>> The Cube presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Good evening, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We've been here two and a half days. We've unpacked a lot of announcements in the last couple days, and we're going to be doing a little bit more of that for our final segment. We've got a couple of guests joining us. Itzik Reich, the VP of the Technologist ISG at Dell and Magi Kapoor Director of Storage Product Management at Dell. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> So great to be back in person. I'm sure great for all of you to see customers and partners and your team that you probably haven't seen in quite a while. But Itzik we want to, we want to start with you VP of the Technologists. That sounds like a, like you need to wear a cape or something. >> Right? Yeah. I wish I do sometimes >> Talk about that role and what you do. >> Right, so our role, we have an outbound part and an inbound part. From an outbound perspective, our role is to ensure that our customers are knowing where we going from a technology perspective. And we do it via conferences or customer calls or via blogs, and think of that nature. But as important, we also have an inbound role to ensure that our employees are knowing where we're going. You can imagine they're a very large company. Not every engineer or any other role knows exactly what we are doing in that space, especially around innovation. So we also ensure that they understand it internally about where we going into that nature. And as a side role, I also have a side job which is to be responsible for our container strategy which has started couple of years ago which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. >> Yeah, that's-- >> Got a side gig. My goodness. >> That's right. >> Maggie, lots of announcements in the last couple of days. Great attendance here. Seven to 8,000 people. Dell's coming off its best year ever, north of 100 billion in revenue and FY 22, 17% year on year growth. What are some of the things that excite you about the strategic direction that Dell is going in with its partners, with the hyperscalers storage bringing it to the hyperscalers? >> Yeah. No lots of great announcements. It's been an exciting week. Like you said, it's been great to be back in person, have these face to face meetings and, you know, see the customers, have presentations in person. Like I feel like we haven't done that in forever. So it's felt really, really great. And announcements, it's been incredible. Like the two keynotes that we had on Monday and Tuesday were both incredible. And so I'd like to talk about a couple of key ones, you know, so just to let you know, I'm a director of product management and I'm responsible for a bunch of pan-ISG initiatives, DevOps and our container strategy being one of those items. And so, you know, we're at this cusp where there are, you know, customers that are on this journey of, you know, developers coming up to speed with multicloud being one of the key areas. We've heard that a lot this week, right? And what I loved about Chuck's keynote when he talked about, you know, a multicloud by default and how we're working to change that to be multicloud for design by design, right? And so what we mean by that is, and DevOps plays a very key role there, right? In the last few years developers have had this opportunity to pick different multi from different multi clouds, right? And develop the applications wherever they find the right tool sets. But that's creating havoc with IT operations because IT has worked in it in different ways, right? So what we're trying to do with DevOps is really bridge the gap between the developers and the IT ops and make it more frictionless. And project Alpine is one of the key ones to make that, you know, to bring that bridge together. Really bring that operational consistency across on-prem and the public clouds and colo facilities and Edge and everything that we've talked about. So project Alpine is really key to the success of DevOps that we're driving across. And then the other thing that I would like to call out in terms of announce and Chuck brought that up on Monday was our focus on developers. And we have a portal called developer.dell.com which we announced and launched in January of this year. Right? It's think of that as our one stop shop for all of our APIs. You heard from Caitlin, you heard from a lot of our leaders that we have been on this journey of having a API first approach to everything we're doing be it products, be it features, functionality. And so the developer portal is the place where we're putting all of our ISG APIs and not just having a one stop shop but standardizing on APIs, which is really key. >> We just spoke to Shannon Champion and Gemma from Salesforce. And we talked about how we entered last decade for visioning lungs. And now we're programming infrastructure. So really interested in your container strategy, your DevOps strategy. How did it start? How was it evolving? Where are you in the spectrum? You know, where are customers in that maturity? Let's dig in >> 2015, I believe was the year when DockerCon their CTO went on stage and they explained their customer that they shouldn't care about storage. They should design their applications running in containers in the 12 factor way, designed to fail, storage doesn't matter. And I remember scratching my head because I was hearing this one before. If there's one thing that I've learned both as a customer and later on as an employee of a storage company at the time, is that customers care about data and they care a lot about their data. Especially if it's not available. It's a bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well. And so we actually, at the time, work with a startup called Cluster HQ to offer persistent volumes for Kubernetes. That startup eventually went down of business. But Google took over the some part of the intellectual property and came with an API called CSI. Which does not stand for your famous TV show. It's actually an acronym for container storage interface. And the CSI role in life is to be able to provide persistent volume from a storage array to Kubernetes. So we start working with Google, just like many other vendors in order to ensure that our stands outs are part of the CSI stand out. And we start to providing CSI interfaces for our storage arrays. And that's how all of these things started. We started to get more and more customers telling us I'm going all in with Kubernetes and I need you to support me in that journey. But what we've also learned is that Kubernetes similarly in a way to the open stock days is very fragmented. There are many distributions that are running on the top of Kubernetes. So seed side itself is not just the end of it. Many customer wants day to be working with VMware (indistinct) with zoo or with red OpenShift or with Rancher. So we need to do different adjustments for each one of these distributions in order to ensure that we are meeting the customer where they are today but also in the future as well. >> Yeah, and Kubernetes back in 2015 was, you know, pretty immature. We were focused on simplicity. You had Mesos doing, you know, more sophisticated things, you know, cluster HQ, obvious. And now you see Kubernetes moving into that realm tackling all those, a lot of those problems. So where does storage fit into that resilient resiliency equation? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think storages are key. What we're hearing a lot from customers is they have infrastructure in place already and they want to take advantage of cloud native and modernizing their applications whether they're the legacy applications or as they're building new applications. So how do really take advantage of the infrastructure that they have invested in? And they love, and they need. I mean, the reason why our customers love our products is because of the enterprise and the data management capabilities that we provide, right? Be it PowerMax for our gold standards on SRDF replication, for instance, they want to make sure that they leverage all of that as they are containerizing their applications. So the piece that Itzik talked about with the CSI plugins, that gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place, take advantage of all the enterprise capabilities that it provides but yet take advantage of cloudifying, if I can say, the applications that they're doing, right? And then on top of that we also have what we call our CSM modules which is the container storage modules which is so, you know, going back again, we, CSI industry stack spec standards, you know, customers started to use it. And what we heard from our customers was, this is great but it has very minimum capabilities, right? Very basic ones. And we love your enterprise products. We want enterprise capabilities with it. So we've been working with CNCF very closely on, you know, working on contributions. But what we have realized is that they're, the community is still far from delivering some of these enterprise capabilities. So we came up with container storage modules which is an extension of CSI modules but to add those enterprise capabilities, you know, be it observability, be it replication, authorization, resiliency. These are the things that customers wanted to use enterprise storage when it comes to containers. And that's what we've been delivering on with our container storage modules. I do want to call out that all of our CSM modules just like CSI are all open source. That's what developers want. They don't want it closed source. And so we're listening to them and we're creating all of this in open source waiting, you know, and wanting them to contribute to the court. So it's not just us doing, you know and writing what we want but we also want the community to contribute. >> You're committing resources there, publishing them, it's all open source? >> Exactly. >> That's the contribution. >> And working with CNCF to see if they can be standardized across the board not just for Dell customers. >> Is that a project going, is that your ideal? It that becomes a project within CNCF or is it? >> That's our goal. Yes. We're definitely working and influencing. We'll see how it goes. >> More committers. Just keep throwing committers at it. >> Support these day is done via slack channel. So if we're changing the way that we run interacting with our customers that are now the developers themselves via slack channel. You don't need to call 100, 800 Dell to get a support case. >> So I'm interested in, you mentioned project Alpine, and it was very interesting to me to see that. You know, you guys talk about multicloud. I try to take it to another level. I call it super cloud and that's this abstraction layer. You know, some people laugh at that, but it has meaning. Multi-cloud is going to multivendor by default. And my premise is data ultimately is going to stay where it belongs in place. And then this mesh evolves, not my word, Jamoc Degani kind of invented. And there needs to be standards to be able to share data and govern that data. And it's wide open now. There are no standards there. And I think open sources has an opportunity as opposed to a defacto standard that would emerge. It seems to be real white space there. I think a company like Dell could provide that self-service infrastructure to those data points on the mesh and standards or software that governs that in a computational way. Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? >> I think it is. So for example, Katie Gordon, which I believe you interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly power part of the its rational, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So, yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. >> Dell meeting the developers where they are. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me and unpacking that. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Speaking of unpacking, Lisa. We're unpacking Dell tech world. >> They're packing up around us. Exactly. We better go. We want to thank you for watching The Cube's two and a half days of live coverage of Dell Technologies world. Dave it's been great to co-host with you, be back in person. >> Thank you Lisa. It was really a pleasure. >> Of course. My pleasure too. >> Let's do more of this. >> Let's do it! >> All right. >> We want to thank you again for watching. You can catch all of this on replay on thecube.net. We look forward to seeing you next time. (soft music)

