 Hi everybody and welcome to this episode of Cube Conversations with wikibon.org. My name is Jeff Kelly. Early this year, Wikibon published the first definition of server sand. We were getting a lot of interest from our community around server sand. And today I've got the author of the report, senior analyst Stu Miniman, who's going to talk a little bit about just what server sand is and talk a little bit about the developments in the market. Specifically, VMware's recent announcement around the general availability of their virtual sand product. So Stu, welcome to the Cube and tell us a little bit about the definition of server sand for those who may not be that familiar with it. Sure. Thanks Jeff. People in the storage world understand that things have been changing. Flash has been one of those things that have just had tremendous impact on architectures. And what we looked at at server sand is first of all, what are some of the things that the hyperscale guys were doing? So if you look at the Google's, Microsoft's, Amazon's of the world, they were building things at massive scale without a separate storage array. If you add that in with what's happening with converged infrastructure and flash, you're seeing a new architecture that is compute and storage in a scale out manner without a separate storage array. So there's a whole industry. EMC really took storage and made it a separate line out of you and buy the best of breed and it will be separate from the server and the applications itself. And now we have really dense compute with multi-core environments. We have flash, we have dense disk arrays that we can all put it in. So these new architectures that are leveraging software and that's where VMware comes in. VMware has really driven some of these software changes of course with server virtualization about over a decade ago. They really changed some of the architectures and now with the server sand they're really starting to push deeper into the storage side of the equation. Right, so let's dig into that a little bit more. So VMware as I mentioned at the top recently announced the GA and announced pricing of their new B-Sand solution. So tell us a little bit about that and kind of what it means for the market. Yeah, so it's really important. So not only is VMware kind of the leader in hypervisors and server virtualization but when they push forward what they call the software-defined data center vision they really looked at how do we extend the benefits that we had with server virtualization across the storage and the network stack and virtual sand is how they do that or vSand is how they're going to do that in storage. So it was announced last year at VMworld so they went into a public beta for about six months and now it's generally available. So here's a real solution from a very powerful vendor in the market that is looking to in many ways disrupt the way that storage is bought. So it's definitely going to have a big impact on the market. I've heard that there's been plenty of startups that have been pushing similar either software-defined or hyperconverged type applications and with VMware there's a lot of attention from everyone and in many ways many people think it'll be the rising tide that lifts many of the boats. On the other hand you've got some of the traditional storage guys that it could disrupt their business. So let's dig into the technology a little bit from a technology perspective. How does vSand compare to some of the other solutions that are on the market today? Yeah, so first I'll talk for a second. If you talk software-defined storage it's kind of... SDS is a bit of a mess in the marketplace. There's some companies that say, hey, we're storage and we have software therefore we're software-defined even if it's an architecture that's 15 or 20 years old. And there's some people that are just kind of just like we saw cloudwashing and big datawashing. Software-defined storage is kind of this amorphous thing out there that doesn't have a great definition. But what vSand does is it's actually built into the hypervisor layers. So as I mentioned earlier, VMware is still the market leader in server virtualization and they're going to put that management functionality to be able to handle both my compute and storage resources and scale that in the hypervisor layers. So what VMware called hypervisor converge. And of course that's a real point of control. What VMware needs to do is gain stickiness with their hypervisor. People have said for the last couple of years that the hypervisor is commoditized and if VMware can get more people liking this new function it will have them buy more licenses and it will be less likely that they might flee to go to Microsoft's Hyper-V or the open source version which is KVM. So Microsoft wants to get stickiness there and that's really important now. There's an architectural decision point. Do I build it in the hypervisor like VMware do or do I do it outside the hypervisor with other software either in the guest or other parts of the ecosystem? It is not a cut and dry one is definitely better than the other. There are trade-offs being in the hypervisor and it should allow for less CPU utilization which in general is good but there could be some trade-offs as to how much functionality can I really put into the hypervisor and it's not necessarily all that open. When I mean open there are ways that we can get functionality into the hypervisor. Pernec's data just announced a partnership to have kind of deeper integration with VMware but it's not like with Xen, I'm sorry with KVM or Xen the two open source alternatives out there that I can really, anybody can just put functionality into it. Interesting to note that VMware is not the only hypervisor embedded solution of the source scale computing is embedded in KVM and is an alternative that they've been selling to VMware but if VMware can get people to like VSAN and like this architecture they're going to stick with VMware as opposed to many of the other solutions out there. You know if I take for an example a Nutanix who builds from the guest layer and they can put lots of functionality into their own software stack Nutanix can run on not only VMware but other hypervisors as well. So in some ways this is a bit of a lock-in from VMware standpoint. So anyone who's followed VMware knows that a lot of its success is due to its really strong both channel and technology partnerships that they've established over the years. So what impact will VSAN have on that? What's their strategy around partnerships with VSAN? Yeah and this is really interesting and kind of nuanced piece of the equation