>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and we're digging into VMware's Vsphere 7 announcement. We've had conversations with some of the executives, some of the technical people. But we know that there's no better way to really understand a technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it. So really happy to have join me for the program, I have Phil Buckley-Mellor. Who is an Infrastructure Designer with British Telecom. Joining me digitally from across the pond, Phil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Hi Stu. >> All right so, Phil, let's start of course British Telecom, I think most people know you know what BT is and you know it's a really sprawling company. Tell us a little bit about your group, your role, and what's your mandate? >> Okay so my group is called Service Platforms. It's the bit of BT that services all the multimillions of our customers. So we have broadband, we have TV, we have mobile. We have DNS and email systems. It's all about our customers. It's not a B2B part of BT, you with me? We specifically focus on those kind of multimillion customers that we've got in those various services. And in particular my group is for, we do infrastructure. So we do data center all the way up to really about boot time or so or just past boot time. And the application developers look after that stage and above. >> Okay great we are definitely going to want to dig in and talk about that. That boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams. But let's talk a little bit first, you know we're talking about VMware. So you know, how long has your organization been doing VMware? And tell us what you see with the announcement that VMware is making for vSphere 7? >> Sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about 12, 13 years. Something like that. And it's an absolutely key part of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really. In every part of our operations design, development, and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products. And so one of the challenges that we've got right now, is application architecture's are changing quite significantly at the moment and as you know. In particular with Serverless and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that. We're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while. We currently use, extensively we use vSphere, NSX T, Vrops, login site, networking site, and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications. And our operations team they know how to use that. They know how to optimize. They know how to PaaS on-prem and troubleshoot. So that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade a least. We've been really, really confident with our ability to work with VMware environments. And along came containers and like I said multicloud as well. And what we were struggling with was the inability to have a single pane of glass. really on all that. And to use the same people and the same processes to manage a different kind of technology. So we've been working pretty closely with VMware on number of different containerization products for several years now. I've worked really closely with the vSphere Integrated Containers guys in particular and now with the pacific guys. With really the idea that when we bring in version 7, and the containerization aspect of version 7 we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass. To allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container. That's really the holy grail, right? >> Yeah >> So we'll be able to allow our developers to develop, our operations team to deploy and to operate, and our designers to see the same infrastructure, whether that's on-premises, cloud, or off premises. And be able to manage the whole piece in that respect. >> Okay so, Phil, really interesting things you've walked through here. You've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years. Want to understand in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds great. I managed all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs, you know? If I think back you know, from an applications standpoint, it was you know let's stick in in a VM. I don't need to change it. And once I spin up a VM, often that's going to sit there for months, if not years. As opposed to you know, I think about a containerization environment. I really want to pull the resources. I'm going to create and destroy things all the time. So you know, bring us inside that organizational piece. You know how much will there need to be interaction, and more interaction or change in policies, between your infrastructure team and your App Dev team? >> Well yes I mean you're absolutely right. The nature and the time scales that we're talking about between VMs and containers is wildly different. As you say we probably almost certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2018 certainly I imagine. Haven't really been touched. Where as you say VMs, a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time. There are parts of our architecture that require that. In particular the very client facing bursty stuff. You know it does require spinning up and spinning down pretty quickly. But some of our other containers do sit around for weeks if not months. It would really just depend on the development cycle aspects of that. But the hard bit that we've really had was just the visualizing it. There are a number of different products out there that will allow you see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment, allow you to troubleshoot on some of them. But they are not... They're new products. They are new things that we would have to get used to. And also it seems like there's an awful lot of competing products. Quite a Venn diagram in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that. So again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere To be able to have a list of VMs and along side it is a list of containers. And to be able to use policies to define how they behave. In terms of the networking, to be able to essentially put our deployments on rails, by using in particular TAC based policies. Means that we can take the owners of security we can take the owners of performance management and capacity management away from the developers. Who don't really care about that a lot of the time. And they can just get on with their job. Which is to develop new functionality and help our customers. So that then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies and making sure that they're adhered to. But again we know how to do that with VMs through vSphere. So the fact that we can actually apply that straight away just with slightly different compute unit, which is really all we're talking about here, is ideal. And then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well. Because we do use multiple clouds where Asia, the US, and Azure customers. And we're between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything other than be excited about to take up. >> Phil, I really like how you described really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand right there's things that developers care about you know they want to move fast they want to be able to build new things. and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about and you know we talk about some of the new world and you know can the platform underneath this take care of it. Well there's somethings platforms take care of, there's somethings that the software or you know your team is going to need to understand So maybe if you could dig in a little bit to some of those what are the drivers from your application portfolio? What is the business asking of your organization that's driving this change and being one of those you know tailwinds pushing you towards you know Kubernetes and the vSphere 7 technologies. >> Well it all comes down to the customers, right. Our customers want new functionality. They want new integrations. They want new content. They want better stability and better performance. And our ability to extend or contract in capacity as needed as well. So they are the real, ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services. So we have to address that, really from a development perspective. It's our developers that have the responsibility to design and deploy those. So we have to, in infrastructure we have to act as a firm foundation really underneath all of that that. That allows them to know that what they spend their time to develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performance. We understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in the short term and in the long term for that. And is secure as well, obviously as well is a big aspect to it. So really we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted. >> Great Phil, you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as your VMware farm I want to make sure if you can explain a little bit a couple of things. Number one is when it comes to your team, especially your infrastructure team. How much are they involved with setting up some of the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud? And secondly when you look at your applications are some of your clouds, some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud and I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around but maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to what cloud really means to your organization and your applications? >> Sure well I mean to us clouds allows us to accelerate development. Which is nice because it means we don't have to do on premises capacity uplifts for new pieces of functionality or so. We can initially build in cloud and test in the cloud. But very often applications really make better sense especially in the TV environment, where people watch TV all the time I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching. The same goes for broadband really. But we generally we're more than an a tower application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have applications that when it makes sense we run them inside, our organization when we have to run them in our organization for you know data protection reasons or whatever. Then we can do that as well but then where say for instance we have a boxing match up. And we're going to see an enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our order journey to allow them to view that to gain access to that. Well why would you spend a lot of money on service just for that level of additional capacity? So we do absolutely have hybrid applications. Not necessarily hybrid blocks. We have blocks of sub-applications. You know dozens of them really to support our whole platform. And what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure. For one of the platforms I mentioned that some of the some of those application blocks have to run inside some can run outside. And what we want to be able to do is let our operations team to define that again by policy As to where they run. And to have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running, how they're running, and the implications of those decisions. So that we can trim those maybe in the future as well. And that way we best serve our customers. We get to, get our customers yeah what they need. >> All right great, Phil. Final question I have for you, You've been through a few iterations of looking at Vms, containers, public cloud. What advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at say a year or two ago? >> Well I'll be honest, I was a little bit surprised by vSphere 7. We knew that VMware were working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as VMs. I mean they're called VMware after all, right. And we knew that they were looking at that. But I was surprised by just quite how quickly they have managed to almost completely reinvent their application really. It's you know if you look at the whole Tanzu stuff and the mission control stuff. I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves, from an application perspective you know. And to really leap forward. And this is between version 6 and 7. I've been following these since version 3 at least. And it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture. The aims to what they want to achieve with the application. And luckily the nice thing is that if you're used to version 6 it's not that big a deal. It's really not that big a deal to move forward at all. It's not such a big change to process and the training and things like that. But my word there's an awful lot of work underneath that. Underneath the covers. And I'm really excited and I think other people in my position should just take it as an opportunity to revisit what they can achieve in particular with vSphere and with in combination with AdeXT. It's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slides about it and unless you've seen the products. Just how revolutionary version 7 is compared to previous versions. Which have kind of evolved for a couple of years. So yeah I think I'm really excited about it. I know a lot of my peers at other companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about 7 as well. So yeah I'm really excited about the whole piece. >> Well, Phil thank you so much. Absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware. The entire company and their ecosystem rallying around help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go. Phil Buckley, joining us from British Telecom. I'm Stu Miniman thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (Instrumental music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to the Palo Alto Studios, theCube. I'm John Furrier, we here for a special Cube Conversation and special report, big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7. I'm here with Krish Prasad SVP and General Manager of the vSphere Business and Cloud Platform Business Unit. And Paul Turner, VP of vSphere Product Management. Guys, thanks for coming in and talking about the big news. >> Thank you for having us. >> You guys announced some interesting things back in March around containers, Kubernetes and vSphere. Krish, tell us about the hard news what's being announced? >> Today we are announcing the general availability of vSphere 7. John, it's by far the biggest release that we have done