>>from the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >>Hello, everyone. And welcome to this breaking analysis. We're here to assess the VM Ware v Sphere seven announcement, which is the general availability of so called Project Pacific. VM Ware has called this the biggest change to V sphere in the last 10 years. Now Project Specific Pacific supports kubernetes and natively in VM Ware environments. Why is this important? This is critical for multi and hybrid cloud because Kubernetes and its surrounding orchestration enable application portability and management. Yeah, as we've been reporting, VM Ware is one of the big players eyeing multi cloud, along with a crowded field of aspirants that include IBM with Red hat, Microsoft, Cisco, Google and a host of specialists in the ecosystem. Like how she and rancher as well play. Some players have focused in their respective stack swim lanes like security and data protection, storage, networking, etcetera. And with me to dig into this announcement is stew. Minutemen's Do is a senior analyst at Wiki Bond and co host of The Cube is too good to see you and let's get into it great to talk about this state. Okay, so the Sphere seven, what is being announced? And why is it relevant? >>Yes. So, David, as you said in the open, this is the general availability of what they talked about at VM World 2019 as Project Pacific. So it really is integrating kubernetes into V sphere. The VM ware, of course, will position this is that they're now enabling, you know, the 90% of the data centers around the world that have VM ware. Hey, your kubernetes enabled. Congratulations. You're cloud native. Everything like that. Only being a little facetious here. But this is very important. How do we get from where we were to live in this more cloud? Native environments. So containers in general and kubernetes specifically are being a first class citizen. There's a lot of work, Dave, and my understanding this has been going on for a number of years. You know, it's not like they just started working at this six months ago. A overhaul to how this works. Because it's not just we're going to stick a couple of containers on top of, you know, the guest operating system in the virtual machine. But there is a supervisor cluster for kubernetes at the hyper visor level. And there's a lot of, you know, in the weeds things that we're all trying to understand and figure out because you've got you know, we've got a hyper visor and you've got VM. And now you've got the containers and kubernetes on. Some of them are living in my data center. Some VM ware, of course, lives on multiple clouds like the VM ware on AWS. Solutions of this will go there on and, you know, how do I manage that? How does this impact my operations? You know, how did this change my application portfolio? Because, you know, the early value proposition for VM Ware always was. Hey, you're gonna put VM ware on there. You don't need to touch your applications. Everything runs like it did before you were running windows APS on a physical server. You move into virtual. It's all great. There's a lot of nuance and complexity. So when VM Ware says this is the biggest change in a decade probably is, I think back to you know, I remember when the fx 2.0, rolled out in V motion really changed the landscape. That was big V balls. Move to really ah storage. To really understand that architecture and really fix storage was was a huge undertaking that took many years. This this definitely stacks up with some of those previous changes to really change the way that we think about VM Ware. I think the advertising you have even seen from being where some places is don't think of them as VM ware their cloud where our container ware with like because vm zehr still there. But VM Ware is much more than VMS today, >>so this feels like it's bm were trying to maintain its relevance in a cloud native world and really solidify its because, let's face it, VM Ware is a platform that Pat Gelsinger's has ride. The Waves tried many times in many angles to try to ride the cloud wave, and it's finally settled on the partnerships with AWS specifically. But others on DSO really Is this their attempt to become cloud native, not get left behind and be cloud naive? His many say >>Yeah, great question, David. Absolutely. There's the question as to you know what's happening with my applications, you know lots of customers. They say, Well, I'm just going to satisfy the environments. Watched the huge growth of companies like service now workday. Those applications, well, customers don't even know what they live on. Do they live on virtualization? Environment is a containers I don't need to worry about because SAS takes care of that. If I'm building modern applications, well, I'm probably not starting with VMS. Containers are the way that most people are doing that. Or they might even be going serverless now if we take these environments. So how does VM ware make sure that they have the broadest application support? Kubernetes really won the container orchestration wars on. And this is a way that VM ware now can enable customers to move down that path to modernize their environments on. And what they wanna have is really some consistency between what's happening in the cloud and happening in the environments that they control >>themselves. Vm ware saying that containers in our first class citizen within v sphere what does that mean? Why is that important? First of all, are they really And what does that mean? And why is that important? >>Yes. So, Dave, my understanding is, you know, absolutely. It's their, You know, the nuances that you will put there is. You know, we're not just running bare metal servers with Lennox and running containers on top of it. It is. You're still sitting on top of the hyper visors. One of the things I'm trying to understand when you dig down is you know what? The device driver level VM ware always looked a little bit like Linux. But the people that use it and operate it, they're not letting people Dave, these, you know, the OS. The number one os that always ran on VM ware was Windows and the traditional applications that ran there. So when we talk about containers and we're enabling that in a kubernetes environment, there are some questions about how do we make sure that my applications get certified? Dave, you got a lot of history knowing things like s ap and Oracle. I need to make sure that we've tested everything in this works. This is not what we were running traditionally in VM ware and VM ware. Just thanks. Hey, v Sphere seven, turn the crank. Everything certified Well, I would tell customers make sure you understand that your application has been tested, that your Eyes V has certified this environment because this is definitely, as VM Ware says, a huge architectural change. So therefore, there's some ripple effects to make sure that what I'm doing in this environment stays fully supported. Of course, I'm sure VM Ware is working with their huge ecosystem to make sure that all the pieces or environment you mentioned things like data protection. We absolutely know that VM Ware is making sure the day one the data protection plugs in and supported in these environments when you're using the kind of kubernetes persona or containers solutions in V sphere. >>Well, this brings me to my next question. I mean, we were talking to Bernard Golden the other day and he was saying, You know, Kubernetes is necessary for multi cloud, but it's insufficient. And so this seems to me to be a first step and, as I say, VM ware maintaining and growing its relevance. But there's gonna be a roadmap here that goes beyond just containers and portability. There's other management factors you mentioned security of enabling the ecosystem to plug in. So maybe talk about that a little bit in terms of what's necessary to really build this out over the next >>decade. And actually, it's a great point. So, first of all, you know, V. Sphere, of course, is the core of VM Ware's business. But there's only a piece of the overall portfolio said this lives in. I believe they would consider this part of what they call their Tansu family. Tando is their cloud native overarching piece of it, and one of the updates is their product hands admission control. Which of the existing product really came out of the Hep D Oh acquisition is how we can really manage any kubernetes anywhere, and this is pure software. Dave. I'm sure you saw the most recent earnings announcement from VM Ware, and you know what's going sass. What's going subscription? VM Ware is trying to build out some of their software portfolio that that isn't kind of the more traditional shrink wrap software, so Tan Xue can manage any kubernetes environment. So, of course, day one Hey, obviously or seven, it's a kubernetes distribution. Absolutely. It's going to manage this environment and but also if I've got Cooper days from azure kubernetes from Amazon communities from other environment. Tanja can manage across all of those environments. So when when you're what VM Ware has always done. If you think back in the early days of virtualization, I had a lot of different servers. How do I manage across those environments? Well, VM ware was a layer that lived across them. VM Ware is trying to do the same thing in the cloud. Talk about multi cloud. And how do I manage that? How do we get value across them? Well, there's certain pieces that you know VM Ware is looking to enable with their management software to go across them. But there are a lot of other companies, you know, Amazon Google actually not Amazon yet for multi cloud. But Microsoft and Google absolutely spent a lot of time talking about that in the last year. A swell as you mentioned. Companies like Rancher and Hashi Corp absolutely play across What Lots of these multi cloud. Well, >>let's talk about the competition. Who do you see is the number one competitors >>Well, so the number one competitor absolutely has to be red hat, Dave. So you know, when I've been in the kubernetes ecosystem for a number of years for many years. When I talk to practitioners, the number one, you know what kubernetes you're using? Well, the answer for many years was, Well, I'm grabbing it, you know, the open source and I'm building my own stack. And the reason customers did that was because there wasn't necessarily maturity, and this was kind of leading edge, bleeding edge customers in this space. The number two besides build my own was Red Hat was because I'm a red hat customer, a lot of Lennox tooling the way of building things the way my application developers do. Things fit in that environment. And therefore, that's why Red Hat has over 2000 open shift customers leading distribution for Kubernetes. And you know, this seems purely directly targeted at that market. That red hat did you know it was a big reason why IBM spent $34 billion on the Red Hat acquisition is to go after this multi cloud opportunity. So you know, absolutely this shot across the bow because Red Hat is a partner of VM Ware's, but absolutely is also a competitive >>Well, Maritz told me years ago that's true. We're with everybody and you could see that playing out. What if you look at what VM Ware could do and some of their options if they gave it away, that would really be a shot across the bow at open shift, wouldn't it? >>Yeah, absolutely, Dave, because kubernetes is not free if you're enabling kubernetes on my Google environment, I, you know, just within the last week's awesome things that were like, Okay, wait. If you're testing an environment, yes, it is free. But, you know, started talking about the hourly charges for the management layer of kubernetes. So you know kubernetes again. A color friend, Cory Quinn. Communities absolutely is not free, and he will give you an earful and his thoughts on it s o in Amazon or Google. And absolutely, Dave, it's an important revenue stream for red hat. So if I'm vm ware and you know, maybe for some period of time, you make it a line item, it's part of my l. A. You know, a good thing for customers to look out for is when you're renegotiating your l a toe, understand? If you're going to use this, what is the impact? Because absolutely, you know, from a financial standpoint, you know, Pat Gelsinger on the VM Ware team has been doing a lot of acquisitions. Many of those Dave have been targeted at this space. You know, not to step Geo, but a bit NAMI. And even the pivotal acquisition all fit in this environment. So they've spent billions of dollars. It shouldn't be a net zero revenue to the top line of what VM Ware is doing in the space. >>So that would be an issue from Wall Street's perspective. But at the same time, it's again, they're playing the long game here. Do we have any pricing data at this point? >>So I still have not gotten clear data as to how they're doing pricing now. >>Okay, Um, and others that are in there and in the mix. We talked about Red Hat. Certainly Microsoft is in there with Arc. I've mentioned many times Cisco coming at this from a networking perspective. But who else do you see and then Antos with Google? >>Yeah. And you know, Dave, all the companies we're talking about here, you know, Pat Gelsinger has had to leverage his intel experience to how to balance that line between a partner with everybody but slowly competing against everybody. So, you know, we've spent many hours talking about the VM Ware Amazon relationship. Amazon does not admit the multi cloud a solution yet and does not have a management tool for supporting all of the kubernetes environment. But absolutely Microsoft and Google do. Cisco has strong partnerships with all the cloud environment and is doing that hybrid solution and Dave Justice nothingto expand on a little bit there. If you talk about V sphere, you say, Okay, Visa or seven trolling out Well, how long will it take most of the customer base to roll to this environment? There will be some that absolutely want to take advantage of kubernetes and will go there. But we know that is typically a multi year process to get most of the install base over onto this. And if you extend that out to where VM Ware is putting their solution into cloud environments, there's that tension between, you know, Is there a match actually, between what I have in my data center and what is in the managed environment managed by VM Ware and Amazon, or manage for to support some of the other cloud environment. So the positioning always is that you're going to do VM Ware everywhere, and therefore it's going to be consistent everywhere. Well, the devil's in the details because I have control on what's in my data center, and I might have a little bit less control to some of those managed services that I'm consuming. So absolutely something to keep a close eye on. And not just for VM, where everybody is having these concerns. Even if you talk about the native kubernetes distributions, most of the kubernetes services from the cloud providers are not, you know, immediately on the latest revision of kubernetes, >>right, So Okay, well, let's let's talk about that. Remember when open Stack first came out? It was a Hail Mary against Amazon. Yeah, well, the new Hail Mary and looks like it has more teeth is kubernetes right, because it allows portability and and and of course, you know Amazon doesn't publicly say this, but it's not. That's not good for Amazon. If you're reporting things, applications, moving things around, moving them out of the Amazon cloud, and that makes it easier. Of course, Amazon does support kubernetes right, But you've got >>alternatives. So, David, it's fascinating. So I've talked to many practitioners that have deployed kubernetes and one of the top reasons that they say that why they're using Kubernetes is so they have options with the cloud. When you also ask them what cloud they're running, they're running Amazon. Did they have planned to move off of it? Well, probably not. I had a great customer that I didn't interview with that one of the Cube con shows, and they actually started out with Azure just because it was a little further head with kubernetes and then for the services they wanted. They ended up moving to AWS and Dave. It's not a click a button and you move from one kubernetes to another. You need toe match up and say, Okay, here's the five or six services I'm using. What are the equivalent? What changes do I need to make? Multi cloud is not simple. Today, I mentioned Hashi Corp is one of those companies that help people across these environments. If you have haji solution and you're managing across multiple clouds, you look in the code and you understand that there's a lot of difference between those different clouds, and they simplify that. But don't eliminate it. Just it is not. There is not a way today. This is not a utility when you talk about the public cloud. So you know Kubernetes absolutely is existentially a little bit of a threat to Amazon but Amazon still going strong in that space. And you know that the majority of customers that have deployed kubernetes in the public cloud are doing it on Amazon just because of their position in the marketplace and what they're. >>So let's double click on that. So Jassy, an exclusive interview with John Furrier before last year's re invent, said, Look, we understand there's a lot of reasons why people might choose multiple clouds, you know, go through them in a developer preference. And I think I think, you know, people want o optionality and reduce lock in potentially. But I've always said, by the way, just as an aside, that that the risk of lock in it is far down on the list relative to business value, people will choose business value over over, you know, no lock in every time. About 15% of the customers you might not agree. Nonetheless, Jassy claimed that typically when you get into a multiple cloud environment, he didn't use the term multi cloud that it's it's not a 50 50. It's a premier primary cloud supplier. So might be 70 30 or 80 20 or even 90 10. But it's really that kind of, you know, imbalance. First of all, do you see that? And then what does that mean for how they approach of this space? Multi cloud and in particular. >>So I'm sorry. You're asking how Amazon should approach the space. And you've said that I don't think they'll >>eventually enter this market place. >>Yeah, you know, absolutely, Dave. You know, first of all, in general, yes, I do agree. It is not. There are certain financial companies that, you know, have always chosen two of everything. Because for regulation and you know certain we need to protect ourselves. We're gonna have to suppliers. We're going to keep them as even as possible. But that is a corner case. Most customers I have a primary cloud. That's what I'm doing. That what I t tries to get everybody on and you need to have Is there a reason why you want to use a secondary or tertiary cloud because there's a service that they need. Of course, Google. You often run it. It's like, Oh, well, there's certain data services that they're doing well And, of course, the business productivity solutions that Microsoft's doing where the relationship with Oracle that are driving people towards Microsoft. But just as we saw Amazon soften on their hybrid solutions, we spent a lot of time at re invent talking about all the various hybrid solutions. Um, since their customers are going to have multiple clouds on and even you take most of their customers that have M and a involved you buy another company, they might be using another cloud. As Microsoft's position in the marketplace has grown, you would expect that Amazon would have not just migration services but management services to match what customers need, especially in this kubernetes environment, seems that it seems a natural fit for them. It's possible they might just leverage, you know, partnerships with red hat VM ware, you know, in some of the other players for the time being. But if the market gets big enough and customers are asking for it, that's usually when Amazon response >>So let's let's wrap with what this means to the customer. And I've said that last decade really multi cloud was a symptom of multi vendor and not so much of the strategy that's changing. You know, clearly, jokes CIOs are being called in to clean up the crime scene on do you know, put in edicts corporate edicts around security and governance and compliance and so forth. So it started to become a complicated situation for a lot of companies. We've said that multi cloud is gonna it's gonna be they're going. People are going to put the right war load and the right cloud, etcetera, and this advantages to certain clouds. But what should customers be thinking specifically as it relates to v. Sphere seven? >>Yes. So, Dave, the biggest thing I would say that people need to look at it is that understanding in your organization that that boundary and line between infrastructure and application people have often looked at you looked at the ascendancy of VM Ware, Andi V. M's and then what's happening with cloud and containers. And we think of it from an infrastructure standpoint that I'm just changing the underlying pieces. This is where it lives and where I put things. But the really important thing is it's about my data and my applications, Dave. So if I'm moving an application to a new environment, how do I take advantage of it? You know, we don't just move it to a new environment and run it the same way we were doing it. I need to take advantage of those new environments. Kubernetes is involved in infrastructure, but the real piece is how I have my application, my developers, my app. Dev's working on this environment and therefore it might be that if VM Ware's the right environment, I'm doing a lot of it that the development team says, Hey, I need you to give me a pool and provisioned this for me and I can have my sandbox where I can move really fast. But VM Ware helped initially customers when they went from physical to virtual, move faster. From an infrastructure standpoint, what it needs to do to really enable this environment is help me move faster on the application side. And that's a big gap from VM. Ware's history is where the pivotal people and hefty O people and bit NAMI and all the new people are helping along to help that whole cloud native team. But that is a big shift from customers. So for this to be successful, it's not just, oh, the virtualization admin. He upgraded to the new thing. He made some changes and said, Okay, hey, I can give you a kubernetes cluster when you need it. It's really understanding what's going to happen on the application side in a lot of that is going to be very similar to what you're doing in cloud environments. And I think this is Dave often where your customers, they say, Oh, well, I did that cloud and it was too expensive and it was too hard, and I repatriated. Everything else is, well, you probably didn't plan properly and you didn't understand what you're getting yourself into. And you jumped into the deep end of the pool and oh, wait, I forgot how to learn how to swim. So you know, that is where we are. You know, Dave, you know the technology parts. Always the easiest piece. It's getting all of the organizational and political things sorted out. And you know the developer we know how important that is, we're seeing. It's great to see VM Ware pushing faster in this environment. Kudos to them for how fast they moved. Project Pacific to G. A. That is really impressive to see and can't wait to hear the customers roll out because if this is successful, we should be hearing great transformation stories from customers as to how this is enabling their business, enabling them to move faster on. You know, that has been what, one of the favorite stories that I've been telling with customers on the Cube last couple of years. >>The vast majority of VM Ware's business, of course, is on print, and essentially they're doing here is enabling developers in their customer base and the half a 1,000,000 customers to really develop in a cloud native manner. The question is, you know, from a ah, from a cultural standpoint, is that actually gonna happen? Or the developers gonna reject the organ and say, No, I want to develop in AWS or Microsoft in the cloud. I think VM Ware would say, We're trying to embrace no matter where they want to develop, but they're still going to be. That's interesting organizational tension or developer attention in terms of what their primary choices is. They're not. >>Yeah, Dave, Absolutely. We've been saying for years. That cloud is not a location. It is an operating model. So this is helping to enable that operating model more in the data center. There's still questions and concerns, of course around, you know, consumption on demand versus you know, whether whether you've bought the entire thing as more and more services become available in the public cloud, are those actually enabled to be able to be used, you know, in my data center hosted environment. So you know, this story is not completed, but we're definitely ready. I believe we're saying it's the multi clouds Chapter three of what? We've been watching >>you and you're seeing a major tam expansion yet again from VM Ware that started with the NSX. And then, of course, went in tow networking and storage. And now they've got a cloud security division. We're talking about the the cloud native capabilities here and and on and on, it goes to thanks for helping us break this VC seven announcement down and good job fixed. All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for stew Minimum. We'll see you next time on the Cube. >>Yeah,

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBES's coverage of VMworld 2020. Our 11th year doing the show and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE's alums. Somebody that's is going to VMworld longer than we have been doing it for theCUBE. So Vaughn Stewart he is the Vice President of Technology Alliances with Pure Storage Vaughn, nice to see you. How you doing? >> Hey, Stu. CUBE thanks for having me back. I miss you guys I wish we were doing this in person. >> Yeah, we all wish we were in person but as we've been saying all this year, we get to be together even while we're apart. So we look to you on little screens and things like that rather than bumping into each other at some of the after parties or the coffee shops all around San Francisco. So Vaughn, obviously you know Pure Storage long, long, long partnership with VMware. I think back the first time that I probably met with the Pure team, in person, it probably was around Moscone, having a breakfast having a lunch, having a briefing or the likes. So just give us the high level. I know we've got a lot of things to dig into. Pure and VMware, how's the partnership going these days? >> Partnership is growing fantastic Pure invests a lot of engineering resources in programs with VMware. Particularly the VMware design partner programs for vVols, Container-Native Storage et cetera. The relationship is healthy the business is growing strong. I'm very excited about the investments that VMware is making around VMware Cloud Foundation as a replatforming of what's going on MPREM to help better enable hybrid cloud and to support Tanzu and Kubernetes platforms. So a lot going on at the infrastructure level that ultimately helps customers of all to adopt cloud native workloads and applications. >> Wonderful. Well a lot of pieces to unpack that. Of course Tanzu big piece of what they're talking about. But let's start. You mentioned VCF. You know what is it on the infrastructure side, that is kind of driving your customer adoption these days, and the some of the latest integrations that you're doing? >> Yeah you know VCF has really caught the attention of our mid to large or mid to enterprise size customers. The focus around, as I use the phrase replatform is planning out with VMworld phrase. But the focus on simplifying the lifecycle management, giving you a greater means to connect to the public cloud. I don't know if you're aware, but all VMware public cloud offerings have the VCF framework in terms of architectural framework. So now bringing that back on-prem, allowing customers on a per workload domain basis to extend to a hybrid cloud capability. It's a really big advancement from kind of the base vSphere infrastructure, which architecturally hasn't had a significant advancement in a number of years. What's really big around VCF besides the hybrid connectivity, is the couple of new tools SDDC Manager and vSphere Lifecycle Manager. These tools can actually manage the infrastructure from bare metal up to workload domains and then from workload domains you're now handing off to considered like delegated vCenter Servers right? So that the owner of a workload if you will and then that person can go ahead and provision virtual machines or containers, based on whatever is required to run their workloads. So for us the big gain of this is the advancement in the VMware management. They are bringing their strength in providing simplicity, and end-to-end hardwared application management to disaggregated architectures. Where the focus of that capability has been with HCI over say the past five or six years. And so this really helps close that last gap, if you will, and completes a 360 degree view of providing simplified management across dissimilar architecture and it's consistent and it's standardized by VMware. So HCI, disaggregated architecture, public cloud, it all operates the same. >> So Vaughn, you made a comment about not a lot of changes. If I remember our friends at VMware they made a statement vSphere 7 was the biggest architectural change in over a decade. Of course bringing in Kubernetes it's a major piece of the Tanzu discussion. Pure. Your team's been pretty busy in the Kubernetes space too. Recent acquisition of Portwox to help accelerate that. Maybe let's talk a little bit about you know cloud native. What you're hearing from your customers. (chuckles) And yeah, like we've Dave Vellante had a nice interview with, Pure and Portwox CEOs. Give the VMworld audience a little bit of an update as you know where you all fit in the Kubernetes space. >> Yeah and actually, there was a lot that you shared there kind of in connecting the VCF piece through to vSphere 7 and a lot of changes there in driving into Tanzu and containers. So maybe we're going to jump around here a bit but look we're really excited. We've been working with VMware, but in addition to all of our application partners, you are seeing nearly every traditional enterprise application being replatformed to support containers. I'd love to share with you more details, but there's a lot of NDAs I'd be breaking in that. But the way for enterprise adoption of containers is right upon us. And so the timing for VMware Tanzu is ideal. Our focus has always been around providing a rich set of data services. One that provides faster provisioning, simplified fleet management, and the ability to move that container and those data services between different clouds and different cloud platforms, Be it on-prem, or in the public cloud space. We've had a lot of success doing that with the Pure Service Orchestrator Version 6.0 enables CSI compliant persistent storage capabilities. And it does support Tanzu today. The addition or I should say the acquisition of Portworx is really interesting. Because now we're bringing on an enhanced set of data services that not only run on a Pure Storage storage products, but runs universally regardless of the storage platform, or the Cloud architecture. The capabilities within Portworx are above and beyond what we had in PSO. So this is a great expansion of our capabilities. And ultimately we want to help customers. Whether they want to do containers solely on Tanzu, or if they're going to mix Tanzu with say Amazon EKS, or they've got some department that does development on OpenShift. Whatever it might be. You know that the focus of storage vendors is obviously to help customers make that data available on these platforms through a consistent control plane. >> Yeah. Vaughn it's a great acquisition. Think a nice fit. Anybody that's been talking to Pure the last year or so you've been. How do we take the storage make it more cloud native if you will. So you've got code. Obviously, you've got a great partnership with VMware, but as you said, in Amazon and some of the other hyper clouds those clouds, those storage services, no matter where a customer is, so that that core value, of course we know, is this the software underneath it. And that's what Portworx is. So you know not only Pure's, but other hardware, other clouds and the likes. So a really interesting space You know Vaughn, you and I've been covering this, since the early days of VMware. Hey this software is kind of a big deal and you know (chuckles) cloud in many ways is an extension of what we're doing. I know we used to joke how many years was it that VMworld was storage world? You know. >> Ooh yeah. >> There was talk about like big architectural changes, you know vVols When that finally came out, it was years of hard work by many of the big companies, including your previous and current you know employer. What's the latest? My understanding is that there are some updates there when it comes to the underlying vVols. What are the storage people need to know? >> Yeah. So great question and VMware is always been infrastructure world really Right? Like it is a showcase for storage. But it's also been a showcase for the compute vendors and every Intel partner. From a storage perspective, a lot is going on this year that should really excite both VMware admins and those who are storage centric in their day-to-day jobs. Let's start with the recent news. vVols has been promoted within VCF to being principal storage. For those of you who maybe are unfamiliar with this term 'principal storage' VMware Cloud Foundation supports any form of storage that's supported by vSphere. But SDDC manager tool that I was sharing with you earlier that really excites large scale organizations around it's end-to-end simplicity and management. It had a smaller, less robust support list when it comes to provisioning external storage. And so it had two tiers. Principal and secondary. Principal meant SDDC manager could provision and deprovision sub-tenants. So the recent news brings vVols both on Fiber Channel and iSCSI up to that principal tier. Pure Storage is a VMware design partner around vVols. We are one of the most adopted vVols storage platforms, and we are really leaning in on VCF. So we are very happy to see that come to fruition for our customers. Part of why VMware partners with Pure Storage around VCF, is they want VCF enabled on any Fabric. And you know some vendors only offer ethernet only forms of connectivity. But with Pure Storage, we don't care what your Fabric is right. We just want to provide the data services be it ethernet, fiber channel or next generation NVMe over Fabric. That last point segments into another recent announcement from from VMware. Which is the support for NVMe over Fabric within vSphere 7. This is key because NVMe over Fabric allows the IO path to move away from SCSI based form of communication one to a memory based form of communication. And this unleashes a new level of performance, a way to better support those business and mission critical applications. Or a way to drive greater density into a smaller form factor and footprint within your data center. Obviously Fabric