hey welcome back to los angeles lisa martin here with the cube we are live at kubecon and cloudnativecon 21. it's been great to be here we've been broadcasting the last couple of days about 2 700 people joining us in person great buzz great energy i've got two guests here next joining me remotely please welcome it's reich the vp technologist at dell emc anivis iyer senior principal product manager at dell technologies gentlemen welcome to the program thanks for having us lisa thank you lisa and we're pleased that you're joining us today it's like let's go ahead and start with you let's talk we've seen a lot of of uptick and kubernetes it's been picking up a lot what are some of the things that you're seeing through your lens right that's a great question lisa so really we need to take a step back bobby into 2019 we just mentioned in-person conferences so back then we started to see a slow adoption of customers that are starting to play with kubernetes in their test environment maybe running some pocs but then the pandemic happened obviously and we started to see huge explosion in terms of adoption and accelerating the digital based projects for our customers so they're really starting to pick up kubernetes and use it heavily in their production and of course in addition to their test and dev environments as well and because of that adoption they started to think about other scenarios and other considerations that are relevant for their production environment which is based upon kubernetes things like disaster recovery availability all of those things that typically you don't worry about when you just run them in a small desk or a poc environment but are super critical for our customers and you know it's the largest storage company in the world we have the smallest company customers in the world but also the largest and the most demanding one it's a really huge adoption that needs to basically accelerate all of those aspects that belong to an enterprise environment that happens to run on kubernetes itself if ask do you see something similar yeah absolutely i agree with itzik and actually one of the brief stories actually i start out with is because a few years ago actually several years ago when i was taking a cab in new york remember the point-of-sale terminal was not working so you know you took my credit card just like use the magnetic spike so not having the technology access was like an inconvenience but it still could transact but now today's age when you look at digital transform trans digitally transformed companies starting with all these web companies like you know you've got like uber lyft and things like that but then you also have mainstream companies where the entire business is now taking over digital hence all these applications are the ones that are powering the entire business if you will and not having these applications available or these apps available uh will basically the business is gonna lose money and and that's and that's what is and the pandemic has only accelerated digital transformation right because everyone working from home and and also the customers are also remote so now you have the entire operation is just software is running the business pretty much every company is a technology company and then you have you know and then all these applications they are modernized so they are modernized in the way that they're not built to the traditional architectures they're now using you know microservices devops and agile these are three major aspects that kind of you know drove the new application modernized applications to build more complex applications and kubernetes has emerged as the sole platform that can you know kind of serve the underlying platform between all of these aspects and hence we see that you know kubernetes adoption has taken off a lot because pretty much every organization is running several projects within the enterprise including app modernization you know transformation of any kind of secondary kind of use cases iot you know the whole digital transformation story is kind of running on kubernetes and as sick was pointing out so now kubernetes are simmered as the key infrastructure as a service layer if you will or above the infrastructure service and it needs to consume storage and it needs to have you know all these traditional capabilities that were for uh for applications right i mean like uh disaster recovery uh having enterprise grade uh availability aspects like you know for this uh data protection things like that and that's sort of is and the enterprise capabilities are relatively i would say uh accelerating a lot earlier kubernetes was more on the non-enterprise aspects of the journey now we are seeing a lot more enterprise growth are you seeing your conversations within organizations elevate up the chain where kubernetes is concerned is this a c-level conversation or the understanding that from a competitive differentiation perspective from a modernization perspective it's the direction they need to go in yeah absolutely and for them you know vmware ran itself a couple of months ago about the reasons that are important for customers to run containers in production there were like ten tens of them but the number one reason is to accelerate software adoption and to basically write codes faster that's like the number one reason it's not about the technology itself you know technology is just an enabler and the enabler is to write the code as quickly as you could deploy it in test and dev quickly as you could run some qa cycles on it and release release release the code that's at the end of the day that's the main difference between the old way of the waterfall approach to the new way of agile approach which eventually got translated into the infrastructure layer itself it needs to accommodate those changes if you will well releasing code faster is going to enable organizations presumably in any industry to be able to develop and release products and services faster to the demanding consumer market i imagine that's absolutely correct we've all got spoiled by the smartphone industry we'll just expect a new version to be just deployed to your device almost every day now it's exactly the same it is we i think we carry that i think it's i think it's impossible not to carry that consumer expectation from our consumer life into our business life and we just expect that things are going to work that way because in our consumer lives they do i want to ask you guys about is that this question is directly for you talk to me about csi what is it besides a tv show i know you have a great answer for this and many spin-offs by the way right not just a single one csi right so let's take a step back into 2015. docker rebecca dockercon they sit on the stage and during the keynote and they explain that you should write your code in the 12 factor way resiliency should be built in into the containers themselves and you shouldn't care about storage persistency now we're in the storage industry for the best part of my life right now and storage persistence is important if a customer lose data that's a very bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well so it's all about the data nothing else really matters the data itself is the goal and so there was no data persistency back then you go here and we actually work with the startup that did just storage consistency for containers basically meaning the ability to provision a volume from storage array into kubernetes and kubernetes will know about this that style tab went busted but the need still existed and so into that need google came and they come up with this api called container storage interface short for csi that does exactly that it allows kubernetes administrator of the kubernetes api to consume storage from the underlying storage array so provision volumes map mapping volumes taking a snapshot of the volume and mapping those from those very basic capabilities now those capabilities are very basic and we now have customers that are telling us i need far more than just the ability to provision a volume for my kubernetes environments i need this volume to be protected i need this volume to be replicated and it is volume to be protected into a backup device all of those things that csi doesn't know to do today no we didn't know to do in the near future so what we did is we said right we're not going to reinvent the wheel that's csi we're not just going to repeat csi all over again we're going to extend csi with open source tools that will enable our customers to do all of those things that are just mentioned before so csm is container storage modules which is what we announced today and it's very high level it provides you i provided the capabilities to do the following the first one is the observability module so if you're monitoring your open source environments you are very very likely to use open source tools like graphing and commit use so we have this plugin that allows you to monitor your storage array with gofundme and prometus and really uh becomes the liaison point between the storage admin the kubernetes admin they can connect both to the console and each really understand the the entity that is not aware of i call it the two-way mirror base second module is the resiliency module kubernetes is very infant in terms of understanding storage it doesn't understand storage failure conditions and so our resiliency module run as the k3s is like a minimum version of kubernetes if you will which keeps monitoring both the storage array and the host and in case of a storage arrow it knows to act upon it and do things like volume unmapping and map those volumes to other surviving servers in the product center etc the other module is the replication module so back into 2015 uh customers are basically telling us today i want to use kubernetes but i also want to replicate the data to either a passive site or an active site and in case of a failure if my primary site goes down i want to fail over this kubernetes volumes and data to a remote site so literally within a click of a button you can fail over your kubernetes environment from site a to site b using the underlying storage array capabilities replication etc etc and the other module that we've also announced is the volume group snapshots so instead of just taking a single volume which is what csr is all about you can actually take multiple volume that belong to multiple micro services that at the end of the day running within those containers in order to really back up a service and not just the micro service itself so all of these modules and future modules that will come in the future as well belong to csm and csm for us is just the beginning it's everything that our most most the demanding customers want us to provide today and they are not willing to wait for csi to catch up base got it so we you've done a great job of explaining what csi is what it isn't what csm is and all the great things that were announced today let's talk about the data protection the security angle we've seen so much change in the security the threat landscape in the last 18 months we've seen ransomware become a household word the proliferation of ddos attacks and of course there's this scattered workforce that is still scattered talk to me about why data protection for kubernetes and what are some of the unique needs that that presents uh sure uh thanks lisa so um so when you look at the kubernetes landscape it originally started out with mostly the front-end aspects multi like you know like web tier type applications but as the landscape has evolved now we are seeing actually in the kubernetes community also there has been newer concepts like stateful sets for example which allows you to have more persistent type uh or basically they you know the application that have retained state and data uh in the kubernetes cluster and we are seeing a huge proliferation and that is also increasing you know across the board on uh for example everything from experimentation or like any kind of user experience kind of data the understanding about sessions you know what users like what they don't like to all critical operational aspects to transactional elements too all of them being brought into the kubernetes we are seeing organizations in various stages of the journey and then add on to the additional uh capabilities on the storage side as she was mentioning about csi and csm and are basically the ways for the kubernetes layer to consume these storage services so when you're building these modern applications uh the state is now preserved as part of the kubernetes and actually recently we had a case with one of the customers we've had and uh so they did not have data protection as part of their kubernetes and uh and you know and we are seeing this in several organizations where you have an it ops kind of a team and there is a devops team there's a two-speed it concept so devops teams a lot of time they do not take into consideration a lot of these uh you know disaster recovery and uh you know the data protection aspects as part of the design and then one of the customers just what happened and they lost you know data because the you know their systems crashed and it was not through ransomware luckily but it was through uh you know a general logical you know failure of hardware things like that and so they could not recover that so they had to go back and they had to like rest all the whole thing so they started investing in saying oh we need a ways to protect the data so that i can recover so data is all about recovery it's about you know making sure you can record to a certain point in time and also recovering in the minimal amount of time and the challenges that kubernetes adds on top of traditional application that you know the entire application definition in kubernetes is split across multiple of these smaller metadata aspects like the application itself will have labels they will have uh you know they'll have secrets they'll have config maps they'll have custom resource definitions they have all this additional metadata that make up the entire application not just the data so you need to have all of that captured in context in a cloud native fashion if you if you're trying to protect that kubernetes environment and that's kind of a little bit of a unique challenge and then from a security aspect that you alluded to from kubernetes yes there are been you know multiple security challenges that we see although we don't directly work on the front end on the uh on the prevention side but on the cure side data protection is an important aspect right i mean if you look at the open source community there is so much open source today and how do you know that the open source and the api that you're consuming is is coming from a valid source you need so there is all kinds of like different security solutions that kubernetes community offers to validate making sure the source code is good the apis are authenticated and you know authorized things like that so there is a lot of these but even despite that you know there is always ability for some attacks to sneak in and that's where data protection is providing that cure so in case something does happen and you have a ransomware attack i have a cyber security vault or i have data stored in a secure fashion in a panic room if you will that i can so my business like i was alluding to my earlier example the business depends on that data and that operational transactional customer data and you need to recover that and you need to store it in a secure place and that's sort of the whole aspect of that it's got to be recoverable that's the whole point guys thank you so much for joining me talking to me about what you're seeing from a kubernetes adoption acceleration perspective thank you for helping me learn a new definition of csi not a show or a spin-off and talk to us about what csm is and the things that you are the modules that you're announcing today we appreciate your candor and your time thank you lisa thanks for having us my pleasure for my guests i'm lisa martin coming to you live from los angeles at kubecon cloudbanditcon21 be right back dave nicholson will rejoin me with our next guest stay tuned you