in the last 10 years. We premiered it as project Pacific few months ago. With this release, we are putting Kubernetes native support into the vSphere platform. What that allows us to do is give customers the ability to run both modern applications based on Kubernetes and containers, as well as traditional VM based applications on the same platform. And it also allows the IT departments to provide their developers, cloud operating model using the VMware cloud foundation that is powered by this release. This is a key part of our (murmurs) portfolio solutions and products that we announced this year. And it is targeted fully at the developers of modern applications. >> And the specific news is vSphere.. >> Seven is generally available. >> Generally a vSphere 7? >> Yes. >> So let's on the trend line here, the relevance is what? What's the big trend line, that this is riding obviously we saw the announcements at VMware last year, and throughout the year, there's a lot of buzz. Pat Gelsinger says, "There's a big wave here with Kubernetes." What does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend? >> Yes what Kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation, they're trying to modernize the IT applications. And the best way to do that, is build off your current platform, expand it and make it a an innovative, an Agile Platform for you to run Kubernetes applications and VM applications together. And not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment, both on-prem and public cloud together. So they want to be able to evolve and modernize their application stack, but modernize their infrastructure stack, which means hybrid cloud operations with innovative applications Kubernetes or container based applications and VMs. >> What's exciting about this trend, Krish, we were talking about this at VMworld last year, we had many conversations around cloud native, but you're seeing cloud native becoming the operating model for modern business. I mean, this is really the move to the cloud. If you look at the successful enterprises, leaving the suppliers, the on premises piece, if not moved to the cloud native marketplace technologies, the on-premise isn't effective. So it's not so much on-premises going away, we know it's not, but it's turning into cloud native. This is the move to the cloud generally, this is a big wave. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, John, if you think about it on-premise, we have, significant market share, we are by far the leader in the market. And so what we are trying to do with this, is to allow customers to use the current platform they are using, but bring their modern application development on top of the same platform. Today, customers tend to set up stacks, which are different, so you have a Kubernetes stack, you have stack for the traditional applications, you have operators and administrators who are specialized in Kubernetes on one side, and you have the traditional VM operators on the other side. With this move, what we are saying is that you can be on the same common platform, you can have the same administrators who are used to administering the environment that you already had, and at the same time, offer the developers what they like, which is Kubernetes dial-tone, that they can come and deploy their applications on the same platform that you use for traditional applications. >> Yeah, Paul, Pat said Kubernetes can be the dial-tone of the internet. Most millennials might even know what dial-tone is. But what he meant is that's the key fabric, that's going to orchestrate. And we've heard over the years skill gap, skill gap, not a lot of skills out there. But when you look at the reality of skills gap, it's really about skills gaps and shortages, not enough people, most CIOs and chief information security officers, that we talk to, say, I don't want to fork my development teams, I don't want to have three separate teams, I don't have to, I want to have automation, I want an operating model that's not going to be fragmented. This kind of speaks to this whole idea of, interoperability and multi cloud. This seems to be the next big way behind hybrid. >> I think it is the next big wave, the thing that customers are looking for is a cloud operating model. They like the ability for developers to be able to invoke new services on demand in a very agile way. And we want to bring that cloud operating model to on-prem, to Google Cloud, to Amazon cloud to Microsoft Cloud to any of our VCPP partners. You get the same cloud operating experience. And it's all driven by a Kubernetes based dial-tone that's effective and available within this platform. So by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can run in this hybrid manner, and give you the cloud operating agility the developers are looking for, that's what's key in version seven. >> Does Pat Gelsinger mean when he says dial-tone of the internet Kubernetes. Does he mean always on? or what does he mean specifically? Just that it's always available? what's the meaning behind that phrase? >> The first thing he means is that developers can come to the infrastructure, which is, The VMware Cloud Foundation, and be able to work with a set of API's that are Kubernetes API's. So developers understand that, they are looking for that. They understand that dial-tone, right? And you come to our VMware cloud foundation that runs across all these clouds, you get the same API set that you can use to deploy that application. >> Okay, so let's get into the value here of vSphere 7, how does VMware and vSphere 7 specifically help customers? Isn't just bolting on Kubernetes to vSphere, some will say is that's simple or (murmurs) you're running product management no, it's not that easy. Some people say, "He is bolting Kubernetes on vSphere." >> it's not that easy. So one of the things, if anybody has actually tried deploying Kubernetes, first, it's highly complicated. And so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a bolt on, but it's certainly not like that we are making it incredibly simple. You talked about IT operational shortages, customers want to be able to deploy Kubernetes environments in a very simple way. The easiest way that you can do that is take your existing environment that route 90% of IT, and just turn on the Kubernetes dial-tone, and it is as simple as that. Now, it's much more than that, in version seven, as well, we're bringing in a couple things that are very important. You also have to be able to manage at scale, just like you would in the cloud, you want to be able to have infrastructure, almost self manage and upgrade and lifecycle manage itself. And so we're bringing in a new way of managing infrastructure so that you can manage just large scale environments, both on-premise and public cloud environments at scale. And then associated with that as well is you must make it secure. So there's a lot of enhancements we're building into the platform around what we call intrinsic security, which is how can we actually build in a truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT. >> I was just going to touch on your point about this, the shortage of IT staff, and how we are addressing that here. The way we are addressing that, is that the IT administrators that are used to administering vSphere can continue to administer this enhanced platform with Kubernetes, the same way they administered the older releases, so they don't have to learn anything new. They are just working the same way. We are not changing any tools, process, technologies. >> So same as it was before? >> Same as before. >> More capability. >> More capability. And developers can come in and they see new capabilities around Kubernetes. So it's a best of both worlds. >> And what was the pain point that you guys are solving? Obviously, the ease of use is critical, obviously, operationally, I get that. As you look at the cloud native developer cycles, infrastructure as code means, as app developers, on the other side, taking advantage of it. What's the real pain point that you guys are solving with vSphere 7. >> So I think it's multiple factors. So first is we've talked about agility a few times, there is DevOps is a real trend inside an IT organizations. They need to be able to build and deliver applications much quicker, they need to be able to respond to the business. And to do that, what they are doing is they need infrastructure that is on demand. So what we're really doing in the core Kubernetes kind of enablement, is allowing that on demand fulfillment of infrastructure, so you get that agility that you need. But it's not just tied to modern applications. It's also all of your existing business applications and your monitoring applications on one platform, which means that you've got a very simple and low cost way of managing large scale IT infrastructure. So that's a huge piece as well. And then I do want to emphasize a couple of other things. We're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for SAP HANA databases, where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there. And you have all of the capabilities like the GPU awareness and FPGA awareness that we built into the platform, so that you can truly run this as the fastest accelerated platform for your most extreme applications. So you've got the ability to run those applications, as well as your Kubernetes and Container based application. >> That's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right? >> That's right, yeah. It's quite powerful that we've actually brought in, basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers, whether that's through containers or through VMs. >> Krish, I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned. I get the lifestyle improvement, life lifecycle improvement, I get the application acceleration innovation, but the intrinsic security is interesting. Could you take a minute, explain what that is? >> Yeah, so there's a few different aspects. One is looking at how can we actually provide a trusted environment. And that means that you need to have a way that the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom, as we would call it. You want to have a controlled environment that, some of the worst security challenges inside in some of the companies has been your internal IT staff. So you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment independent. We've got vSphere Trust Authority that we released in version seven, that actually gives you a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates. So you've got this, continuous runtime. Now, not only that, we've actually gone and taken our carbon black features, and we're actually building in full support for carbon black into the platform. So that you've got native security of even your application ecosystem. >> Yeah, that's been coming up a lot conversations, the carbon black and the security piece. Krish obviously vSphere everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense, but you have a lot of touch points, you got cloud, hyper scalars got the edge, you got partners. >> We have that dominant market share on private cloud. We are on Amazon, as you will know, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud. So all the major clouds, there is a vSphere stack running. So it allows customers if you think about it, it allows customers to have the same operating model, irrespective of where their workload is residing. They can set policies, components, security, they set it once, it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud, and it's all supported by our VMware Cloud Foundation, which is powered by vSphere 7. >> Yeah, I think having that, the cloud as API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model. Alright guys, so let's summarize the announcement. What do you guys their takeaway from this vSphere 7, what is the bottom line? What's it really mean? (Paul laughs) >> I think what we're, if we look at it for developers, we are democratizing Kubernetes. We already are in 90% of IT environments out there are running vSphere. We are bringing to every one of those vSphere environments and all of the virtual infrastructure administrators, they can now manage Kubernetes environments, you can you can manage it by simply upgrading your environment. That's a really nice position rather than having independent kind of environments you need to manage. So I think that is one of the key things that's in here. The other thing though, I don't think any other platform out there, other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's, in Amazon's, in Microsoft's, in thousands of VCPP partners. You have one hybrid platform that you can run with. And that's got operational benefits, that's got efficiency benefits, that's got agility benefits. >> Great. >> Yeah, I would just add to that and say that, look, we want to meet customers, where they are in their journey. And we want to enable them to make business decisions without technology getting in the way. And I think the announcement that we made today, with vSphere 7, is going to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey, without making trade offs on people, process and technology. And there is more to come. Look, we are laser focused on making our platform the best in the industry, for running all kinds of applications and the best platform for a hybrid and multi cloud. And so you will see more capabilities coming in the future. Stay tuned. >> Well, one final question on this news announcement, which is awesome, vSphere, core product for you guys, if I'm the customer, tell me why it's going to be important five years from now? >> Because of what I just said, it is the only platform that is going to be running across all the public clouds, which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the cloud. So think about it. If you go to Amazon native, and then you have a workload in Azure, you're going to have different tools, different processes, different people trained to work with those clouds. But when you come to VMware and you use our Cloud Foundation, you have one operating model across all these environments, and that's going to be game changing. >> Great stuff, great stuff. Thanks for unpacking that for us. Congratulations on the announcement. >> Thank you. >> vSphere 7, news special report here, inside theCube