upgrades tend to not happen in conjunction with hypervisor upgrades, but the ability to provide customers a roadmap and a means to be able to continually evolve their infrastructure non disruptively, is our key there. It would be remiss of me to not point out one kind of orthogonal element, which is the new vMotion capabilities that are in vSphere 7. Customers have been tried for a number of years, probably from vSphere 4 through six to virtualize more performance centric and resource intense applications. And they've had some challenges around scale, particularly with the non-disruptive. The ability to non disruptively move a workload. VMware rewrote vMotion for vSphere 7 so it can tackle these larger more performance centric workloads. And when you combine that along with the addition of like NVMe over Fabric support, I think you're truly at a time where you can say, almost every workload can run on a VMware platform, right? From your traditional two two consolidation where you started to looking at performance centric AI, in machine learning workloads. >> Yeah. A lot of pieces you just walked through Vaughn, I'm glad especially the NVMe over Fabric piece. Just want to drill down one level there. As you said, there's a lot of pieces to make sure that this is fully worked. The standards are done, the software is there, the hardware, the various interconnects there and then okay, when's does the customer actually ready to upgrade that? How much of that is just you know okay hitting the update button. How much of that is do I need to do a refresh? And we understand that the testing and purchasing cycles there. So how many customers are you talking to that are like, "Okay I've got all the pieces, "we're ready to roll, "we're implementing in 2020." And you know, what's that roadmap look like for kind of the typical enterprise, which I know is a bit of an oxymoron? (laughs) >> So we've got a handful. I think that's a fair way to give you a size without giving you an exact number. We had a handful of customers who have NVMe over Fabric deployments today. The deployments tend to be application or workload centric versus ubiquitous across the data center. Which I think does bear an opportunity for VMware adoption to be a little bit earlier than across the entire data center. Because most VMware architectures today are based on top of rack switching. Whether that switching is fiber channel or ethernet base, I think the ability to then upgrade that switch. Either you've got modern hardware and it just needs a firmware update, or you've got to replace that hardware and implement NVMe over Fabric. I think that's very attractive. Particularly that you can do so in a non disruptive manner with a flash array or with flash deck. We expect to see the adoption really start to take take hold in 2021. But you probably won't see large market gains until 2022 or 23. >> Well that's super helpful Vaughn especially Pure Storage you've got customers that have some of the most demanding performance environments out there. So they are some of the early adopters that you would expect go into adopting this new technology. All right. I guess last piece, listening to the keynote looking at all the announcements that they have you know, VMware obviously has a big push into the cloud native space they've made a whole lot of acquisitions. We touched on a little bit before but what's your take as to what you are hearing from your customers, where they are with adoption into really modernizing and accelerating their businesses today? >> I think for the majority of our customers and again I would consider more of a commercial or mid market centric up through enterprise. They've particularity enterprise, they've adapted cloud native technologies particularity in developing their own internal or customer facing applications. So I don't think the technology is new. I think where it's newer is this re platforming of enterprise applications and I think that what's driving the timeline for VMware. We have a number of Pivotal deployments that run up here. Very large scale Pivotal deployments that run on Pure. And hopefully as you audience knows Pivotal is what VMware Tanzu has been rebranded as. So we've had success there. We've have had success in the test and development and in the web facing application space. But now this is a broader initiative from VMware supporting enterprise apps along with you know the cloud native disaggregated applications that have been built over the last say five to 10 years. But to provide it though a single management plane. So I'm bullish, I'm really bullish I think they are in a unique position compared to the rest of our technology partners you know they own the enterprise virtualization real estate and as so their ability to successfully add cloud native application to that, I think it's a powerful mix . For us the opportunity is great. I want to thank you for focusing on the fact that we've been able to deliver performance. But performances found on any flash product. And it's not to demote our performance by any means, but when you look at our customers and what they purchase us in terms of the repeat purchases, it's around simplicity, it's around the native integration with VMware and the extending of that value prop through our capabilities whether it's through the end-to-end infrastructure management, through data protection extending in the hybrid cloud. That's where Pure Storage customers fall in love with Pure Storage. And so it's a combination of performance, simplicity and ultimately, you know, economics. As we know economics drive most technical decisions not the actual technology itself. >> Well, Vaughn Stewart thank you so much for the update, congratulation on all the new things that are being brought out in the partnership >> Thank you Stu appreciate being on theCUBE, big shout out to VMware congratulations on VMworld 2020, look forward to seeing everybody soon >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage VMworld 2020 I'm Stu Miniman and that you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE", with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of VMworld 2020. Of course, such a broad ecosystem in the VMware environment. Been talking a lot, of course, this year, about what's happened in the Cloud Native space. vSphere 7 has Kubernetes coming into the virtualized environment. And one of those key pieces of doing cloud is you need to make sure data protection still works. And, of course, VMware has a long history working with lots of companies. In this segment, we're going to be digging into the VMware, and Dell, also, solution for data protection. So, happy to welcome to the program. First, I have, from VMware, Tom Spoonemore. He is a product line manager for Modern Application Platform with VMware, and welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumnis, Efri Nattel-Shay, who is with Dell technologies, Director of Data Protection and Cloud Native apps. Efri, welcome back, Tom, welcome to the program. >> Thank you very much, it's good to be here. >> So, Tom, I kind of teed it up in my intro. VMware, for the longest time, for as long as I can remember, we've really talked about that ecosystem, those joint solutions. I remember, back when we started "theCUBE", in 2010, you'd go there and it would be, oh, there's $15, no, $20, for every dollar that you spend on VMware that the ecosystem kind of pulls along. When VMware started building the VMware Cloud Foundation and the VMware cloud solutions, data protection really went along with it. So, the integrations that they done with vSphere hold them in there as the environment. Tanzu Kubernetes, there's a lot of new pieces. But I think some of those principles have stayed the same. So, why don't you start us off. Tell us a little bit, philosophically, how is VMware treating this space, and how data protection fills into it, and then, Efri, we'll get your take on it, too. >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, from the perspective of VMware and the ecosystem, as you say, we want to be very inclusive. We want to bring the ecosystem and our partners along with what we're doing, regardless of what space it is, and in the Modern Applications Platform and Cloud Native tooling, we're very much thinking along the same lines. And as it relates to data protection in specific, Cloud Native is a place where, mainly it's been thought of as a place for stateless applications. but what we're seeing in people's deployments is more and more stateful applications are beginning to move to Kubernetes and into containers. And so the question then becomes, what do you do for data protection of those applications that are deployed into Kubernetes? And so, with Tanzu, and specifically Tanzu Mission Control, we have included a data protection capability, along with the other capabilities that come with Mission Control, that allows you to provide data protection for your fleet of Kubernetes clusters, regardless of which distribution, regardless of which cloud they're running on, and regardless of how many teams you might have running on a particular cluster or set of clusters. And so, for this reason, we have introduced a data protection capability that is focused around our open source project called Velero and Mission Control operates Velero in your clusters from a central UI API and CLI. That allows you to do data protection, initiating schedules of backups, doing restores, and even migration from cloud to cloud, from a single control point. And part of this vision is not only providing an API that we can handle directly with our own Velero-based implementation, but also opening that up to partners. And this is where we're working with Dell, specifically, to be able to provide that single API, but yet have Dell, for instance, with their PowerProtect solution, be able to plug in and be a data protection provider underneath Tanzu Mission Control. And so, that's the work that we're doing together to help satisfy this vision that we have for data protection in the Cloud Native space. >> Yeah, agree 100% with Tom. Like Tom has said, when we looked at customer environments three years ago, people talk mainly about stateless applications, but over time, when more storage solutions, persistent data solutions came along, there came the need to, not only provision the data, but also protect it, and be able to do backups, and restores, and cyber recovery solutions, and disaster recovery, and the whole set of use cases that allow a full life cycle of data along the Cloud Native set of applications, not just a traditional one. And what we've seen, we're talking, obviously, with a lot of customers, joint customers with VMware, customers that use our storage solutions, as well as others, on-prem and in the cloud. And what they have shown, to say, there, is that you have the IT infrastructure people on one hand, which have certain needs, and there is the new set of users, the DevOps people, who are writing applications in a new way, and they need to communicate and they need a solution that fits both of them. So, with VMware, with the community, with Velero, we are introducing a solution that is capable of doing both management for the DevOps people, as well as for the other team infrastructure. And, a year ago, we have talked about this coming up, and now it's really there, and it's doing great. >> Oh, Efri, I'm so glad you brought up some of those organizational issues, because it's not just, oh, we have some new applications, and, of course, we need to do data protection. Can you bring us inside a little bit? Your customers, are they aware of what they need to do? Is it central IT that's coming over and telling the DevOps team, hey, don't forget, security, data protection, still super important. How does that engagement go, and what change does that have for the Dell field and the channel? >> Yeah, I think that the more successful organizations really have that kind of dialogue. So, the developers are not operating in silos. They're not doing things themselves. They do, some of the use cases, they do need to copy data for their own use, but they understand that there are also organizational needs. Someone needs to sign the audit pass, the SLAs are in compliance, the regulations are met. So, all of these things, someone needs to do them. And there is a mutual recognition that there is a role for these people and for these people, for these use cases and for these use cases. >> Yeah, I would agree with that. One of the things that we're seeing, particularly as you think about Kubernetes as a multitenant kind of platform, what we're seeing is that central IT operations still wants to make sure that backups are happening with stateful applications, but more and more they're relying on and providing self-service capabilities to line of business and DevOps, to be able to back up their applications in the way that's best for those applications. It's a recognition of domain expertise for a particular application. So, what we've done with Mission Control is allowed central IT to define policy. And those policies then give the framework, or guidelines, if you will, that then allow the DevOps teams to make the best choices within their own field of expertise and for their own applications. >> Yeah, and what we've seen is some of the organizations really like full control over central IT, and some customers have told us, don't give anything to the developers, but most of them are asking for some self-service capabilities for the developers. But then, who is setting the policy? Who is saying, okay, I have a gold policy data protection? Does it mean I replicate to another side? Does it mean I do longterm retention for a month, or for a year? That is for someone in central IT to set up. So, saying what the policy means, or what it actually is, is the job of a central IT, whereas, this application needs application consistency, and it is of gold policy, that oftentimes is the best knowledge and domain expertise of the developer. >> So, Tom, you mentioned Tanzu Mission Control, which is the management solution. Tanzu is a portfolio. Can you help walk us through the relevant pieces here that are part of this joint solution? >> Yeah, sure. So, Tanzu is really a portfolio of applications, or a portfolio of solutions, as you've said. It's really along three main pillars. It's what we call, build, run and manage. Tanzu Mission Control fills in, along with our Tanzu Observability and Tanzu Service Mesh, in our manage pillar. The build pillar is more along the lines of supporting developing of modern applications, developing and deploying modern applications. So, many of the technologies that have come from our acquisitions of Pivotal, as well as Bitnami, make up that pillar, and these are technologies that are coming to fore, and you'll hear more and more about at this VM world and going forward. Our run pillar is really where you'll find Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. Now, this is our distribution, but it's more than just a distribution of Kubernetes. It's a distribution of Kubernetes, along with all the tools that you would need to be able to deploy modern applications. So, all of these three pillars come together, along with services provided by Pivotal labs, to really give you a full, multifaceted platform for deploying and operating modern applications. >> Great, and Efri, where are there integrations there? How does the storage fit in has been a discussion we've been having for a few years% when it comes to Kubernetes. >> Yeah, basically, PowerProtect integrates with all of these levels that Tom has mentioned, starting with the lowest levels of integration. With the storage, VMware has Cloud Native storage solutions, which allow things like incremental snapshots to be taken from the environment. And we're using this mechanism in order to copy data efficiently from TKG, Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, environment, out of the cluster, into a space-efficient data domain, as a target site. So, that's a storage integration. Then, there is qualification and support for the various run environments that Tom has mentioned, the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Integrated, as well as things that we're working with VMware in order to enable protection for what has been called the Project Pacific, which really allows you very sophisticated capabilities of running multiple Kubernetes clusters using the Kubernetes cluster API capabilities. So, you can spin up a cluster very, very quickly by VMware. And then, we can take backups of this environment up to data domain target site. And, finally, working with Tom for tons of amount of time and effort to do the integration between Tanzu Mission Control and PowerProtect. So, allowing cloud, multicloud, multilocation environments to be provisioned and monitoring by Tanzu Mission Control, but also protected using PowerProtect. >> Yeah, so, Tom, we talked about supporting the ecosystem, and it's a much faster cadence now than it was in the past. It used to be, it felt like every other year at VMworld, we got together and talked about the major vSphere release. Of course, in the container, in Kubernetes world, we're having a much faster cadence. So, could you just help us understand, what of this is generally available today? We saw vSphere 7 back in the spring. The update, right ahead of VMworld, that really extended Kubernetes beyond just VCF, to be able to be an all vSphere 7 environment. So, we know some of this is here on the roadmap, so help map this out for us, what's here today from VMware and what the timeline is we expect for all of these pieces we've been discussing. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Mission Control shipped in March. So we're still relatively new, but as you say, we run Cloud Native ourselves, and so we're releasing new features, new capabilities. literally every week. We have a weekly cadence for release. Our data protection capability was just introduced at the end of June, so it's fairly new, and we are still introducing capabilities, like bring your own storage, doing scheduling of backups, and this kind of thing. You'll see us adding more and more cloud providers. We have been working to open up the platform to make it available to partners. And this is, just generally, with Mission Control, across the board, but specifically, when it comes to Dell, and PowerProtect, the data protection capability, this is something that we are still actively working on, and it is past the architecture stage, but it's probably still a little ways out before we can deliver on it, but we are working on it diligently, and definitely expect to have that in the product, and available, and really providing a basis for integrations with other providers as well. >> Yeah, and in terms of PowerProtect, we have told the audience about a tech preview a year ago, and since then we have released a number of releases. We are having a quarterly cadence. So, it is available for the general consumption for quite some time. Talking about the integration layers that we have mentioned before, we are the first stack to protect VMs and Kubernetes and applications using the same platform, the same UI, the same policies, everything looks the same. And we have recently introduced capabilities such as application consistency for a number of applications. The support for TKG is available for now. And, as Tom has said, we are working on further integrations, such as the integration with Tanzu Mission Control with VMware. >> Wonderful, I want to get a final word from both of you. Efri, we'll start with you. We've got this regular cadence coming up. We know we're only a couple of weeks away from DTWE, the Dell Technology World Experience, where, of course, theCUBE will be there. What should we look for the rest of 2020, or any final comments that you have for customers that might be looking at this environment? >> Sure, I think that, two trends that I'm seeing, and they're just getting stronger over the years. The first thing is multicloud, and multicloud means many things to different people, but, basically, every customer that we are speaking to is talking about, I want to run things on-prem, but I also need to run these workloads in the hyperscaler. And I need to move from one hyperscaler region to another, or between hyperscalers, and they want to run this distribution here, and the other distribution there. And there are many combinations of stacks and Database-as-a-Service and other components of the infrastructure that different developers are using on-prem and in the cloud. So, I expect this to go even further, and solutions like PowerProtect and TKG can help customers to do that job, and, of course, Tanzu Mission Control, to monitor and manage this environment. Secondly, I think that protection is going to follow more the workloads. So, application is no longer the VM. Obviously, it's becoming many different components that are starting to span across locations and across environments. And again, the protection nature of these is going to change according to where and how these workloads are being provisioned. >> Yeah, and I would say the same thing about Mission Control, very much multicloud-focused, Today it's largely an AWS-focused solution. We're changing to add more flexible storage options, more clouds. Azure is something that we'll be doing in the short term, Google Cloud platform and Google Cloud Storage after that, as well as just the ability to use your own on-prem storage for your backup targets. Also, we're going to be focusing on driving more policy-driven backup. So, being able to define policies for groups of clusters, define RTO and RPO for groups of clusters, allowing Mission Control to help determine what the individual backup policy should be for that particular asset. And continuing to work with Dell and other partners to help extend our platform and open it up for other data protection providers. >> Tom and Efri, thanks so much for the updates. Tom, welcome to being a CUBE alumni, and Efri, I'm sure we'll be seeing you in the team, in the near future. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Stay with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe. Of course the event this year was supposed to be in the Netherlands, I know I was very much looking forward to going to Amsterdam. This year of course it's going to be virtual, I'm really excited theCUBE's coverage, we've got some great members of the CNCF, we've got a bunch of end users, we've got some good thought leaders, and I'm also bringing a little bit of the Netherlands to help me bring in and start this keynote analysis, happy to welcome back to the program my cohost for the show, Joep Piscaer, who is an industry analyst with TLA. Thank you, Joep, so much for joining us, and we wish we could be with you in person, and check out your beautiful country. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me Stu, and I'm still a little disappointed we cannot eat the (indistinct foreign term) rijsttafel together this year. >> Oh, yeah, can we just have a segment to explain to people the wonder that is the fusion of Indonesian food and the display that you get only in the Netherlands? Rijsttafel, I seriously had checked all over the US and Canada, when I was younger, to find an equivalent, but one of my favorite culinary delights in the world, but we'll have to put a pin in that. You've had some warm weather in the Netherlands recently, and so many of the Europeans take quite a lot of time off in July and August, but we're going to talk about some hardcore tech, KubeCon, a show we love doing, the European show brings good diversity of experiences and customers from across the globe. So, let's start, the keynote, Priyanka Sharma, the new general manager of the CNCF, of course, just some really smart people that come out and talk about a lot of things. And since it's a foundation show, there's some news in there, but it's more about how they're helping corral all of these projects, of course, a theme we've talked about for a while is KubeCon was the big discussion for many years about Kubernetes, still important, and we'll talk about that, but so many different projects and everything from the sandbox, their incubation, through when they become fully, generally available, so, I guess I'll let you start and step back and say when you look at this broad ecosystem, you work with vendors, you've been from the customer side, what's top of mind for you, what's catching your attention? >> So, I guess from a cloud-native perspective, looking at the CNCF, I think you hit the nail on the head. This is not about any individual technology, isn't about just Kubernetes or just Prometheus, or just service mesh. I think the added value of the CNCF, and the way I look at it at least, looking back at my customer perspective, I would've loved to have a organization curate the technology world around me, for me. To help me out with the decisions on a technology perspective that I needed to make to kind of move forward with my IT stack, and with the requirements my customer had, or my organization had, to kind of move that into the next phase. That is where I see the CNCF come in and do their job really well, to help organizations, both on the vendor side as well as on the customer side, take that next step, see around the corner, what's new, what's coming, and also make sure that between different, maybe even competing standards, the right ones surface up and become the de facto standard for organizations to use. >> Yeah, a lot of good thoughts there, Joep, I want to walk through that stack a little bit, but before we do, big statement that Priyanka made, I thought it was a nice umbrella for her keynote, it's a foundation of doers powering end user driven open-source, so as I mentioned, you worked at a service provider, you've done strategies for some other large organizations, what's your thought on the role of how the end users engage with and contribute to open-source? One of the great findings I saw a couple years ago, as you said, it went from open-source being something that people did on the weekend to the sides, to many end users, and of course lots of vendors, have full-time people that their jobs are to contribute and participate in the open-source communities. >> Yeah, I guess that kind of signals a maturity in the market to me, where organizations are investing in open-source because they know they're going to get something out of it. So back in the day, it was not necessarily certain that if you put a lot of effort into an open-source project, for your own gain, for your own purposes, that that would work out, and that with the backing of the CNCF, as well as so many member organizations and end user organizations, I think participating in open-source becomes easier, because there's more of a guarantee that what you put in will kind of circulate, and come out and have value for you, in a different way. Because if you're working on a service mesh, some other organization might be working on Prometheus, or Kubernetes, or another project, and some organizations are now kind of helping each other with the CNCF as the gatekeeper, to move all of those technology stacks forward, instead of everyone doing it for themselves. Maybe even being forced to reinvent the wheel for some of those technology components. >> So let's walk through the stack a little bit, and the layers that are out there, so let's start with Kubernetes, the discussion has been Kubernetes won the container orchestration battles, but whose Kubernetes am I going to use? For a while it was would it be distributions, we've seen every platform basically has at least one Kubernetes option built into it, so doesn't mean you're necessarily using this, before AWS had their own flavor of Kubernetes, there was at least 15 different ways that you could run Kubernetes on top of it, but now they have ECS, they have EKS, even things like Fargate now work with EKS, so interesting innovation and adoption there. But VMware baked Kubernetes into vSphere 7. Red Hat of course, with OpenShift, has thousands of customers and has great momentum, we saw SUSE buy Rancher to help them move along and make sure that they get embedded there. One of the startups you've worked with, Spectro Cloud, helps play into the mix there, so there is no shortage of options, and then from a management standpoint, companies like Microsoft, Google, VMware, Red Hat, all, how do I manage across clusters, because it's not going to just be one Kubernetes that you're going to use, we're expecting that you're going to have multiple options out there, so it sure doesn't sound boring to me yet, or reached full maturity, Joep. What's your take, what advice do you give to people out there when they say "Hey, okay, I'm going to use Kubernetes," I've got hybrid cloud, or I probably have a couple things, how should they be approaching that and thinking about how they engage with Kubernetes? >> So that's a difficult one, because it can go so many different ways, just because, like you said, the market is maturing. Which means, we're kind of back at where we left off virtualization a couple years ago, where we had managers of managers, managing across different data centers, doing the multicloud thing before it was a cloud thing. We have automation doing day two operations, I saw one of the announcements for this week will be a vendor coming out with day two operations automation, to kind of help simplify that stack of Kubernetes in production. And so the best advice I think I have is, don't try to do it all yourself, right, so Kubernetes is still maturing, it is still fairly open, in a sense that you can change everything, which makes it fairly complex to use and configure. So don't try and do that part yourself, necessarily, either use a managed service, which there are a bunch of, Spectro Cloud, for example, as well as Platform9, even the bigger players are now having those platforms. Because in the end, Kubernetes is kind of the foundation of what you're going to do on top of it. Kubernetes itself doesn't have business value in that sense, so spending a lot of time, especially at the beginning of a project, figuring that part out, I don't think makes sense, especially if the risk and the impact of making mistakes is fairly large. Like, make a mistake in a monitoring product, and you'll be able to fix that problem more easily. But make a mistake in a Kubernetes platform, and that's much more difficult, especially because I see organizations build one cluster to rule them all, instead of leveraging what the cloud offers, which is just spin up another cluster. Even spin it up somewhere else, because we can now do the multicloud thing, we can now manage applications across Kubernetes clusters, we can manage many different clusters from a single pane of glass, so there's really no reason anymore to see that Kubernetes thing as something really difficult that you have to do yourself, hence just do it once. Instead, my recommendation would be to look at your processes and figure out, how can I figure out how to have a Kubernetes cluster for everything I do, maybe that's per team, maybe that's per application or per environment, per cloud, and they kind of work from that, because, again, Kubernetes is not the holy grail, it's not the end state, it is a means to an end, to get where we're going with applications, with developing new functionality for customers. >> Well, I think you hit on a really important point, if you look out in the social discussion, sometimes Kubernetes and multicloud get attacked, because when I talk to customers, they shouldn't have a Kubernetes strategy. They have their business strategy, and there are certain things that they're trying to, "How do I make sure everything's secure," and I'm looking at DevSecOps, I need to really have an edge computing strategy because that's going to help my business objectives, and when I look at some of the tools that are going to help and get me there, well, Kubernetes, the service meshes, some of the other tools in the CNCF are going to help me get there, and as you said, I've got managed services, cloud providers, integrators are going to help me build those solutions without me having to spend years to understand how to do that. So yeah, I'd love to hear any interesting projects you're hearing about, edge computing, the security space has gone from super important to even more important if that's possible in 2020. What are you hearing? >> Yeah, so the most interesting part for me is definitely the DevSecOps movement, where we're basically not even allowed to call it DevOps anymore. Security has finally gained a foothold, they're finally able to shift lift the security practices into the realm of developers, simplifying it in a way, and automating it in a way that, it's no longer a trivial task to integrate security. And there's a lot of companies supporting that, even from a Kubernetes perspective, integrating with Kubernetes or integrating with networking products on top of Kubernetes. And I think we finally have reached a moment in time where security is no longer something that we really need to think about. Again, because CNCF is kind of helping us select the right projects, helping us in the right direction, so that making choices in the security realm becomes easier, and becomes a no-brainer for teams, special security teams, as well as the application development teams, to integrate security. >> Well, Joep, I'm glad to hear we've solved security, we can all go home now. That's awesome. But no, in all seriousness, such an important piece, lots of companies spending time on there, and it does feel that we are starting to get the process and organization around, so that we can attack these challenges a little bit more head-on. How 'about service mesh, it's one of those things that's been a little bit contentious the last couple of years, of course ahead of the show, Google is not donating Istio to the foundation, instead, the trademark's open. I'm going to have an interview with Liz Rice to dig into that piece, in the chess moves, Microsoft is now putting out a service mesh, so as Corey Quinn says, the plural of service mesh must be service meeshes, so, it feels like Mr. Meeseeks, for any Rick and Morty fans, we just keep pressing the button and more of them appear, which may cause us more trouble, but, what's your take, do you have a service mesh coming out, Kelsey Hightower had a fun little thing on Twitter about it, what's the state of the state? >> Yeah, so I won't be publishing a service mesh, maybe I'll try and rickroll someone, but we'll see what happens. But service meshes are, they're still a hot topic, it's still one of the spaces where most discussion is kind of geared towards. There is yet to form a single standard, there is yet a single block of companies creating a front to solve that service mesh issue, and I think that's because in the end, service meshes are, from a complexity perspective, they're not mature enough to be able to commoditize into a standard. I think we still need a little while, and maybe ask me this question next year again, and we'll see what happens. But we'll still need a little while to kind of let this market shift and let this market innovate, because I don't think we've reached the end state with service meshes. Also kind of gauging from customer interest