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Dave Vellante. Dave, it's been an exciting almost two full days, and we're very excited to be joined by Joel Reich, the EVP of products and operations at NetApp. And none of us can believe you haven't been on the Cube before! >> I haven't been. I'm sure I've sure I've watched a lot of the episodes, but I've never been a guest. >> I apologize for that. I'm shocked, given our past history and relationship, but welcome. >> Thank you. >> And we like to hear that- >> We'll see how I do before you invite me back again. (laughing) >> As a former NetApp-ian, I have high hopes. So Joel, NetApp is positioning itself as a storage software company for multi-cloud world. What does that really mean? >> So what it means is that, you know, when I think about it, when I talk to customers, the problem space about how do I manage my data has gotten so wide and so broad in the last three years because, you know, it used to include to walls, just the space between the four walls of the data centers that you owned. And now the problem space is that plus other data sources you might need to take to grow your business. It might be infrastructure as a service that you built in the cloud. It might be a software as a service application that you're running that's still your data, but it's in some other person's data center. So what it means is that we've really focused on the fact that the world is going to be hybrid cloud and that it's going to be multi-cloud. And the problems that, a high-class problem to solve is how to allow people to manage their data in that world. >> And we've been talking all week on the Cube, and you see it now at VMware's results, there's a lot of tailwinds, but part of that is the customer reality that they can't bring their business into the cloud and reformulate it to force fit it into the cloud. Rather, they have to bring the cloud to the data. >> Joel: Yep, exactly. >> That's sort of your wheelhouse. When you think about multi-cloud, are you talking about being the data store that multiple clouds can access? And do you see it going beyond that, where people are, you know, cross-clouding, if you will, inter-clouding? >> Sure, yeah, I mean, and the mechanisms vary by which people will do that. You know, we see people wanting to still own their data, in other words still have it behind their firewall. So one of the ways they can cross connect to multiple clouds is they can put a storage system, you know, NetApp storage system, in a cold location facility, let's say an Equinix facility, and there they have access to all of the fastest, broadest pipes that you could find anywhere on the network. And you can do a direct connect to Azure. You can do an express connect, or direct connect to Amazon or express connect to Azure, and make a decision about, you know, who has the best pricing plan or who has the best contractual terms or legal terms for you to go to the cloud. So you know, there's that way to do it when you're trying to manage, really just physically own your data when you're concerned about the privacy or sovereignty of it. There's other ways of doing it also, where our storage management software can sit in the cloud. We have a product called Cloud ONTAP, and you can buy it as a service in Amazon, or you can buy it as a service in Azure. And you could store your data in their infrastructure, and because it has a built-in capability of moving from one, you know, from one vendor to another, you don't have to worry about format differences between the cloud vendors. So you can migrate, you know, across, you could SnapMirror, which is a replication capability that we've had for 20 years, and you could be multi-cloud in that sense also. >> You know what's interesting about that, Joel, is when I first started looking at NetApp, and there was no such thing as cloud, but it struck me that you guys were early on with the concept of storage as a service. You had many, many services within your solutions, whether it was copy services or even data reduction services, well ahead of its time, that were bundled in to the platform. And you would invoke those as necessary. Very sort of cloud-like or, you know, we all talk about serverless today, and that's sort of the model, is invoking services as I need them. >> Yes. >> Kind of composable, if you will. So very compatible, in concept anyway, with cloud. So take us through kind of where you are today, with the architecture, you know, used to be so simple. EMC block, NetApp file, right? And that's changed dramatically. And of course I'm oversimplifying. Where are we today with the portfolio and the company strategy? Maybe you could talk to things like all-flash arrays, hyper-converged, bring us up to date. >> So I mean, I think there's, we look at, you're right, we do take a services perspective of what we're building. And what I do, we look at that there's a consumption continuum that people actually want to buy those services in different shapes or forms. So when we think about it, it's not, we don't have a separate clustered data ONTAP roadmap for, you know, our next high-end FAS system that has different features than the roadmap for the version of ONTAP that's going to run in the cloud. It's actually one product, right, that we build to be able to be consumed in different ways. And that, you know, when you think about it, that's kind of like a microcosm of our strategy, which is that what we're trying to do is make those data services available no matter where the data happens to be. And so to give you an example of a new service that we've implemented as part of cluster data ONTAP, it was in a new release that we did this past spring called 9.2. So it has a feature in it called Fabric Pools. And what Fabric Pools allow you to do is, you know, we have this idea that over time, storage becomes a service-level based thing and you have a capacity tier and you have a performance tier. And over time whatever that performance tier is going to be built of is going to be, you know, as flash progresses to Optane and things like that, that capacity tier is going to get faster and faster and faster, and it's always going to be a little bit more expensive than the, I mean, the performance tier is going to get, you know, it's going to get bigger, it's going to get faster, it's always going to be more expensive than the capacity tier. So Fabric Pools is essentially designed, if you forward think a bunch of years, when what you've got in the data center is all flash, you know, where's your capacity tier going to be? Well so in essence what we're doing is we're doing tiering between all flash and any S3 target. So that S3 target could be Glacier. The S3 target could be S3, I mean the S3 target could be, you know, it could be any S3 target. It could anybody's object store. And essentially what happens is, the system will manage secondary data and snapshot data into that capacity tier, but it'll manage it all together so that you're getting the most efficient use you can of flash. So you look at that and say, okay, that's the consumption model. That's a traditional consumption model, where you're buying controller-based functionality. Well it turns out that cloud ONTAP can use Fabric Pools also. So what that means is I can deploy, I could go to Amazon's Marketplace, I can buy Cloud ONTAP for I think it's $1.45 an hour, and I can run an instance, I can set up a cluster in the cloud, and I could use EC2 storage. And I could use Amazon storage and I could run ONTAP on it, and then if I want to I could implement Fabric Pools and I could tier to S3 or Glacier, right, within the cloud. >> The point is, the value of that is single point of control. >> Joel: Yeah. >> And customers will pay for that value. >> My point is actually, the point is was trying to make is that it's a consumption model choice. I'm not going to force someone, I view the cloud as our friend, right, what we're trying to do is find ways for people to leverage either the infrastructure of the public cloud or their on prem infrastructure to be able to manage their data in ways that they can't. >> And discretely selling that software as a service. >> Joel: Yes. >> Yeah. >> Exactly, or as a feature of our standard appliance product. >> But a much different model than taking a Seagate disk drive, packaging it into a controller, and selling it for 10X what you paid for it. >> Right, exactly. So you know, that's really the exciting thing is trying to find ways of making what we have portable into the different ways that people want to consume data management services these days. >> A couple questions for you, Joel. You mentioned the word "friends." You've been, NetApp, long-time friends with VMware. >> Yes. >> Since we're one year post combination of Dell EMC, how has the NetApp VMware relationship evolved? One of the things we heard Michael Dell say this morning was it's very important to maintain the independence of the VMware ecosystem. Talk to us about how in the last year that relationship has progressed and how that's helping NetApp continue its history of being very innovative. >> Yah, so there's always been coopetition, there's always been places where, you know, our products overlapped and where you could do similar things with VMware at the server level that we could do at the storage level. But from the beginning, you know, the integrations that we did with them I think were, you know, really helped move the market and really helped move both of our businesses. I think there's like three things that we're doing right now that are new, you know, in the last year with them. One of them is we built another version of ONTAP, which we call vNAS, which can run on top of VSAN. And you know, in an ESX environment and provide, you know, NFS and CIFS file services on top of VSAN, right? So that's a really interesting combination of both of our software-defined products that solve a customer problem. Another thing we've done is, you know, we've announced our HCI product, NetApp HCI, and we have a really close partnership with VMware. We decided that that was the way to go, that we didn't want to build our own hypervisor, and that they did a really good job on the management side, and you know, that our integration of those three things would build something, you know, with our strength being at the storage management layer and their strength being at the hypervisor and management layer, that that would help us build a really effective, competitive product. So you know, I think those are two really good examples of that the partnership is moving forward. Lots of interesting integrations, we're working on figuring out how to bring value to what VMware is now doing with AWS. Cause we have a very large install base. I came to the show and I asked, well how many combined customers do we have with VMware? And it's 50,000 combined customers over the years we've been doing this. So you know, our customers want to know how to get access to that capability, how to move into AWS in a way that provides them an interim step. So there's some really good cooperative work going on between our developers in that area. >> And a couple of strong GTM routes, right, through, you mentioned a new version of ONTAP for VSAN. Yesterday Pat Gellsinger mentioned there's now 10,000 customers on VSAN, talked about obviously with AWS as another GTM opportunity for you. >> Yeah, I mean, our teams work together great. There's no question about it. >> Yeah, I mean you guys have always been right there, in the inner circle of integration with VMware. I mean, in the days where, you know, EMC was trying to control the chessboard, NetApp was always able to have products like, same day, you know, as integrated as anybody. And that was important for VMware to show its independence. >> Well you know, Mountain View is much closer to Sunnyvale than Hopkinton. (laughing) >> It's true. >> So you talked about, you chose not to develop your own hypervisor. Others have. So maybe talk about that a little more, how you differentiate from some of the other hyper converged players. >> I mean, I don't, you know, there are other ways of dealing with, you know, when people don't want to spend money on a license, there are other ways of dealing with that problem than building your own hypervisor. You know, for example, so in our HCI product, we can scale server and, we can scale compute and storage independently. So you don't actually get locked into buying, you don't have to buy another VMware license if all you're doing is selling combined storage, you know, combined HCI nodes. By breaking them apart and having separate HCI nodes, we don't drive people into consuming VMware licenses that they might not need, right, in order to meet the demands of, you know, what they're trying to build. So I think we've taken a much different approach to HCI. We talk about it as second generation. The core, there's a lot of value to it. The core value in differentiation is really ease of setup and use that people have grown to expect from HCI combined with an amazing amount of quality of service and workload guarantee, you know, guaranteed workload per workload performance and scaling to, you know, 100 nodes, which, you know, we think really makes HCI a data center class technology. You know, not an edge technology, not a single application technology, but by adding data management features and having that real ability to scale to very large systems, we think we really, you know, come into the market at a time when HCI is ready to move to that next step of not just being single workload, single application. So we think we're there at a good time, with the right product. >> How