 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018, brought to you by NetApp. Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018 from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our alumni Jennifer Meyers, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing at NetApp and welcoming to theCUBE Alok Arora, Senior Director of Cloud Data Services and the product owner for NetApp Cloud Advisor, which we'll talk about today. So guys, the keynote this morning, one of the things that George Curie and your CEO who's going to be on the program, I think next with Stu and me, talked about the four pillars of digital transformation and one of them was hybrid and multi-cloud is now the de facto architecture. Jennifer, from a product marketing standpoint, how is NetApp engaging with your customers, both your install-based enterprise customers and engaging with new customers to help them evolve a successful multi-cloud strategy? Well, what's funny about that is it's not really even up to us, it's up to the customer and where they're at today, meeting them there and then taking them kind of to that destination that's interesting or important for them. And what we know today is not only are customers in the cloud because they want to be close to innovation, that's one of our big themes is inspiring innovation with the cloud, but they've got their hands in multiple clouds and studies show that at least 80 to 81% of customers are doing multi-cloud with two or more public clouds and I think that's really interesting. I think that in some cases it's because their end users or their customers have chosen a cloud that they want to go with and so they're trying to service those needs where they exist, but also maybe they realize that they want to subscribe or consume services in one cloud versus what's available in another cloud and so it's not our job really to tell them where to go, it's to make sure that we've got a consistent seamless amount of services to give these customers to consume wherever they may be in whichever public cloud. Well, I like what you said, meeting them where they are because I think in some ways we're giving customers a little bit of credit that this was actually planned full as to how they got to where they are. You know, I'm sure if we took that 81% that say they know they're multi-cloud, if we go with the other 19%, most of them are probably multi-cloud and just don't realize it because just like we had 19 the old day, I have an application, a business unit or somebody drives something and oh my gosh, that's how we ended up with silos and we ended up breaking those things apart. Or shadow IT, right? You've got a lot of developers that know exactly what tools they want. So we had a good discussion with Anthony Lai and Tad Brockway talking about Azure and some unique functionality that NetApp's looking to drive into that partnership with Microsoft. Wonder if we could step back, if you can help us understand kind of the cloud portfolio of NetApp, you know, people that just know NetApp as oh, that's that Filer company that I've probably got a lot of products from. The multi-cloud has been evolving for quite a few years now so I want to help understand the breadth and depth of the offering. That's right and I think, you know, we always think about it almost like a four layer stack in terms of our strategy and what we're doing to bring more of these innovative data services to our install base to your point, but also our NetNew buyers, folks that are coming to us through Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud or AWS and so it really does start with our legacy and our foundation of, in this case, cloud storage and the data services or the advanced data management that's built upon those storage protocols, so of course it's NFS and SMB, but when you think about being able to offer that and compliment what's available in the public clouds today because that's why they've chosen to partner with NetApp, on top of that we are delivering advanced services in those public clouds that have never been available before, things like automatic snapshots or rapid cloning and backup and tiering and I think it's really important because what it does is it extends our customers' experience from on-prem into the public cloud without having to sacrifice a thing. Yeah, look, it's a tough thing that customers are trying to figure out. When I look at it and talk to customers, they've got an application portfolio, what are they modernizing, what are they starting from fresh and then they've got all the other stuff that they have. How's NetApp helping them out? Yeah, absolutely, I think that's a great point. So you talked about the offerings that we have with multi-cloud and that creates me all the options for future state architecture I can build there. However, in order to understand how do I get there, I need to understand where I am today, right? So we start looking at your current state footprint. We look at our customers' current state footprint, understand how it is architected, how it is designed, how it is serving up the applications because it can be really a tedious job to get started, to get to the cloud and building the roadmap. So what Cloud Advisor does is it leverages active IQ data to get that insight for us. And we're leveraging data science, machine learning to give them a guidance as to how they can get there, what should be their migration approach, how should they build the transition strategy because at a lot of times they would call the consultants to help with the transition strategy. At the end they get a power point which is not very actionable. We started this grounds up, we understand their detail, you know how the stuff, the bits and bytes are organized so that we start giving them an actionable strategy they can execute upon. So that's really Cloud Advisor geared