and actual production implementations, I don't think this has trickled down from the largest companies that have the most requirements into the smaller companies, the smaller markets, which is something that we do usually see, now Kubernetes is definitely doing that. So in terms of service meshes, I don't think the innovation has reached that endpoint yet, and I think we'll still need a little while, which will mean for the upcoming period, that we'll kind of see this head to head from different companies, trying to gain a foothold, trying to lead a market, introduce their own products. And I think that's okay, and I think the CNCF will continue to kind of curate that experience, up to a point where maybe somewhere in the future we will have a noncompeting standard to finally have something that's commoditized and easy to implement. >> Yeah, it's an interesting piece, one of the things I've always enjoyed when I go to the show is just wander, and the things you bump into are like "Oh my gosh, wow, look at all of these cool little projects." I don't think we are going to stop that Cambrian explosion of innovation and ideas. When you go walk around there's usually over 200 vendors there, and a lot of them are opensource projects. I would say many of them, when you have a discussion with them, I'm not sure that there's necessarily a business behind that project, and that's where you also see maturity in spaces. A year or so ago, in the observability space, open tracing helped pull together a couple of pieces. Storage is starting to mature. Doesn't mean we're going to get down to one standard, there's still a couple of storage engines out there, I have some really good discussions this week to go into that, but it goes from, "Boy, storage is a mess," to "Oh, okay, we have a couple of uses," and just like storage in the data center, there's not a box or a protocol to do anything, it's what's your use case, what performance, what clouds, what environments are you living on, and therefore you can do that. So it's good to see lots of new things added, but then they mature out and they consolidate, and as you said, the CNCF is help giving those roadmaps, those maps, the landscapes, which boy, if you go online, they have some really good tools. Go to CNCF, the website, and you can look through, Cheryl Hung put one, I'm trying to remember which, it's basically a bullseye of the ones that, here's the one that's fully baked, and here's the ones that are making its way through, and the customer feedback, and they're going to do more of those to help give guidance, because no one solution is going to fit everybody's needs, and you have these spectrums of offerings. Wild card for you, are there any interesting projects out there, new things that you're hearing about, what areas should people be poking around that might not be the top level big things? >> So, I guess for me, that's really personal because I'm still kind of an infrastructure geek in that sense. So one of the things that really surprised me was a more traditional vendor, Zerto in this case, with a fantastic solution, finally, they're doing data protection for Kubernetes. And my recommendation would be to look at companies like Zerto in the data protection space, finally making that move into containers, because even though we've completed the discussion, stateful versus stateless, there's still a lot to be said for thinking about data protection, if you're going to go all-in into containers and into Kubernetes, so that was one that really provoked my thoughts, I really was interested in seeing, "Okay, what's Zerto doing in this list of CNCF members?" And for that matter, I think other vendors like VMware, like Red Hat, like other companies that are moving into this space, with a regained trust in their solutions, is something that I think is really interesting, and absolutely worth exploring during the event, to see what those more traditional companies, to use the term, are doing to innovate with their solutions, and kind of helping the CNCF and the cloud data world, become more enterprise-ready, and that's kind of the point I'm trying to make, where for the longest time, we've had this cloud-native versus traditional, but I always thought of it like cloud-native versus enterprise-ready, or proven technology. This is kind of for the developers doing a new thing, this is for the IT operations teams, and we're kind of seeing those two groups, at least from a technology perspective, being fused into one new blood group, making their way forward and innovating with those technologies. So, I think it's interesting to look at the existing vendors and the CNCF members to see where they're innovating. >> Well, Joep, you connected a dotted line between the cloud-native insights program that I've been doing, you were actually my first guest on that. We've got a couple of months worth of episodes out there, and it is closing that gap between what the developers are doing and what the enterprise was, so absolutely, there's architectural pieces, Joep, like you, I'm an infrastructure geek, so I come from those pieces, and there was that gap between, I'm going to use VMs, and now I'm using containers, and I'm looking at things like serverless too, how do we built applications, and is it that bottom-up versus top-down, and what a company's needs, they need to be able to react fast, they need to be able to change along the way, they need to be able to take advantage of the innovation that ecosystems like this have, so, I love the emphasis CNCF has, making sure that the end users are going to have a strong voice, because as you said, the big companies have come in, not just VMware and Red Hat, but, IBM and Dell are behind those two companies, and HPE, Cisco, many others out there that the behemoths out there, not to mention of course the big hyperscale clouds that helped start this, we wouldn't have a lot of this without Google kicking off with Kubernetes, AWS front and center, and an active participant here, and if you talk to the customers, they're all leveraging it, and of course Microsoft, so it is a robust, big ecosystem, Joep, thank you so much for helping us dig into it, definitely hope we can have events back in the Netherlands in the near future, and great to see you as always. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, stay tuned, we have, as I said, full spectrum of interviews from theCUBE, they'll be broadcasting during the three days, and of course go to theCUBE.net to catch all of what we've done this year at the show, as well as all the back history. Feel free to reach out to me, I'm @Stu on Twitter, and thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

(soft music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And we're digging in with VMware with the latest update of the VMware cloud, on AWS definitely technology solution set that the ecosystem has been very interesting into. And to help us do that deep dive happy to welcome back to the program, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of the cloud platform business unit with VMware. Kit, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me Stu. >> All right, so you brought along some slides said if people want to watch we've done an executive interview to give kind of the general business update, but when it comes to the technology, you know I guess we start with VMware, Amazon partnership is a deep integration we've heard both from Andy Jassy and for Pat Gelsinger, on how much engineering work and how critically important it is. Anybody from the technical side understand that one of the interesting things in cloud is that Amazon created bare metal instances to support this solution. So one of the items here is that there is a new bare metal instance. So why don't you bring us inside, you know What the updates are and what this means to the user base? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah so the bare metal support is something that we worked very closely with AWS on when we were first launching VMware cloud on AWS. And the idea there was that bare metal support is that it very similarly models, EC2 virtual machines, in the sense of each of these Vms VM types or instance types, as they say, are various kinds of T short sizes, right? And so they have a lot of these different instance types. And so similarly speaking, on the bare metal side, we're also seeing a lot of different instance types there. So we started out with an i3.metal instance, and we added an r5.metal instance and now we're really excited to add what we're we're calling i3en.metal. And so lets bring about slide to talk more about all the new capabilities there with i3en. You know, we have found when we talk to customers is that they love the simplicity of the hyper converged model that i3 brings. What they said was, hey, we've got a lot of workloads that are storage capacity battle. And so that meant that, you know they had the issue there is workloads, they use some amount usually a good amount of CPU memory, but they have a lot of storage capacity requirements. What that meant with i3, is they had to get a lot of these i3 hosts to get enough storage capacity to support those workloads. And obviously, they have some extra compute capacity lying around. And so you know what we've done here with i3en, is dramatically increase the amount of storage capacity. So we can see here, what is it about 45 terabytes or so so much, much larger than what you can get about four x larger than we can get on i3en. metal today. So this is again, very targeted to those very large workloads that needed beefy underlying server and, just trying to better align the customer needs and workload needs with the underlying physical capabilities. And so this is just going to be one of many that we'll bring out. We've got, a whole pipeline of these actually. And, you know, again, you can imagine all the different types of VM instance types, right? There's GPU ones, there's FPGA based ones, you know, so there's all sorts of different shapes and sizes. And, you know as we get more and more feedback from customers, as they're running more and more applications, we'll get more and more of these instance types out there as well. >> Yeah, it's really interesting Kit it give, it gives me flashbacks. I'm thinking back to your 10 or even 15 years ago, when you talked in the early days of, did I just deploy VMware on the servers I had? Or did I buy servers that had the configuration, so I could optimize and take advantage of the feature functionality that's needed? All right, when I heard some of the things you talked about there, about the, you know, being able to use certain workloads and the like, one of the feedbacks I've gotten from users is, you know, the overall price of this, let's just say it's not the least expensive solution to start with. So, so, what, what are, what are some of the new entry level options that you have with the VMC on AWS? How does this update help? >> Yeah, yeah, first of all on the price side what we have found is that this is actually extremely price efficient price competitive. if you're able to utilize all the underlying physical and variable capacity. But you know, as you just mentioned, Stu, you know, the default configuration is three nodes of those i3 hosts, and that those three hosts aren't small either, right? They're pretty beefy and if you just want to get started, just try something small. Well, today, we do have actually a OneNote instance. But that OneNote instance, is just a temporary is kind of a testbed, if you will a proof of concept type of environment. It's not a long term, long running a production environment. And so customers kind of have this OneNote on the one hand or three notes on other and, you know, obviously they're saying, "Hey, why can't we just start with two nodes, "make it super simple, "reduce that price point again "for a very small footprint deployment, "and then allow us to scale up." So we bring up the next slide, what you can see is that that's exactly what we've done here as well, supporting two nodes now. And the idea here is this is a full production environment. You get all the great VMware technology, you can do motion stuff, HA, you get availability, and so forth, stores policies, as you see here. So again, this is meant to be a long lived, fully supported production environment that can also scale up if need be, right? You might start out with two nodes, but then find, "Hey, I want to add three or four or more." And you can certainly fully do that and fully support that. So again, this is just giving customers more optionality, more flexibility for where they want to to come in. What we've been doing thus far is talking with a lot of customers that had, you know, pretty large footprints and saying, "Hey, I want to move a good chunk of my data center, "or I've got a lot of workloads I want to burst." And of those cases, three or more nodes made a lot of sense. What we're finding now is that a lot of customers do want that flexibility to start smaller, just with two nodes really simple, kind of put their toe in the water, if you will and get a feel for the service and then expand from there. >> Yeah, okay, Kit, one, one quick follow up on this, you mentioned that if customers are maximizing, you know, leveraging the full environment they I have there, it's very cost competitive. You know, how are we hearing from data from from customers? What is their, their growth pattern? Are they getting good utilization? Do, do they have a good feel for, how to manage that economics in the AWS space, a lot of talk about things like FinOps these days, and how to make sure that the technical group and the Financial Group are working close together. >> Yeah, such a great question, actually. And the whole notion of the economics around this is a huge focus area for us. We have a whole Cloud Economics group, as a matter of fact, that we frequently bring in to talk with customers to help them think through all these different things. There's, there's a number of different considerations there. You know, a lot of look from, going from on-prem into the Cloud to the VMC on AWS. And, you know, with VMC on AWS, our prices are just public cloud in general, it's very easy to understand the price 'cause it's right up front, you're getting charged, right? On Premise a bit more difficult to understand that you've got a lot of capital expenses, you got a lot of other sort of operational expenses, you know, power electricity, people, and how do you, how do you make all the right computations there? So we have whole teams to help people think through that. But usually, what we have found is that price is not the main thing, right? Price is kind of a secondary or tertiary type of consideration. The main thing is always one of our primary use cases, it's like, man, I need to get out of my data centers, or my data center is that capacity, I want to keep it but I really need to be able to burst to the cloud, maybe some sort of test dev* like test in the cloud and production on pram or vice versa. Those are the key use cases that bring customers in, and then it's really a question of, okay, now that you know, you want to do this, how do we do this as effectively, efficiently from a cost perspective as well as possible, right? And that's where that sort of economic discussion starts to happen. And then you get into more of the details like, okay, which kind of instance type do I want? What are the cost metrics of that? Can I actually fill it to capacity? That's where we start getting into those more specific situations for each customer. >> Excellent, we have that. That really tees up for me kit, when, when I think about the, you know early customers that I've talked to that are using VMC on AWS, they tend to be your enterprise customers, they're big VMware customers, they've enterprise license agreements, and the like. VMware has got a strong history working across the board. And you talk about Cloud in previous solutions. You've had close partnerships with the, with the managed service providers. >> Yeah. >> So my understanding is you're actually looking to help connect between what you've done with a managed service project in the past and this VMware on AWS solution. So bring us inside, you know this, this, this option >> Sure. Yeah, let me let me break it down for you 'cause we do work with a lot of partners. You know, obviously from VMware, its inception partners have been, you know, core to our strategy and core to our success, right? What we've actually been doing, actually somewhat kind of quietly over the past 15 years anyway, isn't really building out, what we call our VMware Cloud Provider Partner Program, and the VCPP program. And, you know, the idea there is that we do have a lot of these managed service providers that can take our software and run it on behalf of their customers, essentially, delivering our software as a service to their customers. And that's been great. We've seen a lot of success stories there. And we have about 4200 of these folks now, like a tremendous amount spread all around the world, all sorts of different geographies, and also all sorts of different industry verticals. And so you see a lot of these folks getting really specific, you know, let's say to the finance, vertical, you know, in and around Wall Street, running all sorts of great services for the financial services firms. Well, these folks are looking to evolve as well and what they're saying and seeing is like, hey, you know, just this basic idea of running infrastructure. Well, I can do that. But it doesn't necessarily differentiate me right? I need to move up the stack and start offering more services, and really trying to be a very, you know, sort of boutique and targeted solution for their customers. And so a lot of these customers, you know, obviously want to run on VMC on AWS. And so what we've been doing is enabling these partners to, you know, sell through essentially VMC on AWS that to sell these servers to their customers. But one of the challenges there is that they're only able to sell the full sort of bare-metal server, they weren't able to break that up or split that across customers as they can do today within their own environments. In fact, today, within their environments, they use something called VMware Cloud Director. And this is software that we give them. And you know, it's really nice that you can take a vSphere environment, software-defined data center and break it apart or kind of carve it up, if you will, into multiple smaller tenants, then, the, you know, each of these customers can, can take part of. And so but we didn't have that functionality for VMware Cloud on AWS. And so that's for the announcements all about, so let's pull up the slide to talk about that. The basic idea here is we can now enable the same software defined data centers that are running inside of AWS as part of VMware Cloud on AWS to be accessed by VMware Cloud Director. And so what we've done is actually made, we call it VCD, for short made VCD, a service that we now operate, and it runs there alongside VMC on AWS. And so now these managed service providers can leverage the VCD as a service to rule out access and, and carve up these SDDC that they get. And, you know, the takeaway here is that we're just giving these partners much greater flexibility and optionality in terms of how they consume, the underlying bare-metal infrastructure on VMC on AWS, and then give that out to their own customers again, giving greater customer choice and options, those customers. >> All right kit, so the other big thing that we've covered this year with VMware, of course, is the launch of vSphere 7. What that means the cloud native-space, the whole Tanzu portfolio line. So help us understand how all the application modernization Kubernetes and like ties into now the solution that we're talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's about a huge focus for us, as you know. Yeah, we launched Tanzu last year at Vmworld. And have, then launched the product set earlier this year, it's finally ready to GA. It's in great customer interest and has customer traction there. And obviously, one of the big questions people had was like, "Hey, how can I get this for VMC on AWS?" And so the specific product they were looking at there was called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. And so the idea with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is that it enables a customer to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters across any cloud, right? And you can do this on AWS, you can do this on-prem, on vSphere, or other clouds and so forth. And, so obviously, this technology needed to come to BMC. You know, the thing we talk about with customers, when it comes to VMC on AWS is this notion of migrate the modernize, that we can migrate you off of your on-prem infrastructure to this modernized cloud infrastructure that is VMC on AWS. And once you have that modernized infrastructure, it makes it much easier to modernize your applications, you've got all sorts of great AWS services sitting there. So now the application itself can start taking advantage of all these things, as well as these new type of capabilities. So let's pull up the slide for this one. So what we're announcing here is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid plus on VMC on AWS. And what this gives you is all that great functionality, the ability to get Kubernetes seamlessly running on top of your VMC environment right next to all of your existing apps. So it's not one of those situations where you need, you know, separate clusters or different environments. You can have a single environment, they can have both your traditional applications and your more modern ones. And Tanzu Kubernetes Grid takes care of all the management of that Kubernetes environment. It ensures that it's up to date, properly lifecycle manage, manage local security, you get a Container Registry there, can elastically scale based on demand. And of course, you get all that great consistency as well. And we do a lot of customers that are multicloud that, that are doing things across different environments. And so TKG can replicate itself and give you that consistent management across any of those environments on-prem and the cloud between clouds. So that's really what the power of this is. And again, it's really taking VMC from just being a platform from migrating your existing workloads to really being a platform for modernizing those workloads as well. >> Yeah, it's interesting Kit, you know if when I think about traditionally, VMware, it was, you know, let me take my app and I'm going to shove it into the end and I'll never think about it again. So what's the change in mindset? How do you make sure that it's not just, you know, stick it in there and forget about it, but, you know, can move in change which is, you know, really the, the call for today is that I need to be more agile, I need to be able to respond to change? >> That's a great question. And we actually spend a lot of time talking about this with customers. So if we take a step back, you know, it's important to understand the traditional journey most customers are looking at when they're moving to the cloud. I talked about this notion of migrating then modernizing. Oftentimes, you know, before the advent of VMC on AWS, you didn't have the ability to take those two apart, you had to migrate and modernize simultaneously. In order to move to the cloud, you actually had to do a bunch of refactoring and retooling and so forth to your application. And obviously, that created a lot of challenges because it slowed how quickly customers can move up to the cloud. And so what we've done, which I think is really, really powerful is kind of broken those two apart. To say, you know what, you may have a business imperative to get out of the data center, we can help you do that, we can move, you know, some customers moved hundreds of workloads a week, up to VMC on AWS. And then once you've done that, you're now a little bit more breathing room, right? You've gotten out of your immediate business problem, and let's say in this case, closed-ended data center. And now you can sort of focus on okay, how do I think about modernizing these applications? How do I think about the interior points to opening them up and actually getting inside of them? And so I think, you know, the most valuable aspect of the approach that we've taken here is that ability to, to separate out those two to get the quick business wins that you need. And then to take the time to think about, okay, how do I actually modernize this? How do I want to? What sort of technologies do I want to use? How should I do this right, rather than just need to do this quickly? And so I think that's a really, really powerful aspect of our approach, and that we can give customers more optionality in terms of how they approach their modernization efforts. >> Yeah, so, so Kit, the final question I have for you, the VMware AWS partnership has been around for a couple years now. >> Yeah. >> What would you say is the biggest change technically, from when the solution was first announced, just to where we are today with all the new updates that you've talked about? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Look, it's hard to pick one, right? I think the biggest thing in general, is just the increasing maturity of this offering. And that goes really across the board, technical maturity, operational maturity, compliance, certification maturity, right? Getting more and more of those under our belt, global reach maturity, right? We started off in one region, but now we're all over the world, pretty much every region that AWS has. You see more and more features, you know, we're constantly releasing new features, new hardware types. And so I think that's really the biggest thing. It's not been like one singular thing, what has been is just a lot of work by the team across 1000 different areas, and moving all those in parallel. And that's really been the heavy lift that we've had to do with the past few years. You know, as we talked about, it was a lot of work just to get this thing out in the first place, right? We had to do a lot of technical work with AWS to enable this bare metal-capability. And so we got that one out, we got it out and had that initial service. There have been a lot of limitations, right? We just had one instance type, only one region, you know, didn't have as many compliance certifications. So obviously that limited the number of customers initially, right? Just because there are some restrictions around that. So our goal has really been to open this up to as many customers, in fact, every customer, all of our 500,000 odd vSphere customers to be able to move to VMS on AWS. And so we're slow, you know, slowly but surely, every month knocking down more and more barricades to that, right? And so what you're seeing is just a tremendous explosion of innovation and effort across the entire team. And so it's really it's kudos to the team for their continued effort day in day out of these past three years or so, to get VMC on AWS to where it is today. >> Excellent, well, thank you so much, Kit. Great to talk to you. Congratulation to the VMware and AWS team. And of course, looking forward to talking to more of the customers down the road, as they take advantage of this, hopefully at Vmworld, and some of the Amazon shows too. Thanks so much for joining us Kit. >> Thank yous Stu. >> All right, stay with us for lots more coverage, of course VMware Cloud on AWS really exciting and interesting topic we've been covering since day one. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover the Virtual Experience. I'm your host Stu Miniman. And we are now excited to be able to go beyond the hype of hyper convergence. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our regulars, even though he has a new title, Patrick Osborne is the vice president and general manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Hyperconverged Infrastructure, or HPE HCI as we could abbreviate. Patrick, good to see you. Thanks for much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Absolutely Stu, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be on theCUBE. >> All right. So, you know, HCI, obviously has had a dramatic impact on the storage industry, you know, HPE has, you know, acquisitions like SimpliVity, Nimble has a play there, you've got partnerships with some solutions including with GreenLake. Why don't you give us just kind of the update, you've been with HPE for quite a while, what really, you know, excited you about taking this job and then we'll begin on the latest in the portfolio. >> Well, I think, so what's exciting about this market is it's a growth market. HCI is certainly a great solution for a whole swath of customer segments. So we thought, you know, about these HCI solutions from everyone, from our largest enterprise customers all the way down to our smallest SMB customers, and it really fits the bill not only for what you think about a standard HCI, where you're collapsing workloads and you're collapsing infrastructure, but also I think one of the interesting things that we've been able to deliver, especially with products like the HCI is around delivering dHCI experience for three tiers of architecture. And, you know, I think that's really exciting for customers that you know, certainly are moving more towards generalists, away from specialists and, you know, you're going to get really get that HCI experience in addition to a lot of other things we bring to the table here at HPE, that you know, we've talked about before, especially around AI ops and InfoSight and the ability to do a ton of things around predictive analytics. So it's an exciting space and it serves almost our entire customer base. >> Excellent. Now your group you did some announcements, a little bit ahead of Discover, why don't you give us the latest on the news and lay out how the portfolio fits. >> Yeah, so back in May we made some significant announcements on, in the HCI portfolio. So both on HCI SimpliVity as well as our Nimble dHCI offerings. One of the things we brought to market was around VDI specifically and we launched a new platform called the SimpliVity 325 and based on some new technology with our partner AMD are able to, you know, significantly lower the cost and increase the performance for the number of remote users that were, you know, that we're able to support with the platform and also bring together a solution you know, so, you know, what you also partner with folks like Citrix and CTERA and a whole a number of folks so we can have a full vertically oriented solution stack for customers that are doing, you know, they're significantly expanding their footprint around remote workers. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's going to cut in half, you can say 50% savings on your, you know per remote worker for desktop. So some significant savings there, and we've seen a huge amount of uptick for that platform in the last two months, even since we announced it. And then secondly, on the dHCI side, we made a number of announcements around simplicity, adding that a platform to our GreenLake consumption model, which is really cool, and then adding a whole set of new building blocks on the compute side based on AMD technology that allows, you know, folks to apply different types of compute per workload for our dHCI solution. So we made a pretty, pretty big announcement back in May around our portfolio for HCI solutions and the customers are definitely impacted super positively for both announcements. >> Yeah, it's funny. I remember a few years back, everybody kind of rolled their eyes a little bit. It was like, Oh, you know, VDI talked about it to death. And of course with the global pandemic, now of course remote work so critically important, I've talked to a number of CIOs that have had HCI solutions and it's like, Hey, I need to dramatically increase my services, I need to be able to scale things up and if I didn't have these solutions, I wouldn't be able to react as fast as I need. You said you you've seen an uptick, any particularly anecdotes or, you know, customer stories as to how they've been able to react fast in today's climate. >> Yeah, so especially for knowledge workers that are working remote, I mean, I can tell you that, almost 98 or 99% of my staff and the folks at HPE are working remotely and they're doing a fantastic job. So, you know, when we're able to service, you know, very small customers that are just, you know, embarking on their journey for remote workers to some of the largest corporations out there that our partners and customers of HPE, we've been able to, you know, produce a, you know, a really good outcome for them in addition to, you know, working with our partners, our reseller partners, to put this is another solution building block in their bag of tricks for their customers. >> All right. The other thing, what I want to talk a bit about is, you know, HCI is a managed service, so GreenLake, I've talked to some of your team, it has about a thousand customers HCI, so you know, one of the main options that they're offering there. Why don't you bring us inside a little bit as to, you know, why customers are choosing choosing GreenLake and you know, what that means for your product set? >> So this, from a strategic perspective, HPE, we've stated this publicly is that we want to offer all of our products and solutions as a service from a consumption perspective over the next couple of years. And so, you know, one of those key things that we want to offer from a workload perspective is certainly HCI as a service, so VMs as a service and as well as, you know, higher level type of applications, like VDI as a service. And so one of the announcements that we made was including both of our portfolios, HCI and dHCI in GreenLake so you can, essentially as a customer, you can start off very small and you are paying for the solution in metered increments, and we have lots of flexibility, you can do it at the workload level, you can do it at the CPU consumption level, you can do it at storage consumption level and so that gives a lot of flexibility and that's great for our larger customers that want to move from a CAPEX to an OPEX model. And, but it also really helps a lot of our small and medium sized customers who are, you know, in this environment, they are, you know, one of the top things in their mind is maintaining liquidity and so they can move that to an OPEX model and we actually have some really great offers that we announced with HPE financial services in conjunction with GreenLake on making this a very flexible, very cost effective manner to consume infrastructure and provide solutions for their customers and their end users. >> Excellent. You mentioned before a little bit about AI ops, give us a little bit as to how you see the, really the next generation of HCI taking advantage of, you know, automation intelligence and the like. >> Yes, so you know, as we've a talk on theCUBE before, one of the, I think one of the key solutions that we have and experiences that we bring to our customers in addition to the consumption level is this ability to do AI ops, global learning, predictive analytics for our workloads, for our customers, and essentially really really cut down on the costs in people that it takes to maintain these solutions and then you can, you know, essentially use the global learning and global aspect of, you know, a giant fleet in our entire install base and that gets applied to HCI. So SimpliVity HCI has been plugged into info site for over about a year now. Nimble obviously, Nimble dHCI, it's a core from the product offering and it's the best offering in the market for AI ops. And so our ability to do these things and provide predictive analytics, memory pressure, black listing, and white listing, the install base for problems, being able to reach out to customers before issues happen, noisy neighbors, VM consumption, storage consumption, all these things, you know, really cut down and provide a really awesome support automation experience for customers and essentially have a seamless experience for managing all of our systems. And when you think about HCI 2.O being able to do that, not only on a compressed infrastructure like HCI, but being able to do it on dHCI, which is desegregated hyperconverged so you can scale storage and networking and compute separately and you provide that same HCI experience from a management perspective and the AI ops around it is a game changer for, you know, some of the most, you know, business and mission critical applications that our customers are running. >> Alright. Well, one of the big themes that we're hearing across HPE Discover this year is about it's solutions. Traditionally I think of HCI really as helping collapse and simplify the data center, really that cloud operating model almost in the data center, where do these things connect? How does the edge fit in to this whole discussion? >> Yeah, so one of the beauties of HCI and specifically SimpliVity is our ability to be hyper efficient not only in the just the storage of the data. So, you know, from day one, everything is de-duped, everything is compressed and that's across both your on prem copies, as well as your DR copies, as well as your backup copies. And one of the things that we're seeing is that, sure HCI is great to collapse workloads in the data center and, but what we're seeing now is the ability to go serve as workloads that are running outside of the data center and when we talk about edge, we have some fantastic assets and a lot of customers, you know, running our edge compute solutions, our edge networking solution, specifically wireless and Aruba and what we're able to do is we're bringing those services, so compute, networking, and storage closer to the end user, but outside the data center and so there are some challenges to that like, so how do you federate the management of hundreds, if not thousands of clusters of these workloads running that could be anywhere from, you can think about a small, like a micro data center to a closet to even just, you know, small form factor that could be in a half of a rack and being able to manage those effectively but then also be able to pull the workloads and the data back. So being able to do edge, to core to cloud from a data mobility perspective. It's something that we provide and our customers are certainly deploying our solutions because of that. So a lot of stuff going on in the edge and I think one of the other things too that we see is people are running virtualized workloads, so VMs, and then also starting to incorporate containers. So microservices for, you know, industry specific things like vision and video and, you know, a whole bunch of things that happen around AI and ML at the edge. So it's very exciting place. >> Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up. You know, obviously one of the things that we're hearing a lot of interest from the community when it comes to virtualization is, you know, what is happening with that, really application modernization and containerization a big piece of that, of course, VMware with vSphere 7 are really helping to bring Kubernetes together to the virtualization environment. How do you see all of these playing together? You know, being a bare mental virtualization, containers, you know, edge, core, cloud, it's a complicated environment and, you know, the goal of HCI was always to help simplify this but we know IT is a bit messy and additive. >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day, you know, there are some basic services that customers want to run at the end of the day. They want to be able to deploy a workload on infrastructure that can be managed remotely, that could be managed at scale that provides, resiliency, it provides performance and it provides data mobility and HCI provides all of those capabilities whether it's, you know, through the HPE SimpliVity portfolio or Nimble dHCI and so you have a number of different building blocks that you can build. But on top of that is a set of data services in cloud consumption like experience that allows you to place those workloads on the infrastructure that you need and where you need it. And so if it's running at the edge, this commingling of VMs and containers, you know, we have a pretty unique platform out there, especially for things like AI and ML workloads in our HPE container platform and so you can run that for example, on something like HPE SimpliVity or dHCI, whether that's in the data center or whether you're running that on the edge and being able to service those customers, that's not an all or nothing proposition. At this point, you know, a number of our customers are running workloads that are virtualized and that are side by side to provide essentially good to customers, their customers at the end of the day. >> Excellent. Patrick, I'll give you the final word, takeaways if you want, that your customers want to have from HPE Discovery's week. >> Yeah, HPE Discover Virtual Experience has been great and you know, I think everyone participating in this, you know, we'd love to provide you as (mumble) as possible. There are a number of announcements around HCI, both our HCI platform was SimpliVity, to dHCI, we made some really great announcements recently around our primary storage and then we're going to continue at HPE Discover around some of our cloud data services. So when you think about someone who's going to provide, you know, you're going to partner with, from a costumer perspective on your most valuable workloads, whether it's workloads that exist today, or workloads that are fuel your digital transformation, HPE really is a partner that's providing, you know the infrastructure, the workloads and the cloud like experience both from a management perspective as well as from a consumption perspective that's going to service as these workloads from edge to core to cloud. So we're pretty excited about HPE discover now. >> Excellent. Thanks so much, Patrick and we'll be right back with lots more coverage from HPE Discover, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you as always for watching theCUBE.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VeeamON 2020 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VeeamON 2020 online. Of course, instead of all gathering together in Las Vegas, we were getting to talk to participants of the community where they are around the globe. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest on the program, he's part of the opening keynote I'm sure most of you saw, Simon Kofkin-Hansen, chief technology officer for VMware Solutions inside of IBM. Simon, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, it's a pleasure to be here. >> All right, so you know, obviously we know IBM quite well. We at theCUBE at you know, the virtual events, both RedHat Summit and IBM Think not too long in the past there. Talking a lot about you know, the open hybrid cloud many of the messages that I hear from Veeam remind me of what I heard at their environments you know, it, multicloud environment, we need flexibility in what we're doing, we, you know, need to of course you know, data is such an important piece of what's going on. Maybe before we get into it too much, give us a little bit about you know, your role there, where you fit into that whole discussion of what IBM is with Cloud. >> So Stu, yeah, I'm the chief technology officer of IBM, of Veeam solutions on the IBM cloud. Primarily involved and helped create the partnership that exists between IBM and VMware today. Basically, I'm providing automated solutions for our clients. Automated, secure solutions for our clients around the VMware and the IBM Cloud infrastructure space. >> Yeah, well, Simon, it's interesting stuff, you've got some good history there, maybe you might remind our audience you know, I remember at VMWorld, before there was a big partnership, that VMware made with a certain public cloud provider that gets talked about a lot, IBM was the first and if I saw you know, correctly, I'd love for you to be able to provide the data behind it. There are more VMware customers on the IBM Cloud than any other cloud is what I believe is the data I saw, I think. So bring us in little bit more, explain that relationship. >> So yes, we were, as IBM, beginning of all of this, I mean VMware and IBM have had a long relationship. And in fact, IBM manages over 850,000 predominantly VMware workloads on-prems, and have done for the last 10+ years. But in the latest iteration of this partnership, we brought together our automation and our codified experience from dealing with these, our client accounts around the world and brought that expertise along with VMware's product side to align this automated stdc stack on cloud platforms. And first to market with that automated stdc stack called VMware Cloud Foundation. First to market out and we've had a great ongoing relationship since then. It's really resonated with many of our clients and our enterprise clients out there. >> All right well Simon, one of the most important pieces of that, you know, VMware stdc message is that I have VMware, I know how, I manage that environment, and it's got a really robust ecosystem, so, of course Veeam started exclusively in the VMware environments, now lives across many environments, but you know the comment I've made on some of these interviews for VeeamON is, wherever the VMware solution and VMware Cloud goes, Veeam could just go along for the ride, really, if it were. There's obviously some integration work and testing, but help dig into a little bit, what that means for you know, solutions like Veeam tying into what VMware is doing, and what VMware is doing in the IBM Cloud. >> Well particularly at the beginning of this relationship, part of this partnership with VMware was its rich partner ecosystem. And I was given the remit and had the luxury to choose the best of the best products that's out there. Which wasn't necessarily IBM's products in this particular space. Obviously we chose Veeam for backup. I mean Veeam's reputation out there's the backup, it's known as the market leader for the backup of its actual workloads. So it was very important for us to embrace that ecosystem. And it's been a great partnership from the very, very beginning. Getting the backup products out into our platform and as we've done more recently, bringing in the new enhancements like Veeam Cloud Connect to deal with data replication and more use cases around migration and the movement of data in a hybrid cloud sense. And Veeam has been right there with us every step of the way. >> Yeah, so Simon, you're a CTO, so bring us in a little bit architecturally because when I think about hybrid cloud or even you know having to move my data between you know different data centers, you know there are, you know, the physics challenges, and you know sometimes I can, you know, get closer, I can (microphone cuts out) through there, and then there's the financial considerations. So give us to how we have to think about that, what is data movement in 2020, you know, what considerations do we have to have here, and how does IBM maybe differentiate a little bit from some others? >> So I'll answer your first question, I'll answer some of the last questions first. What does data movement in 2020 look like? Well, to be perfectly honest, Stu, we never imagined what would happen this year, but data mobility and the movement of data in a hybrid scenario has never been more acute or prevalent because of the stage that the world is currently in and the conditions that we're living in today. Being able to use familiar based tooling that represents what is used in an on-premises state, over in the cloud, enabling Veeam, or people who have existing investments in Veeam, to use that tooling for multiple different use cases. Not just backup, but that actual data replication functionality has become ever more prevalent in these cases. I was saying similar messages back in 2019 and 2018 and as long as back in 2010. I feel as though, I look at that, it's been almost a decade now, talking about the need or the capabilities of hybrid cloud and this movement of data. But I've absolutely seen an absolute increase in it over the last few years and particularly in 2020 in this current situation. The major difference from an IMB perspective is I would say, is our openness, and our, how we're dealing with the openness in the community, and our commitment to open source. Our flexibility, our security, and the way we actually deal with the enterprise. And one of the major differentiations is the security to the core. Actually building up the security, looking at the secure elements, making sure their data is safe from tampering, it's encrypted both in transit and at rest. And these are many of the factors that our enterprise clients actually demand of us and particularly when we look at the regulated industries with their heavy focus on the financial services sector. And Veeam, with its capabilities and its ability to both do the backup and migration functionality, sort of clients are expecting a two-for-one deal, in these days when they're trying to cut costs, and get out of their own data centers in an effort to cut their costs. >> Excellent. Well, Simon, you know you laid out really the imperative for enterprises, you know today and how they're dealing with that, bring us in as to what differentiates the IBM-Veeam relationship versus just IBM is open and flexible, so there are a lot of options. You know what particularly is there about Veeam that makes that relationship special? >> Well, I think it all down to the partnership and the deep willingness to work together. The research that we're doing in the products, yeah? Looking at ways that we can take Veeam beyond the VMware space and into bare metals and containers. But maintaining that level of security and flexibility that clients demand. I mean, many clients, if they've invested in a particular technology to do their backups, back up and DR, because of the heavy data requirements are still one of the most important if not the most important use case that many cloud users or many of our clients actually go for. So having that partnership with Veeam, in not only dealing with the traditional base, which is the VMware backups, but really pushing the boundaries and looking how we can extend that into migrations, into containers, and bare metal, by still keeping that level of security and flexibility. It's a difficult balance. Sometimes to make it more secure, you have to make things less flexible. And vise-versa, having things more flexible, they become less secure. So being willing to work us and actually define that difficult balance, and still provide the level of the user experience and the level of functionality that our clients demand, and keeping both client sets happy, both IBM and Veeam. It's challenging at times, but I guess it's what makes the job interesting and exciting. >> Yeah Simon, I'm actually glad you mentioned containers as one of the you know, modernization efforts going on there. Of course from Veeam's standpoint, when vSphere 7 rolls out, that they are being supported in you know one of the first work in that. I'd love to hear your viewpoint, what you're hearing from customers, how you expect, as a VMware partner for cloud, that movement of VMs and containers and how they're going together. What should we be looking for as that kind of matures and progresses? >> So I would absolutely watch this space. Particularly as we move into this. Containers and VMs living very much side-by-side. With VMware's announcements around Project Pacific and tanzu, it's very interesting. It's certainly a furor around the market. And we as IBM are very closely working with them with our acquisition last year of RedHat and its containerization platform. All while maintaining our ability in the OpenShift community around Kubernetes. So Stu, obviously I'm privy to a lot more information which I really can't really say and dig into too much detail around this particular angle but just to say that, watch this space. There's a lot going to happen. You're going to see a lot of announcements in the back half of 2020 and in the first few halves of 2021, particularly around the carburetions between containers and VMs and seeing how the different offerings from the different companies shape-- (mic cuts out) interesting times ahead. >> Yeah, absolutely. Simon, maybe you're right, don't want to get you in trouble as looking too much into the future, but maybe bring us into, I'm sure you're having lots of conversations with customers, what's their mindset, you talked about, you know, there's bare metals, virtualization, containers, you know application modernization, I've always said the long haul of the dent in any transformation and modernization (mic stutters) doing, so you know, 'cause some of the challenges and opportunities that you're hearing from customers that you and your partner are helping to solve? >> So some of the challenges around this containerization is containerization (mic stutters) is taking a lot longer and its taking a lot more time than we originally anticipated or expected. So the realization is actually hitting that VMware is going to be around for a while. I mean, the idea that people are thinking that they're just going to transform their applications, or all their VMs over a six or 12-month period, is just not reality. So we're living in this hybrid platform way, where you have VMware, you have virtual machines, and containers coexisting. Certain parts of the application, namely the, if I take the three-tier web app as an example, consisting of a http server, an application server, and a database. When you containerize that, or modernize that, it's very easy to modernize the http server, which turns into the ingress/egress servers on the container. It's very easy to modernize the application server, which is fairly static and you can just put a container. But as we know, Stu, data is sticky. So what many enterprises the data migration, or the way that the database is transformed, is the thing that takes the longest. So we're seeing out there in the enterprises people who are running their apps both with the ingress/egress service, the application server container containerized, but the database still living on a virtual machine, for a extended period of time. And until that made the final jump or chone their data service, they make that move. I do see this being, I personally, I honestly don't believe in my lifetime VMs will actually disappear. Because we're seeing that in some cases it's actually too costly for organizations to actually transform their applications or there's no real business case. It works perfectly well with the existing process. There's no need to modernize. But they're looking at ways and what parts of the architecture can be modernized, and containers are definitely the future for all the attributes that we know and love. But there is going to be this hybrid world. So having tools and partners like Veeam, who are willing to cross the ecosphere of the different platforms, is critical for our clients today and critical for partnerships that we have. Like the one we have with Veeam. >> All right well Simon, it goes back to one of those IT maxims, you know, is IT always additive. We almost never really get rid of anything, we just keep adding to it and changing it and as you said, data is that critical component and I think you highlighted nicely how you know, Veeam fits in you know, very much for that story. So Simon, thank you so much for joining us, pleasure having you on the program, glad to have you in theCUBE alumni ranks at this point. >> Thank you Stu, and thank you, it was a pleasure. Take care. >> All right stay tuned for lots more coverage from VeeamON 2020 online, I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (calm music)

from the cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cute conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to this special presentation we have a launch from Dell technologies updates to the BX rail family we're gonna do things a little bit different here we actually have a launch video from Janet champion of Dell technologies and the way we do things a lot of times is analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things you might have questions on it though rather than me just walking it are you watching herself I actually brought in a couple of Dell technologies expert two of our cube alumni happy to welcome back to the program Jonathan Segal he is the vice president of product marketing and Chad Dunn who's the vice president at price today of product management both of them with Dell technologies gentlemen thanks so much for joining us it was too great to be here all right and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna be rolling the video here I've got a button I'm gonna press Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit go into some questions when we're all done we're actually holding a crowd chat where you will be able to ask your questions talk to the expert and everything and so a little bit different way to do a product announcement hope you enjoy it and with that it's VX rail taking API to the extremes is is the theme we'll see you know how what that means and everything but without any further ado it but let's look fanon take the video away hello and welcome my name is Shannon champion and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with the ex rail let's get started we have a lot to talk about our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the core edge and cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options as well as the latest in software innovations so let's jump right in before we talk about our announcements let's talk about where customers are adopting the ex rail today first of all on behalf of the entire Dell technologies and BX Rail teams I want to thank each of our over 8,000 customers big and small in virtually every industry who have chosen the x rail to address a broad range of workloads deploying nearly a hundred thousand nodes to date thank you our promise to you is that we will add new functionality improve serviceability and support new use cases so that we deliver the most value to you whether in the core at the edge or for the cloud in the core the X rail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VX rail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment now we can support even more demanding applications such as in-memory databases like s AP HANA and more AI and ML applications with support for more and more powerful GPUs at the edge video surveillance which also uses GPUs by the way is an example of a popular use case leveraging the X rail alongside external storage and right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing and as it relates to VDI the X Rail has always been a great option for that in the cloud it's all about kubernetes and how dell technologies cloud platform which is VCF on the x rail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and cloud native applications and we're doing that together with VMware the X ray o is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments designed to enhance the native VMware experience this joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers all right so Shannon talked a bit about you know the important role of IP of course right now with the global pandemic going on it's really you know calling in you know essential things you know putting you know platforms to the test so I'd really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers also you know VDI of course you know in the early days it was HDI only does VDI now we know there are many solutions but remote work is you know putting that back front and center so John why don't we start with you is you know what you're absolutely so first of all us - thank you I want to do a shout out to our BX real customers around the world it's really been humbling inspiring and just amazing to see the impact of our bx real customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here you know just for a few examples there are genomics companies that we have running the X rail that have a row about testing at scale we also have research universities out in the Netherlands on doing the antibody detection the US Navy has stood up a hosta floating Hospital >> of course care for those in need so look we are here to help that's been our message to our customers but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this so just just a pleasure there but as you mentioned just to hit on the the VDI comments so it's your points do you know HCI and vxr8 EDI that was initially use case years ago and it's been great to see how many of our existing VX real customers have been able to inhibit very quickly leveraging via trail to add and to help bring their remote workforce you know online and support them with your existing VX rail because V it really is flexible it is agile to be able to support those multiple workloads and in addition to that we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost-effective catered to everything from knowledge workers to multimedia workers you name it you know from 250 desktops up to a thousand but again back to your point BX rail ci is well beyond video it had crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually and you know where VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads any of our customers out there it supports now a range of workloads as you heard from Shannon whether it's video surveillance whether it's general purpose only to mission-critical applications now with SAV ha so you know this is this has changed the game for sure but the range of workloads and the flexibility of yet rail is what's really helping our existing customers from this pandemic we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments from the ones that we serve all knew and loved back in the the initial days of of HCI now the mission-critical things now to cloud native workloads as well and you know sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI and specifically VX rail gives them that ability to pivot when these you know shall we say unexpected circumstances arise and I think if that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IT strategies look like as they move forward they want that same level of agility and the ability to react quickly with our overall infrastructure excellent want to get into the announcements what I want my team actually your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo so maybe they can dig up that footage talk about how fast they pivoted you know using VX rail to really spin up things fast so let's hear from the announcements first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later so let's get to the actual news that and it's gonna share okay now what's new I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms to further enable IT modernization across core edge and cloud I will cover each of these announcements in more detail demonstrating how only the X rail can offer the breadth of platform configurations automation orchestration and lifecycle management across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent simple side operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications I'll start with hybrid cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell technologies cloud announcements just a few weeks ago related to VMware cloud foundation on the X rail then I'll cover two brand new VX rail hardware platforms and additional options and finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VX rail HCI system software capabilities for lifecycle management let's get started with our new cloud offerings based on the ex rail you xrail is the HCI foundation for dell technologies cloud platform bringing automation and financial models similar to public cloud to on-premises environments VMware recently introduced cloud foundation for dotto which is based on vSphere 7 as you likely know by now vSphere 7 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release in keeping with our synchronous release commitment we introduced the XR l 7 based on vSphere 7 in late April which was within 30 days of VMware's release two key areas that VMware focused on were embedding containers and kubernetes into vSphere unifying them with virtual machines and the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere lifecycle manager or VL CM I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how the X rail fits in in a moment for V cf4 with tansu based on vSphere 7 customers now have access to a hybrid cloud platform that supports native kubernetes workloads and management as well as your traditional vm based workloads and this is now available with VCF 4 on the ex rel 7 the X rails tight integration with VMware cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid cloud but also to deliver kubernetes a cloud scale with one complete automated platform the second cloud announcement is also exciting recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid cloud because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture and with that Dell technologies cloud platform can now be deployed with a four node configuration lowering the cost of an entry-level hybrid cloud this enables customers to start smaller and grow their cloud deployment over time VCF on the x rail can now be deployed in two different ways for small environments customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture it's ideal for getting started with an entry-level cloud to run general-purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost but still with a consistent cloud operating model for larger environments we're dedicated resources and role based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred you can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at 8 nodes for independent management and workload domains a standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes horizon VDI and vSphere with kubernetes all right John there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware's doing with vSphere 7 understand if you wanted to use the kubernetes piece you know it's it's VCF as that so we you know we've seen the announcements delt partnering there helped us connect that story between you know really the the VMware strategy and how they've talked about cloud and how you know where does the X rail fit in that overall Delta cloud story absolutely so so first of all is through the x-ray of course is integral to the Delta cloud strategy you know it's been VCF on bx r l equals the delta cloud platform and this is our flagship on-prem cloud offering that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any cloud right whether it's on prem in the edge or in a public cloud and we've seen the delta cloud platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons one is it offers the fastest hybrid cloud deployment in the market and this is really you know thanks to a new subscription on offer that we're now offering out there we're at less than 14 days it can be set up and running and really the deltek cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models overall comes to the extra secondly I would say is fast and easy upgrades I mean this is this is really this is what VX real brings to the table for all our clothes if you will and it's especially critical in the cloud so the full automation of lifecycle management across the hardware and software stack boss the VMware software stack and in the Dell software however we're supporting that together this enables essentially the third thing which is customers can just relax right they can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated and always be in a continuously validated state and this this is the kind of thing that you know those three value propositions together really fit well with with any on print cloud now you take what Shannon just mentioned and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same the x-ray link structure alongside traditional applications this is a game changer yeah it I love you know I remember in the early days that about CI how does that fit in with cloud discussion and align I've used the last couple years this you know modernize the platform then you can modernize the application though as companies are doing their full modernization this plays into what you're talking about all right let's get you know can't let ran and continue get some more before we dig into some more analysis that's good let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases first up I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new delhi MCB x rail series the DS series this is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of the x rail for workloads at the edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas the X ray LD series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the BX rail portfolio with simplicity agility and lifecycle management but in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches it's a durable form factor that's extremely temperature resilient shock resistant and easily portable it even meets mil spec standards that means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VX rail HCI system software and 24 by 7 single point of support enabling you to rapidly react to business needs no matter the location or how harsh the conditions so whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base running real-time GPS mapping on-the-go or implementing video surveillance in remote areas you can ensure availability integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VX Rail ruggedized D series had would love for you to bring us in a little bit you know that what customer requirement bringing bringing this to market I I remember seeing you know Dell servers ruggedized of course edge you know really important growth to build on what John was talking about clouds so yeah Chad bring us inside what was driving this piece of the offering sure Stu yeah you know having the the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important and that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these edges or some of the more exotic locations you know whether that's manufacturing plants oil rigs submarine ships military applications in places that we've never heard of but it's also been extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VX rails you're managing your edges the same way using the same set of tools so you don't need to learn