about all-flash arrays? Bring us up to speed on that. You guys made an acquisition of SolidFire, great acquisition, picked it up at a good time in the marketplace, got it for I think a relatively good price, really good company, true software defined, built for sort of cloud-oriented applications. So how have you integrated that asset, where do it fit in your portfolio? And maybe you can share some proof points. >> Yeah, so we've seen a lot of success with that. You know, what we were doing, when we bought SolidFire, there were a whole bunch of motivations for it. One of the motivations was we knew we needed access to the new buyers. We knew we needed access to people who were making decisions about deploying applications independent of the infrastructure that they happened to have in their data center. Right, they were trying to find new ways of doing things. So when we bought SolidFire, you know, a lot of it was, we loved the technology. A lot of it was getting access to the new buyers and bringing them to the table. And it's funny cause I was noticing today in a bunch of customer meetings that I had here, that you know, in the past I'd have meetings and it would be like sort of the same IT stack, here's the system admin, here's the server admin, here's the network admin, here's the storage person sitting around the table. And when I talk about, you know, we talk about the data fabric, which is the way we tie together, you know, our hybrid clouds. When I talk about that, you know, either people would start to yawn or they'd start to feel threatened because you know, we're talking about something that was a new world for them that they didn't quite know how they would fit in. One of the things I'm seeing now, especially this year, is that customers are coming to the table with both with a cloud architect, and you know, the person who's trying to figure out how they get to the next place, plus the person who owns the existing infrastructure, and they're trying to figure out how to modernize it. So it's something, you know, when we bought SolidFire, we had this theory, okay, we got to go, we have this new technology, it's aimed at a new buyer. And one of the things I'm seeing now is that the portfolio sale of the things that we're offering is starting to be relevant to actually, we don't have to go find the different people. We're actually starting to see them come to the table and talk to us together. So you know, all-flash for us, that's been what's driving the company. We went, we made a big investment about two and a half years ago. It started to pay off last year. We're still growing much faster than the market, much faster than companies who are a lot smaller than us, and the last, you know, market research data that I saw had us as number two in the world, after really not even, you know, being in the top single digits about three years ago. So that's been a really good thing for us, both for our install base but also winning new footprint and winning new business that we didn't have before. We're displacing legacy competitors, one a day. I think George talked about it in our last earnings call. We're replacing EMC once a day, right, at least, and accelerating past that. And it's replacing the old stuff. And a lot of it is because of what we've done with flash. A lot of it is also because it's a future proof. Okay, well, how am I going to, so let's say I decide I want to move this part of this workload that's on here, one workload that's on here to the cloud next year. Alright, NetApp, how could you help me do that? And we'll go through and talk about, this is what we do with Azure, this is what we do with Amazon, right, this is what we do with IBM Cloud. None of our competitors can do that. >> Excellent, and so, sorry to cut you off, we've got to wrap. But you've got a NetApp Insight 2017 Change the World with Data coming up in, you're going to have to come back to Vegas in October and Berlin, and I'm sure, >> Right here, I might even be sitting in the same place. (laughing) >> I hope you get some fresh air. >> Let's make that happen. Let's get the Cube to Insight. >> There we go! Thank you so much for joining. You're now a Cube alumni, which is fantastic. >> Thank you, do I get a t-shirt? >> Congratulations, a pin I think. >> Yeah, a pin. Alright, well for my cohost Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, we want to thank you for watching. Come right back. We've got more exciting coverage from day two of VMworld 2017 right now. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Dell EMC World 2017. We're live here in the Venetian in Las Vegas. Day one of the three day show. Had Michael Dell out on the keynote stage earlier today. Also had David Blaine, world famous magician. Pretty interesting performance to say the least. >> Yeah I went down to get an ice pick. (man laughing) During our break. >> We'll get into that later but it was interesting. Keith Townsend, John Walls also joined by Itzik Reich who is the CTO of XtremeIO at Dell EMC. Itzik, thanks for being with us. It's good to see you sir. >> Thank you very much. >> All the way from Tel Aviv and great to have you. Alright, so your sweet spot of the company is giving birth to a new baby today. >> There you go. >> XtremeIO X2, tell us about that. What spawned that, and then what that responses be, what you developed. >> Right, I think in order to understand Xtreme, you need to start with the beginning, the X1. So, November 2015 I was having my class reunion, meeting my ex-girlfriend, and we've launched X1. And X1 became, within two quarters, the largest sole Dell flash array in the world. From nowhere to the largest sole flash array, at least in terms of units sold to the market. Right, both Garthner and I. And it was huge. A huge building and a success for us. A success because nobody would become the number one leader. And we built them because we didn't have the life cycle to normally mature a product. Right, so you mentioned being a father. I'm a father to two daughters, lovely daughters. One of them is six years old, one of them is five. And the young one is starting to show some signs of being a really clever person. And I'm afraid that somebody will tell me, oh she can skip the first class. Because skipping class serves some association with it. Social aspects of it. So we've been really busy trying to understand XtremeIO X1. Making super stable. Today we're already about 5/9 in the market. But it also would stand to refresh the product and come with something new. So our life cycle wasn't a traditional year or year and a half of refreshing the product. It took us longer for us to X2 and this is what we announced today. So what's new with X2. The first thing is the ability to come with really Dell's XO Drive and Dell's configuration. In X1 each DAE, you could put up to 25 drives inside of the DAE. And X2 can put out up to 72 drives per DAE right. And you can scale just like before. Up to 8X bricks. It's a huge capacity which you need for the vast majority of the use cases out there they don't know. Just VDR or just a single database is right. Today XtremeIO can fill pretty much every transaction while closing including virtualization wall close. You just need a lot of capacity for thousands of VM's. So that's one of the things. The other thing we improved performance of the X2 array. And the magic story around there was that because of the thousands and thousands of customers that we're involved with really got the good insight of the workload that they are running. And what we found out is something very interesting. The majority of those customers are running workload that they're very small block size. So you storage every item that arrives in the system as a different blocks characteristic and we found that the majority of them are using very, very small block size. And we want them to improve the performance of those block sizes. The IOPS and the latency. And we also wanted to make sure that it's actually more economical cheaper than the very expensive drives that the new NVMe drives that are out there. So different design goals. Making it faster and also making it cheaper in different dimensions. So we come with a new feature called Drive Boost. In a nut shell, in a nut shell Drive Boost will give you 80% better latency for pretty much every walkthrough that is out there. >> So... With that small block sizes versus big block sizes. Why is that important? We're at a conference and we're talking a lot about digital transformation. CEO, we teased John earlier. You know he's a sports guy, he doesn't do LAG goals. >> (laughing) Sorry. >> That's alright. >> Help us understand the value of that data type. >> Sure, so you know we like to think about digital transformation but at the end of the day. You're the customer, you have a database. You'll use it on query or queries against the database. If it's a very large database, there are thousands maybe even millions of queries everyday. Those queries take time for the end user to get a response for. So let's assume that you want a monthly report. And this report normally takes nine hours to generate. If I can shrink the report crunching time to two hours instead of nine, that means that I have provided better value for the business success. Right. One of the stories is that we have a financial customer in the Middle East. They need to generate the report every month between midnight because this is where they locate their reports. Up until eight o'clock in the morning. Why eight o'clock because this is when the employees start to come to work. And every hour that they exceed after the eight hour generation they get fined by the government. So if I'm saving this customer four hours then they are not getting fined by the government for generating the report. That's a true value for the customer return. Cause those things are important. People tend to think about just performance numbers in terms of IOPS but the real magic number is latency. How quick can you make the query? Whether it's a database application or a VDI VM or just a generic web server running on a Voltron machine. Those are the important things today. >> So transactional apps. Big deal. Are these transactional apps, we learned a lot about virtualization and cloud computing to date. Are these transactional apps running in a virtualized environment or are we still relying on big heavy metal workloads going to treat IO2. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At least from my experience some would argue that anywhere between 70 to 80% of the customer that allowed it went full virtualized. So their running their entire application running either under V6 or a Microsoft type of V. So they are fully virtualized. Some of the customers are still running their workload on a traditional physical servers right. Even in the S6 at the end of the day it runs on a physical server to all day the kill in itself. But yeah, the majority of them are already there in terms of virtualization. >> So what are customers really excited about when it comes to features sets for an XIO2 versus XtremeIO version wise. >> Right, amazing question. So performance, we've already discussed performance. 80% better latency, that's not something that you get because of the usage of better CPU's. Intel moves slow, it's basically dead right. They don't give you 200% performance between generation so we wanted to do something else and solve the same problem. The other thing is quality of service. We are not cheaping NGA but it's coming soon. The ability to give a specific VM, a specific IO copying and the latency copying. And also could give you the ability to burst to more IOP's techniques needed for a couple of minutes. So quality of service I the noisy neighbor right. Somebody generate too much noise you want him to be quiet. That's what quality of service is. The other things that we've announced native replication. We found out finally of our own replication that can replicate between one XtremeO2 and another. But it's not a traditional replication. The unique thing about XtremeIO was always the cusp. The content of dressable architecture. People typically think about it as a D Duplication feature but in fact we don't have a feature called D Duplication. We analyze the data as it goes through the system itself. And we give a unique shot signature to each one of those blocks. And if the shot signature already exists in the system we dupe the block. But it's not the feature per se. That why the D Duplication's so fast on XtremeIO. So up until now the customers architecture was only applicable to writing the data into the array itself. Now it's also applicable for replicating the data. So for example if you have a data reduction of five to one which is very common in virtualize use case. Many VM, many the same template and so on. You know need to replicate four times less the data at the source to the destination target. Right. So that's a very, very big thing because you need to replicate more and more data. But the 24 hour window isn't changed. God didn't upgrade it where the server respects the time. Right. >> (laughing) Right. >> It's still 24 hours per day. So this is super important for us and we're very excited about it. And the other thing is that, again larger denser configuration of the array itself so the customer can have up until two-thirds cheaper. The drive, the cost drive of the XtremeIO in itself so it's cheaper for them to put their walkthrough on ExtemeIO. Whether to really pick up the just the database that needs all the performance in the world. So we can really become a true enterprise array with those features. >> It seems like it's got to be for you a constant chase though right. You're looking for higher performance, you're looking for lower costs. You've said you just gained 80% increase in your performance capabilities. >> Yup. >> And now people are going to be looking at you over the next Xtreme and so what next? You know, where are the gains to be had in the next generation of technology and just in terms of philosophically approaching that so what do you do. >> Yeah, yeah again another good question. I