at memory tiering right i think we talked last time about capitola and memory tiering and you know being able to bring that forward uh being able to do more with confidential computing as an example right secure enclaves and confidential computing so you know a lot of this is focused around simplicity and security going forward and ease of management around take the heavy lifting away from the customer abstract that in offer the power and performance that's right and it's going to come down to delivering time to value for our customers you know can we cut that time to value by 25 50 percent so they can be in production faster yeah i think project monterey is something we'll be building on for a long time right i mean this is the start of a major new future architecture of these companies so if you had to pick one we have 40 initiatives that are joined together real literally project monterey is one of my favorites for sure in terms of what it's going to do not just for that common cloud experience but for the edge and and we talked a lot about the edge today and where that's headed you think it's going to explode up new apps i really do think so well it's going to put you in a new it's going to put in curve yeah absolutely right and operationally uh security wise um from a modern apps perspective i mean all it checks all the boxes and it's going to allow us to to help and take our existing customers on that journey as well what's great about this conversation we've been following both you guys for a long time and your companies and and technology upgrades and and the business impact and open source and all doing all this for customers but the wave that's coming we're seeing the expo hall here i mean it's people are really excited they're enthused they're committed highly confident that this this wave is coming they kind of see it people kind of seeing the fog lift they're seeing money making value creation people kind of feeling more comfortable but still a little nervous around you know what's coming next because it's still uncertainty but pretty good ecosystem i'd have to say that's pretty pretty interesting yeah a lot of them are excited about you know what they can do at the edge and how they can differentiate their businesses i mean that's right well congratulations guys thanks for coming on thecube and sharing the update thank you it more innovation it's not stopping here at vmware explorer dell and vm we're continuing to have that kind of relationship joint engineering it's all coming together and you can mix and match this and the stack but it's ultimately going to be cloud operations edge is the action of course hybrid cloud as well it's thecube thanks for watching [Music] you