anything else so operational simplicity is is absolutely key here but in those locations you can take a product that's designed for a data center where you're definitely controlling power cooling space and take it to some of these places where you get sand blowing or sub-zero temperatures so we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat extreme cold extreme altitude but still offer that operational simplicity if you look at the the resistance that it has to heat it can go from around operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range but it can do an excursion up to 55 °c or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours it's also resisted the heats and dust vibration it's very lightweight short depth in fact it's only 20 inches deep this is a smallest form factor obviously that we have in the BX rail family and it's also built to to be able to withstand sudden shocks it's certified it was stand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation it's pretty high and you know this is this is sort of like where were skydivers go to when they weren't the real real thrill of skydiving where you actually the oxygen to to be a put that out to their milspec certified so mil-std 810g which i keep right beside my bed and read every night and it comes with a VX rail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment and we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for for naval chakra quirements EMI and radiation immunity of all that yeah you know it's funny I remember when weights the I first launched it was like oh well everything's going to white boxes and it's going to be you know massive you know no differentiation between everything out there if you look at what you're offering if you look at how public clouds build their things what I call it a few years poor is there's a pure optimization so you need scale you need similarities but you know you need to fit some you know very specific requirements lots of places so interesting stuff yeah certifications you know always keep your teams busy alright let's get back to Shannon we are also introducing three other hardware based editions first a new VX rail eseries model based on were the first time AMD epic processors these single socket 1u nodes offered dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from 8 to 64 cores up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer-aided design next the addition of the latest NVIDIA Quadro RT X GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional workflows designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering deep learning and visual computing workloads and Intel obtain DC persistent memory is here and it offers high performance and significantly increase memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity even when power is lost enabling quicker recovery and less downtime with support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like sa P Hana alright let's finally dig into our HCI system software which is the core differentiation for the xrail regardless of your workload or platform choice our joint engineering with VMware and investments in the x-ray HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers under the covers the xrail offers best-in-class Hardware married with VMware HCI software either vcn or VCF but what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two Dell technologies has a dedicated VX rail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper-converged system that team has also developed our unique the X rail HDI system software which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver a seamless automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere the key components of the x rail HDI system software are shown around the arc here that include the X rail manager full stack lifecycle management ecosystem connectors and support I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today but if you're interested in learning more I encourage you to meet our experts and I will tell you how to do that in a moment I touched on VLC M being a key feature to vSphere seven earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of the xrail lifecycle management the LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them with the X ray all customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business customers tell us that lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively and that it isn't the most efficient economically Automation of lifecycle management in VX Rail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure but as shown here our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages and reduced overall cost of operations with the xrail HCI system software intelligent lifecycle management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated keeping clusters in continuously validated States while minimizing risks and operational costs how do we ensure continuously validated States Furby xrail the x-ray labs execute an extensive automated repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customer's choosing across their VX rail environment the VX rail labs are constantly testing analyzing optimising and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack all the while the x rail is backed by Delhi MCS world-class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software IT productivity skyrockets with single-click non-disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing taking you to the next VX rail version of your choice while always in a continuously validated state you can also confidently execute automated VX rail upgrades no matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster they don't have to all be the same and upgrades with VX rail are faster and more efficient with leap frogging simply choose any VX rail version you desire and be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between only the ex rail can do that all right so Chad you know the the lifecycle management piece that Jana was just talking about is you know not the sexiest it's often underappreciated you know there's not only the years of experience but the continuous work you're doing you know reminds me back you know the early V sand deployments versus VX rail jointly develop you know jointly tested between Dell and VMware so you know bring us inside why you know 2020 lifecycle management still you know a very important piece especially in the VL family yeah let's do I think it's sexy but I'm pretty big nerd yes even more the larger the deployments come when you start to look at data centers full of VX rails and all the different hardware software firmware combinations that could exist out there it's really the value that you get out of that VX r l HTI system software that Shannon was talking about and how its optimized around the VMware use case very tightly integrated with each VMware component of course and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware all of the drivers all of the software altogether tremendous value to our customers but to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment so she Anna mentioned we've run about twenty five thousand hours of testing across each major release four patches Express patches that's about seven thousand hours for each of those so obviously there's a lot of parallelism and and we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality one of the key things that were able to do as Shannon mentioned is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state we've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously a huge amount of automation and then when we talk about that investment to execute those tests that's well north of sixty million dollars of investment in our lab in fact we've got just over two thousand VH rail units in our testbed across the u.s. Shanghai China and corn island so a massive amount of testing of each of those those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state yeah well you know absolutely it's super important not only for the day one but the day two deployments but I think this actually be a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to so we've got the CIO of Amarillo Texas he was an existing VX rail customer and he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work from home initiative as well as you know we get to hear in his words the value of what lifecycle management means though Andrew if we could queue up that that customer segment please it was it's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it you know as we mature and they I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so so fervently why it was so urgent today three years ago we the answer would have been no there would have been we wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt with it with the x-ray all in place you know in a week we spun up hundreds of instant phones we spawned us a seventy five person call center in a day and a half for our public health we will allow multiple applications for Public Health so they could do remote clinics it's given us the flexibility to be able to to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive and it's not only been apparent to my team but it's really made an impact on the business and now what I'm seeing is those those are my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well all right so rich you talked to a bunch about the the efficiencies that they tie put place how about that that overall just managed you know you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances you need to be able to do things much simpler so you know how does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion it makes it so much easier and you know in the in the old environment one it took a lot of man-hours to make change it was it was very disruptive when we did make change this it overburdened I guess that's the word I'm looking for it really over overburdened our staff it cost disruption to business it was it cost-efficient and then you simple things like you know I've worked for multi billion-dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production simply can't afford that at local government you know having the sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change as I said earlier it's allow us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management because it's greatly simplified and move those resources and rescale them in in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business it's hard to be innovated when a hundred percent of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat all right well you know nothing better than hearing straight from the end-user you know public sector reacting very fast to the Cova 19 and you know you heard him he said if this had hit his before he had run this project he would not have been able to respond so I think everybody out there understands if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology you know it would be much harder all right I'm looking forward to doing the crowd chat and everybody else digging with questions and get follow-up but a little bit more I believe one more announcement he came and got for us though let's roll the final video clip in our latest software release the x-ray of 4.7 dot 510 we continue to add new automation and self-service features new functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch this is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window of course running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates we are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific the xrail version or down Rev one or more more nodes that may be shipped at a higher Rev than the existing cluster this enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in cluster to sum up all of our announcements whether you are accelerating data center modernization extending HCI to harsh edge environments deploying an on-premises Dell technologies cloud platform to create a developer ready kubernetes infrastructure BX Rail is there delivering a turnkey experience that enables you to continuously innovate realize operational freedom and predictably evolve the x rail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations automation and lifecycle management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across core edge and cloud I now invite you to engage with us first the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about the ex rails new features and functionality and score some sweet digital swag while you're at it it delivered via an automated via an augmented reality app all you need is your device so go to the x-ray is slash passport to get started and secondly if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VX rail meet the experts sessions available for a limited time first-come first-served just go to the x-ray dot is slash expert session to learn more you all right well obviously with everyone being remote there's different ways we're looking to engage so we've got the crowd chat right after this but John gives a little bit more is that how Del's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got firfer options for them yeah absolutely so as Shannon said so in lieu of not having Dell tech world this year in person where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions whether it's in the booth or you know in in meeting rooms you know we are going to have these meet the experts sessions over the next couple of weeks and look we're gonna put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to to everyone out there so again definitely encourage you we're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we could still stay in touch answer questions be responsive and really looking forward to you know having these conversations over the next couple weeks all right well John and Chad thank you so much we definitely look forward to the conversation here in int in you'd if you're here live definitely go down below do it if you're watching this on demand you can see the full transcript of it at crowd chat /vx rocks sorry V xrail rocks for myself Shannon on the video John and Chad Andrew man in the booth there thank you so much for watching and go ahead and join the crowd chat

from around the globe it's the cube with digital coverage of Red Hat summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat last year in 2019 IBM made the biggest M&A move of the year with a 34 billion dollar acquisition of red hat it positioned IBM for the next decade after what was a very tumultuous tenure by CEO Ginni Rometty who had to shrink in order to grow unfortunately she didn't have enough time to do the grille part that has now gone toward Arvind Krishna the new CEO of IBM this is Dave Volante and I'm here with Stu minimun and this is our Red Hat keynote analysis is our 7th year doing the Red Hat summit and we're very excited to be here this is our first year doing Stu the Red Hat summit post IVM acquisition we've also got IBM think next week so what we want to do for you today is review what's going on at the Red Hat summits do you've been wall-to-wall with the interviews we're gonna break down the announcements IBM had just announced its quarter so we get some glimpse as to what's happening in the business and then we're gonna talk about going forward what the prognosis is for both IBM and Red Hat well and Dave of course our audience understands there's a reason why we're sitting farther apart than normal in our studio and you know why we're not in San Francisco where the show is supposed to be this year last year it's in Boston Red Hat summit goes coast-to-coast every year it's our seventh year doing the show first year doing it all digital of course our community is always online but you know real focus you know we're gonna talk about Dave you know you listen to the keynote speeches it's not the as we sit in our preview it's not the hoopla we had a preview with pork or mayor ahead of the event where they're not making big announcements most of the product pieces we're all out front it's open source anyway we know when it's coming for the most part some big partnership news of course strong customer momentum but a different tenor and the customers that Red Hat's lined up for me their interview all talking you know essential services like medical your your energy services your communication services so you know real focus I think Dave both IBM and right making sure that they are setting the appropriate tone in these challenging times yeah I mean everybody who we talked to says look at the employees and safety comes first once we get them working from home and we know that they're safe and healthy we want to get productive and so you've seen as we've reported that that shift to the work from home infrastructure and investments in that and so now it's all about how do we get closer to clients how do we stay close to clients and be there for them and I actually have you know business going forward you know the good news for IBM is it's got strong cash flow it's got a strong balance sheet despite you know the acquisition I mean it's just you know raise some more you know low low cost debt which you know gives them some dry powder going forward so I think IBM is gonna be fine it's just there's a lot of uncertainty but let's go back to your takeaways from the Red Hat Summit you've done you know dozens of interviews you got a good take on the company what are you top three takeaways - yeah so first of all Dave you know the focus everybody has is you know what does Red Hat do for the cloud story for IBM OpenShift especially is absolutely a highlight over 2,000 customers now from some really large ones you know last year I interviewed you know Delta you've got you know forward and Verizon up on stage for the keynote strong partnership with Microsoft talking about what they're doing so OpenShift has really strong momentum if you talk about you know where is the leadership in this whole kubernetes space Red Hat absolutely needs to be in that discussion not only are they you know other than Google the top contributor really there but from a customer standpoint the experience what they've built there but what I really liked from Red Hat standpoint is it's not just an infrastructure discussion it's not OPM's and containers and there's things we want to talk about about VMs and containers and even server lists from Red Hat standpoint but Red Hat at its core what it is it they started out as an operating system company rel Red Hat Enterprise Linux what's the tie between the OS and the application oh my god they've got decades of experience how do you build applications everything from how they're modernizing Java with a project called Korkis through how their really helping customers through this digital transformation I hear a similar message from Red Hat and their customers that I hear from Satya Nadella at Microsoft is we're building lots of applications we need to modernize what they're doing in Red Hat well positioned across the stack to not only be the platform for it but to help all of the pieces to help me modernize my applications build new ones modernize some of the existing ones so OpenShift a big piece of it you know automation has been a critical thing for a while we did the cube last year at ansible fest for the first time from Red Hat took that acquisition has helped accelerate that community in growth and they're really Dave pulling all the pieces together so it's what you hear from Stephanie shirasu ironically enough came over from IBM to run that business inside a Red Hat well you know now she's running it inside Red Hat and there's places that this product proliferate into the IBM portfolio next week when we get where it I didn't think I'm sure we'll hear a lot about IBM cloud packs and look at what's underneath IBM cloud packs there's open shift there's rel all those pieces so you know I know one of the things we want to talk about Davis you know what does that dynamic of Red Hat and IBM mean so you know open shift automation the full integration both of the Red Hat portfolio and how it ties in with IBM would be my top three well red hat is now IBM I mean it's a clearly part of the company it's there's a company strategy going forward the CEO Arvind Krishna is the architect of the Red Hat acquisition and so you know that it's all in on Red Hat Dave I mean just the nuance there of course is the the thing you hear over and over from the Red Hatters is Red Hat remains Red Hat that cultural shift is something I'd love to discuss because you know Jim Whitehurst now he's no longer a Red Hat employee he's an IBM employee so you've got Red Hat employees IBM employees they are keeping that you know separation wall but obviously there's flowing in technology and come on so come on in tech you look at it's not even close to what VMware is VMware is a separate public company has separate reporting Red Hat doesn't I mean yes I hear you yo you got the Red Hat culture and that's good but it's a far cry from you know a separate entity with full transparency the financials and and so I I hear you but I'm not fully buying it but let's let's get into it let's take a look at at the quarter because that I think will give us an indication as to how much we actually can understand about RedHat and and again my belief is it's really about IBM and RedHat together I think that is their opportunity so Alex if you wouldn't mind pulling up the first slide these are highlights from IBM's q1 and you know we won't spend much time on the the the IBM side of the business although we wanted to bring some of that in but hit the key here as you see red hat at 20% revenue growth so still solid revenue growth you know maybe a little less robust than it was you know sequentially last quarter but still very very strong and that really is IBM's opportunity here 2,200 clients using red hat and an IBM container platforms the key here is when Ginni Rometty announced this acquisition along with Arvind Krishna and Jim Whitehurst she said this is going to be this is going to be cash flow free cash flow accretive in year one they've already achieved that they said it's gonna be EPS accretive by year two they are well on their way to achieving that why we talked about this do it's because iBM has a huge services organization that it can plug open shift right into and begin to modernize applications that are out there I think they cited on the call that they had a hundred ongoing projects and that is driving immediate revenue and allows IBM to from a financial standpoint to get an immediate return so the numbers are pretty solid yeah absolutely Dave and you know talking about that there is a little bit of the blurring a line between the companies one of the product pieces that came out at the show is IBM has had for a couple of years think you know MCM multi cloud management there was announced that there were actually some of the personnel and some of the products from IBM has cut have come into Retta of course Red Hat doing what they always do they're making it open source and they're it's advanced cluster management really from my viewpoint this is an answer to what we've seen in the kubernetes community for the last year there is not one kubernetes distribution to rule them all I'm going to use what my platforms have and therefore how do I manage across my various cloud environments so Red Hat for years is OpenShift lives everywhere it sits on top of VMware virtualization environments it's on top of AWS Azure in Google or it just lives in your Linux farms but ACM now is how do I manage my kubernetes environment of course you know super optimized to work with OpenShift and the roadmap as to how it can manage with Azure kubernetes and some of the other environments so you know you now have some former IBM RS that are there and as you said Dave some good acceleration in the growth from the Red Hat numbers we'd seen like right around the time that the acquisition happened Red Hat had a little bit of a down quarter so you know absolutely the services and the the scale that IBM can bring should help to bring new logos of course right now Dave with the current global situation it's a little bit tough to go and be going after new business yeah and we'll talk about that a little bit but but I want to come back to sort of when I was pressing you before on the trip the true independence of Red Hat by the way I don't think that's necessarily a wrong thing I'll give an example look at Dell right now why is Dell relevant and cloud well okay but if Dell goes to market says we're relevant in cloud because of VMware well then why am I talking to you why don't I talk to VMware and so so my point is that that in some regards you know having that integration is there is a real advantage no you know you were that you know EMC and the time when they were sort of flip-flopping back and forth between integrated and not and separate and not it's obviously worked out for them but it's not necessarily clear-cut and I would say in the case of IBM I think it's the right move why is that every Krista talked about three enduring platforms that IBM has developed one is mainframe that's you know gonna here to stay the second was middleware and the third is services and he's saying that hybrid cloud is now the fourth and during platform that they want to build well how do they gonna build that what are they gonna build that on they're gonna build that an open shift they they're there other challenges to kind of retool their entire middleware portfolio around OpenShift not unlike what Oracle did with with Fusion when it when it bought Sun part of the reason - pod Sun was for Java so these are these are key levers not necessarily in and of themselves you know huge revenue drivers but they lead to awesome revenue opportunities so that's why I actually think it's the right move that what IBM is doing keep the Red Hat to the brand and culture but integrate as fast as possible to get cash flow or creative we've achieved that and get EPS accretive that to me makes a lot of sense yeah Dave I've heard you talk often you know if you're not a leader in a position or you know here John Chambers from Cisco when he was running it you know if I'm not number one or number two why am I in it how many places did IBM have a leadership position Red Hat's a really interesting company because they have a leadership position in Linux obviously they have a leadership position now in kubernetes Red Hat culturally of course isn't one to jump up and down and talk about you know how they're number one in all of these spaces because it's about open source it's about community and you know that does require a little bit of a cultural shift as IBM works with them but interesting times and yeah Red Hat is quietly an important piece of the ecosystem let me let me bring in some meteor data Alex if you pull up that that's that second slide well and I've shown this before in braking analysis and what this slide shows in the vertical axis shows net score net score is a measure of spending momentum spending velocity the the horizontal axis is is is called market share it's really not market share it's it's really a measure of pervasiveness the the mentions in the data set we're talking about 899 responses here out of over 1200 in the April survey and this is a multi cloud landscape so what I did here Stu I pulled on containers container platforms of container management and cloud and we positioned the companies on this sort of XY axis and you can see here you obviously have in the upper right you've got Azure in AWS why do I include AWS and the multi cloud landscape you answered that question before but yesterday because Dave even though Amazon might not allow you to even use the word multi cloud you can't have a discussion of multi cloud without having Amazon in that discussion and they've shifted on hybrid expect them to adjust their position on multi-cloud in the future yeah now coming back to this this this data you see kubernetes is on the kubernetes I know is another company but ETR actually tracks kubernetes you can see how hot it is in terms of its net score and spending momentum yeah I mean Dave do you know the thing the the obvious thing to look at there is if you see how strong kubernetes is if IBM plus red hat can keep that leadership in kubernetes they should do much better in that space than they would have on with just their products alone and that's really the lead of this chart that really cuts to the chase do is you see you see red Red Hat openshift has really strong spending momentum although I will say if you back up back up to say April July October 18 19 it actually was a little higher so it's been pushed down remember this is the April survey that what's ran from mid-march to mid April so we're talking right in the middle of the pandemic okay so everybody's down but nonetheless you can see the opportunity is for IBM and Red Hat to kind of meet in the middle leverage IBM's massive install base in its in its services presence in its market presence its pervasiveness so AKA market share in this rubric and then use Red Hat's momentum and kind of meet in the middle and that's the kind of point that we have here with IBM's opportunity and that really is why IBM is a leader in at least a favorite in my view in multi cloud well Dave if you'd look two years ago and you said what was the competitive landscape Red Hat was an early leader in the kubernetes you know multi-cloud discussion today if you ask everybody well who's doing great and kubernetes you have to talk about all the different options that amazon has Amazon still has their own container management with ACS of course IKS is doing strong and well and Amazon whatever they do they we know they're going to be competitive Microsoft's there but it's not all about competition in this space Dave because you know we see Red Hat partnering across these environments they do have a partnership with AWS they do have you know partnership with you know Microsoft up on stage there so where it was really interesting Dave you know one of the things I was coming into this show looking is what is Red Hat's answer to what VMware is really starting to do in this space so vSphere 7 rolled out and that is the ga of project Pacific so taking virtualization in containers and putting them together Red Hat of course has had virtualization for a long time with KVM they have a different answer of how they're doing openshift virtualization and it rather than saying here's my virtual environment and i can also do kubernetes on it they're saying containers are the future and where you want to go and we can bring your VMs into containers really shift them the way you have really kind of a lift and shift but then modernize them Dave customers are good you know you want to meet customers where they are you want to help them move forward virtualization in general has been a you don't want to touch your applications you want to just you know let it ride forever but the real the real driver for companies today is I've got to build new apps I need to modernize on my environment and you know Red Hat is positioning and you know I like what I'm hearing from them I like what I'm hearing from my dad's customers on how they're helping take both the physical the virtual the containers in the cloud and bring them all into this modern era yeah and and you know IBM made an early bet on on kubernetes and obviously around Red Hat you could see actually on that earlier slide we showed you IBM we didn't really talk about it they said they had 23% growth in cloud which is that they're a twenty two billion dollar business for IBM you're smiling yeah look good for IBM they're gonna redefine cloud you know let AWS you know kick and scream they're gonna say hey here's how we define cloud we include our own pram we include Cano portions of our consulting business I mean I honestly have no idea what's in the 22 billion and how if they're growing 22 billion at 23% wow that's pretty awesome I'm not sure I think they're kind of mixing apples and oranges there but it makes for a good slide yeah you would say wait shouldn't that be four billion you added he only added two or three billion you know numbers can tell a story but you can also manipulate but the point is the point is I've always said this near term the to get you know return on this deal it's about plugging OpenShift into services and modernizing applications long term it's about maintaining IBM and red-hats relevance in the hybrid cloud world which is I don't know how big it is it's a probably a trillion-dollar opportunity that really is critical from a strategy standpoint do I want to ask you about the announcements what about any announcements that you saw coming from Red Hat are relevant what do we need to know there yeah so you know one of the bigger ones we already talked about that you know multi cloud manager what Red Hat has the advanced cluster management or ACM absolutely is an era an area we should look VMware Tong's ooh Azure Ark Google anthos and now ACM from Red Hat in partnership with IBM is an area still really early Dave I talked to some of the executives in the space and say you know are we going to learn from the mistakes of multi vendor management Dave you know you think about the CA and BMC you know exactly of the past will we have learned for those is this the right way to do it it is early but Red Hat obviously has a position here and they're doing it um did hear plenty about how Red Hat is plugging into all the IBM environments Dave Z power you know the cloud solutions and of course you know IBM solutions across the board my point of getting a little blue wash but hey it's got to happen I think that's a smart move right you know we talked about you know really modernizing the applications in the environments I talked a bit about the virtualization piece the other one if you say okay how do I pull the virtualization forward what about the future so openshift serverless is the other one it's really a tech preview at this point it's built off of the K native project which is part of the CNC F which is basically how do I still have you know containers and kubernetes underneath can that plug into server list order server let's get it rid of it everything so IBM Oracle Red Hat and others really been pushing hard on this Kay native solution it is matured a lot there's an ecosystem growing as how it can connect to Asher how it can connect to AWS so definitely something from that appdev piece to watch and Dave that's where I had some really good discussions with customers as well as the the Red Hat execs and their partners that boundary between the infrastructure team and the app dev team they're hoping to pull them together and some of the tooling actually helps ansible is a great example of that in the past but you know others in the portfolio and lastly if you want to talk a huge opportunity for Red Hat IBM and it's a jump ball for everyone is edge computing so Red Hat I've talked to them for years about what they were doing in the opened stack community with network function virtualization or NFV Verizon was up on stage I've got an interview for Red Hat summit with Vodafone idea which has 300 million subscribers in India and you know the Red Hat portfolio really helping a lot of the customers there so it's the telco edge is where we see a strong