actually gave a briefing about it just earlier. So, the first thing we need to do is an industry not just the daily insists to lower the costs of the drive itself to be even cheaper than and economical drive. That's not Dell today right, the hybrid mechanical drive. You can get a more economical drive if you apply data reduction on it right. So if you're five times cheaper because of the data that's gets integrated into the array and get a different compress and different provisioning. Then you can be on par with the mechanical drives. So first we want to be on par if not cheaper. We want everybody to move to S's. And we were the first twirl for charade the portfolio of Dell EMC. That's the first thing. The second thing is to really get a better insight into your wall application, wall close. Today people analyze things like IOP's and latency but what does your application really think? Where are the cues in the application stock itself right. How can you find them out in the storage sub-system itself right. So we are on a journey to over there with our importing mechanisms. So a year and a half ago, we started a new project to completely change the reporting mechanism of the WebUI. The interface of XtremeIO right. And today you can really get to drill down into pretty much every aspect. Up until now you had to purchase a third party software that will analyze your walkthrough for you. So things like Instagram, IO's, block size, read and write like I can see pair of blocks. So you can really understand your workload. We also give you something like abnormalities. We can tell you every week this application is being fine but on that Friday for some reason the response time wasn't that good. You should go in and check it out. Maybe it's in the application there is a bottleneck. Maybe it was a bottleneck in the storage load. So you can actually find it out. But I would argue that the long term goal. That's a vision right? That I'm not announcing anything yet. Is really the ability to marriage or combine between the softer defined wall right. The input converge mechanism, to the traditional arrays right. Although SSD's not that traditional. Maybe you can have a denser configuration with very small to DAE but the performance aspect of it will not be drive from the DEA where it actually store the data but from Voltron machines. That you can spin up and down in a cloud like fishing. That will bring you all the performance that you need. That's a thing to me the only gray. The really merging between the walls. Cause there isn't one perfect answer right. The softer refined guys will tell you everything should go to softer defined storage. We will tell you everything should go to flash arrays. But really the truth is like always right in between. And this is really one of the direction that we are approaching. >> I tell you what, for now I want you to enjoy X2 for now. How about that. >> That sound good. >> It's a good day for you. And don't let that five year old skip either. I think that's a good idea too. >> Very good. Very good. Thank you very much. >> And so thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Back with more here on theCUBE. We're live in Las Vegas at Dell EMC World 2017. (exciting techno music)

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Last year, we noted in a breaking analysis that the cloud ecosystem is innovating beyond the idea or notion of multi-cloud. We've said for years that multi-cloud is really not a strategy but rather a symptom of multi-vendor. And we coined this term supercloud to describe an abstraction layer that lives above the hyperscale infrastructure that hides the underlying complexities, the APIs, and the primitives of each of the respective clouds. It interconnects whether it's On-Prem, AWS, Azure, Google, stretching out to the edge and creates a value layer on top of that. So our vision is that supercloud is more than running an individual service in cloud native mode within an individual individual cloud rather it's this new layer that builds on top of the hyperscalers. And does things irrespective of location adds value and we'll get into that in more detail. Now it turns out that we weren't the only ones thinking about this, not surprisingly, the majority of the technology ecosystem has been working towards this vision in various forms, including some examples that actually don't try to hide the underlying primitives. And we'll talk about that, but give a consistent experience across the DevSecOps tool chain. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon, Cube insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis, we're going to share some recent examples and direct quotes about supercloud from the many Cube guests that we've had on over the last several weeks and months. And we've been trying to test this concept of supercloud. Is it technically feasible? Is it business rational? Is there business case for it? And we'll also share some recent ETR data to put this into context with some of the players that we think are going after this opportunity and where they are in their supercloud build out. And as you can see I'm not in the studio, everybody's got COVID so the studios shut down temporarily but breaking analysis continues. So here we go. Now, first thing is we uncovered an article from earlier this year by Lori MacVittie, is entitled, Supercloud: The 22 Answer to Multi-Cloud Challenges. What a great title. Of course we love it. Now, what really interested us here is not just the title, but the notion that it really doesn't matter what it's called, who cares? Supercloud, distributed cloud, someone even called it Metacloud recently, and we'll get into that. But Lori is a technologist. She's a developer by background. She works at F-Five and she's partial to the supercloud definition that was put forth by Cornell. You can see it here. That's a cloud architecture that enables application migration as a service across different availability zones or cloud providers, et cetera. And that the supercloud provides interfaces to allocate, migrate and terminate resources... And can span all major public cloud providers as well as private clouds. Now, of course, we would take that as well to the edge. So sure. That sounds about right and provides further confirmation that something new is really happening out there. And that was our initial premise when we put this fourth last year. Now we want to dig deeper and hear from the many Cube guests that we've interviewed recently probing about this topic. We're going to start with Chuck Whitten. He's Dell's new Co-COO and most likely part of the Dell succession plan, many years down the road hopefully. He coined the phrase multi-cloud by default versus multi-cloud by design. And he provides a really good business perspective. He's not a deep technologist. We're going to hear from Chuck a couple of times today including one where John Furrier asks him about leveraging hyperscale CapEx. That's an important concept that's fundamental to supercloud. Now, Ashesh Badani heads products at Red Hat and he talks about what he calls Metacloud. Again, it doesn't matter to us what you call it but it's the ecosystem gathering and innovating and we're going to get his perspective. Now we have a couple of clips from Danny Allan. He is the CTO of Veeam. He's a deep technologist and super into the weeds, which we love. And he talks about how Veeam abstracts the cloud layer. Again, a concept that's fundamental to supercloud and he describes what a supercloud is to him. And we also bring with Danny the edge discussion to the conversation. Now the bottom line from Danny is we want to know is supercloud technically feasible? And is it a thing? And then we have Jeff Clarke. Jeff Clark is the Co-COO and Vice Chairman of Dell super experienced individual. He lays out his vision of supercloud and what John Furrier calls a business operating system. You're going to hear from John a couple times. And he, Jeff Clark has a dropped the mic moment, where he says, if we can do this X, we'll describe what X is, it's game over. Okay. So of course we wanted to then go to HPE, one of Dell's biggest competitors and Patrick Osborne is the vice president of the storage business unit at Hewlett Packet Enterprise. And so given Jeff Clarke's game over strategy, we want to understand how HPE sees supercloud. And the bottom line, according to Patrick Osborne is that it's real. So you'll hear from him. And now Raghu Raghuram is the CEO of VMware. He threw a curve ball at this supercloud concept. And he flat out says, no, we don't want to hide the underlying primitives. We want to give developers access to those. We want to create a consistent developer experience in that DevsSecOps tool chain and Kubernetes runtime environments, and connect all the elements in the application development stack. So that's a really interesting perspective that Raghu brings. And then we end on Itzik Reich. Itzik is a technologist and a technical team leader who's worked as a go between customers and product developers for a number of years. And we asked Itzik, is supercloud technically feasible and will it be a reality? So let's hear from these experts and you can decide for yourselves how real supercloud is today and where it is, run the sizzle >> Operative phrase is multi-cloud by default that's kind of the buzz from your keynote. What do you mean by that? >> Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, multiple public clouds, On-Premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was, it can be and it should be. It is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they want to maintain an On-Premise cloud, On-Premise clouds are not going away, I mentioned edge clouds, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud by default we mean that's the state of the world today. Our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design as you heard. >> Really great question, actually, since you and I talked, Dave, I've been spending some time noodling just over that. And you're right. There's probably some terminology, something that will get developed either by us or in collaboration with the industry. Where we sort of almost have the next almost like a Metacloud that we're working our way towards. >> So we manage both the snapshots and we convert it into the Veeam portable data format. And here's where the supercloud comes into play. Because if I can convert it into the Veeam portable data format, I can move that OS anywhere. I can move it from physical to virtual, to cloud, to another cloud, back to virtual, I can put it back on physical if I want to. It actually abstracts the cloud layer. There are things that we do when we go between cloud some use BIOS, some use UEFI, but we have the data in backup format, not snapshot format, that's theirs, but we have it in backup format that we can move around and abstract workloads across all of the infrastructure. >> And your catalog is control in control of that. Is that right? Am I thinking about that the right way? >> Yeah it is, 100%. And you know what's interesting about our catalog, Dave, the catalog is inside the backup. Yes. So here's, what's interesting about the edge, two things, on the edge you don't want to have any state, if you can help it. And so containers help with that You can have stateless environments, some persistent data storage But we not not only provide the portability in operating systems, we also do this for containers. And that's true. If you go to the cloud and you're using say EKS with relational database services RDS for the persistent data later, we can pick that up and move it to GKE or move it to OpenShift On-Premises. And so that's why I call this the supercloud, we have all of this data. Actually, I think you termed the term supercloud. >> Yeah. But thank you for... I mean, I'm looking for a confirmation from a technologist that it's technically feasible. >> It is technically feasible and you can do it today. >> You said also technology and business models are tied together and enabler. If you believe that then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want. They want to leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do. >> Well, that's exactly right. If I take that in what Dave was saying and I summarize it the following way, if we can take these cloud assets and capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to deliver a distributed platform, game over. >> We have a number of platforms that are providing whether it's compute or networking or storage, running those workloads that they plum up into the cloud they have an operational experience in the cloud and they now they have data services that are running in the cloud for us in GreenLake. So it's a reality, we have a number of platforms that support that. We're going to have a a set of big announcements coming up at HPE Discover. So we led with Electra and we have a block service. We have VM backup as a service and DR on top of that. So that's something that we're providing today. GreenLake has over, I think it's actually over 60 services right now that we're providing in the GreenLake platform itself. Everything from security, single sign on, customer IDs, everything. So it's real. We have the proofpoint for it. >> Yeah. So I want to clarify something that you said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers. I use the word abstraction. And usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to do. In fact, that's the last thing we are trying to do. What we are trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application. So that you can use the cloud provider services if that's what you want to use. But the DevSecOp tool chain, the runtime environment which turns out to be Kubernetes and how you control the Kubernetes environment, how do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value. And so really the VMware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements, number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise. And number two, you can move faster. And number three, you can just spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we are trying to do. We are not... So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction. In terms of where are we? We are still, I would say, in the early stages. So if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these greenfield applications. And there is an entire ecosystem emerging around Kubernetes. There is still, Kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of Kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our Tanzu Application Platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time be entirely secure, et cetera. >> Well, look, the multi-cloud by default today are isolated clouds. They don't work together. Your data is siloed. It's locked up and it is expensive to move and make sense of it. So I think the word you and I were batting around before, this is an interconnected tissue. That's what the world needs. They need the clouds to work together as a single platform. That's the problem that we're trying to solve. And you saw it in some of our announcements here that we're starting to make steps on that journey to make multi-cloud work together much simpler. >> It's interesting, you mentioned the hyperscalers and all that CapEx investments. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a cloud and build on the CapEx and then ultimately have the solutions machine learning as one area. You see some specialization with the clouds. But you start to see the rise of superclouds, Dave calls them, and that's where you can innovate on a cloud then go to the multiple clouds. Snowflakes is one, we see a lot of examples of supercloud... >> Project Alpine was another one. I mean, it's early, but it's its clearly where you're going. The technology is just starting to come around. I mean it's real. >> Yeah. I mean, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of all of the cloud innovation out there? >> Is that something that's, that supercloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective. >> I think it is. So for example Katie Gordon, which I believe you've interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect which is another project. That's exactly part of the it's rationale, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why are we doing? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers, using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the APEX console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them into tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So yes we are walking on all of those different aspects. >> Okay. Let's take a quick look at some of the ETR data. This is an X-Y graph. You've seen it a number of times on breaking analysis, it plots the net score or spending momentum on the Y-axis and overlap or pervasiveness in the ETR dataset on the X-axis, used to be called market share. I think that term was off putting to some people, but anyway it's an indicator of presence in the dataset. Now that red dotted line that's rarefied air where anything above that line is considered highly elevated. Now you can see we've plotted Azure and AWS in the upper right. GCP is in there and Kubernetes. We've done that as reference points. They're not necessarily building supercloud platforms. We'll see if they ever want to do so. And Kubernetes of course not a company, but we put 'em in there for context. And we've cherry picked a few players that we believe are building out or are important for supercloud build out. Let's start with Snowflake. We've talked a lot about this company. You can see they're highly elevated on the vertical axis. We see the data cloud as a supercloud in the making. You've got pure storage in there. They made the public, the early part of its supercloud journey at Accelerate 2019 when it unveiled a hybrid block storage service inside of AWS, it connects its On-Prem to AWS and creates that singular experience for pure customers. We see Hashi, HashiCorp as an enabling infrastructure, as code. So they're enabling infrastructure as code across different clouds and different locations. You see Nutanix. They're embarking on their multi-cloud strategy but it's doing so in a way that we think is supercloud, like now. Now Veeam, we were just at VeeamON. And this company has tied Dell for the number one revenue player in data protection. That's according to IDC. And we don't think it won't be long before it holds that position alone at the top as it's growing faster than in Dell in the space. We'll see, Dell is kind of waking up a little bit and putting more resource on that. But Veeam, they're a pure play vendor in data protection. And you heard their CTO, Danny Allan's view on Supercloud, they're doing it today. And we heard extensive comments as well from Dell that's clearly where they're headed, project Alpine was an early example from Dell technologies world of Supercloud in our view. And HPE with GreenLake. Finally beginning to talk about that cross cloud experience. I think it in initially HPE has been more focused on the private cloud, we'll continue to probe. We'll be at HPE discover later on the spring, actually end of June. And we'll continue to probe to see what HPE is doing specifically with GreenLake. Now, finally, Cisco, we put them on the chart. We don't have direct quotes from recent shows and events but this data really shows you the size of Cisco's footprint within the ETR data set that's on the X-axis. Now the cut of this ETR data includes all sectors across the ETR taxonomy which is not something that we commonly show but you can see the magnitude of Cisco's presence. It's impressive. Now, they had better, Cisco that is, had better be building out a supercloud in our view or they're going to be left behind. And I'm quite certain that they're actually going to do so. So we have a lot of evidence that we're putting forth here and seeing in the marketplace what we said last year, the ecosystem is take taking shape, supercloud is forming and becoming a thing. And really in our view, is the future of cloud. But there are always risks to these predictive scenarios and we want to acknowledge those. So first, look, we could end up with a bunch of bespoke superclouds. Now one supercloud is better than three separate cloud native services that do fundamentally the same thing from the same vendor. One for AWS, one for GCP and one for Azure. So maybe that's not all that bad. But to point number two, we hope there evolves a set of open standards for self-service infrastructure, federated governance, and data sharing that will evolve as a horizontal layer versus a set of proprietary vendor specific tools. Now, maybe a company like Veeam will provide that as a data management layer or some of Veeam's competitors or maybe it'll emerge again as open source. As well, and this next point, we see the potential for edge disruptions, changing the economics of the data center. Edge in fact could evolve on its own, independent of the cloud. In fact, David Floria sees the edge somewhat differently from Danny Allan. Floria says he sees a requirement for distributed stateful environments that are ephemeral where recovery is built in. And I said, David, stateful? Ephemeral? Stateful ephemeral? Isn't that an oxymoron? And he responded that, look, if it's not ephemeral the costs are going to be prohibitive. He said the biggest mistake the companies could make is thinking that the edge is simply an extension of their current cloud strategies. We're seeing that a lot. Dell largely talks about the edge as retail. Now, and Telco is a little bit different, but back to Floria's comments, he feels companies have to completely reimagine an integrated file and recovery system which is much more data efficient. And he believes that the technology will evolve with massive volumes and eventually seep into enterprise cloud and distributed data centers with better economics. In other words, as David Michelle recently wrote, we're about 15 years into the most recent cloud cycle and history shows that every 15 years or so, something new comes along that is a blind spot and highly disruptive to existing leaders. So number four here is really important. Remember, in 2007 before AWS introduced the modern cloud, IBM outpost, sorry, IBM outspent Amazon and Google and RND and CapEx and was really comparable to Microsoft. But instead of inventing cloud, IBM spent hundreds of billions of dollars on stock buybacks and dividends. And so our view is that innovation rewards leaders. And while it's not without risks, it's what powers the technology industry it always has and likely always will. So we'll be watching that very closely, how companies choose to spend their free cash flow. Okay. That's it for now. Thanks for watching this episode of The Cube Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who does some of the background research? Alex Morrison is on production and is going to compile all this stuff. Thank you, Alex. We're all remote this week. Kristen Nicole and Cheryl Knight do Cube distribution and social distribution and get the word out, so thank you. Robert Hof is our editor in chief. Don't forget the checkout etr.ai for all the survey action. Remember I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can check out all the breaking analysis podcasts. All you can do is search breaking analysis podcast so you can pop in the headphones and listen while you're on a walk. You can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. If you want to get in touch or DM me at DVellante, you can always hit me up into a comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante. Thank you for watching this episode of break analysis, stay safe, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Hey, welcome to this continuing coverage of the H P E Aruba. Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen by now the announcement from john and Antonio, we're going to get into some technical details. Now I've got two guests joining me. Please welcome Krishna Otopeni, the VP of engineering at Pensando and frank Reich stein, senior Director platform engineering from HP Aruba guys welcome to the program. >>Hi lisa. >>Hi lisa. Thanks for having us. >>Sure. So we're going to, we're going to dig in here. You guys are tasked with bringing these two worlds together, christian. Let's go ahead and start with you talk to me about the announcement why this is so significant and then we'll dig into the technical details. >>Yeah. So as you know, right, Pensando has been in the market for a couple of years right now. Um, and we heard a lot of success with the cloud providers and we're also working with be a million project Montreat. Um, so what we learned in the last couple of years, we're trying to take all the lessons and I was a little bit going to what, what we learned with the crop, your providers. So we took a dsC card, which is a B C, a form factor, the customer takes dsC card inserts into the, into server with various forces and hypervisors. So it's really exciting that the BSE is in production with some of the providers already and some of them were taking to production in this calendar quarter and we also have in connection with that first generation BSC cards a couple of years and some of the biggest banks and storage platform providers. So, so this is kind of a big deal for us because we are starting with what we call a D P U. Uh that Pensando is bailing which is the latest generation of it is called code named Alba which delivers the software in silicon program ability while matching the performance of hardware. So internally the DPU has the tight integration between special purpose processors that consent of what we call mps and a general purpose processor like arm course where we do the management and control software and with tied together with offload engines like encryption and compression. The key takeaway from this platform. Their consent of belt. It's it's programmable at all layers Either by Pensando or our customers whether it's in data plane using P four or control and management plane. All right. So what we learned while developing this platform and taking this production with the public cloud providers, we realize that the platform and architecture is not only very highly scalable with very high performance with respect to, you know, packets per second or stable connections per second or NBA me I ops but it's also adaptable like a very rapid paced. And another key lesson that we learn from our cloud partners is that the new devoPS model operations is as important as functionality. For example, the importance of creating the DPU pipeline the subsequent guarantees or providing Hatch uh first fateful connections so that in some cases the component fails, there is hardware or software customer doesn't have any disruption in his network or storage operations. So we took all the ski lessons that we learned over the last few years. And then we are building a new platform partnering with Aruba team which is very high scale with very high performance at the same time, tied with very good operations um that you know it comes the best of both both platforms from the pew side and from the Aruba side frank they want to add on the Aruba platform side. >>Sure, yeah. So the Aruba networking team has been building network switches for the past 25 years and we've been following all of the trends and evolutions over that time frame. And as we've gone through a few years ago we decided to make an evolution of our operating system to scale it up for the modern needs of the modern world. And this included doing things like designing with a micro services oriented architecture to provide for a high degree of resiliency throughout the product line. And then being able to extend that single network operating system from the core to the edge of the network. As we've been partnering with Pensando, it came very clear that the evolution of the network the next step was this form of a deep, you integrated into that top of rack switch to provide a deeper and richer feature set and what has traditionally been available in your top of rack switch. And so this partnership has enabled us to leapfrog but has been traditional top of rack