cCnversation, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCube. We are having a very special Cube Conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will of the new VMware vSphere 7.0 we're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have longtime Cube alumni, Kit Colbert here, is the VP and CTO of Cloud Platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. And, and new to theCube, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management VMware, and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release. And great to have you on board. >> Feels pretty good, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7, bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that might be coming with the acquisition of the FTO team. So really exciting news. And I think Kit you tease it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud. So this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So, we talked at VMworld about project Pacific, this technology preview, and as Jared mentioned, what that was, is how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere. As you know, we had Hybrid Cloud Vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible. Now part of the broader VMware Cloud Foundation portfolio. And as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud on-premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question, how do we actually evolve that platform? So it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> All right. So I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo. So why (murmurs) and let's see what it looks like. You guys can keep the demo? >> Narrator: So we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware Cloud Foundation for and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is a developer is actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The selfie in watermelon, (all laughing) So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads, though. This is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed, so go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed. On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And one of the amazing things about this is, from an infrastructure is code standpoint. Now, the developers infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in, not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at sort of a side by side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application and on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things, the same names, and so this means what a developer calls their IT department and says, "Hey, I got a problem with my database," we don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter vSphere namespaces. And so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now as a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my active directory infrastructure, so I can use the same, corporate credentials to access the system, I tap into all my existing storage. So, this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere, but to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides, seeing the VMs and things that developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created, the compute network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again, from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data is invaluable, often saves hours, just to try to figure out what we're even talking about more trying to resolve an issue. So, as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot, we get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, "Where's the Kubernetes?" And they're surprised. They're like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks, it looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer stores, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well, it's pretty wild. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined Kit teased out at VMworld, which was, the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but (murmurs) see Kubernetes and really bringing those together in a unified environment. So that, depending on what your job is and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see in this kind of unified environment. >> Yeah, as the demo showed, (clears throat) it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere, Kubernetes base one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as the traditional vSphere interface API's, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> And then it really is interesting too, you tease that a lot. That was a good little preview, people knew they're watching. But you talked about really cloud journey and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are that are running in their classic VMs, and then kind of the modern, kind of cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum, and getting from one to the other, but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will, and this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum, they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, I think we think a lot about it like that, we talk to customers, and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go, their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud and involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them. Because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of these two extremes either you're here where you are, kind of the old current world, and you got the bright Nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other, they have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming, and very error prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really to your point as you call it, the messy middle, I would say it's more like, how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap we had to invest all this time and resources? How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps, each of which have a lot of business value, but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application, where there's a lot of things that are different about it. But one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate, versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities what the application can do. And that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense. As you said, not all applications need to make that move, but most of them should, and most of them are, and most of them are at least making that journey. Do you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that, certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from, looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7, is how we manage applications. So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings, or, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure, you talk about it in terms of, this VM is going to be encrypted, or this VM is going to have this firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say, I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> And like, I can even zoom back a little bit there and say, if you look back, one thing we did was something like vSAN before that people had to put policies on a LAN an actual storage LAN, and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, inherited certain policies. And so, vSAN will turn that around allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared is talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workloads is not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. You got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some on the cloud. And so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere is really powerful and very simplified one. >> And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view, which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but when the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications. And more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them, based on on either customer demands or competitive demands, or just changes in the marketplace. >> Yeah when you look at something like a modern app that maybe has 100 VMs that are part of it, and you take something like compliance. So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down hardened and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. If you think about vCenter today, you might log in and see 1000 VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before. Because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e. building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so being by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level, and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction. It actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other. But in fact, now they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe, and in compliance, and so forth. >> So there's a lot more to this, this is a very significant release, right? Again, a lot of foreshadowing, if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant kind of re-architecture of many, many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question, because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific, but it's now just part of vSphere. And certainly, that is a very large aspect of it. But to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so there is a demo here, let's pull up some slides. And we're ready to take a look at what's there. So, outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first first one is simplified Lifecycle Management. And then really focused on security as a second one, and then applications as well, but both including, the cloud native apps that could fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing, around simplifying life cycles. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology vSphere Lifecycle Management, vLCM. And the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, lifecycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative, with a single image, you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of ins and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really, really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, because upgrading to the sevens is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing you as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great VCR functionality at a more rapid clip. How do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well. >> Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep >> We just got back from RSA. Thank goodness, we got that show in before all the badness started. But everyone always talks about security is got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. Talk about kind of the the changes in the security. >> So I've done a lot of things around security, things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, dramatic simplifications they're across the board. What I want to focus on here, on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere Trust Authority. And so with that one, what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces, and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats, including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted. And obviously, if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them. How do you implement the concept of least privilege. >> Jeff: Or zero trust (murmurs) >> Exactly. So they idea with trust authority that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down ensure a fully secure, those can be managed by a special vCenter Server, which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that, okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay, so they're okay to actually run workloads or they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, just better leveraging, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs, and kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed. So you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space, as you mentioned, all sorts of accelerators coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3D rendering. But FPGAs, and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw in the very early days of virtualization, i.e. silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And what you find is, all the things we found before you find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, putting security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see in most customers and it's funny because, and sometimes you think, "Wow, shouldn't we be past this?" As an industry should we have solved this already, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage network. But now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere, really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide, we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if the we go to the next slide, what we see is that, with that fusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization, you can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together. So they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, have multiple people sharing a GPU, we can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it, in fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's free, it's pretty cheap, because the classifications of the assets now are much, much larger, much varied and much more workload specific right. That's really the opportunity slash challenge there. >> They are a lot more diverse And so like, a couple other things just, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities, things around DRS and vMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right. So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA or Oracle databases, and how do we ensure that vMotion can scale to handle those, without impacting their performance or anything else there? Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing, and so forth. So a lot of the stuff not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core as people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> All right. So Jared I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while. There's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them? What should they be excited about? What are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps. I think today, you look at all of these organizations, and what ends up happening is, the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT infrastructure. And so, now, I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple of years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team? Make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation and Kit both of you for getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift. And it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it. And thanks for for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep dive into this ton more resources for people that didn't want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCube. We're in the Palo Alto Studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music) >> Hi, and welcome to a special Cube Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're digging into VMware vSphere 7 announcement. We've had conversations with some of the executives some of the technical people, but we know that there's no better way to really understand the technology than to talk to some of the practitioners that are using it. So really happy to have joined me on the program. I have Philip Buckley-Mellor, who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond. Phil, thanks so much for joining us. >> Nice too. >> Alright, so Phil, let's start of course, British Telecom, I think most people know, you know what BT is and it's, really sprawling company. Tell us a little bit about, your group, your role and what's your mandate. >> Okay, so, my group is called service platforms. It's the bit of BT that services all of our multi millions of our customers. So we have broadband, we have TV, we have mobile, we have DNS and email systems. And it's all about our customers. It's not a B2B part of BT, you're with me? We specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services. And in particular, my group we do infrastructure. we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just pass boot time, and the application developers look after that stage and above. >> Okay, great, we definitely going to want to dig in and talk about that, that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams. But let's talk a little bit first, we're talking about VMware. So, how long has your organization been doing VMware and tell us, what you see with the announcement that VMware is making for vSphere 7? >> Sure, well, I mean, we've had really great relationship with VMware for about 12, 13 years, something like that. And it's a absolutely key part of our infrastructure. It's written throughout BT, really, in every part of our operations, design, development, and the whole ethos of the company is based around a lot of VMware products. And so one of the challenges that we've got right now is application architectures are changing quite significantly at the moment, And as you know, in particular with serverless, and with containers and a whole bunch of other things like that. We're very comfortable with our ability to manage VMs and have been for a while. We currently use extensively we use vSphere NSXT, VROPs, login site, network insight and a whole bunch of other VMware constellation applications. And our operations teams know how to use that they know how to optimize, they know how to pass the plan, and (murmurs). So that's great. And that's been like that for half a decade at least, we've been really, really confident with our ability to deal with VMware environments. And along came containers and like, say, multi cloud as well. And what we were struggling with was the inability to have a single pane of glass, really on all of that, and to use the same people and the same processes to manage a different kind of technology. So we, we've been working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products. For several years now, I've worked really closely with the vSphere integrated containers, guys in particular, and now with the Pacific guys, with really the ideal that when we bring in version seven and the containerization aspects of version seven, we'll be in a position to have that single pane of glass to allow our operations team to really barely differentiate between what's a VM and what's a container. That's really the Holy Grail. So we'll be able to allow our developers to develop, our operations team to deploy and to operate, and our designers to see the same infrastructure, whether that's on-premises, cloud or off-premises, and be able to manage the whole piece in that respect. >> Okay, so Phil, really interesting things you walk through here, you've been using containers in a virtualized environment for a number of years, want to understand and the organizational piece just a little bit, because it sounds great, I manage all the environment, but, containers are a little bit different than VMs. if I think back, from an application standpoint, it was, let's stick it in a VM, I don't need to change it. And once I spin up a VM, often that's going to sit there for, months, if not years, as opposed to, I think about a containerization environment. It's, I really want to pool of resources, I'm going to create and destroy things all the time. So, bring us inside that organizational piece. How much will there needs to be interaction and more interaction or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team? >> Well, yes, me absolutely right, that's the nature and the timescales that we're talking about between VMs and containers is wildly different. As you say, we probably almost certainly have Vms in place now that were in place in 2018 certainly I imagine, and haven't really been touched. Whereas as you say, VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time. There are parts of architecture that require that, in particular, the very client facing bursty stuff, does require spinning up and spinning down pretty quickly. But some of our some of our other containers do sit around for weeks, if not months, really does depend on the development cycle aspects of that, but the heartbeat that we've really had was just visualizing it. And there are a number of different products out there that allow you to see the behavior of your containers and understand the resource requirements that they are having at any given moment. Allies troubleshoot and seven. But they need any problems, the new things that we we will have to get used to. And also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products, quite a Venn diagram of in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that. So again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere. And to be able to have a list of VMs on alongside is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how they behave in terms of their networking, to be able to essentially put our deployments on rails by using in particular tag based policies, means that we can take the onus of security, we can take the onus of performance management and capacity management away from the developers who don't really have a lot of time, and they can just get on with their job, which is to develop new functionality, and help our customers. So that means then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies, and making sure that they're adhered to. But again, we know how to do that with the VMs through vSphere. So the fact that we can actually apply that straight away, just with slightly different compute unit, is really what we're talking about here is ideal, and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well, because we do use multiple clouds where (murmurs) and as your customers, and we're between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything other than be excited about (murmurs) >> Yeah, Phil, I really like how you described really the changing roles that are happening there in your organization need to understand, right? There's things that developers care about the they want to move fast, they want to be able to build new things and there's things that they shouldn't have to worry about. And, you know, we talked about some of the new world and it's like, oh, can the platform underneath this take care of it? Well, there's some things platforms take care of, there's some things that the software or your team is going to need to understand. So maybe if you could dig in a little bit, some of those, what are the drivers from your application portfolio? What is the business asking of your organization that's driving this change? And being one of those tail winds pushing you towards, Kubernetes and the vSphere 7 technologies? >> Well, it all comes down to the customers, right? Our customers want new functionality. They want new integrations, they want new content, they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well. So there will be ultimate challenges that we want to give our customers the best possible experience of our products and services. So we have to have address that really from a development perspective, it's our developers have the responsibility to, design and deploy those. So, in infrastructure, we have to act as a firm, foundation, really underneath all of that. That allows them to know that what they spend their time and develop and want to push out to our customers is something that can be trusted is performant. We understand where the capacity requirements are coming from in the short term, and in the long term for that, and he's secure as well, obviously, is a big aspect to it. And so really, we're just providing our developers with the best possible chance of giving our customers what will hopefully make them delighted. >> Great, Phil, you've mentioned a couple of times that you're using public clouds as well as, your VMware firm. Want to make sure I if you can explain a little bit a couple of things. Number one is, when it comes to your team, especially your infrastructure team, how much are they in involved with setting up some of the basic pieces or managing things like performance in the public cloud. And secondly, when you look at your applications, or some of your clouds, some of your applications hybrid going between the data center and the public cloud. And I haven't talked to too many customers that are doing applications that just live in any cloud and move things around. But you know, maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to, what cloud really means to your organization and your applications? >> Sure, well, I mean, tools. Cloud allows us to accelerate development, which is nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality are so we can initially build in the cloud and test in the cloud. But very often, applications really make better sense, especially in the TV environment where people watch TV all the time. I mean, yes, there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching. Same goes for broadband really. But we generally were well more than an eight hour application profile. So what that allows us to do then is to have applications that are, well, it makes sense. We run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for, data protection reasons or whatever, then we can do that as well. But where we say, for instance, we have a boxing match on. And we're going to be seeing an enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our auto journey to allow them to view that and to gain access to that, well, why would you spend a lot of money on servers just for that level of additional capacity? So we do absolutely have hybrid applications, not sorry, hybrid blocks, we have blocks of sub applications, dozens of them really to support our platform. And what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platforms, I mentioned, that some of the some of those application blocks have to run inside some can run outside and what we want to be able to do is to allow our operations team to define that, again, by policies to where they run, and to, have a system that allows us to transparently see where they're running, how they're running, and the implications of those decisions so that we can tune those maybe in the future as well. And that way, we best serve our customers. We got to get our customers yeah, what they need. >> All right, great, Phil, final question I have for you, you've been through a few iterations of looking at VMs containers, public cloud, what what advice would you give your peers with the announcement of vSphere 7 and how they can look at things today in 2020 versus what they might have looked at, say a year or two ago? >> Well, I'll be honest, I was a little bit surprised by vSphere 7. We knew that VMware will working on trying to make containers on the same level, both from a management deployment perspective as VMs. I mean, they're called VMware after all right? And we knew that they were looking at that. But I was surprised by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent the application, really. It's, you know, if you look at the whole Tansy stuff and the Mission Control stuff, I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves from an application perspective, and to really leap forward. And this is, between version six and seven. I've been following these since version three, at least. And it's an absolutely revolutionary change in terms of the overall architecture. The aims to, to what they want to achieve with the application. And luckily, the nice thing is, is that if you're used to version six is not that big a deal, it's really not that big a deal to move forward at all, it's not such a big change to process and training and things like that. But my word, there's an awful lot of work underneath that, underneath the covers. And I'm really excited. And I think all the people in my position should really use take it as an opportunity to revisit what they can achieve with, in particular with vSphere, and with in combination with NSXT, it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slides about it and unless you've seen the product, just how revolutionary the version seven is compared to previous versions, which have kind of evolved through a couple of years. So yeah, I think I'm really excited about it. And I know a lot of my peers or the companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well. So yeah, I'm really excited about though the whole base >> Well, Phil, thank you so much. Absolutely no doubt this is a huge move for VMware, the entire company and their ecosystem rallying around, help move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go. Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you my Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeaamOn. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman, Duncan Epping is here, Chief Technologist, Storage and Availability at VMWare and the world's number one blogger in virtualization, Yellow Bricks, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much coming to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> No problem, my pleasure, it's been a while. I actually hoped to be on the show probably six, seven, eight years ago, I don't know how long it is, but I've watched many episodes. So it's great to be part of it. >> Well great, Duncan one of the biggest problems is you're so busy, every year at VM World you were totally booked up, so no thanks so much we're so glad we could do this. >> So Stu and I remember the peer insight we did many many years ago back when we had Boonyon on recently, and he was talking about when VMWare sort of created virtualization, it pushed the bottle neck around. It created a lot of stress on the storage systems. And WMWare for years dealt with that through API integration and the like and very well sort of covered. But I wonder if you could take us through your perspectives of the journey of storage at VMWare and generally, or specifically, and virtualization generally. >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think everyone that has been part of the community has faced all of the different challenges from a storage perspective. I mean, Stu, you now what kind of problem EMC had when VMWare first started doing virtualization. And I think the key reasons for these were fairly straightforward. When we started virtualization and we started leveraging shared storage systems, those shared storage systems were never designed with virtualization in the back of their minds. They were designed for physical workloads, maybe one or two machines connected to it, you know in larger volume it may be 10 or 15, but not 10 or 15 physical hosts with hundred of virtual machines. So we started noticing is that from a performance perspective systems were lagging, we were doing all sorts of things to the storage systems that they weren't expecting, virtual machine snapshots. They were seeing IO patterns that they had never seen before. Instead of sequential IO we had a lot of random IOs so we had to start doing different things from a storage perspective so as you said, we started with APIs, we had the vSPhere APIs for IO filtering, we have the Divi APIs, the array integration, so that we can offload some of the functionality, but of course on top of that what we started doing within VMWare is we started exploring what we could do smarter from a storage point from our stance. So not just looking at how we can help the ecosystem, but also what we can do from our perspective, so there were two main efforts over the past couple of years. The first one is virtual volumes. It has taken a while before the adoption ramped up. I think part of that is mainly because a lot of our customer base was still on vSphere 5.5. Now that we're starting to see broader adoption of vSphere 6.0 and actually 6.5 and 6.7, we're starting to see the adoption of stuff like virtual volumes go up as well. That is also due to the fact that our partners like Pure Storage, Nimble, HP with 3PAR has been pushing or have been pushing VVols tremendously. So they've done a great job, and we're starting to see a lot of customers adopting VVols, and that way we're getting around some of the limitations that we have from a traditional storage perspective. >> Explain that, what are customers telling you about the benefits that they're getting out of VVols and VVol and VVol adoption? >> Well, there's two main things. It kind of depends on what kind of problems you're facing, but a lot of customers come to us with management issues and scalability issues. From a scalability perspective we have larger customers that literally have thousands of volumes. If you look at an E6 cluster today you're limited in terms of the numbers of volumes you can connect to a cluster. So that's one thing. As soon as they start moving to VVols now they're not managing those individual volumes anymore but they're managing the storage system as a whole, and they start creating policies, and that's where the management aspect comes into play. So it becomes a lot easier to manage, because instead of having thousands of volumes to select from, they don't normally have to look at a spreadsheet, for instance, to figure out where to place a virtual machine, now they simply make a policy and the policy engine will figure out where to place that virtual machine. >> Dave: It sounds like cloud. >> It actually is, you know, the cloud version of, cloudified version of storage I would say. But it brings a lot of benefits. And the funny thing is that we've been talking about policies and policy engines for a long time, even in the cloud, but try to come up with one cloud that actually has a decent policy engine. Hardly anyone has that today. From a storage perspective I think storage policy based management framework that VMWare has is quite unique. Well now we're starting to see that popping up in other areas, and that's the strange thing about it. >> Always back to the software mainframe Stu. >> Yeah, and Duncan one of the things we've really seen, a transition for, it took us about a decade to try and fix storage in a virtualized environment, and today most things are built either understanding virtualization, or at least that's part of the puzzle, and then of course VVols led us into was the ability for vSANs. Help us kind of transition that threshold as to how that's just kind of a given underneath for vSAN and other solutions like it. >> Yeah, if you look at vSAN it has been around for a while. The beta was in 2013, as you guys know. We have a large adoption, at least we saw a large increase over the last couple of years, I would say the last two years. You guys have spoken with Yangbing before, so you know about the business side of vSAN, I'm not going to cover that, but if you look at it from a technology perspective we stared developing this 2008, 2009, that's when we started thinking about what we could do different from a storage perspective. There were already some companies doing something in the hyperverge space and we figured we could do something significantly different than they were doing. They had a storage solution that sat on top of the hypervisor, we own the hypervisor so we can create something that sits within the hypervisor, and that's when we started looking at including these different technologies, so we started looking in how can we introduce things like deduplication and compression? What can we do with for ROBO solutions? Can we do something like stretch clustering in an easy way? There are a lot of stretch cluster solutions out there, but if you look at a stretch clustering solution today it typically takes weeks to implement that. If you look at something like vSAN, it was our aim to actually to be able to deploy something like that from a storage perspective within hours instead of weeks, right? And we've been able to achieve that, and it has been a huge undertaking, but I think it's fair to say that it has been rather successful. >> All right, Duncan, help connect the dots to where we are here at VeeamOn. It's funny, I think Veeam started out heavily in virtualization, still heavily involved in virtualization, they've got a v in the beginning of their name. When I hear the keynote this morning, a lot of hyper, reminded me of before we had, before hyperconverge fully took over, VMWare tried to call it a hypervisor converge system around VMWare, so talk to us a little bit about data protection, the Veeam relationship and how that fits into things like vSAN and vSphere? >> Yeah I think, I talk to a lot of customers as a Chief Technologist, it's part of my role to talk to customers and have discussions about what's on top of their mind. Data protection is always one of those things that comes up. I would say it's always in the top three. Whenever you talk to a CIO, a CTO, protection of the data, availability of data, resiliency, reliability, it's fairly important. Veeam of course, for us, is a great partner. Primarily because of the simplicity of the features and the products that they offer. Whenever I talk to a customer and they explain how difficult it is to manage their backup and recovery solutions I always point them to a partner like Veeam simply because it's going to make their life a lot easier if you ask me. And I can see that Veeam is slowly transitioning. As you mentioned, the v is in front of the name. The v is in front of our name as well, but we know that it's not, the whole world isn't just VMWare and the whole world isn't just virtual. There's a lot of other different solutions out there, and actually Veeam's looking at other revenue streams as well. I would argue, though, if you're looking at something like the edge space which I think that more or less exploring at looking at things like IoT, there's going to be some form of virtualization within that, whether that's VMWare based or another solution of course is going to be the question. That is something that we'll need to figure out in the upcoming years, but I think there's a big opportunity out there. If you ask me, the keynote was really interesting. I kind of missed the end of details. I'm hoping that the closing keynote is going to give some more details on what they will be doing in the IoT space, how they see their solution evolving from that point of view because it's a market that's still being developed, but that's definitely going to be interesting. >> So Duncan it's interesting to hear you say that when you talk to customers data protection is in the top three, even amongst CIOs. It used to not be that way. Data protection was always a bolt on, it was an afterthought, it was kind of one size fits all. What's changed? >> Well I think the importance of the data has changed. If you look over the last 10 years whenever you talk to any company out there that has lost any significant amount of data they understand what the value was of the data that they were hosting. I think the big difference over the past 10 years is in the past we had applications like email, maybe some file services and that's it. But now everything revolves around applications, and that's also the shift that I'm seeing in the industry. Also from an IT perspective, right? In the past, over the past decade I think everyone has been focused on the infrastructure layer. If you look at something like VBlock, very much infrastructure focused. If you look at something like hyperconverged solutions, very much infrastructure focused. But now whenever we talk to customers, customers are more and more interested in what we can do for the application layer. What kind of benefits do we have for Exchange, for Oracle, for SAP, you name it? I think that's also a big change that's happening in the industry right now. One of the things from a technical perspective, and there may be others, but when VMWare really became prominent it was wonderful but we were reducing the number of physical resources, and the one workload that took a lot of physical resources was backup, and then sort of Veeam swept in and took advantage of that sea change. What's the technical constraint now when you think about things like multi cloud and SaaS and IoT, data's much more distributed, it's out of the control necessarily of a single platform. So from a technicals perspective, what's the big challenge and sort of the gate to architectures today? >> Well as you said, the distribution of data is the big challenge as it stands right now from a technical perspective. I think the biggest challenge that most of the players in this space, and not just Veeam, some other players as well, will have is trying to figure out how to control and manage their data. Other platforms are facing similar challenges. And no one really has solved this problem yet. We're starting to see some players in this space that have solutions that sit out in Azure, that sit out in Google Cloud, but it's a very challenging solution, and I think if you ask me, and this is something that I've said internally as well, the company that is capable of managing and owning the data is the company that's probably going to be most successful in the cloud war that's now happening. I think that's the most critical aspect. Workloads can move around, but data is very difficult to move around and own as well. >> Duncan one of the discontinuities we see in the marketplace that you mentioned earlier, wondering if you can talk to, in the enterprise in the data center, how do we get them to get to that next version? Comfortable with it, it's stable, it works. I look at the cloud, I'm running Microsoft Azure or AWS I'm running the version that they want. How do we help close that gap? Because from a security standpoint, from a features standpoint, we need to move there, but you know it seems to be just one of the greatest disconnects we see between kind of my data center and somebody else's cloud. >> That is a great question. I think we had a lot of challenges in the past. I think it's fair to say with vSphere 5.0 it was a great release, 5.5 among great releases. But the challenges that we have from an upgrade perspective was typically V centered and all of the components connected to it. It's not just the vSphere platform but if you look at the vSphere platform, the challenges that we had were all of the components integrating with it, whether that's something like vROps, VRA's, or VREalize Automation, but it could also be something like Evermar or maybe Veeam. So there were so many different components we had to take into account. So what we started doing within VMWare was simplifying the architecture from a vSPhere perspective. If you look at vSAN for instance, it used to be a solution where we had multiple functions spread out across different virtual machines. I'm now trying to bring that back into a single virtual machine again. Actually dumbing it down, making