 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Welcome back to theCUBE's live continuing coverage of VMworld 2017. We're on day two, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks so much for joining. I'm joined by my co-host Keith Townsend and Keith and I are excited to be joined by CUBE first time visitor, Mike Flam, Senior Product Manager of HPE. Welcome Mike. Well thank you for inviting me here. Appreciate it to have the opportunity. So great announcements over the last day and a half. Tell us what's new with HPE and VMware. Sure, so today our announcement went out VMware Cloud Foundation on top of Synergy. And this is a follow on announcement that we had for VMware Cloud Foundation on top of DL380 which is the industry leading rack based server. And what we've done is we've now extended to our composable platform on Synergy and that was the announcement that went out earlier today. Composable infrastructure in VMware Cloud Foundation on paper doesn't kind of make sense. You have this thing that's super flexible and what's supposed to be a reference kind of a validated design, how does that work? Sure, so it really accomplishes two things. And what we're hearing from our customers very specifically is how do we make it easier? It's really not about technology. It's that how do people consistently do these deployments? So by using a composable platform it allows them to standardize and do the implementations and then on top of that VMware Cloud Foundation has its own installation appliance that installs the vSphere, the vSAN and the NSX. So we're totally aligned with VMware by making it easier for the customer implementations and then the ongoing maintenance and support of it. Sorry, I was going to say from a go to market perspective, so yesterday I think Pat Gelsinger had said 10,000 customers on vSan, a huge install base with vSphere. Talk to us about sort of the specific joint customer opportunities globally that you're seeing. Sure, so with the install base of vSphere and then the vSAN install base our customers are really asking for this. One of the things that we've done also is that we have OEM SKUs. So we're actually taking the vCF and the vSAN and you're able to buy these products directly from us from VMware. So there's a synergy between, no pun intended, to actually have our customers be able to buy from just from one vendor. So we're able to purchase the VMware and the synergy from HPE. So that's been ongoing. So customer reaction in general, the concept is kind of abstract. We get cloud VMware on AWS, we took us a while to get that. Are customers getting kind of, they can have that type of flexibility in their own data center? Absolutely. So what happens is that when the DL380 announcement happened it was great for a rack based system but that really doesn't scale super large. So customers think about customers that have multiple cabinets, multiple rows, multiple data centers and that's really where the vCF on synergy makes a huge difference. It's where the large data center deployments and those customers are like, wow we really see the value in vCF but we really want to have it on synergy for this platform because we have large data centers and that's really where, and the customers take those large data centers, they also want to be able to leverage vCF on AWS. So they want to have this hybrid approach to having the workloads being both in the cloud and on-premise. So let's talk a little bit about day two operations. What is it like or what's the differentiator for synergy and vCF versus any other solution? So the difference is what makes it composable. On the synergy platform we have an actual hardware that's the composer and it runs OneView and OneView has certain templates in order to make the compute network and storage all run appropriately for the vCF on top of it. The parts of the customers like about vCF is the SDDC manager which is, they look at this and they're like wow that manages all the vSphere, the NSX and vSAN. They need to have the composable and one view management of the underlying hardware and that's where we come in from the composable side. So one of the things that, I think it was Michael Dell that talked about this morning about these growing volumes of data. Everybody knows data is fuel and it's pathway to other sources of economy within an organization. As we look at servers and storage, what is the C level conversation around these technologies in terms of the benefits? Like speeds and feeds and things like that. But how is the HPE VMware announcement today with composable? What are some of the key business problems that that's going to solve for a CEO, a CIO, a CTO? Sure, so one of the things that happens is this proliferation of equipment. They buy a blade system, they buy a storage array, they buy networking and it ends up being on three different vendors. One of the benefits of doing it on synergy is that we're using the local storage. So the local storage is great but it requires the vSAN that comes from VMware. And then the vCF is what puts it all together. So it's not that you can't use vSphere and NSX and vSAN separately. The benefit is to put it on the one system on the synergy that combines it all together. And for the CIO what happens is instead of buying three different equipment, three different vendors, managing three different firmware streams, now you have it all converged on the one system that's purpose built for this. So that's really the main difference. So I hear cost reduction, like reduce CapEx, reduce OpEx. Are you seeing customers be able to move resources around and be able to utilize resources for other strategies within their companies? Absolutely. So on the synergy we have a technology called Virtual Connect which is actually hardware. And one of the things that it does when you run these composable templates on top of it is that it makes it one resource pool. So if you have compute resources or storage resources that are in different cabinets, it presents that to the vCF manager and you're able to move that as needed. So it makes it easier because it just, it sets it up as one giant computer. Whereas before it might be segmented based upon on the cabinet level. So that's really one of the main differences to have these resource, the fluid resource pools. But it really relies on having the vCF on top of it. So talking about that data center wide resource pool, I'm a customer, I have complicated data center. I have DL380s, I have DL580s, I have synergy, I have original chassis. Help me move forward to this vision of vCF. What's the roadmap for a typical customer who has a diverse data center? So this question comes up all the time and the customers say, look we're on your existing products and we have those for years. And what I tell them is, if you just need to do an incremental ad then to buy that particular hardware platform. If you're building a new data center you want to pick the next generation platform. And so what you want to do is do your proof of concept on the synergy and then build that for the future. It's not that the other platforms don't work. It's not that they're not going to continue to be supported. They will. But you're always taking a look of where do I want to be two years from now? And that's the big difference is that I'm going to look at synergy and leverage the vSphere which I've been using for years. I'm going to use the vSAN which was just recently certified. But it's also a component of vCF. And I'm able to leverage that local storage which compresses it all down into one hardware platform. So that's where the customers really get the added benefit. Terrific. Well Mike, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today and explaining from your perspective the impact that the announcement with HPE and VMware on composable means today. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE again. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Keith Townsend. We are live on day two of VMworld 2017. Keep watching, we'll be right back.