for accelerating the journey to the cloud that our customer should be taking to. How are you guys helping customers to start embracing emerging technologies, IoT devices? We had Ducati on this morning, a MotoGP bike is basically an IoT device. But in terms of, you know Jennifer, you talked about this in a look, you just reinforced it. You are basically co-developing in partnership with your customers. It's about helping them understand where they are, what they can do today. How are some of the services helping them to be able to harness the power of AI, say for example, to work with the data authority to use that data for actionable business insight and outcomes. Yeah, it's interesting you talk about the IoT. I think NetApp saw that 20 years ago. ASAP is our original IoT. That is where we get billions of data points from our customers, controllers, millions of controllers worldwide. And we build on that metadata and we apply the artificial intelligence in that. We actually start looking at classifying their applications so that if they have a strategy driven by the application, as you were saying, hey, there is a directive from a BU from an agility point of view, we want to take these applications in the cloud. How do you figure out what application? Where does the data live? How does it govern? We figure that out by that IoT data, by that artificial intelligence and also making sure that these applications, no workloads are left behind because applications can be complicated. They talk to each other. So when you start thinking about taking one part of the application, you also want to make sure the other parts that make that application whole also go to the cloud. And that is where we're leveraging artificial intelligence to cluster these applications and recommending the customers that, hey, don't leave these workloads behind because otherwise you're going to have a failed strategy. So we want them upfront to make sure they're successful when they start making executions. I think another piece of that too is just the fact that for many years we've had workloads just trapped on prem. They haven't had a place to go into the public cloud without a ton of refactoring or re-architecting, right? You'd have to rewrite them for object or you'd have to do a lot of manual labor and things just to make it happen. And in most cases, it hasn't been worth it. And so when you looked at the fact that about 80% of on-prem files were in NFSB3 protocol, there wasn't really a place in the public cloud to match that. So by even just delivering cloud volume service for Google Cloud and AWS or Azure NetApp Files, which is the version for Azure, we're able to give customers a way to free up that trapped set of workloads, put those into the public cloud so that it then can be available to all of those advanced services that live on those public clouds to do things like big data analytics or to do developing applications and services of their own and for their own benefit. Yeah, I think that's a great point because- He's so excited. Sorry. Yeah. Because when you start looking at building your strategy, you want to have a confidence in your strategy. Right. So with your protocols and all that discovery, we also not only give you the option that NetApp offers, but show you what are the other options you have within hyperscalers and how would your workloads perform with NetApp technology so you can move with confidence. Right. So that's the good part about Cloud Advisor to make sure that you moving with confidence not just with a blind spot with you. One of the other transitions we've been watching is really the ascendancy of the developer in DevOps. And I've talked to the SolidFire team for many years. I see them at some of the shows that we've been covering. In the keynote this morning, George Kurian said that Kubernetes and Istio are the multi-cloud control plane. Jennifer, I'm wondering if you can help explain the StackPoint Cloud acquisition. Because some people that might not have the context about what NetApp and SolidFire, even before the acquisition we're doing, are being like, wait, I don't understand. Kubernetes is something that Google and Red Hat and others are doing. Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? And we even learned what the abbreviation for it was. KDS. Absolutely. It's all about concatenating long words together. So it's really interesting because when I talked about that four layer strategy, right? The third layer, so it's cloud storage at the bottom. Then it's the advanced capabilities and data management above that. But the one there next is orchestration and integration. And there's really a few things that live in there. Our cloud orchestration sort of technology is really what we got from our QStack acquisition. Our teams in Iceland and what they've been able to do, largely to underpin a lot of what we've seen with cloud volume service today. But certainly right in there is NetApp Kubernetes service, which as you now know, is from our StackPoint intellectual property. And so back on September 18th when we announced this acquisition, it was really to kind of give our developers and our DevOps folks a way to finally start solving for some of that data gravity that I think we've been paroled by over the last few years. And what we now know as Kubernetes is the operating system of the clouds. It is the clear winner of container orchestration among things, and so it made a lot of sense to pair that kind of multi-cloud orchestration, again given our strategy to be where our customers want to be, with some of our cloud orchestration technology from our QStack acquisition, and make sure that with Trident and some of the ways that we're able to deliver finally persistent storage to those containers, I mean this is like a match made in heaven. We're going to give people the way to make sure