push there it's definitely something we've been watching from the you know the big cloud players and those partnerships Dave so you know last year Satya Nadella was up on the main stage with Red Hat this year Scott Guthrie you know there he's at every Microsoft show and he's not the red head show so it is still ironic for those of us that have watched this industry and you say okay where are some of the important partnerships for Red Hat its Microsoft I mean you know we all remember when you know open-source was the you know evil enemy for from Microsoft and of course Satya Nadella has changed things a lot it's interesting to watch I'm sure we'll talk more at think Dave you know Arvind Krishna the culture he will bring in with the support of Jim Whitehurst comes over from IBM compared to what Satya has successfully done at Microsoft well let's talk about that let's let's talk about let's bring it home with the sort of near-term midterm and really I want to talk about the long term strategic aspects of IBM and Red Hat's future so near-term IBM is suspended guidance like everybody okay they don't have great visibility some some some things to watch by the way a lot of people are saying no just you know kind of draw draw a red line through this quarter you just generally ignore it I disagree look at cash flow look balance sheets look at what companies are doing and how they're positioning that's very important right now and will give us some clues and so there's a couple of things that we're watching with IBM one is their software business crashed in March and software deals usually come in big deals come in at the end of the quarter people were too distracted they they stopped spending so that's a concern Jim Cavanaugh on the call talked about how they're really paying attention to those services contracts to see how they're going are they continuing what's the average price of those so that's something that you got to watch you know near-term okay fine again as I said I think IBM will get through this what really I want to talk about to do is the the prospects going forward I'm really excited about the choice that IBM made the board putting Arvind Krishna in charge and the move that he made in terms of promoting you know Jim Whitehurst to IBM so let's talk about that for a minute Arvind is a technical visionary and it's it's high time that I VM got back to it being a technology company first because that's what IBM is and and I mean Lou Gerstner you know arguably save the company they pivoted to services Sam Palmisano continue that when Ginny came in you know she had a services heritage she did the PWC deal and IBM really became a services company first in my view Arvind is saying explicitly we want to lead with technology and I think that's the right move of course iBM is going to deliver outcomes that's what high-beams heritage has been for the last 20 years but they are a technology company and having a technology visionary at the lead is very important why because IBM essentially is the leader prior to Red Hat and one thing mainframes IBM used to lead in database that used to lead in storage they used to lead in the semiconductors on and on and on servers now they lead in mainframes and and now switch to look at Red Hat Red Hat's a leader you know they got the best product out there so I want you to talk about how you see that shift to more of a sort of technical and and product focus preserving obviously but your thoughts on the move the culture you're putting Jim as the president I love it I think it was actually absolutely brilliant yeah did Dave absolutely I know we were excited because we you know personally we know both of those leaders they are strong leaders they are strong technically Dave when I think about all the companies we look at I challenge anybody to find a more consistent and reliable pair of companies than IBM and Red Hat you know for years it was you know red hat being an open-source company and you know the way their business model said it it's not the you know Evan flow of product releases we know what the product is going to be the roadmaps are all online and they're gonna consistently grow what we've seen Red Hat go from kind of traditional software models to the subscription model and there are some of the product things we didn't get into too much as to things that they have built into you know Red Hat Enterprise Linux and expanding really their cloud and SAS offerings to enhance those environments and that that's where IBM is pushing to so you know there's been some retooling for the modern era they are well positioned to help customers through that you know digital transformation and as you said Dave you and I we both read the open organization by Jim lighters you know he came in to Red Hat you know really gave some strong leadership the culture is strong they they have maintained you know really strong morale and I talked to people inside you know was their concern inside when IBM was making the acquisition of course there was we've all seen some acquisitions that have gone great when IBM has blue washed them they're trying to make really strong that Red Hat stays Red Hat to your point you know Dave we've already seen some IBM people go in and some of the leadership now is on the IBM side so you know can they improve the product include though improve those customer outcomes and can Red Hat's culture actually help move IBM forward you know company with over a hundred years and over 200,000 employees you'd normally look and say can a 12,000 person company change that well with a new CEO with his wing and you know being whitehurst driving that there's a possibility so it's an interesting one to watch you know absolutely current situations are challenging you know red hats growth is really about adding new logos and that will be challenged in the short term yeah Dave I I love you shouldn't let people off the hook for q2 maybe they need to go like our kids this semester is a pass/fail rather than a grid then and then a letter grade yeah yeah and I guess my point is that there's information and you got to squint through it and I think that look at to me you know this is like Arvin's timing couldn't be better not that he orchestrated it but I mean you know when Ginny took over I mean was over a hundred million a hundred billion I said many times that I beams got a shrink to grow she just ran out of time for the Gro part that's now on Arvind and I think that so he's got the cove in mulligan first of all you know the stocks been been pressured down so you know his tenure he's got a great opportunity to do with IBM in a way what such an adela did is doing at Microsoft you think about it they're both deep technologists you know Arvind hardcore you know computer scientist Indian Institute of Technology Indian Institute of Technology different school than Satya went to but still steeped in in a technical understanding a technical visionary who can really Drive you know product greatness you know in a I would with with Watson we've talked a lot about hybrid cloud quantum is something that IBM is really investing heavily in and that's a super exciting area things like blockchain some of these new areas that I think IBM can lead and it's all running on the cloud you know look IBM generally has been pretty good with acquisitions they yes they fumbled a few but I've always made the point they are in the cloud game IBM and Oracle yeah they're behind from a you know market share standpoint but they're in the game and they have their software estate in their pass a state to insulate them from the race to the bottom so I really like their prospects and I like the the organizational structure that they put in place in it by the way it's not just Arvind Jim you mentioned Paul Cormier you know Rob Thomas has been been elevated to senior VP really important in the data analytic space so a lot of good things going on there yeah and Dave one of the questions you've been asking and we've been all talking to leaders in the industry you know what changes permanently after the this current situation you know automation you know more adoption of cloud the importance of developers are there's even more of a spotlight on those environments and Red Hat has strong positioning in that space a lot of experience that they help their customers and being open source you know very transparent there I both IBM and Red Hat are doing a lot to try to help the community they've got contests going online to you know help get you know open source and hackers and people working on things and you know strong leadership to help lead through these stormy weathers so Stuart's gonna be really interesting decade and the cube will be here to cover it hopefully hopefully events will come back until they do will be socially responsible and and socially distant but Stu thanks for helping us break down the the red hat and sort of tipping our toe into IBM more coverage and IBM think and next week this is Dave alotta for Stu minimun you're watching the cube and our continuous coverage of the Red Hat summit keep it right there be back after this short break you [Music]

[Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students leaky bomb John Farrar we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7 I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of 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 the vSphere Chris just 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 previewed it this project Pacific a 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 tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year and it is star gated fully at the developers of modern applications and the specific news is vSphere 7 is general available generally vSphere 7 yes ok that 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 pascal sternness says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expand it and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm not just that customers are also looking at being able to manage a hybrid cloud environment both on pram 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 on VMs what's excited about this trend increase we were talking with us at vmworld last year and we've 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 and even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move 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 if John if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share 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 application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a 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 Paul Pat said kuba is gonna be the dial tone on the Internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but if what he meant is is that's the key fabric that's gonna work a straight and you know 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 are so that we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi-cloud this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the 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 VC peepee partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by a kubernetes based dial-tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me 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 what's is what's the meaning behind that that phrase no I 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 once across all these clouds you get the same API said that you can use to deploy that application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does VMware vSphere seven specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or used whether you're running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey use bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody's actually tried deploying kubernetes first it's highly complicated um so so definitely one of the things that we're bringing is you call it a Bolton 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 we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out ninety percent of IT and just turn on 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 and 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 truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT yeah I mean I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the 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 it was before same as it was before more capable dealer and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's 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 it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right 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 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 it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your modern applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's it we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA where 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 applications that's the accelerate application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs which I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then in the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned I get the lifestyle improvement a life cycle 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 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 you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your in choler internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment and independent we've got these fair trust authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know 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 negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot in conversations the carbon black in the security piece chrishelle see these fear everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is that the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your 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 right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective of where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it once it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all fun a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take dare take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean I I think what we're if we look at it for developers we are democratizing kubernetes we already are in ninety percent 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 so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP 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 yeah I 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's more to come look we're 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'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned well one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome vSphere core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna 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 right which will allow you to an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go to Amazon native and then you have orc Lord 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 graduates on the insulin thank you at vSphere 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Ferger thanks for watching [Music]

(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 seven dot O. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of 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. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, 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 that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased 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, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a 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 you know, 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 of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? 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 you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's 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 a 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 with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department 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, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, 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 is 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 of 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 the 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's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're 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 like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, 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 that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs 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 and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, 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, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, 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, it 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, with 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. That you 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, is 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? >> Right. 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 of 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. So 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, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, 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. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in 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, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. 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 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 either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? 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, and 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. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a 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 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. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, 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 is 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 instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll 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 one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focus on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't 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 lifecycle. 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 life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that 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 in 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. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere 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? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One 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 but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are 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 on 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. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. 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 accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, 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 on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion 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 you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, 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, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is 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 pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity slash challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, 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. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. 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, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple 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, again both of you, for you 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 sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> 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)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students leaky bomb John free we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware to discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere seven I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of 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 the vSphere there's just 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 previewed it this project Pacific a 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 tansu portfolio of 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 7 is general available you know really vSphere 7 yes ok that 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 VMworld last year and throughout the year there's a lot of buzz Pat Keller says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expanded and and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm 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 excited about this trend Chris we were talking with us at VMworld last year and we've 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 even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move 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 if Jon if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share 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 application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a 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 yep all Pat said Cuba is gonna be the dial tone on the internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but a buddy mince is is that's the key fabric there's gonna work a straight and you know 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 and major security are so that we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi-cloud this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the 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 VC peepee partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by a kubernetes based dial-tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me 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 what says what's the meaning behind that that phrase the 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're 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 said that you can use to deploy their application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does VMware vSphere 7 specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or are you running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey just Bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody's actually tried deploying kubernetes first it's it's highly complicated um so 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 we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out ninety percent of IT and just turn on turn on the kubernetes dial tone and it is as simple as that now it's much more than that in version 7 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-managed 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 and 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 truly a trusted platform for your developers and IIT yeah I mean I I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the 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 administered the older laces so they don't have to learn anything new they're just working the same way we are not changing any tools process technologies so same as it was before same as it was before more capable dealer and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's 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 it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right there is DevOps as 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 is they need infrastructure that is on demand so what 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 it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your monitoring applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's a that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and m/l applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA were 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 applications that's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs Chris 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 a life cycle 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 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 the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom as we would call it you you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your Intel or internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment in independent we've got these fair trust Authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know 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 negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot conversations the carbon black in the security piece Chris obviously have vsphere everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is got the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your 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 right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it once it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all for a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take Derek take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean 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 be sphere 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 so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP 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 yeah I 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's more to come that we're 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'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned oh one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome vSphere core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna 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 right which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go to Amazon native and then you have orc Lord and as your 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 graduates on the insulin Thank You Vera bees fear 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Farrar your thanks for watch [Music] and welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we are having a very special Q conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil if you will of the new VMware vSphere 7 dot gonna get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have a longtime cube alumni kit Kolbert here is the vp and CTO cloud platform at being work it great to see you yeah and and new to the cube jared rose off he's a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm guessin 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 alright so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect what is so different about vSphere seven yeah great so vSphere seven baek's 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 that might be coming when the with the acquisition of the hefty Oh team so really exciting news and I think it 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 the realization of that vision yes yeah so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific right this technology preview and as Jared mentioned of what that was was how do we take kubernetes and really build it into vSphere as you know we had a 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 you know 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 work clothes as well right all right so I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo so why don't ya well into there and let's see what it looks like you guys can cube the demo yes we're gonna start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation for an vSphere 7 so what you're seeing here is the developers actually using kubernetes to deploy kubernetes the self eating watermelon right 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 is and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere and so you know 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 you know 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 you know one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as 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 a 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 V Center and what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through kubernetes those are showing up right inside of the V center console and so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names and so this means what a developer calls their IT department 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 say they see the same information so what we're gonna do is that you know we're gonna push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and you know what you'll see here is that V Center is the V Center you've already known and loved but what's different is that now it's much more application focused so here we see a new screen inside of V Center vSphere namespaces and so these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications like a whole distributed system now as a single object inside a V Center and when I click into one of these apps this is a managed object inside of e spear 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 you know corporate credentials to access the system I tap into all my existing storage so you know this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers 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 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 you know seeing the VMS and 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 the vCenter console and so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective this data is invaluable it often saves hours just in trying to figure out what what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue so the you know as you can see this is all baked right into V Center the V Center 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 that 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 V Center UI and so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins well that's a it's pretty it's pretty wild you know it really builds off the vision that again I think you kind of outlined kid teased out it at VMworld which was you know the IT still sees vSphere which is what they want to see when they're used to seeing but devs siku Nettie's 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 gonna see in this kind of unified environment yeah yeah as the demo showed it is still vSphere at the center but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere the kubernetes base one which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks as well as the traditional vSphere interface API is which is great for VI admins and IT operations right and then and really it was interesting to you tease that a lot that was a good little preview of people knew they're watching but you talked about really cloud journey and and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are that are running in their classic memes and then kind of the modern you know county cloud native applications built on kubernetes and youyou 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 ya know I think we think a lot about it like that that we look at 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 it involves modernizing applications and you know as you mentioned that it's 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 it's the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other that you 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 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 come you able people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost right and its really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about about one of the fundamental things is we're now the application defines a reach sources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the what the application can't do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as as makes sense 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 you see that yeah definitely I mean I think that you know certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from you know looking historically at how we managed infrastructure one of things we enable in VCR 7 is how we manage applications right so a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know your 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 gonna 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 be have these security rules on it and so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level right yeah and like I kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say you know if you look back one thing we did was something like V San before that people had to put policies on a LUN you know an actual storage LUN and a storage array and then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array it inherited certain policies right and so these have turned that around allows you to put the policy on the VM but what jerez talking about now is that for a modern workload a modern were close not a single VM it's it's a collection of different things you've got some containers in there some VMs probably distributed maybe even some on-prem some in 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 it's really powerful and very simplifying one right 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 it's a nice big word but 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 you know based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace yeah well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance right so today if I want to check of this app is compliant I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and 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 each Center set the right security settings on that and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are gonna inherit that stuff so it really simplifies that it also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications you know if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory when you log in with vSphere seven what you see is a few dozen applications so a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure many more applications and 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 ie building applications well 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 is ready fourth so there's a lot more to this is a very significant release right again a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves that's a pretty significant you know kind of RER context or many many parts of ease of beer so beyond the kubernetes you know kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out and there's a very significant release yeah it's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about kubernetes what was project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point you know vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features and so instead of a demo here let's