functionality and add to it. Things that previously were not attainable in that layer of the network >>frank. Continuing on with you. Talk to me about some of the technology requirements and challenges of designing and engineering and delivering the industry's first distributed service switch. What were some of those? >>Sure, sure. So a lot of the challenges around integrating this type of solution come down to how to ensure that you have the highest performance possible and maintaining high speed of performance when you're now introducing an additional pay hop within the network topology inside of the switch, a lot of that came down to integrating the background and skill setting capabilities that come along with osc x that were made it quick for us to enable a new piece of functionality within the architecture and then a lot of credit has to go to the Pensando team for the richness of the feature setting capability set that they have within that DPU product as it stands >>christian, let's go ahead and dig through some of those core features and capabilities that are really going to be benefiting customers. >>Yeah, so basically right, uh taking a little bit of step back, we started with the dsc market from Pensando perspective where we wanted to put gPU in every survey and we obviously have success in enterprise customers and cloud customers that we discussed earlier. But we also learned a few lessons while deploying DSC and enterprise markets in the sense that enterprise markets do not need the performance of every DSC at 200 G full duplex network services for every survey. And also you know what makes historic key is that you know, there are a lot of brownfield service in current enterprise data centers where customers do not want to open up a server to put the DSC in. So we wanted to give a product with the form factor that frank is talking about and technology that's very familiar to every IT department given the Aruba Lois uh in a deployment in data centers. And also as I said earlier, what we lessons that we learned, we came up with this taking this production very deep you software and hardware which is deployed in public clouds. And combined with those features that that have been rapidly evolving uh through multiple Aruba releases into enterprise data centers in a switch form factors. So what we think is by doing this taking the best of both worlds. We're creating a new product category that is not that is for the features and capabilities are not available in the market from any vendor specifically providing state full services at every tour without the complexity of the service redirection because today's data centers if you want to install services. It's a it's a lot of effort operator to bring in those services. This obviously also has a great operational model, great TCO and the functionality that customers that you never see in tar before. For example, in the first release we are providing state full firewall with the visibility at every floor level that goes through the tower which never existed in the market before. >>New product category. That's a big deal christian. Talk to me a little bit about how long you guys have been at this, you were in stealth mode crack that open for us. >>I mean it has been a less than a year but of development that both teams have been doing and we work very closely together and we meet I mean for sure at least more than a week uh you know, more than once the once a week between uh frank's team and you know, and send it to them and there's a coordination between the sales team and the marketing team and the go to market team and then how we sell it and the manufacturing team, there's a lot goes on in building this product. I mean we believe this is the fastest uh tard new generational product that we built because because we could do that because the experience of both the teams trying they want anything more to this one. >>Yeah, I think that that really goes to the point here. The capabilities and maturity of the deep you solution that Pensando was bringing into the solution really allowed for a very fast and seamless integration on top of that Aruba, OsC X and the platform that we built there with automated Api generation and integration with our Aruba fabric composer orchestration layer really created the capability to make things go as fast as possible for this development effort And so to really take a new product and define a new product space within a 12 month time frame has been a really exciting and impressive feat by both teams. >>Very impressive considering the challenges and the dynamics in the market and the global market that we've had frank. How big of a lead do you think you have on incumbents here? >>I think we have a substantial lead on the incumbents here. I think what we're doing is a fundamentally different take on how you do a top of rack switch and the capabilities that we're bringing to bear at the top of rack are fundamentally new and differentiated from what the competition has been thinking about. So I believe we have a substantial lead on the competition. >>Excellent chris to talk to me about what's next? What's the future? I have some secret sources that tell me that john and Antonio are meeting regularly pushing you guys, what does the future hold. >>Yeah. So I mean obviously this is the start of an exciting journey. There's a first platform you're bringing to the market jointly and obviously we like a bunch of form factors without upcoming road map. So additionally I mean the software in silicon performance that with all the services that we deliver a software means that scope and scale of the state will services that we can deliver and evolve over time whether you talk about security or encryption or state flat or load balancing or d does all of the services and then you know hybrid connectivity. So obviously you know there's a lot that we can do with this platform that will be driven by with the partnership with our customers. We also see that you know the market of all where you know all the customers we'll have some customers will have deep us in the service and some customers will use the new platform that we're bringing together. So we won't have all the management start to make sure all of them can be managed uniformly and any time you know you this is a major step for a new category of platform and architecture we're developing jointly with the rubber and I believe this will be a huge opportunity for both the companies and our customers and this is exciting times ahead for us >>and talk to me both of your opinions here where can customers go to find more information, how can they get started frank will go ahead and start with you. >>Yeah you can jump straight to Aruba networks dot com and dig into the feature sets and packages that we have available with the Aruba 10-K product line direct from there. >>Fantastic christian anything to add >>that is correct actually. So we are treating it as one product coming from both the companies. All the documentation is where you know, frank pointed out in Aruba website, we put all the documentation at the same place and we're supporting it as one unified product from both the companies. >>Are you seeing any? We've seen so much change in the last year and a half. Last question. I'm just wondering if if either of the HPV riverside or the pence underside is seeing any industries that might be really prime to take advantage of knowing how many industries all have been affected by the events of the last year and a half christian any thoughts there? >>Yeah, I mean if you look at it right and obviously all of us are working from home and now everything happens, you know, mostly at the edge, right? You know, and we are in that this platform will help us get there where we get security to the edge and we get more visibility and more services to the edge. Right? So I mean that's what you know Pensando is all about and hoping that you know, this is uh this journey that we started with the D. P us, we go with this platform and it will ever all and it will help customers, our customers and our partners leverage all the functionality that, you know, Pensando and the rubber can bring together. >>Well guys, congratulations on an enormous feat accomplished in not just a 12 month time period, but a very challenging 12 month time period. We appreciate you guys breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement and more technical detail. Those can go to learn more information and again, congratulations. >>Thank you. >>Thank you very much lisa >>for my guests. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement. Thanks for watching. >>Mhm >>mm.

>>Hi, welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and pleased to welcome back. One of our cube alumni, Christian rowdy, the VP of technology strategy at Citrix Christian. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. And thanks for having me. Great to see you again, and we'll be virtually at this time. >>Great to see you too. It's been a couple of years and quite a few things have changed since we got to sit down at synergy a couple of years together together. Citrix has an exciting new announcement. Let's unpack that. Talk me to me about what you're announcing and what it's going to deliver. >>Sure. You know, as you said, actually, I can't believe it's been a couple of years since we last saw each other. And I think, you know, time's kind of just disappeared within the pandemic. So it actually, as a result of some of those things that we've seen, you know, people get so tired of being stuck in the same place and tired of being on this constant stream of video. And one of the things that we wanted to do was, was actually a vital Citrix launch part, which is kind of our new announcement series that will be delivered via LinkedIn live. But he's really intended to be kind of a short burst approach to providing updates to some of them really important things that we're working on at Citrix. So, uh, hopefully, uh, people would love to say a reason and get some rich information from them. >>And there's going to be a series of three launchpad programs. Now we've seen so much change since the rapid pivot to work from home. Now this worked from anywhere hybrid environment. We've seen the, the massive adoption of cloud and SAS. We've also seen the threat landscape, the attack surface, just expand and expand. Talk to me about why Citrix is doing the launch pad series and then we'll go through each of the three series. >>Yeah, absolutely. So maybe I think just to set a little bit of context, you know, we, we were working on some pretty interesting things, uh, pre pandemic, you know, uh, as a result of the, kind of the, the evolution of Citrix as an organization, but perhaps more importantly, the journey that our customers were on globally, you know, every customer that we had in, in any industry across the world, we're all at various stages of their own digital transformation. And I think what the pandemic has done apart from all the really bad things, actually, if you look at it as a, perhaps one gleaming bit of light in the whole thing was that we've given organizations, whether we realize it or not the opportunity to try this huge remote work experiment. And I think what it has done above anything else has shown that remote work actually works. >>And so as a result of that, what we've seen coming out of the pandemic is that organizations are really going to use that as a springboard. So implement some new strategies, new technologies, and really drive the next generation of that business. So with one eye on that, I think if you were to categorize the three big things that we're looking at from a Citrix perspective, it's really about how to help, we'll continue to help our customers with that accelerated it modernization to really help them understand what it takes to have secure, flexible work in this new post pandemic world. And then also to think about productivity, what does productivity mean in a world of ever more distributed teams? And so the events that we're talking about and specifically the cloud one, we'll focus on some of the new offerings from Citrix, some of the new technologies and talk about the trends that we've seen within our customers. >>So, you know, one of the big things that Citrix has always been very proud of is our market leading position in virtual application and virtual desktop delivery. And even that itself has now begun to emerge into what we call desktop as a service. And there's a ton of new innovations that we've been working on in that space as well. But also if you think about what's happening in cloud, as you talked about, you know, the evolution of applications being from traditional on premises, wills to SAS applications, what we're also seeing is things like the network services that use to support those applications when they looked slightly different, which from a deployment perspective, and now all moving to cloud services, the security that you alluded to in terms of how complicated that is, but how important it is for it, organizations, those services also moving to cloud as the applications begin to look very differently in the future. So extremely excited about the cloud launch. Patino, we're going to talk a lot about those things that we're doing both in the public cloud, in the hybrid cloud. And I think it will resonate well with customers around the world. >>I think it will as well. And you mentioned there are glimmers of hope that we've seen in the last 18 months. And one of the things that this has proved is that work from home can be productive, can be successful. Employees need to be empowered to be able to do that. Let's go ahead and talk through the first, um, program accelerating it monetization. This is Tuesday, September 28th. Let's talk about some of the, of the Citrix innovations that you're going to be announcing. >>Yeah, so I mean, as I mentioned know, we, we, we think about sort of ecstatic. I see modernization in various parts. You know, we tend to start with the classic infrastructure and we've seen over the years that lots of infrastructure, you know, he's leaving