 Everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of .NEXT 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with two great guests, Rajeev and Marani, who's the chief technology officer at Thomas Cornerlea, SVP of Product Management. Day two keynote, product, platform, announcements, news, a lot of people, Rajeev are super excited about the platform, moving to subscription model, everything's kind of coming into place. How are the customers seeing this? How are they adopted? Hybrid cloud, it's a hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, data, data, data, those are the, that's where the puck is right now, you guys are there. How are customers seeing this? Great question, John, and by the way, great to be back here on theCUBE again this year. So when we talk to our customers, pretty much all of them agree that for them, the ideal state that they want to be in is a hybrid world, right? Where they want to essentially be able to run both on the private data center and the public cloud. And sort of have a common platform, common experience, common skill sets, same people managing workloads across both locations. And unfortunately, most of them don't have that tooling available today to do so, right? And that's where the platform, the Nutanix platform's come a long way. We've always been great at running in the data center, running every single workflow. We continue to make great strides on our core with increased performance for the most demanding workloads out there. But what we have done in the last couple of years is also extend this platform to run in the public cloud and essentially provide the same capabilities, the same operational behavior across locations. And that's what we're seeing a lot of excitement from our customers because they really want to be in that state, but they have the common tooling across both locations. As you can imagine, we're getting traction with the customers who want to move workloads to public cloud, don't want to spend the effort to refactor them, or for customers who really want to operate in a hybrid mode with things like disaster recovery, cloud bursting, workloads like that. So, you know, I think we've made a great step in that direction and continue to do more with our customers. What is the big challenge that you're seeing with this hybrid transition from your customers and how are you solving that specifically? Yeah. If you look at how public and private operate today, they're very different in the kind of technologies used and most customers today will have two separate teams, like one for their on-prem workloads using a certain set of tooling, a second completely different team managing a completely different set of workloads with different technologies. And that's not an ideal state. In some senses, that's not true hybrid, right? It's like creating two new silos, if anything. And our vision is that you get a point where both of these operate in the same manner. You have the same people managing all of them, the same workloads on anywhere, but similar performance, similar SLA. So they're going to literally get to the point where applications and data can move back and forth. And that's where I think the real future is for hybrid. I have to ask you a personal question. It's the CTO, you've got to be excited with the architecture that's evolving with hybrid and multi-cloud. I mean, it's pretty exciting from a tech standpoint. What's your reaction? 100%, and it's been a long time coming, right? We've been building pieces of this over years. And if you look at all the product announcements the Nutanix has made over the last few years and the acquisitions we've made and so on, there's been a purpose behind them. There's been a purpose to get to this model where we can operate customers who are close to your hybrid environment. So really, really happy to see all of that come together years and years of work, finally bearing fruit. Well, we've had many conversations in the past, but I congratulate you. A lot more to do, so much more action happening. Thomas, you got the keys to the kingdom, okay? And the product manager, you got to prioritize, you got to put it together. What are the key components of this Nutanix cloud platform, a hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy that's in place? Because there's a lot of headroom there, but take us through the key components today and then how that translates into hybrid, multi-cloud for the future. Thank you, John, thank you again. I'm great to be here. I mean, kind of Reggie said it up really nicely here. If you look at our portfolio at Nutanix, what we have is great technologies that have been sold as a lot of different products in the past, right? And what we've done the last few months is we kind of bring things together, simplify and streamline, and we align everything around a cloud platform, right? And this is really the message we're going after is, look, it's not about the products, about solutions, about business outcomes for customers. And so we're really focusing on, you know, pushing the cloud platform, which encompasses five key areas for us. What we refer to as cloud infrastructure, you know, the infrastructure is going to be running, your workloads, cloud management, which is how you're going to go energy manage, operate, automate and get governance. And then services on top, let's start around all around data, right? So we have unified storage, files and objects, data services, we have database services, then we have our set of desktop services, solutions for EUC. So all of this, the big change for us is, this is something that, you know, you can consume in terms of solutions, can consume on-premises. As Reggie discussed, you know, we can take the same platform and deploy it in public cloud regions now, right? So you can now get no seamless hybrid cloud, same operating model, but increasingly what we're doing is taking those solutions and retargeting issues and problems at workloads running natively in public clouds. So think of this as going after automating, more governance, security, you know, files, objects, database services, wherever your workload is running. So this is taking this portfolio and reapplying it and targeting on-prem, at the edge, in hybrid and increasingly in public cloud, natively. That's awesome. I've been watching some of the footage and I was