pull up with some slides right 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 seven so the first first one is simplified lifecycle management and then really focus on security it's a second one and then applications as well out both including you know the cloud native apps that don't 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 cycle 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 VL cm 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 in and out 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 gonna have automation on automation right because they're upgrading to the sevens is probably not any consequent inconsequential tasks mm-hm and yeah and going forward and allowing you know 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 right next big thing you talk about is security yep we just got back from RSA thank goodness we got that that show in before all the badness started yeah but everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top yeah talk about kind of the the changes in the security so done a lot of things around security things around identity Federation things around simplifying certificate management you know dramatic simplifications there across the board one 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 but you know what what's how do you implement that the concept of least privilege right or zero trust right yeah topic exactly so the idea with trust authorities that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and sure fully secure those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very lockdown 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 these untrusted hosts haven't been modified we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing so is 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 right and then the third kind of leg of the stool is you know just better leveraging you know kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you know what things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application could draw the appropriate resources as needed so you've done a lot of work here as well yeah there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space as you mentioned all sort 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 you know 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 ie silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using and you know what you find is all things we found before you found we 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 at most customers and it's funny because and some ones you think well well shouldn't we be past this as an industry shouldn't we have solved this already you know we did this with virtualization but as it turns out the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network but now we really needed to virtualize all these accelerators and so that's where this bit fusion technology that we're including now with vSphere it really comes to the forefront so if you see in the current slide we're showing here the challenge is that just these separate pools of infrastructure how do you manage all that and so if you go to the we go to the next slide what we see is that with bit 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 you know have multiple people sharing a GPU we can do it very dynamically and the great part of it is 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 pretty it's pretty trick is because the classifications of the assets now are much much larger much varied and much more workload specific right that's really the opportunities flash they are they're good guys are diverse yeah and so like you know 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 sa P Hana or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that the emotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else they're making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth right now a lot of this stuff not just kind of brand new cool new accelerator stuff but it's also how do we ensure the core ass people have already been running for many years we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well right all right so do 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 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 you know IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps right I think today you look at a lot 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 right and so now I think we can shift that story around I think that there's you know there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and appdev teams are gonna be having over the next couple 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 congratulations that get both of you for forgetting to 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 I'm sure there's ton more resources from people I even want to go down into the weeds so thanks for stopping by thank you thank you all right ease Jared he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're in the Palo Alto studios thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] hi and welcome to a special cube conversation I'm Stu min a minute and we're digging into VMware vSphere seven 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 joined me for the program I have Bill Buckley Miller who is in infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond bill thanks so much for joining us nice - all right so Phil let's start of course British Telecom I think most people know you know what BT is and it's a you know a really sprawling company tell us a little bit about you know your group your role and what's your mandate okay so my group it's called service platforms it's the bit of BT that services all of our multi millions of our customers so they we have broadband we have TV we have mobile we have DNS and email systems and one and it's all about our customers it's not a B to be part of BT you with me we we specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services I'm in particular my group is for we do infrastructure so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just past boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above okay great we definitely gonna 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's your organization been doing VMware and tell us you know what you see with the announcement that VMware's making work BC or seven sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about twelve thirteen years something like that and it's a absolutely key part of our 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 serving us 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.v raps log insight 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 capacity plan and troubleshoot so that's that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade at least we've been really really confident with our ability to still with Yemen where environments and Along Came containers and like I say multi cloud as well and what we were struggling with was the inability to have a cell pane a glass really on all of that and to use the same people and the same same processes to manage a different kind of technology so we we'd be working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products for several years now I would really closely with the b-string integrated containers guys in particular and now with the Pacific guys with really the idea that when we we bring in version 7 and the containerization aspects 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 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 was bad ok so Phil really interesting things you 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 I manage all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs you know if I think back you know from an application standpoint it was you know let's stick it in a vm I don't need to change it and once I spin up a VM often that's gonna sit there for you know months if not years as opposed to you know I think about a containerization environment it's you know I really want a pool of resources I'm gonna 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 making absolutely right that's the nature and that the time scales that were talking about between VMs and containers oh he's wildly different as you say we we probably oughta certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2000 and 2018 certainly but I imagine I haven't 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 our architecture that require that in particular the very client facing bursty stuff it you know does require spinning up spinning down pretty quickly but some of our smaller the containers do sit around for weeks if not if not months I really just depend on the development cycle aspects of that but the heartbeat that we've we've really had was just the visualizing it and there are a number 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 allows troubleshoot and so on but they are not they need their new products their new things that we we would have to get used to and also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products quite a Venn diagram if in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that so through again again coming back to being able to manage through vSphere to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it is a list of containers and to be able to use policies to define how the 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 you don't really care about 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 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 new visa so the fact that we can actually apply that straightaway just to add slightly different completely unit which 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 cards where AWS and as your customers and were between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything of them be you know excited about take oh yeah still I really like how you described it 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 talked about some of the new world and it's like oh can the platform underneath this take care of it well there there's some things platforms take care of there's some things that the software or you know your theme 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 that's driving this change and you know being one of those you know tailwind pushing you towards you know kubernetes and the the vSphere 7 technologies well it all comes down with the customers right our customers want new functionality they want new integrations they want new content and they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well so they're the real ultimate 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 them to deploy those so we have to 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 as performant we understand where their capacity requirements are coming from in in the short term and in the long term for that and it's secure as well obviously 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 you know your your your your VMware farm one of 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 involved with setting up some of the 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 you know maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to you know what cloud really means to your organization and your applications sure well I mean to us climate allows us to accelerate development she's nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality or 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 we're well more than an eight-hour application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have well it makes sense we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for you know 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 seen enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into our order journey for 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 suburb locations you know dozens of them really to support oil platform and what you would see is that if you were to look at our full application structure for one of the platform as I mentioned that some of the smoothers application blocks I 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 policy as to where they run and to you know 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 you know 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 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 so we knew that VMware we're working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as we MS I mean they're called VMware after all we knew that they were looking it's no surprise by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really it's you know if you look at the whole tansy stuff from the Mission Control stuff I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves and from an application perspective you know and to really leap forward and this is the very 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 - what they want to achieve with the application and you know 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 no awful lot of work underneath that underneath the covers and I'm really excited and I think other people in my position should really just take it as an opportunity to really revisit what they can achieve with them in particular with vSphere and with in combination with and SXT it's it's but you know it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slide or slides about it and useless you've seen the products just how revolutionary the the version 7 is compared to previous revisions which have kind of evolved for a couple of years so yeah I think I'm really excited to run it and know a lot of my peers other companies that I speak with quite often are very excited about seven as well so yeah I'm really excited about the whole ball 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 helped move to the next phase of where application developers and infrastructure need to go Phil Buckley joining us from British Telecom I'm Stu minimun thank you so much for watching the queue

(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)

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Palo Alto students of the cube um John free we're here for a special cube conversation and special report big news from VMware discuss the launch of the availability of vSphere 7 I'm here with Chris Prasad SVP and general manager of the vSphere business and cloud platform business unit and Paul Turner VP a VP of 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 Chris just 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 previewed it this project Pacific a 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 tansu portfolio of solutions and products that we announced this year and it is star gated fully at the developers of modern applications and the specific news is vSphere 7 is general available generally vSphere 7 yes ok that 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 VMworld last year and throughout the year there's a lot of buzz pascal Cerner says there's a big wave here with kubernetes what does this announcement mean for you guys with the marketplace trend yeah so what kubernetes is really about is people trying to have an agile operation they're trying to modernize their IT applications and they the best way to do that is build off your current platform expanded and and make it a an innovative a agile platform for you to run kubernetes applications and VM applications together I'm 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 was excited about this trend Chris we were talking with us at vmworld last year and we've 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 and even the suppliers the on-premises piece if not move 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 if John if you think about it on-premise we have significant market share 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 application modern application development on top of the same platform today customers tend to set up stacks which are different right so you have a kubernetes stack you have a 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 Paul Pat said Cuba is gonna be the dial tone on the internet most Millennials might even know what dial tone is but what he meant is is that's the key fabric there's gonna work a straight and you know 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 and major securitizers as we talk to you say I don't want to fork my development teams I don't want to have three separate teams so I don't have to I I want to have automation I want an operating model that's not gonna be fragmented this kind of speaks to this whole idea of you know interoperability and multi clout this seems to be the next big way behind ibrid I think it I think it is the next big wake the 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 VC PP partners you get the same cloud operating experience and it's all driven by kubernetes based dial tone it's effective and available within this platform so by bringing a single infrastructure platform that can one run in this hybrid manner and give you the cloud operating agility that developers are looking for that's what's key in version seven says Pat Kelsey near me 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 what says what's the meaning behind that that phrase no I the 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 one across all these clouds you get the same API said that you can use to deploy that application okay so let's get into the value here of vSphere seven how does vmware vsphere 7 specifically help customers isn't just bolting on kubernetes to vSphere some will say is it that's simple or user you running product management no it's not that easy it's yeah some people say hey use bolton kubernetes on vSphere it's it's not that easy so so one of the things if if anybody has actually tried deploying kubernetes first its highly complicated and so 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 and you talked about IT operational shortages customers want to be able to deploy kubernetes environments in a very simple way the easiest way that we can you can do that is take your existing environment that are out 90% of IT and just turn on turn on the kubernetes dial tone and it is as simple as that now it's much more than that in version 7 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 and 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 truly a trusted platform for your developers and IT yeah I mean I I was just going to touch on your point about the shortage of IT staff and how we are addressing that here the 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 Italy before more capable they are and developers can come in and they see new capabilities around kubernetes so it's best of both worlds and what was the pain point that you guys are so obviously the ease-of-use is critical Asti operationally I get that as you look at the cloud native developer Saiga's 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 it's it's multiple factors so so first is we've we've talked about agility a few times right 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 is they need infrastructure that is on demand so what 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 it's not just tied to modern applications it's also your all of your existing business applications and your modern applications on one platform which means that you know you've got a very simple and and low-cost way of managing large-scale IT infrastructure so that's a that's a huge piece as well and and then I I do want to emphasize a couple of other things it's we're also bringing in new capabilities for AI and ML applications for sa P Hana databases where we can actually scale to some of the largest business applications out there and you have all of the capabilities like like the GPU awareness and FPGA our 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 applications that's the accelerated application innovation piece of the announcement right that's right yeah it's it's it's quite powerful that we've actually brought in you know basically new hardware awareness into the product and expose that to your developers whether that's through containers or through VMs Chris I want to get your thoughts on the ecosystem and then in the community but I want to just dig into one feature you mentioned I get the lifestyle improvement a life cycle 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 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 the key management that even your administrator is not able to get keys to the kingdom as we would call it you you want to have a controlled environment that you know some of the worst security challenges inside and some of the companies has been your in choler internal IT staff so you've got to have a way that you can run a trusted environment and independent we've got these fair trust authority that we released in version 7 that actually gives you a a secure environment for actually managing your keys to the kingdom effectively your certificates so you've got this you know 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 negative security of even your application ecosystem yeah that's been coming up a lot in conversations the carbon black on the security piece chrishelle see these fear everywhere having that operating model makes a lot of sense but you have a lot of touch points you got cloud hyper scale is that the edge you got partners so the other dominant market share and private cloud we are on Amazon as you well know as your 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 right it allows customers to have the same operating model irrespective of where their workload is residing they can set policies compliance security they said it wants it applies to all their environments across this hybrid cloud and it's all fun a supported by our VMware cloud foundation which is powered by vSphere 7 yeah I think having that the cloud is API based having connection points and having that reliable easy to use is critical operating model all right guys so let's summarize the announcement what do you guys take dare take away from this vSphere 7 what is the bottom line what's what's it really mean I 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 so I think that's that is one of the key things that's in here the other thing though is there is I don't think any other platform out there that other than vSphere that can run in your data center in Google's in Amazon's in Microsoft's in you know thousands of VC PP 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 yeah I 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's more to come that we're 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'll see more capabilities coming in the future stay tuned oh one final question on this news announcement which is this awesome we spear core product for you guys if I'm the customer tell me why it's gonna 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 right which will allow you to have an operational model that is consistent across the clouds so think about it if you go the Amazon native and then yeah warlord and agile 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 graduates on the announcement thank you at vSphere 7 News special report here inside the cube conversation I'm John Fergus thanks for watching [Music] and welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the cube we are having a very special cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil if you will of the new a VMware vSphere seven dot gonna get a little bit more of a technical deep dive here today we're excited to have a longtime cube alumni kit Kolbert here is the vp and CTO cloud platform at being work it great to see you yeah and and new to the cube jared rose off he's a senior director of product management at VMware and I'm guessin 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 alright so let's just jump into it from kind of a technical aspect what is so different about vSphere seven yeah great so vSphere seven baek's 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 that might be coming when the with the acquisition of the hefty Oh team so really exciting news and I think it 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 yes yeah so we talked at VMworld about project Pacific all right this technology preview and as Jared mentioned of what that was was how do we take kubernetes and really build it into vSphere as you know we had a 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 you know 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 workflows as well right all right so I think you brought some pictures for us a little demo so I don't know yeah why was dive into there and let's see what it looks like you guys can cube the demo yes we're gonna start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation for an vSphere 7 so what you're seeing here is the developers actually using kubernetes to deploy kubernetes the self eating watermelon right 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 is and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere and so you know 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 you know 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 you know one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as 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 a 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 V Center and what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through kubernetes those are showing up right inside of the V center console and so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names and so this means what a developer calls their IT department 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 say they see the same information so what we're gonna do is that you know we're gonna push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience and you know what you'll see here is that V Center is the V Center you've already known and loved but what's different is that now it's much more application focused so here we see a new screen inside of V Center vSphere namespaces and so these vSphere namespaces represent logical applications like a whole distributed system now as a single object inside a V Center and when I click into one of these apps this is a managed object inside of East fear 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 you know corporate credentials to access the system I tap into all my existing storage so you know 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 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 you know seeing the VMS and 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 the vCenter console and so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective this data is invaluable it often saves hours just in trying to figure out what what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue so the you know as you can see this is all baked right into V Center the V Center 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 that 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 V Center UI and so we're able to take all that and make it work for your existing VI admins well that's a it's pretty it's pretty wild you know it really builds off the vision that again I think you kind of outlined kit teased out it at VMworld which was you know the IT still sees vSphere which is what they want to see when they're used to seeing but devs siku Nettie's 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 gonna see in this kind of unified environment yeah yeah as the demo showed it is still vSphere at the center but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere the kubernetes base one which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks as well as a traditional vSphere interface API is which is great for VI admins and IT operations right and then and really it was interesting to you tease that a lot that was a good little preview of people knew they're watching but you talked about really cloud journey and and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classic old-school apps that are that are running in their classic themes and then kind of the modern you know counting cloud native applications built on kubernetes and youyou 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 ya know I think we think a lot about it like that that we look at 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 it involves modernizing applications and you know as you mentioned that it's 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 it's the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other that you 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 come you able people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost right and its 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 we're now the application defines a sources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as as makes sense 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 did you see that yeah definitely I mean I think that you know certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from you know looking historically at how we managed infrastructure one of things we enable in VCR 7 is how we manage applications right so a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know your resource allocation you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure you talked about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is gonna 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 be have these security rules on it and so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level right yeah and like kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say you know if you look back one thing we did was something like V San before that people had to put policies on a LUN you know an actual storage LUN and a storage array and then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array it inherited certain policies right and so these hammer turned that around allows you to put the policy on the VM but what jerez talking about now is that for a modern workload amount and we're closed not a single VM it's it's a collection of different things you've got some containers in there some VMs probably distributed maybe even some on-premise I'm in 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 a vSphere it's really powerful and very simplifying one right 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 it's a nice big word but 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 you know based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace yeah well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance right so today if I want to check of this app is compliant I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down and 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 each Center 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 you know if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory when you log in with vSphere seven what you see is a few dozen applications so a single admin can manage a 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 ie building applications well 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 they'll 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 is a fourth so there's a lot more just this is a very significant release right again a lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves that's a pretty significant you know kind of RER contexture of many many parts of ease of beer so beyond the kubernetes you know kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out and there's a very significant release yeah it's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about kubernetes what was project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point you know VCR 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features and so instead of a demo here let's pull up with some slides I'm ready 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 seven so the first first one is simplified lifecycle management and then really focus on security it's a second one and then applications as well out both including you know the cloud native apps that don't fit in the kubernetes bucket as well as others and so we go on that first one the first column there there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying life cycle 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 VL cm 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 in and out 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 gonna have automation on automation right because upgrading to the sevens is probably not any consequence in consequential tasks mm-hmm 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 right next big thing you talk about is security yep we just got back from RSA thank goodness yeah we got that that show in before all the badness started yeah but everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top yeah talk about kind of the the changes and the security so done a lot of things around security things around identity Federation things around simplifying certificate management you know dramatic simplification is there across the board a one 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 but you know what's how do you implement that the concept of least privilege right or zero trust me yeah topic exactly so they deal with trust authorities that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and sure fully secure those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very lockdown 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 these untrusted hosts haven't been modified we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing so is 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 right and then the third kind of leg of the stool is you know just better leveraging you know kind of a more complex asset ecosystem if you know with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application could 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 mention all sort 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 you know FPGA is 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 ie silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using and you know what you find is all things we found before you found we 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 at most customers and it's funny because and some ones you think well well shouldn't we be past this as an industry should we have solved this already you know we did this with virtualization but as it turns out the virtualization we did was for compute and then storage and network 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 it really comes to the forefront so if you see and the current slide we're showing here the challenge is that just these separate pools of infrastructure how do you manage all that and so if you go to the we go to the next slide what we see is that with bit 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 you know have multiple people sharing a GPU we can do it very dynamically and the great part of it is 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 pretty it's pretty trick is because the classifications of the assets now are much much larger much varied and much more workload specific right that's really the the the opportunities