it easier to upgrade. So that is something that is actively happening within VMWare, and it is something that we started with 6.0, and that's also the reason why we see the adoption from 6.0 to 6.5 and 6.5 to 6.7, is at a must faster pace than 5, in the 5 code stream, so 5 to 5.1, for instance, took a lot longer for a lot of customers or 5.1 to 6.0, took extremely long for a lot of customers. It's the key reason is complexity from our infrastructure stand. While we're changing that, we're evolving that in the upcoming years. >> Duncan it's the last question here, but as the technologist, things that you're looking at that are exciting to you, that you know, get your juices flowing? >> Yeah, that's an interesting one because it's something that I've been thinking about recently. I've been doing vSphere for the last, well wasn't even called vSphere back then, but I've been doing this for the last 12 years, virtualization. Thirteen years maybe something like that. At least as a consultant and then as a technologist and technical marketing, but recently I'm starting to look more and more at the edge space. For computing, IoT, I think that's a really interesting space, especially because there isn't really significant market. Well, there is a significant market out there, but there isn't really one player out there that really stands out. No one has really figured out what customers would like to do with it and how our customers are going to use it. So the edge computing space and IoT's a really interesting thing and especially because of the distributed aspect is one of the things that I've been always been passionate about, vSphere clusters, which is a distributed mechanism. So distributed computing is definitely something that has my interest. >> All right if you care about virtualization, VMWare, follow the yellow brick road, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat tech music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with my co-host Justin Warren, And we're at vmworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE worldwide leader in tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Juan Gaviria who's with ADP, and he's the senior director of technical systems engineering. Juan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So vmworld, it's my 8th year coming to the show. I've been part of the community for a long time, but one of the things that people love at this show, about 20,000 maybe a little north of that, it's peers talking to peers. People that dig into the technology, find out what works and how to do things better and everything. Tell us a little bit about your role. I think most of us know ADP. We've gotten checks with the logo on it, or lots of areas of other services. But what's you're role inside the org? >> Yeah, sure. So really quick about ADP to your point, the logo is pretty well known. We actually pay one in six people in the United States, so over 25 million employees we pay. We have over 650,000 clients, and our mobile app, which is really the way I recommend you look at your pay stubs, 401K, benefits, etc., has been downloaded over 12 million times. So the ADP brand is doing well. It's a healthy business. My role specifically is that I manage all computer at ADP, so think about servers, server operating systems, and server virtualization; that's my role. >> Yeah, you brought up mobile, so maybe start there. Pat Gelsinger this morning was talking about kind digital transformation. We look at financial services, how do you reach those users? What does that kind of ripple through to all of the things that you manage? How long have you been there, and what changes have you been seeing? >> I've been there 15 years, and I've seen a lot of changes. >> Stu: 15 years ago they probably weren't even virtualized so... >> No, no, in fact, I remember rolling out ESX2.X and using the good ole mooey, so we've come a long way. And mobile has just been explosive. Ya know, from a product perspective the goal now, it's mobile first, right? So even now if you think about your benefits, when you go enroll in your benefits every year, the goal is to make that experience translate to mobile, and that's a little harder than it seems, but that's the goal for ADP. It's everything mobile. >> Bring us in. What's kind of the scope of what you manage? You said ADP globally what you handle, but what's kind of the team size? How many devices or VMs or however you manage, what are you listed in? >> Sure, so my team is responsible for computers, I mentioned, so think of everything from demand management through operations. We have globally about 50 associates that are responsible for that. We have over 3000 ESXI hosts deployed across seven global data centers with well over 40000 VMs. So it's a pretty good size infrastructure. >> And bring us inside VMware. How long have you been using it? What pieces of VMware in the ecosystem have you been using? >> We have been using VMware, again, since the early days of server virtualization. We're a VROPS customer, a VRA customer, in fact, VRA, we're leveraging it for infrastructure as service to our deaf community. We have, for ADP, thousands and thousands of developers, so just the amount of churn in our private cloud is tremendous. Airwatch, we're a big Airwatch customer, as well. >> Expand a little bit on the developer piece. What do they look for? How does that impact what you're doin? >> Yeah, sure. I don't know what they're looking for cause it's always changing to be honest with you. But we have somewhere around 6000 developers, and they're obviously developing ADP's next generation products. So they're just looking for us to get out of their way, right? They want VMs; they want 'em now. They want containers; they want 'em now. And every day I turn around they want bigger VMs, bigger containers, and it's getting harder and harder. So through VRA, we provide those pools of capacity and then they're able to spin up, tear down, rebuild VMs as needed. On a monthly basis what I see through VRA just in the developer community lab is about 3000 or so actions a month. So it's pretty high amount of change in that environment. >> Based on what was announced in the Kali, particularly around the partnership with AWS, do you thing that's going to resonate with the developers? >> Yeah, absolutely. Most of our, not most, but a fair amount of our next generation products are being developed on AWS, right? So everyone wants to be on AWS. In fact, we're bringing in a lot of college hires, and as soon as they come in they say, "I want to work on AWS." So for us it resonates because what ADP does, security is key, and we want to have a hybrid cloud, so we were actually part of the Lighthouse Program. So we were an early customer. Got to see the logo during the KeyNote which was nice. So, yeah we plan on leveraging that relationship to help us. For example, burst in that DevCloud. >> Unpack that for us. One of the things we look at, when I hear hybrid cloud I need you to explain that because every customer I talk to, it means different things to me, especially, you mention things like bursting that's a little scary sometimes. So maybe explain what that actually means in your environment. >> Yeah, so, in the Dev environment specifically, what it means is, as I mentioned, we get requests that come out of left field, right? I need a 300 gig memory VM and 10 terabytes of storage. You're just like, "Where, I don't have this," right? I don't have hundreds of those. So we can put that capacity out on AWS much faster, and as those projects materialize, we can then bring that back in. So that's what I mean by hybrid cloud for us. >> So you're using the VMware on AWS, you've been testing that out, you said? My understanding is you're also using Vsan, is that separate from that? Cause Vsan's part of the VMware Cloud or cloud foundation suite, a piece of it, so what's your interest been in Vsan, and how does that fit into the entire picture? >> So it is different. For us, the AWS relationship is going to be more of a manage service, obviously. We're actually going to become a consumer. So we're going to feel like our own customers. To answer your question on Vsan, yeah, we've made a huge investment in Vsan, so all of our VM storage, which again is 40000 VMs worth, which is well over 4+ petabytes of storage, we're moving that all to Vsan. >> What's happenin to all those arrays? >> They're going to be gone. >> Yeah? >> They're going to be gone. >> That's a really big move. Can you, you got to take us back, ya know. How did you is this a top-down or, ya know, bottoms-up walk us through some of that. >> Yeah what started that? Like how did you come to even begin contemplating replacing all of your storage? >> So it's been both to answer your first question. Both top-down and bottom-up. We've been looking at the technologies for a while, and just kind of keepin close to them. At this point, they're mature enough that we feel they can run our business-critical products. And it's been a journey, right? For the last year, we've spent looking at all the different market leading technologies and figuring out which ones make sense in an environment our size. How do we operationalize this thing? So it's been a journey and this is the beginning for us, so we're actually, as I speak, we're starting to deploy our first Vsan clusters in production and we're deploying it in hundreds of servers at a time so it's exciting and interesting times for the team and I. >> Yeah, one of the interesting things, some people look at Vsan and they're like "Oh well it's kind of small deployments," but we had some of the VMware people on earlier today, and they're like, "We're deploying internally," but it's lots of clusters because if you tell me hundreds of servers, I'm like, "Well that's not a single cluster that's lots of clusters." How do you carve that up? How do you manage that? How do you roll that out? What does that look like? >> That's the trickiest part, right? And, by the way, as we look at different solutions, the cluster size became one of the reasons why we chose Vsan. >> Okay. >> A lot of the other solutions that are out there will limit you to about eight node clusters, and to your point, we have thousands of hosts. That's hundreds of clusters. So Vsan gives us the ability to have slightly larger clusters. Today we're going to look at about 16 node clusters to start. That seems to be where VMware is going as well, so we'll follow their lead. We figure they know what they're doin'. And we'll manage that using Vroms as well. >> Yeah I was curious as to what was actually driving the change to Vsan, and what was it about Vsan that said, "Yes! This is great! "This is the one that we're going to pick." You've mentioned cluster size, were there other things that made you sort of decide that Vsan was the right choice for you? >> So to me, the way I look at Vsan from a Vsphere perspective is that they've made storage a feature. And our Vsphere administrators, they know how to run Vsphere and now they just have another feature. So that was one of the main reasons, just the operational efficiencies from a team perspective. There are a lot of other reasons as well. Security: some of the other competitors out there, for example, didn't have encryption when we were looking at it, which is, everything we do revolves around security, so that was another key reason for Vsan for us. And what drove us at first was really, with the traditional models, we found ourselves to not be very agile. Because our business is growing so fast, we're building about six months of capacity at a time, and if you can think about the cost of that much capacity at a shot it's millions of dollars, it's kind of sitting idle. So with HCI technologies and Vsan, specifically, we think we're going to be much more modular in our approach and closer to just in time. So we expect significant capital benefits from that. >> So if I hear you right, it's the pooled nature of what you're doing and that the building blocks are small enough that you're not getting to what people usually have is like, "Oh yeah, I have all this capacity and I'm three years in "and I'm still not using a lot of what I run into, "ya know, I overbuy so much because of that." >> Exactly, and think about that first purchase. You've got to sit with finance and say, "Hey I've got to go buy an array "and I've got to go buy a couple hundred servers." Now I don't have to buy that much up front so it's a huge benefit for us. >> And it sounds like it's going to be cord deployments as well, cause there are a lot of like the HCI deployments, traditionally, have been for remote office things, or just particular work loads like VDI will be one thing that it runs on, but it sounds like this is going to underpin pretty much everything that you do. >> Pretty much everything, yeah. And in addition to VDI we have a very large VDI deployment that supports all of our customer support reps, and it's going to underpin that in addition to underpinning all of the business products that you use to view your pay statement. >> Alright, so you talked about the finance people, what about the storage people? I have to imagine you had storage admins, you look at it and you say, "Okay are they out of a job? "Are they going to work on new challenges?" Can you walk us through how you approach them? How they've looked at this whole migration? And what happens to them versus the VMware people? The virtualization admins I should say. >> It's a funny question cause I've become a little bit more popular now with the storage scene. They've actually knocked on my door and said, "Hey, anything we can help you with?" But, no, it's a good partnership. My peer and I who run storage, we actually built a team together that's going to help us roll out Vsan so we know that there are skills in the storage team that we can leverage, and our vision of it is that we're no longer going to have Vsphere administrators or storage administrators. We're going to have cloud engineers, and they have to know, compute network storage really cause we view the skills as converging as well. It's not just the software and the hardware. >> How about the management of that though? Are you essentially going to be managing a team together rather than it being separate people managing different people? >> Correct it's one