noticing quite a lot of innovation around virtualized networking, disaster recovery, security and data services. It's all good. You guys have been, this is in your wheelhouse. I know you guys have been doing this for many, many years. So I want to dive deeper in that because the theme right now that we've been reporting on, you guys are hitting right here with the keynote is cloud scale is about faster development, right? Cloud native is about speed. It's about not waiting for these old departments, IT or security to get back to them in days or weeks and responding to either policy or some changes. You got to move faster and data is critical in all of this. So we'll start with virtualized networking because networking again is a key part of it. The developers want to go faster. They're shifting left. Take us through the virtualization piece of how important that is. Yeah, that's actually a great question as well. So if you think about it, virtual networking is the first step towards building a real cloud-like infrastructure on-premises that extends out to include networking as well. So one of the key components of any cloud is automation and the key component is self-service. And with the API, as you put it on virtual networking, all of that becomes much simpler, much more possible than having to, you know, call up IT, work with someone there to reconfigure physical networks and so on. So we can do that in a self-service way, much more automated way. But beyond that, the notion of virtual networks is really powerful because it helps us to now essentially extend networks and replicate networks anywhere on the private data center, but in the public cloud as well. So now when customers move their workloads, we've already made that very simple with our clusters offering. But if you really peek behind the layers a little bit, it's like, well, yeah, but the network's not the same on the site. So now it means I have to go reIP my workloads, create new subnets and all of that. So there was a little bit of complication left in that process. With virtual networks, that goes away also. So essentially you can reference the same network in both locations. You can literally move your workloads, no redesign of your network required and still get that self-service and automation capabilities of virtual networking. So great step forward and really helps us complete that infrastructure as a service stack. We had great storage capabilities before, we had great compute capabilities before and sort of networking as a third leg and all of that. Talk about the complexity here because I think a lot of people will look at DevOps movement and say, infrastructure as code, when you go to one cloud, it's okay, you can make things easier, programmable. When you start getting into data center, private data centers or essentially edges now because if it's a distributed cloud environment or cloud operations, it's essentially one big cloud operation. So the networks are different, as you said. This is a big deal. Okay, so to make infrastructure as code happen in multiple environments across multiple clouds is not trivial. Could you talk about the main trends and how you guys see this evolving and how you solve that? Yeah, well, the beauty here is that we are actually creating the same environment everywhere, right? From the point of view of networking, compute and storage, but also things like security. So when you move workloads, things like security postures also move over, which is super important. It's a really hard problem and something a lot of CIOs struggle with, but having the same security posture in public and private cloud is important as well. So with this cluster's offering and our on-prem offering completing the infrastructure as a service stack, we really now have this capability where your operations really are unified across multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, anywhere you run. Okay, so if I have multiple cloud vendors, they're different vendors, you guys are creating a connection unifying those three. Is that right? Essentially, yes. We're running the same stack on all of them and abstracting away the differences between the clouds that you can run operations. And the benefits of the customers are what? What's the main benefit there? Essentially, they don't have to worry about where their workloads are running. They can pick the best cloud for their workloads. You can seamlessly move them between cloud. They can move their data over easily and essentially stop worrying about getting locked into a single cloud. Either a multi-cloud scenario or a hybrid cloud scenario, right? There are many companies now who have started on a cloud-first mandate, but over time realize that they want to move workloads back to on-prem. All the other way around, traditional workloads that have started on-prem and want to move them to public cloud now. And we make that really simple. Kind of a trick question. I wanted to tee that up for Thomas because I love that kind of that horizontal scales with the clouds all about. But when you factor data into it, this is the sweet spot because this is where, you know, I think it gets really exciting and complicated too because, you know, data's got, can get unwieldy pretty quickly. You've got state, you've got multiple applications. Thomas, what's your, can you share the data aspect of this? This is super, super important. Absolutely. And it's, you know, it's really our core source of differentiation. We think about it. Like that's what makes Nutanix special, right? In the market, when we talk about cloud, right? Actually, if you've been following Nutanix for years, you know, we've been talking a lot about making infrastructure invisible, right? The new way for us to talk about what we're doing with our vision is, is to make clouds invisible, right? So that in the end, you can focus on your own business, right? So how do you make clouds invisible? Lots of technologies that the application layer to go and containerize applications, you know, make them portable, modernize them, make them cloud-native. That's all fine when you're not talking of state-class containers. That's the simplest thing to move around, right? But as we all know, you know, applications end of the day rely on data and measure the data across all of these different locations. I'm not even going to go sideways