flash challenge they are they're good guys are diverse yeah and so like you know 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 V motion really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads right so you look at some of the massive sa P HANA or Oracle databases and how do we ensure that V motion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else they're making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth right now a lot of this stuff is not just kind of brand-new cool new accelerated stuff but it's also how do we ensure the core ass people have already been running for many years we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well right alright so Joe 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 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 you know IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps right I think today you look at a lot 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 right and so now I think we can shift that story around I think that there's you know there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and appdev teams are gonna be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team making more productive give you better performance availability disaster recovery and these kinds of capabilities awesome well Jared congratulations that get both of you for for getting a 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 I'm sure there's ton more resources from people I even want to go down into the wheat so thanks for stopping by thank you thank you all right he's Jared he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube we're in the Palo Alto studios thanks for watching we'll see you next time [Music] hi and welcome to a special cube conversation I'm Stu min a minute and we're digging into VMware vSphere seven 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 joined me for the program I have Bill Buckley Miller who is an infrastructure designer with British Telecom joining me digitally from across the pond bill 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 it's a you know a really sprawling company tell us a little bit about you know 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 they we have broadband we have TV we have mobile we have DNS and email systems and one and it's all about our customers it's not a beat to be part of beating you with me we we specifically focus on those kind of multi million customers that we've got in those various services I mean in particular my group is four we were um structure so we really do from data center all the way up to really about boot time or so we'll just past the boot time and the application developers look after that stage and above okay great we definitely gonna want to dig in and talk about that that boundary between the infrastructure teams and the application teams on but let's talk a little bit first you know we're talking about VMware so you know how long's your organization been doing VMware and tell us you know you what you see with the announcement that VMware's making work be cr7 sure well I mean we've had a really great relationship with VMware for about 1213 years some weather and it's a absolutely key part of our of our infrastructure it's written throughout BT really in every part of our 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 the server less bandwidth 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 V ROPS 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 capacity plan and troubleshoot so that's that's great and that's been like that for a half a decade at least we've been really really confident with our ability to till we p.m. where environments and Along Came containers and like say multi cloud as well and what we were struggling with was the inability to have a cell pane a glass really on all of that and to use the same people and the same same processes to manage a different kind of technology so we we'd be working pretty closely with VMware on a number of different containerization products for several years now I would really closely with the b-string integrated containers guys in particular and now with the Pacific guys with really the idea that when we we bring in version 7 and the containerization aspects 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 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 I'm be able to manage the whole piece in that was bad ok 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 in the organizational piece just a little bit because it sounds great I manage all the environment but you know containers are a little bit different than VMs you know if I think back you know from an application standpoint it was you know let's stick it in a vm I don't need to change it and once I spin up a VM often that's gonna sit there for you know months if not years as opposed to you know I think about a containerization environment it's you know I really want a pool of resources I'm gonna 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 in a rack or change in policies between your infrastructure team and your app dev team well yes make absolutely right that's the nature and that the time scales that we're talking about between VMs and containers oh he's wildly different as you say we probably all certainly have VMs in place now that were in place in 2000 and 2018 certainly I imagine I haven't haven't really been touched whereas as you say VMs and a lot of people talk about spinning them all up all the time and there are parts of our architecture that require that in particular the very client facing bursty stuff you know just require spinning up spinning down pretty quickly but some of our smaller the containers do sit around for weeks if not if not months I mean they just depend on the development cycle aspects of that but the Harpeth that we've we've really had was just the visualizing it and there are a number 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 allows Troubleshooters and so on but they are not they need their new products their new things that we we would have to get used to and also it seems that there's an awful lot of competing products quite a Venn diagram if in terms of functionality and user abilities to do that so through again again coming back to to being able to manage through vSphere to be able to have a list of VMs and alongside it 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 capacity management away from the developers you don't really care about 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 then means that then we have to be really responsible about defining those policies making sure that they're adhered to but again we know how to do that with VMs new vSphere so the fact that we can actually apply that straightaway just towards slightly different completely unit which is really all are talking about here is ideal and then to be able to extend that into multiple clouds as well because we do use multiple cards where AWS and those your customers and were between them is an opportunity that we can't do anything of them be you know excited about take home yeah bill I really like how you described it 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 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 you know 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 that's driving this change and you know being one of those you know tailwinds pushing you towards you know urban Eddie's and the 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 and they want better stability and better performance and our ability to extend or contracting capacity as needed as well so they're 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 a firm foundation really underneath all of that that 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 their capacity requirements are coming from in the in the short term and in the long term for that and it'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 you know your your your your VMware farm what a minute 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 involved with setting up some of the 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 you know maybe if you could clarify those pieces as to you know what cloud really means to your organization and your applications sure well I mean to us cloud allows us to accelerate development she's nice because it means we don't have to do on-premises capacity lifts for new pieces of functionality or 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 and I mean yes there are peak hours and lighter hours of TV watching same goes for broadband really but we generally we're well more than an eight-hour application profile so what that allows us to do then is to have applications that will it make sense we run them inside our organization where we have to run them in our organization for you know 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 seen enormous spike in the amount of customers that want to sign up into an order journey for 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 suburb locations you know dozens of them really to support oil 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 smothers application blocks I 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 policy as to where they run and to you know 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 you know 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 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 base rate so we knew that VMware we're working on trying to make containers on the same level both from a management deployment perspective as we Eames I mean they're called VMware after all right we knew that they were looking at at that no surprise by just quite how quickly they've managed to almost completely reinvent their application really it's you know if you look at the whole town zoo stuff in the Mission Control stuff and I think a lot of people were blown away by just quite how happy VMware were to reinvent themselves and from Asian perspective you know and to really leap forward and this is the vote 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 - what they would want to achieve with the application and you know 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 just take it as opportunity to greevey will revisit what they can achieve with them in particular with vSphere and with in combination with and SXT it's it's but you know it's quite hard to put into place unless you've seen the slide or slides about it and he's lost you've seen the products just have a revolutionary the the version seven is compared to previous revisions which have kind of evolved for a couple of years so yeah I think I'm really excited to run 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 I'm really excited about the whole 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 minimun thank you so much for watching the queue [Music]

>> We're back with Rob Emsley who's the director of product marketing for Dell EMC's data protection division. Rob, good to see you. >> Hi, Dave, good to be back. >> So we just heard from Beth about some of the momentum that you guys have. From your perspective, from a product angle, what is really driving this? >> Yeah, well, one of the things that we've definitely seen is as we talk to our customers, both existing and new customers, cloud journeys is top of mind for all of the CIOs. It's being driven by either the desire to drive efficiency, take out costs, and data protection is one of the most common use cases. One of the things that we find is there's four use cases for data protection that we see. Long term retention of data, cloud disaster recovery, backup to the cloud, and the emerging desire to stand up new applications in the cloud that need to be protected. So backup in the cloud really completes the four major use cases. >> Well, one of the things I think is really important in this market is that you deliver optionality to your customers. So how are customers enabling these use cases? >> Yeah, so the first two use cases of long terms retention and cloud disaster recovery is really driven by our software and our appliances. Both of those are really predicated based upon the assumption that customers are going to deploy data protection on premises to protect their on premises workloads and then tier to the cloud, or, which is becoming more common, use the cloud as a disaster recovery target. It's delivered by our data protection software and that's either in a software form factor or that software delivered and integrated appliance form factor. >> So let's talk about purpose built backup appliances. I think our friends at IDC I think coined that, they tracked that market for awhile, you guys have been a leader there, the acquisition of Data Domain obviously put you in a really strong position. Give us the update there. Is it still a vibrant market? Is it growing, what's the size? What's it look like? >> Yeah, so as we look at 2020, IDC forecasts the market size to be a little under $5 billion. So it's still a very large market. The overall market is growing at a little over 4%. But the interesting thing is that if you think about how the market is made up, it's made up of two different types of appliances. One is a target appliance, such as Data Domain and the new PowerProtect DD, and the other is integrated appliances where you integrate the target appliance architecture with data protection software. And it's the integrated appliance part of the market that is really growing faster than the other part of the PBBA market. It's actually growing at 8%. In fact, IDC's projection is that by 2022, half of the purpose built backup appliance market will be made up of integrated appliance solutions. >> So it's grown to twice the overall market rate, but you guys have two integrated appliances. Why two, how should people think about those? >> Yeah, so a little under three years ago, we introduced a new integrated appliance called the Integrated Data Protection Appliance. It was really the combination of our backup software with our Data Domain appliance architecture. And the Integrated Data Protection Appliance has been our work course for the last three years, really allowing us to support that fastest growing segment of the market. In fact, last year, the Integrated Data Protection Appliance grew by over 100%. So triple digit growth was great. It's something that allows us to address all market segments, all the way down to SMB all the way to the enterprise. But last year, one of the things you may remember at Dell Technologies World is we introduced our PowerProtect portfolio and that constituted PowerProtect Data Manager our new software defined platform as well as the delivery of PowerProtect Data Manager in an integrated appliance form factor with PowerProtect X400. So that's really our new scale out data protection appliance. We've never had a scale out appliance in the architecture before, in the portfolio before, and that gives us the ability to offer customers choice, scale up, or scale out, integrated and target, and with the X400, it's available as a hybrid configuration or it's also our first all Flash architecture. So really, we're providing customers with the existing software solutions that we've had in the market for a long time, an integrated form factor, with the Integrated Data Protection Appliance as well as the brand new software platform that will really be our innovation engine. That will be where we will be looking at supporting new workloads and certainly leaning into how we support cloud data protection in the hybrid cloud reality of the next decade. >> Okay, so one of the other things I want to explore, is we've heard a lot about your new agile development organization, Beth has talked about that a lot, and the benefit, obviously, is you're able to get products out more quickly, respond to market changes, but ultimately the proof is in translating that development into product. What can you tell us about how that's progressing? >> Yeah, so certainly with PowerProtect Data Manager and the X400, that really is the epicenter of our agile product development activities. We've moved to a three month cadence for software releases, so working to deliver small batch releases into the market much more rapidly than we've ever done before. In fact since we introduced PowerProtect Data Manager where we shipped a first release in July, we're now at the third iteration of PowerProtect Data Manager and therefore the third iteration of the X400 appliance. So there's three things that I'd like to highlight within the X400 appliance specifically. First is really the exciting news that we've introduced support for Kubernetes, so we're really the first large enterprise data protection vendor to lean into providing Kubernetes data protection. So that becomes vitally important especially with the developments over at our partner in VMware with vSphere 7, with the introduction of Tanzu, and the reality is that customers will have both vSphere virtual machines and Kubernetes containers working side by side and both of those environments need to be protected. So PowerProtect Data Manager and the X400 appliance has that support available now for customers to take advantage of. Second, we talk about long term retention of data in the cloud. The X400 appliance has just received the capabilities to also take part in long term retention to AWS. So those are two very important cloud capabilities that are brand new with the X400 appliance. And then finally we introduce the X400 appliance with a maximum configuration of four capacity cubes. Rough and tough that was 400 terabytes of usable capacity. We've just introduced support of 12 capacity cubes. So that gives the customers the ability to scale out the X400 appliance from 64 terabytes all the way to over a petabyte of storage. So now if you look at our two integrated appliances, we now cover the landscape from small numbers of terabytes all the way through to a petabyte of capacity whether or not you pick a scale up architecture or a scale out architecture. >> Yeah, so that really comes back to the point I was making about optionality. Kubernates is key. It's going to be a linchpin, obviously, a portability for multi cloud sets that up. As we've said, it's not the be-all end-all, but it's a really necessary condition to enable multi cloud which is fundamental to your strategy. >> Absolutely. >> All right, Rob, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Thanks, Dave. >> And thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. (bright music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the cube now here's your host David on tape the imperative to protect data has never been more pressing as companies transform themselves from businesses into digital businesses the intrinsic value of their data Rises exponentially the problem for infrastructure pros is that everything in IT is additive it seems like nothing ever dies which means more things to manage now think about that when you're protecting data you have bare metal VMs now containers you've got cloud you got to worry about the edge all this data needs to be protected not only does this increase complexity it expands the attack surface for adversaries wanting to steal or ransom your data at the heart of all this is a build out of a massively global distributed cloud we saw wave 1 of the cloud which was public wave 2 was really hybrid and that's evolving now in parallel you're seeing the emergence of multi cloud and as I said these earlier trends are additive they're not replacements and with me to discuss these important issues and how Dell EMC specifically is pivoting toward cloud data protection is Beth Phelan who is the president of Dell emcs Data Protection Division that's great to see you well good to be here again so we know the world is hybrid it's a fundamental the on-prem stuff is part of the fundamental digital digital transformations of these these companies and now you've got data protection for the cloud so what do you see happening in that world yeah let's start with what we're seeing in the market we recently remade on our global data protection index we've been doing it for many years and we've been really using that to help us understand the landscape and what our customers need and first not surprisingly it shows that continued trend of movement and reliance towards cloud environments for business applications continuing to increase on top of that the customers despite that are continuing to struggle with ensuring they have the right data protection for their cloud environments right so they're they're struggling you see that we see that as well what what's going on there well what is the data tell you yeah first of all more than half of the customers don't have a comprehensive data protection solution for their Salas cloud native and multi cloud environments more than two-thirds of the customers who may be relying on their cloud service providers for data protection say that they do not have a solution that covers all of their workloads so whether they're working with a cloud service provider or some other vendor they're being really clear that they do not have a comprehensive approach to cloud data protection yeah so I mean you see the cloud adoption is going like crazy but it seems like the data protection component is lagging how is that affecting the traction in your business yeah you know it's a double-edged sword right on one level customers see the advantages of moving to a cloud on the other hand you know they are really looking for vendors that they can partner with to still have the same confidence that the data is protected that they have on Prem and what we're seeing now is that customers are turning to us to help solve that problem we have over a thousand customers using Dell EMC for their Cloud Data Protection and we're narrowing in on three exabyte the data that we're currently protecting in the cloud so it's happening yeah that's pretty good traction so I want to talk about VMware obviously VMware is the linchpin of many customers hybrid strategy and it's a clearly an important component of Dell technologies talk a little bit about the relationship between Dell EMC data protection specifically and VMware I'm interested in you know they've announced project tenzou and there's kubernetes how are you guys working together to really deliver a value for customers so we are super excited about the opportunity to work so closely with VMware because as they're cut in their domain we're working directly with them and that's an advantage that comes with being part of the dell technologies family and so we were the first company to bring data protection for were kubernetes environments out to market it's available now so you'll see us bring that into the tenzou mission-critical has been moved forward partnering closely with with vmware and of course we're already fully certified for vmware cloud it's really an ongoing regular conversation about how we can work together to bring the best to our customers so Beth I gotta ask you so you're part of your role as the leader of the the division is obviously you gotta get a lot of mouths to feed big division you got to make your plan you got to deliver for customers but strategy is another key component of this how do all these cloud trends shape your strategy so core to our strategy is to be the essential provider of data protection for multi cloud environments so no matter where customers are choosing to deploy their applications they can have the same confidence that they always did that that data is protected and the way they can get it back so that's core and if you want three words to remember for our strategy think VMware cloud and cyber cloud is central to it and you're going to be hearing a lot more about it in the weeks and months ahead okay so I gotta ask you break out your binoculars maybe even the telescope what are the future what are the future's look like when you think about the division and the market so we've been talking about cloud for a long time but we are still in the middle of this journey customers are going to rely on the cloud even more for additional use cases and especially in the data protection space right now we're seeing backup to the cloud dr to the cloud but the future will include cyber resiliency that's leveraging cloud deployments you're also going to see more and more of an emphasis on people leveraging SAS for their software consumption and for us that means not only protecting SAS applications but it also means giving customers the option to consume data protection in a SAS model we already do that today with things like cloud snapshot manager with things like the power protect management and orchestration but you're going to see us do even more of that because they're just incredible benefits of people leveraging sass to consume their software data constantly evolving lamps landscape data protection has to evolve with it Beth thanks so much for thank you and thank you keep it right there we'll be right back right after this short break from world famous cloud Studios Dell Technologies presents the world's number one show on data protection solutions for today's organizations it's proven in modern magazine with Jake and Emmy hello everyone and welcome to the premiere of PM magazine where we cover the proven Dell technology solutions that you've come to rely on and the latest modern innovation driving powerful data protection for the future I recently spent some quality time with one of our customers and I learned a thing or two about Dell proven data protection solutions let's watch the clip we've always relied on tell performance efficiency and scale to help us keep pace with our data protection needs but there's so much more for example we've been crushing it with Dell cloud data protection for backup to the cloud in cloud backup cloud tearing cloud dr uh-huh look at the picture it's a huge business advantage how so our costs are down we spend less time on management we're meeting our service levels and we have peace of mind that all of our data is protected right awesome did you talk about how Dells agile development approach is accelerating the speed at which we deliver customer value yes and how cloud capabilities will continue to grow yes and about VMware protection yes and cyber recovery yes I mean we covered all of that as well as the mega trends that require data protection with a modern approach well modern is exactly what our guests today are here to discuss Jake he is Ken fatale a noted data protection expert and joining us from the field on her vacation in the Bahamas is Barbara Penner of the data management Institute thank you both for being here so Ken what should our viewers think about when they hear the phrase modern data protection they should think new requirements for modern applications cloud native workloads Cubana is multi-cloud and data services to name a few Barbara would you add anything to that list I would add business service recovery on premises or in the cloud autonomous protection to auto detect and protect workloads across edge core and cloud infrastructure and lastly all of this must operate at global scale thank you both this is exactly where we're heading with Dell power protect solutions well it's time for a break but when we come back we've got something special in store for you don't we Jake I was hoping you forgot oh no someone learned how to make cream puffs and it did not turn out well for him yeah my apologies in advance to my mother who tried to show me around the kitchen but as you can see we'll be right back [Music] we're back with Rob and Rob Emslie who's the director of product marketing for Delhi MCS data protection division Rob good to see you hi Dave good to be back so we just heard from Beth about some of the momentum that you guys have from your perspective from a product angle what is really driving this yeah well one of the things that we've you know definitely seen is that as we talk to our customers both existing and new customers cloud journeys is is top of mind for all of the CIOs it's being driven by either the desire to drive efficiency take out costs and data protection is one of the the most common use cases and one of the things that we find is that there's four use cases for data protection that we see long term retention of data cloud disaster recovery backup to the cloud and the emerging desire to stand up new applications in the cloud that need to be protected so backup in the cloud really completes the four major use cases well one of the things I think is really important this market is that you deliver optionality to your customers so how are our customers enabling these use cases yeah so the the first two UK's first two use cases of long term retention and cleitus recovery is is really driven by our software on our appliances both of those are really predicated based upon the assumption that customers are going to deploy data protection on premises to protect their on-premises workloads and then it's here to the cloud or which is becoming more common used to cloud as a disaster recovery target you know it's delivered by our data protection software and that's either in a software form factor or that software delivered in an integrated appliance form factor so let's talk about purpose-built backup appliances I think you know our friends at IDC I think you know coined that they tracked that market for a while you guys have been a leader there the acquisition of data domain obviously put you in a really strong position give us the update there is it's still a vibrant market is it growing what's the size it's it look like yeah so as we look at 2020 you know IDC forecasts the market size to be a little under five billion dollars so it's still a very large market the overall market is growing at a little over four percent but the interesting thing is that if you think about how the market is is made up it's made up of two different types of appliances one is a target appliance such as data domain and the new power protect dd and the other is integrated appliances where you integrate the target appliance architecture with data protection software and it's the integrated appliance part of the market that is really growing faster than the other part of the of the people being market it's actually growing at 8% in fact IBC's projection is that by 2022 half of the purpose-built back to appliance market will be made up of integrated appliance solutions so it's growing at twice the overall market rate but you guys have two integrated appliances what why - how should people think about those yeah so a little under three years ago we introduced a new integrated appliance the called the integrated data protection appliance it was really the combination of our backup software with our data domain appliance architecture and the integrated air protection appliance has been our workhorse for the last three years really allowing us to to support that that fastest-growing segment of the market in fact last year the integrated air protection appliance grew by over a hundred percent so triple digit growth was great you know it's something that you know allows us to address all market segments all the way down to SMB all the way to the enterprise but last year one of the things you may remember at Delta Nadi's world is we introduced our power to protect portfolio you know and that constituted power protect data manager our new software to find platform as well as the delivery of packet there in an integrated appliance form-factor with perfectly x400 so that's really our our new scale out data protection appliance we've never had a scale out appliance in the architecture before in the portfolio before and that gives us the ability to offer customers choice scale up or scale out integrated and target and with the X 400 it's available is a hybrid configuration or it's also our first or flash architecture so really we're providing customers with the existing software solutions that we've had in the market for a long time an integrated form factor with the integrator protection appliance as well as the brand-new software platform that will really be our innovation engine that will be where we'll be looking at supporting new workloads and certainly leaning into how we support cloud air protection and the hybrid cloud reality of the next decade okay so one of the other things I want to explore is we've heard a lot about your new agile development organization Beth has talked about that a lot and the benefit obviously is you're more you're able to get products out more quickly respond to market changes but ultimately the proof is in translating that development into product what can you tell us about how that's progressing yep so certainly with Papa Tech Data Manager and the X 400 that really is the the epicenter of our agile product development activities you know we've moved to a three-month cadence for software releases so working to deliver a small batch releases into the market much more rapidly than we've ever done before in fact since we introduced palpitate Denham manager where we we shipped the first release in July we're now at the third iteration of palpitate Data Manager and therefore the third iteration of the x100 appliance so there's three things that you know I'd like to highlight within the x100 appliance specifically first is really the the exciting news that we've introduced support for kubernetes so we're really the first you know large enterprise data protection vendor to to lean into providing kubernetes data protection so that becomes the vitally important especially with the developments over our partner in VMware with vSphere 7 with the introduction of tan zoo and the reality is that customers will have both these fear virtual machines and kubernetes containers working side-by-side and both of those environments need to be protected soap a patek denim algae and the x400 appliance has that support available now for customers to take advantage of second we talked about long-term retention of of data in the cloud the x100 appliance has just received the capabilities to also take part in long term retention to AWS so those are two very important cloud capabilities that are brand-new with the excellent appliance and then finally we introduced yet 400 appliance with a maximum configuration of four capacity cubes rough-and-tough that was 400 terabytes of usable capacity we've just introduced support of 12 capacity cubes so that gives the customers the ability to scale out the x100 appliance from 64 terabytes all the way to over a petabyte storage so now if you look at our two integrated appliances we now cover the landscape from small numbers of terabytes all the way through to a petabyte of capacity whether or not you pick a scale up architecture or a scale length architecture yeah so that really comes back to the point I was making about optionality and kubernetes is key it's gonna be a linchpin obviously a portability for multi cloud sets that up as we've said it's it's not the be-all end-all but it's a really necessary condition to enable multi cloud which is fundamental to your strategy absolutely alright Rob thanks very much for coming on the cube it's great to have you thanks Dave and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Volante for the cube we'll see you next time [Music]