that they know that containers are ephemeral and data is not. So let's help them do kind of all the things that they want to do in the clouds that they want to do them. I think I read online that was the StackPoint cloud acquisition based on after actually NetApp used it internally? Yes. Tell us a little bit more about that because I think the NetApp on NetApp story is probably something that could be leveraged your marketer as a differentiator when customers have so much choice. Well and I feel like it's a story that every vendor should be forced to tell if you're not willing to use your own IP and technology what is that saying to your customers? So it is true and a lot of our developer teams if you've heard of Yonsey Stephenson and Anthony Lies team, that is how this sort of came about as we were looking for a way to sort of do it ourselves. And we thought man through all this investigation there's something here. There's something that we shouldn't hold to ourselves and we should share with the rest of the world. And so at one point we need to get those guys on with you as well so they can tell a little bit more about their story. So, proof is always in the pudding. Can you give us an example of one of your favorite customer stories? We'll start with you Alok, who have really embraced the Cloud, first of all helped you develop the optimal Cloud services on our really achieving this big business benefits with the Cloud services NetApp is developing. Yeah so several of the customers as we talked to and especially for Cloud Advisor and as we were looking at their journey how they were starting to think about how much money they were spending upfront to figure out a strategy. They had a strategy driven by a data center that was where the lease was coming up and so they had to plan to evacuate the data center into the Cloud. From there they need to figure out what applications they're running there. Obviously the virtualization also was there so that had to be configured in the Cloud. So we started thinking about in that use case that we need to provide these triggers and strategy points to our customers. At the same time the other shift that we saw was that these guys were not just talking among the infrastructure teams, they had to talk to the application owners and they had to have conversations with CFOs to talk about the economics of the Cloud. So we made sure that when we build this that give them the tools that enable them to talk to various stakeholders. Give them the application footprint that is running there. Give them the economics. What it is going to cost to run these applications and workloads that they identify to when they, in the Cloud. So give them the data point that they can go and talk to their CFO. So with that, really start shaping a product that will meet their needs and meet the needs of other our customers. Jennifer, favorite customer example? Oh, it's easy this week because it's all about Wushi Next Code and I don't know if you've picked up on any of their story because we've plastered it around our conference this week because we're so proud of not only what they're doing as a mission, which is very impressive in terms of genomic sequencing and the scale at which they're doing it. But the fact that they've based their foundation now on NetApp Cloud Volume Service is huge. And really what they came to us and said is look, we are trying to sequence all of these genomes in parallel and our benchmark is really to look at about 100,000 individuals at once. When they were trying to do that on their own using their own self-managed storage in the Cloud they could never complete it. It would either fail or they would have some sort of a problem where they just couldn't get it to work. And with NetApp Cloud Volume Service they were able to complete it in about 45 minutes. And so what they're finding is again with this extreme performance with the ability to scale and most importantly to tie it back to our discussion it's multi-cloud. They themselves are multi-cloud because of their big pharma and hospitals that they serve. They have customers in every one of those public clouds and so we are able to help them wherever they need us to be. And that's very exciting. It's also one of those great examples that everybody understands genomic sequencing related to healthcare, disease predictions and things like that. So it's a story that resonates well. But something that you just said sort of reminded me of one of the four principles that George Curian talked about this morning and speed is the new scale. And this sounds like a customer who's achieving that in spades. Well it's so fun because I think for a long time we've been really fast on-prem and I think people have just sort of come to expect a certain level of it's good enough in the public cloud. And what we're showing them in droves again on AWS GCP or with Azure is that you should expect more. Particularly for high performance computing workloads or things that you really just if you're moving your SAP workloads to the cloud and speed is there is no option. It has to be fast. We are showing people now possibilities that they didn't ever dream of before because of this extreme performance through things like cloud volume service. It's really too bad you guys aren't excited about this. I know how much longer to do that. Jennifer Alok, thanks so much for stopping by and having a chat with Stu and me and talking about how customers are really helping NetApp become a data authority that they need to be to help customers become data driven. We appreciate your time and have a great time with the rest of the show. Thank you both. Thank you both. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from NetApp Insight 2018 from Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. Stick around, Stu and I will be back shortly with our next guest.