team. >> One team? >> It's really interesting, Juan, I'm just curious, in your kind of evaluation phase, what did you learn that if you had known it at the beginning might have either accelerated or you might have positioned things a little bit differently now that you're ready to kind of this massive roll out? >> I think I would have had maybe stricter entrance criteria. You think about a company our size and all the partners we have. We looked at a lot of different solutions. We spent a lot of time in the lab. Where in the end we knew that, for example, an eight node cluster, or not having encryption, were showstoppers, but yet we spent the time in the lab to do that, so my recommendation or advice to my peers out there is come up with good criteria that you know you have to have, and then from there, do the paper exercise and bring in the ones that you know will actually be able to get to production. >> What was that entire kind of evaluation phase? How long did that take? >> More than six months. >> And can I ask what underlying deployment you're going to use for Vsan? >> From a hardware perspective? >> Yeah. >> Sure, HP servers. DL360s. >> Okay, and what led you to choose that versus, ya know, the Dell people are all lined up to say, ya know, come on we own VMware, ya know, you should do VXrails? >> Vxrail to me is a little bit different than just Vsan, but yeah absolutely Dell was pretty interested in that business as well, and the beauty of Vsan is that it gives us the choice. We've been a long-time, happy HP customer, so for this first phase we'll continue to be with HP, and for some reason, if something changes we know with Vsan we have that flexibility. >> You've been with VMware for quite a while, I'm sure you've been watching Vsan. What are you still asking them for? They've had a very aggressive road map. I think they've got most of the basic check blocks done. I've heard a little bit about the road map, but what's on your to-do list for Vsan or any kind of the associated pieces? >> You mentioned VXrail as an example and the automation that they've brought with rail is significant. It's very valuable. I think they need to bring some of that same automation to Vsan's standalone. So as I think about patching thousands of hosts with Vsan and the drivers and that entire matrix of things. They've got to help us there. I think they've got some work to do in terms of improving the performance management of that because environments this size, managing that manually is too much work. So I think we've got some work to do there. But they've been a great partner. They've been listening to us, so I'm pretty happy about where they're headed. >> Earlier you mentioned deploying VMs and containers, is that like Docker or how do containers fit in? >> So Docker has been sort of a religious debate internally to be honest. Do you deploy it on bare metal? Do you deploy it on VMs? I think right now, we're settled on deploying Docker on VMs, but very large VMs. We're thinking 200 gigs, and the goal will be, we're going to try to do that on Vsan. So we're still in early development there, but that seems to be where we're finally landing on. >> Interesting, and I'm assuming that's Linux on top of the VMs to allow that. >> Yes. >> Alright, well, Juan Gaviria, really appreciate you sharing that really interesting use case. I wish ya best of luck on the rollout, and thank you for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Alright, for Justin, I'm Stu, and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partner. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my co-host John Troyer, and you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's production of VMworld 2017. We're the world-wide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program not only a first-time guest but a first-time for the company, Andrew Hillier, who is the CTO and co-founder of Densify, and not only the first time we've had Densify, we didn't even have Serva on so, I'm not sure what the problem was, but appreciate you joining us, and looking forward to learning about you and the company. >> Glad to be here, it's good. >> All right, Andrew, tell us a little bit about, you're a co-founder, so bring us back to the early days, what the idea was, and then there's some rebranding recently so I know that's relevant to the conversation. >> Sure, I'll tell you the story. So, we're all about analytics. I mean, we started off by looking at, with all the data that's available, and saying if you really do the math on it, you can make a lot of very important decisions, and not leave them to opinions or chance. So we built out a very powerful analytics engine, a lot of big customers adopted it, run on-prem, drive huge savings in virtual environments, de-risk. And what we found is that everybody's interested in those outcomes of the analytics, but not necessarily wanting to adopt software products. I mean, it's kind of the basis of all SaaS. So, we went and made a SaaS version of that product that runs, it's like a brain in the cloud, to give the same outcomes, and we've kind of really now taken that to the extreme where it's as a service now. And it's called Densify, we rebranded around that in the June timeframe to really capture the simplicity and the outcome of what we do. Which is to drive down cloud costs, drive down the amount of infrastructure you need on-prem, and make it all work better. >> Yeah, I'm wondering if you could give us just a little, from a macro standpoint, software. And the different consumption models you just walked through a little bit, but what are customers looking for, why has it been challenging before, and do we have it right this time? >> Yeah, well, I mean, from our perspective again, I think we get adopted, and traditionally in the past you would have to deploy the product, you would have to provision servers to run it on, a database server, train people, you know, have maybe a center of excellence around using it, and so that's worked really well. But I think that's, I think the novelty of running software has worn off for most organizations. They want to move on, and we see the cloud being adopted. People just want to get out of the business of running anything, really, and have it all done for them. And so we support on-prem model, and as many serve as on-prem, but really, this new model is where everybody's going because it's just so simple. It means, you can just adopt it and get results right away without reading any manuals or doing anything. >> Andrew, we've been talking about cloud for years now, right? It was almost a joke, it's much more real now. Your customers and the people you talk with, hybrid cloud, multicloud, how many, we have a choice of many different platforms. On-prem is not going away anytime soon, at least, I don't know, I'd love your opinion on that, but your customer base, the people you talk with, what kind of a, how many platforms are they on, what kind of platforms, and how does Densify pull all that together? >> Yeah, it's funny because it's a bit of everything, and that's IT, right? You always have one of everything you've ever had, plus all the new stuff, so, we support, these huge virtual footprints out there, a lot of companies have big VMware environments. But there's definitely a big focus on the cloud. So almost every customer we have is in some form looking, is really they see that as the future, the cloud containers, some mix of on- and off-prem. So I think it's going to be hybrid for quite some time. I don't think you're going to see the on-prem go away, that would just be unrealistic, but again, a lot of energy is being put into the public cloud, and it shows. So you know, one's almost a maintain mode in some cases, one's kind of the invest, we're investing in new technology, that's where a lot of the excitement is. So even our most conservative customers are looking at cloud in some way, and some of our newer customers are 100% cloud, there's no on-prem. >> Andrew, talk to us about the relationship with VMware that you've had and have today, and I guess one of the questions I looked, VMware announced like seven SaaS services, one which was Cost Insight. Does that compete at all against what you are doing? >> Well it's, it's a hugely complicated space with a lot of different, and a lot of the same words used for all the same thing. So we have a very good relationship with VMware. We integrate with all the product line, VRA, vROps, DRS, pDRS, we have integrations with all these things, and it works with that. But I think there's some confusion sometimes around all the people using the same words, like we optimize, or we do this or that. So what we find is that, in the core of what we do, is we analyze workload patterns. And it's like playing a game of Tetris. It's like saying, that workload's busy in the morning, that one's busy at night, we combine them together, we get a lot of efficiency. And nothing in the VMware product line does that. So it really plugs in very nicely with DRS, and again vROps, but there is confusion in the words people use. You might think that that does that, and there's some cost, you know, there's a lot of products that do cloud costs. Every product that starts with the word Cloud does cloud cost, but that's not really where you get this cost-saving, it's really analyze the workloads in the cloud is where you get those cost-savings. >> Yeah, I'm curious, you must have a really good view as to utilization. So I think back, there's a lot of argument as to how much utilization we're actually getting, 'cause VMware in the early days, it was like, oh I'll consolidate servers, I'll get greater utilization. But we still kind of stink at utilization, and I have gear, even cloud today, I've seen lots of companies, right, that I can take huge amount of costs out of what you're doing, so how are customers doing, what are they good at, what do they suck at, and where are some of the things that you're helping really well? >> Well, I mean, you struck a nerve there, because I mean, people are doing a terrible job in the cloud but often it's, a lot of times they throw things up there, and they don't even really look at what they're doing. It's kind of primitive in terms of the data collectioning, and the tooling around that. So a lot of times, these people don't even know what the workload is or what the utilization is. So we see some pretty big opportunity to carve that down. I mean, on-prem, I think people have gotten better. I think when they run our product, they really, it's designed to get at the optimal utilization, and that might be at 90%, it might be 50%, it might be 30 depending on your requirements. And if you have a mission critical environment that is active-active, and redundant, and all these things going on, then maybe your utilization won't be very high, but that's as high as you can make it and meet all your obligations. If in that test environment, you can run it a lot higher. So, there is no one right answer for what the best utilization is, it kind of, it depends on your workloads and what the environment's supposed to be doing, but universally in the cloud, we find it's just terrible. 'Cause they rush things into the cloud without having all the maturity around it to figure out how to optimize it. >> Right, Andrew, does that mean then the common mistake is under-utilization? Are people just running a lot of instances without actually knowing what's running in them, or how it's costing them? >> Yep, there's underutilized, there's deadwood for starters. So there's, and that's kind of a different problem. It's not that they don't know what they're doing, somebody forgot them, so there's no process around that, there's no ITSM pros that can turn these things off, so we find a lot of that. And there's this stuff that's not utilized very well at all that you could just be running better, 'cause somebody setting's extra large, and they never revisited it. The other, last thing that we do, we find this quite a lot lately, is we call modernization. So, you look okay, but you're on an old instance. There's a newer one that's a lot cheaper. You know, you're on an R3, you could be on an R4 on Amazon, and so we find a ton of those. And it's because people deployed an app six months ago, a year ago, and it looked great, it still looks great, but they don't have the ability to analyze and use benchmarks to say I have a new instance that's as powerful as that one, that's cheaper. You need the benchmarks. >> That's something that really doesn't happen when you have hardware, right? It's not like the server vendor calls you up and says, I have a new version I can swap out if you just tell me. >> Yeah, I mean, in the cloud I give the analogy to a cell phone company. It's like, they don't phone you and tell you that they have a new plan that'll be cheaper for you. You've got to kind of do that on your own. And so we do that for customers, it's one of the things that we do, and we kind of do it for you. So, we just tell you that, just make this move, it's got a lateral move to a new instance, and save a ton of money, and customers are just, they're too busy to become experts, and read the news every morning to figure out if new instances come up, it's just too much, right? >> But wait, they haven't seen these 17 announcements that Amazon had today that might have affected them? Does your tool make the change, recommend the change, how does that kind of workflow work? >> Yeah, it depends on the platform, how it works, but we have a very high degree of automation that we enable, and there's a few reasons. One is that the analysis is so precise, that when it says do this, you can just do that. So, for example, on-prem, if we say move the VM, we know it's not supposed to go with those other ones for PCI compliance. We know that that won't drive up the over-commit, so there's, you know, our equation, there's a lot of terms. That means it's very precise. So that means when we say to do something, you can just do it, and that means you drive a very high automation as a result. >> What kind of granularity? Is this happening minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour, or day-by-day, or? >> Well, there's two levels of granularity. There's predictive and there's real time. So one of the main things we do is that we will kind of gather all the workload