the building. And by that we mean the traditional realms of on-premise data centers or co-location facilities, this constant evolution and migration of those services, uh, to, to infrastructure as a service providers from the huge cloud companies that are out there. And we can continue to see that as a, as a huge trend. Of course. Um, one of the things that off the back of that of course is our move from the traditional world of virtual desktops, which was a very on-premise concept into desktop as a service. So really the key around desktop as a service, it's a simplification, some cost optimization and the things that it are looking at in terms of how they can really bring things to the party for their organizations going forward. >>And of course, as we move into that world of everything being delivered as a service know, things like network services, security services, they almost follow. So some of the things that you'll hear about that is really around our application, delivering security and also our move from VDI to DAS. And, you know, you'll hear a lot about what we're doing with the world's leading cloud providers to really add more Citrix value or build on what we've already done with them, but lots, lots more, uh, and really support the, the, the notion of the, every customer is on a journey to cloud one way or the other. And of course, districts will be ready to help at any stage of that journey. >>Every customer is on the journey to cloud. And we've seen that accelerate so much in the last 18 months. Talk to me a little bit about if we, if we think of desktop as a service, as an evolution of VDI, is that what you're saying? >>Yeah. You know, you think about sort of the traditional VDI scenario was that your virtual desktops, where we were using instead of physical desktops, you know, in inside the usual office location, but during the pandemic, you know, we saw so many customers rely on moving to VDI, to cloud, for reasons of scalability and reasons of security, but then also needing to still in many cases, provide access to those sort of traditional physical PCs. And of course, Citrix has had solutions for that for fundamentally many, many years. Um, but what we're also seeing is that organizations are striving for simplicity. You know, the kind of the value of the desktop is being able to deliver it on demand to the end user securely from wherever they are in the world on whatever device they're on. And as we see this sort of establishment of these new working norms, and I'm not a great fan of the phrase, the new normal, I think we have a new now and that now will evolve. You know, they almost daily as we come through the other side of the pandemic. So the real key drivers for us there obviously flexibility, reliability, security, and also cost optimization, which of course is the bread and butter of most conversations we have with CIO and CTO is around the world. >>That's critical. And I'm going to borrow that, um, the new, now, if you don't mind, I'll cite you credit. But I like that. I agree that I hope this is not the new normal, but one of the things that we've seen in the new now on the security front is we've seen this massive increase in ransomware. Everybody went to work from home almost overnight. Suddenly you have millions of devices, IOT devices connecting to corporate networks. Security became the acceleration of security, became a huge challenge for customers in any organization globally. Let's talk about now the second announcement. This is going to be Tuesday, October 5th, empowering a secure distributed workforce. >>Yeah. And I, and I think you you've hit the nail on the head there. I think the one thing that was perhaps completely staggering to everybody was the speed in which organizations were forced to lock their employees out of the physical office locations and by force. I mean, for all the right reasons that are around the health and wellbeing. I mean, if I think back to my earlier career, you know, before I joined Citrix, I was in a large organization and we would, you know, perform these fire drills every so often where we would go through our disaster recovery business continuity plans and really play scenarios out. Like the office in London was unavailable or the office in LA was unavailable, but never once do I remember is doing every office. And every location is offline from tomorrow. And there's no negotiability. If you have a device at home, please use it. >>You know, we can't provide laptops quick enough, especially with the global chip shortage now as well. So whatever device you have, we'll do our best to, to make that secure. And I think there was, uh, an expectation that the employees would sort of play nicely in that scenario. But of course, you know, if you have your home device, you probably don't update it as much as a work device. So it really does require a new set of thinking. And of course, Citrix has been at the forefront of the zero trust evolution. Now the technologies that we have in place do permit remote work and have them for many years. But I think what we're seeing now is a slightly different type of remote work, you know, with different types of, of applications and devices, as you said, different locations, you know, needing to knit all of that together in a sort of a more contextual way so that we can understand, you know, combinations of the end user, their location, the types of applications that they're using the state of their devices, and sort of bring it all that together to really understand, you know, just exactly how much security needs to be applied. >>I think the traditional challenges are still there, you know, too much security and end users will find a way around it because it's not a good user experience. And, you know, perhaps too much user experience without the security leaves, big holes and big problems for organizations. So, yeah, I think this balancing act is really key. And of course, uh, as we go through the launch funnel security, we'll talk about some of the great innovations and solutions that are coming from central. >>You're right with the fact that, uh, you know, this rapid pivot security, the changes, the things that people are saying, the workforce needs to be empowered. You know, we saw this sudden dependence on all these SAS applications to communicate and to collaborate. We also saw with that rapid PennDOT to work from home ransomware, I was doing some research recently, Christian, and that's it, it's up almost 11 X just in the first half of 2021 DDoSs is massively up. People are, are working from home in environments that are just suddenly a bit chaotic. And it's challenging from a security perspective when you have so many distractions to be able to make sure that you're following all the right steps as an employee, um, that you're not clicking on nefarious links and that you're really doing your own due diligence. So having that zero trust and help from folks like Citrix is really key to this new. Now, as you say, >>It is, you know, the unfortunate thing is that wildlife, uh, no end user, or certainly I would hope that no one user would willingly cause a problem from a security perspective. I think just by the very nature of the way that end users thing, can they interact with links in emails or the, uh, you know, interact with attachments in emails? Unfortunately, relying on the human is always going to be the weakest link in the chain. And I think that's why we have to have new approaches to how we address the use of behavior. You know, can we actually, uh, you know, guide people in different ways. There are plenty of technologies that are out there now. And then many, many from Citrix that actually allow us to what we've lovingly said is, is to save the users from themselves. You know, we can't simply rely on every user to be diligent for every single email or every single link that they see. So, you know, being able to actually understand, you know, where the threats are as it relates to the end user and the likely interaction they have, and then being able to combat those threats in the technology at a seamless way is really part of the excited evolution of, of what we're doing with Citrix. And again, lots of great things to come as we go through the security. >>And the third announcement is around worker boosting worker productivity. That's been a challenge that we've all faced in the last 18 months of having, like I said, a minute ago, you know, people that have suddenly kids learning from home spouses, working people competing for bandwidth. Talk to me about some of the things that Citrix is doing to help those workers be more engaged, be plugged in and really be able to get their jobs done from anywhere. >>Yeah, well, you know, I mean, I can give you the benefit of my experience, you know, being, uh, in a, in a home office for, for, for almost 20 months has been completely the antithesis of the opposite of the rest of my career. You know, I've, I've always been very mobile, um, you know, kind of picking up different devices and using them for different things, just purely from a, you know, the perspective of what's most convenient to me. And I think, you know, if you take that and extrapolate it to, to every employee and every organization around the world who has had to invite work into their home, you know, and another soundbite that I use quite often now is that, you know, for the last 20 months, we really haven't been working from home. We've been living at work, you know, and, and, and it's, it's a fact, you know, we've probably done more hours than ever before. >>We've run the risk of burnout more than ever before. And, you know, prior to the pandemic, I know, talked to you and I talked about this very thing, uh, at synergy, you know, w we talked about the notion of needing to focus on employee experience and employee productivity. You know, we saw plenty of examples in customers with huge initiatives around employee experience and employee productivity. You know, CIO is partnering with HR leads and really trying to figure out a map, the employee journey, you know, what is it that they do every day? You know, how can we make their life easier? And perhaps interestingly, how can we reduce some of the mundane overhead, you know, approvals or requests or things that we see in our everyday life, but actually give the employees more time to be valuable and, and do great cognitive work, which is of course, what, what humans do best. >>And so, you know, you remember, we talked about the micro apps back then. We, we we'd completed the acquisition of Sappho, uh, as you and I talked last time when we unveiled micro apps and micro workflows, as a way to really help end users interact within Citrix workspace. So the systems that they use every day, but provide a new way to do that. And just earlier this year, we completed the acquisition and integration of Reich, which was a fantastic addition to the Citrix portfolio. And so we've really begun to think about, you know, how can we actually help employees to do their best work? You know, w w what are the new capabilities that we need within Citrix workspace? What are the new capabilities that we need in Reich? How do we bring all that together with some of the other solutions that we have Citrix Podio is a really interesting suite of productivity applications that we have really aimed at that number one problem, which is how can I get people to be productive, to stay engaged, to lower the burnout and help them do their best work. And I'm really, really excited because there's some fantastic things. So we announced that the work version of the launch pod, which is on October 12th, >>All of those are so critical. You know, I I've always said employee productivity employee is directly related to the customer experience. I've used Wrike myself before, um, for different projects and being able to have productivity tools that allow the employee to engage, to be able to empower them to move projects forward, especially in a time that is still somewhat chaotic is, is critical as is to your point, ensuring that there are the proper tools to facilitate folks so that they get what they need when they need it to help reduce burnout. That's been a big challenge. You're right. That the living at work thing is real, it's persisting, and we're going to be in this hybrid environment for some TBD amount of time longer. So having the ability to be empowered and productive in a secure way, leveraging cloud capabilities is really key. And it's exciting to hear what Citrix launchpad is going to announce over those three days and deliver. >>Yeah. You know, I, I would just say, you know, in, in, in sort of summary where we're, we're really excited about the three areas now, and they really do sort of all come together in some of those challenges that we talked about, you know, specifically around how we can help organizations to address that accelerated it modernization to drive secure, flexible work in the new now, and also to really reach that goal of having extremely productive, distributed teams as we come out the other side of the pandemic. So, you know, lots going on a fantastic time to, to be here and to talk to you and to be at Citrix, of course, with so many, you know, huge customer issues that we, that we have to solve. And we're really excited for the challenge. >>Excellent. And we all are looking forward to that, the Citrix launchpad series, Christian, where can folks go to register for these different programs? >>Yeah, sure. So it's pretty simple. So if we just go to HTTP bit dot Lee, bit dot L Y forward slash Citrix launchpad, and we can sign up through that. >>Excellent. I've already signed up. I'm looking forward to these series, this series, to learn more about what you guys are doing and kind of dig in double click on some of the things that you spoke about Christian. Thank you for joining me today, talking about the launch pad series and letting folks know where they can go to register. >>Thank you. Great to be on the great to see you again. >>Likewise, for Christian Riley, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching a cube conversation.