because that's almost a given. When you're talking about the application, you can go and stretch from edge to on-prem to hybrid to different public cloud regions. You know, how do you go and basically control of that and get consistency of all of this, right? So that's part of it is being aware of where your data is, right? But the other part is that you can see a set of data services regardless of where you're running. And so this is something that we look at the cloud platform where we provide you the cloud infrastructure to go and run the applications, but you also built into the cloud platform, you get all of your core data services, whether you have to consume file services, object services, or database services to re-support your application. And that will move with your application. That is the key thing here. By bringing everything onto the same platform, you now get to see the operations regardless of where you're running the application. The last thing that we're adding, and this is a new offering that we're just launching, which is a service, it's called Nutellix Data Lens, which is a solution that will give you visibility and allow you to go and get better governance around all your data wherever it may live across on-prem, edge, and public clouds. That's a big deal again, because to manage it, you first have to go and make sense of it and get control over it. And that's what Data Lens is going to be all about. You know, one of the things we've been reporting on is data is now a competitive advantage, especially when you have workflows involved. Super important, how do you see customers go into the edge? Because if you have this environment, how does the data equation, Thomas, go to the edge? How do you see that evolving? So it's, I mean, edge is not one thing. And that's actually the biggest part of the challenge of defining what the edge is, depending on the customer that you're working with. But in many cases, you get data ingesting of being created at the edge that you then have to go move to either your private cloud or your public cloud environment to go and basically aggregate it, analyze it, and get insights from it. So this is where a lot of our technologies, whether it's having the objects offering built in, allows you to go and make the ingest over great distances, over the network. And then have your common data lake to actually do analytics on it, over our own object store. Again, the instance we brought into our storage solutions here is being able to actually do analytics directly onto the object store solution, using things like S3A or S3Select built into our protocols. So again, make it easy for you to go and ingest anywhere, control your data, and then get value out of it using some of the latest enhancements on the API front. Rajiv, databases are still the hard of most applications in the enterprise these days, but databases are not just the data, there's a lot of different data moving around. You have a lot of new data engineering platforms coming in. A lot of customers are scratching their head and they want to kind of be ready and be ready today. Talk about your view of the database services space and what you guys are doing to help enterprise operate and manage their databases. Yeah, it's a super important area, right? I mean, databases are probably the most important workload customers run on-premises and pretty close on the public cloud as well. And if you look at it recently, the tooling that's available on-premises, fairly traditional, but the cloud's been being great innovation. We look at things like Amazon's Relation Database Service, makes it an order of magnitude simpler for customers to manage their databases. At the same time, we also have a proliferation of databases. We have the traditional Oracle and SQL Server, but we have Open Source, MongoDB, and MySQL, and a lot of Postgres. There's a lot of different kinds of databases that people have to manage and now it just becomes just a killer. I have this spoke tooling for each one of them. So with our era product, what we're doing is essentially creating a database management layer that unifies operations across your databases and across location of the cloud and private cloud. So all the operations that you need to do, which are very complicated in the traditional tooling, the provisioning of databases, backing up and restoring them, providing a true time machine capability so you can roll back transactions, doing copy data management for your developers. All of that has existed in the era for a wide variety of database engines, your choice of database engine at the back end. And so the new capabilities you're adding sort of extend that lead that we have in that space. So one of the things we announced at .next is one click storage scaling. So one of the common problems with databases is as they grow over time, it's not running out of storage capacity. Now, reprovision storage for a database might get all the data over it's weeks and months of work, right? Well, guess what? With era, you can do that in one click. It uses the underlying AOS scale out architecture to provision more storage and it does it with zero downtime. So on the fly, you can resize your databases as needed. We're adding some security capabilities. You're adding some capabilities around resilience. Era continues to be a very exciting product for us. And one of the things that we're really excited about is that it can really unify database operations between private and public cloud. In the future, we also offer a version of Era which operates on native public cloud instances and really excited about that. Yeah, and you guys got the two X performance on scaling up databases and analytics. Another big point there. Since you brought up security, I got to ask you, how are you guys talking about security? Asi, it's embedded in from the beginning. I know you guys continue to talk about that, but talk about Regi, the security that's on everyone's mind. Okay, it's always evolving. You're seeing ransomware to continue to happen more and more and more. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. What do you guys help? How are you guys helping customers stay secure? The security is something that you always have to think about as it depends in depth when it comes to security. There's no one product that's going to do everything for you. That said, what we are trying to do is to essentially cover the gamut of detection prevention and response with our security. And ransomware is a great example of that, right? We partnered with Qualis to essentially be able to do a risk assessment of your workloads, to basically be able to look into your workloads, see whether they've been bashed, whether they have any known vulnerabilities and so on. So try and prevent malware from infecting your workloads in the first place, right? So that's the first line of defense. Now, no systems will be perfect. Some malware will probably get it anyway. So then you detect it, right? We have a database of over 4,000 ransomware signatures that you can use to prevent ransomware from, or detect ransomware if it does infect the system. And if that happens, we can prevent it from doing any damage by putting your file systems and storage into read-only mode, right? You can also prevent lateral spread of your ransomware through microsegmentation. And finally, if you were to evade all those defenses that you were actually able to encrypt data on a filer, we have immutable snapshots that you can recover from those kind of attacks. So it's really a defense in depth approach. And in keeping with that, we also have a rich ecosystem of partners. Wallis is one of them, but all the networks, monk, et cetera, that we work with closely to make sure that our customers have the best tooling around and the simplest way to manage security is not for their infrastructure. Well, I got to say, I'm very impressed guys by the announcements from the team. I've been, we've been following new trends from the beginning as you know. And now it's back in the next phase of the inflection point. I mean, looking at my notebook here from the announcements, the VPC virtual networking, DR observability, zero trust security workload, governance performance, expanded availability and AWS elastic DR. Okay, we'll get that in a second. Clusters on Azure preview, cloud native ecosystem, cloud control plane. I mean, besides all the buzzword bingo that's going on there. This is cloud. This is a cloud native story. This is distributed computing. This is virtualization, containers, cloud native kind of all kind of coming together around data. What you see here is, I mean, it is cloud. It is about the modern applications, right? And this is about our shift in strategy in terms of focusing on the pieces where we're going to be great at, right? And a lot of these are around data, giving you data services, data governance, you know, having, giving you an invisible platform that can be running in any cloud. And then partnering, right? And this is just recognizing, you know, what's going on in the world, right? People want options, customers want options when it comes to cloud. They want options to where they're running. Developers want options in terms of whether they'll be using to and build the modern applications, right? So a big thing here is providing and being the best platform to go and actually support for developers to come in and build and run their new and modern applications. That means that for us, supporting a broad ecosystem of partners on top of the platform. You know, we announced our partnership with Red Hat a couple of months ago, right? And this is going to be a big deal for us because again, we're bringing two leaders in industry that are amenity complimentary when it comes to providing you a complete stack to go and build, run and manage your clients' applications. When you do that on premises, Newtonics will be like the preferred ACI environment to do that using a Red Hat OpenShift or you know, bring this to public cloud and again, making it seamless and easy to do the applications and they're supporting data services around them that support them whether they're running on-prem in hybrid or in public cloud. So Planetive is a big deal but when it comes to Planetive, the way we look at this, it's all about giving customers choice, choice of platform services and choice of infrastructure services. You know, it's talk of the Red Hat folks, Reggie. It's, you know, it's there and operating system thinking company. You know, you look at the internet now and cloud and edge and on-premise. It's essentially an operating system. You know, you need your backup and recovery. You need the disaster recovery. You need to have the HCI. You need to have all these elements part of the system. It's building on top of the existing Nutanix legacy and the roots in the ecosystem with new stuff. Right. And in fact, the Red Hat is a great example of, you know, perfect marriage if you will, right? It's the best in class platform for running cloud native workloads and the best in class platform service offering in there. So two really great companies coming together. So very happy that we could get that done. And, you know, the point here is that cloud native applications still need infrastructure to run on, right? And that infrastructure, if anything, the demands on that are growing. It's no longer that, hey, look, I have some block storage. I have some filers and, you know, the storage site I'm set. People are using things like object stores using databases increasingly. They're using the Kafka and MapReduce and all kinds of data stores out there. And the platform has to be great at supporting all of them. And that's where, as Thomas said earlier, data services, data storage, those are our strengths. So that's where we're building on. That's from the platform. And then from there onwards, the platform services, great to have Red Hat as a part of that. People still forget this, you know, still hardware and software working together behind the scenes. The old joke we have here in theCUBE is, serverless is running on a bunch of servers. So, you know, this is the way it's going. It's really the innovation. This is infrastructure as code, truly. This is what's happening. It's super exciting. Rajiv, Thomas, thank you guys for coming on. Always great to talk to you guys. Congratulations on an amazing platform you guys are developing. Looks really strong. People are giving it rave reviews. And congratulations on your keynotes. Thank you for having us. Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with that next global virtual 2021 Cube coverage, day two keynote review. I'm John Furrier theCUBE. Thanks for watching.