here. How do they go to market and how do they partner? So first of all this should be a good partnering solution for server deployment. So if we look at when I first got involved with VMware back in the early 2000s it was HP, IBM, and Dell that were the real drivers of these technologies and today at the launch you saw IBM, Dell, Cisco, and Supermicro as partners in what's called the VSAN server ready partnership which this basically means that they can build an entire appliance pre-baked out with the configuration that they have. So it's a good way for VMware to sell licenses. It's a good way for those OEM partners to kind of expand what they're doing and it should fit nicely with many of the existing VMware channel partners. So the question I have is how are those channel partners going to make money? Because the VSAN solution, the good thing about it is it's going to be a simpler architecture but that might reduce some of the services that a channel partner can play. And from a technology partner standpoint one of the big ones I didn't mention was HP. HP's not a server ready partner out of the gate. They will be a solution that I can do kind of what's known as the Build Your Own so I can buy just about any x86 machine and build this node but HP has their own VSA designed solution came long ago from the left hand acquisition. It's done quite well in the marketplace and so there will be some tension between some of the HP cell force and some of the VMware ones and finally on the ecosystem partners what does this mean for the storage ecosystem? VMware has been adding more storage functionality into their stack and in many ways that puts them at odds with some of their traditional partners. A lot of news was made at their partner exchange that Veeam who is one of the early evangelists of virtualization in VMware specifically was left out of that environment. Veeam of course still sells plenty into the VMware environment but they're also doing lots with Hyper-V and all their alternatives. And you've seen through the storage ecosystem everybody is hedging their bets and making sure that they don't allow VMware to have too much power and that customers have the flexibility to choose the hypervisor that they want and this is an example where VMware is going to try to make people stick on vSphere while some of the other VMware solutions if I think about NSX on the networking side can work across many hypervisors. So as I said it's a bit nuanced a lot of layers as to where VMware fits and I'd say it's a bit of a mixed message on the ecosystem front. So let's switch gears and talk about what it means for customers. So obviously with the GA just having been released vSAN is a 1.0 product. So really what's the sweet spot for this product at this point and what are some of the ways customers can use this today? Yeah, great question Jeff. I know we talk a lot about where this fits from an application standpoint and the first one that seems to be a big winner here is VDI. Of course Citrix is the leader when it comes to desktop virtualization and VMware has made a lot of moves with their end user computing. They actually refreshed a good part of their management team and they made a big acquisition with AirWatch to really get deep into the mobile space. But when it comes to desktop virtualization VMware Horizon View has definitely expanded its maturity and it's getting into more customer environments and this is a nice should be simple and relatively low cost solution that customers can deploy for VDI. So the question is from both the capital expense and operational expense there's a lot of VDI solutions out there from the convergence partners that work with VMware, the storage partners that work with VMware all the flash guys out there it's a very noisy market and you know it's an interesting project-based deployment but the big thing for VMware is they're not targeting traditional storage applications they're not going to storage guys and saying hey you know get rid of whatever you know SAN or NAS array you have and do vSAN. This is really a pitch towards the virtualization administrator or what they'd like to call a cloud architect so VDI is a great fit TESDEV is a good fit just the you know OLAP might fit here but today you know this is not something I'm going to put you know a thousand seat exchange on or my database on as this solution matures it's expected that it should move up the stack just like vSphere did over the years with server virtualization. So final question obviously you covered the conversion for structure market very closely and I'm a leading thought leader in that space what's happened in the last year in terms of maturity in that market? Yeah so it definitely has matured a lot and we're seeing huge growth what people have said is does vSAN really change the landscape for you know converged infrastructure and while I think it's very important for software defined storage and especially for the server SAN space that Wikibon's put forth I really don't think it has a drastic impact one is if you look at the leaders in converged infrastructure today it's companies like Oracle it's you know VCE with their V block and you know IBM and the IBM Lenovo piece and most of the applications that those you know big you know big iron target are not the ones that vSAN are going to fit into today. So you know look at VCE you know this is not going to disrupt anything in the Cisco EMC partnership of VCE company did well over a billion dollars last year and from all that I've heard things are accelerating this year it's a key driver for the really large customers that are buying UCS and if you look at the hyperconvergence space they're seeing real growth too so I mentioned the Tanix before SimpliVity is another one seeing really good growth some of them obviously will look at vSAN as either a direct competitor or a potential competitor and others just look at it as as I said before that rising tide that will lift all ships here so converged infrastructures growing greatly of course we did the first market forecast for converged infrastructure look to Wikibon soon for actually our market forecast on the server sand space and how that will impact it so you know exciting times to see how vSAN you know really moves forward certain parts of the market and how things adjust throughout. Oh great well obviously a lot happening in this market so we'll be keeping an eye on research on wikibon.org and that's where you can find all the great research on server sand virtualization networking and all things infrastructure so thanks for joining us for this cute conversation and we'll see you next time