history, and kind of learn the patterns of that, and to come up with a strategic plan saying for tomorrow, do this, but the VM in these places. And then, leave DRS turned on, it'll do its thing, but it won't do very much, because we've anticipated all the workflow patters. So a lot of times, we will do the kind of daily optimization and DRS and vROps can do their things all day long. They just don't do as much. But we also have real-time, so if we see something getting hot, we will do a hot add on it, we can do that as well. So we kind of have the combination of both predictive and reactive at the same time. >> Okay, um. How do you handle kind of your pricing of the solution? I've heard some offerings out there that it's like, oh, we're going to save you millions, and we're just going to take a fraction of that, rather that, or are you more traditional licensing, how does that all work? >> It's funny, the gainshare we found on that is very hard to structure. It sounds great until you finally make the contracts for it. What we do is for on-prem, we do it by target, and that's a physical-virtual system, and that's worked really well. That's the way a lot of our customers go there. And in the cloud, that doesn't work, because an instance could be anything from a tiny docker container to a giant X1, so it's as a percentage of spending. That's kind of what a lot of vendors kind of sat along in the cloud world. But we kind of don't make it infinitely variable. We know people want, they want the predictability, so we kind of say, you're in this band, it's just going to cost this and you can do whatever you want. >> And what, did you have any kind of standard rule of thumb as to you know, if you're, have X kind of spend in the cloud we'll usually save you X percentage, or, and wait, if you save them a lot more, doesn't that mean you're pushing them down into a lower tier, and so, you know, how does that get sorted out? >> It's a great question, that's the hazard of it it. It is, I mean, it doesn't hold us back from wanting to optimize, so, what we find is if you just take, for example, right-sizing the cloud. If you say you're under-utilized, we can make you smaller in the same class, a lot of people would say, 15% you might save. We find that the ability to go between instance classes, so again, you're memory optimized and you're computer optimized, or vice versa, we found is 35 to 40%, pretty reliably in our customers. So it's a pretty, more than pays for the product, many times over, it's pretty compelling. And it's pretty easy to get to. And in fact, next month's bill, which is the biggest thing, you know, on-prem is some cost. You can optimize it a lot, but until the next refresh, may not realize the gains. But in the cloud, next month's bill will actually be smaller. So we find it's a lot of urgency to do it in the cloud. >> Um, I'm curious, what have you seen from customers these days between their on-premises environment and the public cloud? One thing that struck me for years is, you know, if I bought gear and I'm not getting the results, the utilization out of it, you know, that kind of got a lot of attention. When I go see the public cloud, there's plenty of customers like, oh, what do you know, I was overspending 3x more than I expected, haha, I guess I'll fix it later. And I was like, wait, if you were buying hardware, you would have fired somebody, and, like, beat up your sales rep and things like that, but public cloud seems to be less mature in that standpoint? Are you seeing that changing, or what are you seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think there is a realization, that kind of sticker shock for these people where it is kind of three times more than they thought it would be, but your point is also not really anybody whose problem that is, a lot of times. So we do see that becoming someone's problem. The cloud architects kind of seek out more roles that are financial optimization in the cloud, so people do care. I think that's a very positive thing. I think when a lot of dev ops groups start using Amazon for the first time, it's a bit of a Wild West, and they get agility, but nobody's really looking over their shoulder. I think that's starting to change pretty quickly. >> Yeah, I wonder. One of the problems I've heard, I've talked to plenty of customers that are like, I have to dedicate an engineer to pricing when it comes to the cloud. Do you solve that, do they still need to kind of have like a dedicated person, or part of a person, or is that part of the value that you offer? >> Well, and that's a good question. It depends on the customer's size, I think. So we see really small organizations, and again, the beauty of our new offering is that you, we can, you know, we can go to really small companies or really huge companies. We have customers with a hundred thousand systems, and some with 500. And the smaller ones, they may not have a big team, so they may not have those roles. So some of our smallest ones, we're just that role for them. They don't have a person that's dedicated to that kind of thing, they just wait for our advisors to try and make, 'cause we actually have a human advisor that's part of our service that gives you advice or insight into what's happening. So, for the small ones, that can be that person. For larger companies like the big banks that are customers of ours, we kind of become one of the team. So you probably still have people with lots of expertise, but maybe you don't need to rely on it so much, maybe you can not have it at all, but it's more like we're someone that makes their life easier. So they can go on and focus on what they should be doing, which is not looking at the cloud pricing every morning. >> Nice, I see that more and more, right, that you need, it's a service you're delivering, right? And it's not just bits and bytes, that's customer success, and you have people there that can help. This stuff is crazy complicated, especially if you are, say, a VMware admin just getting into Amazon. The pricing, like we just said right, the pricing is very complicated. So, can you talk a little bit about from the admin standpoint, the vRealize integration and some things like that, or is this, there's an admin-facing piece and then I suppose then there's a cost-facing piece, or? >> Yeah, I think there's several ways it can be used. You can use us almost like middleware and the admin doesn't necessarily need to interact. We, some of our customers, we run as an engine that just sits there, it's getting data, analyzing it and making changes. But, you're still using VRA for blueprints and VRO, and that kind of comes through us, but it's kind of behind the scenes. So it's a nice use case, because it just adds value without making anybody's life more difficult. We do have consols that are very powerful, so if you're a capacity manager or a data scientist, or a cloud architect you can actually start logging in and seeing workload curves and stuff. So we have some use cases where we are, our interface is used quite heavily, and some where it kind of sits behind the scenes. And so for administrators, again, it tends to make your life better without making it worse. You know, they're really busy as well, and they don't, they save time to look at that, so. >> If you have a big investment in vRealize, right? That's great, it just sits behind the scenes. Tools you already know. >> Exactly, we just pull data from it, and we push the rest back. We pull the rules from DRS, we push new rules down the DRS, it's all very clean, and so it just makes it all better without overlapping, and again, it makes your environment calmer. So, what we see in a lot of environments is you'll be able to fit a lot more work into it, and you don't have the vMotion activity during business hours. So we're starting to measure that in our customers, because volatility's an important thing. Like if vMotion at noon, at the peak of your app being busy, it's not good, right? So, we actually cause that to go away. >> Andrew, how much of your business is on-premises, and virtualized environment, versus cloud and any kind of line up as to where you spend the most time on the cloud? >> Well, I think for, I mean, we have lot of customers that are mostly VMware. I think a good portion of them are looking at cloud in some way. Some of our newer customers are 100% in the cloud, so that's kind of more because it's a newer offering, and Densify's quite new, I think that's a smaller number right now. But as far as what we're chasing down, it's big. It's very large portion of it. So I think it's really where we see where things are going. Again, it's, we usually do both, but the cloud stuff really captures our imagination. That's what they want to be doing. >> Yeah, any commentary on the VMware on AWS, you know, stuff that we've heard so far? >> Well I mean, I think it's cool, it's great. It's another option. What I like about is that what we find is when we analyze, there's technologies that over-commit and ones that don't. So I could take a workload and put it in the VMware environment and over-commit it, and the patterns match up, and get efficiency. If I put it in Amazon in like a large instance, I might be wasting my money 'cause I'm not using the whole instance, so. And I can't run a hypervisor in one of those. What we found is that for certain transactional applications it's much better to stack them together. For like batch workloads, it's better to run them in, rent a large for an hour. So I think it's a great offering, because for certain workloads it is quite efficient. For other workloads, it's not. And we have, you know, we're showing you here today, the ability to analyze and compare the two, saying if you took that app and put it in the new VMware on Amazon versus standard small, medium, and large, what's the cost difference? It's a cool analysis, 'cause it's different for each app, right? >> If I saw right, there are free trials available on your site. Is there anybody that ever comes up, tries your stuff, and then doesn't have something that saves them money? >> No, we have a very good success when you try it because it's a, partly because it's so easy. It's just, it's 15 minutes, you pull down a connector for VMware and you plug it into vCenter or vROps, and the data goes up and then we just do it all for you. And it'll always find something you didn't know or some savings, or some hidden risks in there. Usually a lot of savings, hardware savings or software savings. We will optimize the software licensing. And in the cloud it uncovers all kinds of stuff. We see all kinds of crazy stuff, utilization's very low, so it's a, yeah. >> I've run across people that do this similar sorts of thing, at least at a high level on the virtualized side and on the cloud side. I'm not sure that I've seen anybody that does it at both, is that one of your differentiators, how do you line up, what's the competitive landscape look like? >> Yeah, doing both is a big part. I think on each individual, we also do it much deeper. So like I said, in the virtual environments our ability to play Tetris with the workloads, there's nothing else really like it. We put a lot of R and D on that, and in the cloud there's a lot of focus on the cost. But not necessarily digging deeper into what's the cause of that cost? Or your Kubernetes environment, the utilization of those nodes, it requires deeper analytics than a lot of vendors actually have, so. >> Do you give any advice as to them saying I'm trying to decide if I want to do it on-premises or in the cloud, do you give any guidance that way? >> I don't think there's any standard answer. We don't try and take sides, like, the data talks. And it's not, in my opinion, it's not an area for opinion, it's just that numbers will tell you what's best for your app and everybody's different. >> You were talking certain, you know, I've got this batch application, oh well heck, I can run this in, you know, some extra large thing in the cloud, and therefore it would cost me this versus standing up some server farm. >> Yeah, and what we find is that the only real trick is that, absolutely, if you have something that's live for 12 hours and then off for a week, renting an instance for 12 hours is the way to go. But the other consideration, it goes back to one of your earlier questions, is multicloud, and how many providers do you want? 'Cause we'll analyze the environment and that app might be cheaper in Azure and that one might be cheaper in Google, but you're not going to put each app in each, so you're going to choose one or two and kind of send them all there. So, the analytics understand that as well. They're saying, well, you're not going to spread this stuff everywhere, we're going to find the best overall answer for your portfolio of workloads. And that's an important thing. >> Okay, so last question for ya. The virtualization admins out there, is there anything that they're still doing kind of very wrong that would make their environment more efficient? >> Well I think, I mean, it's funny that we still see an awful lot of spreadsheets out there. It's funny when people try and do the numbers, like to figure out where to put a new app. And they'll still kind of figure that out in a very rudimentary way, when again, science will tell you that. So you can make that happen automatically. So, there's still certain things people are doing manually that don't need to be done manually anymore, and it maybe it's their comfort zone. Maybe sometimes maybe it's other groups. But I think, again, our focus is saying that's great, let's take your policies and your rules, we'll just embed them, encode them, codify them, and then you can move on to better things than updating a spreadsheet or generating reports to send to your team every, you know, like, it's, we have very powerful reporting, so you can just make that happen automatically to people. And so, it's getting out of those kind of tasks that people have done for years and moving up the value chain and saying, now I'm going to focus on cloud, or on VSAN, or whatever it is people want to be doing next. >> All right, Andrew Hillier, appreciate you giving us all the updates on your company, and look forward to hearing more in the future. John Troyer and I will be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (cheerful music)