 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. Welcome to VMworld 2017, this is theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas on day one of the event. A really exciting high energy general session kicked things off. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined by two folks from VMware. We've got CUBE alumni, Jan Bing Lee, Senior VP and GM of the Storage and Availability BU. Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to be here. And we've also got Matt Amder, your first time on theCUBE, Principal of VMware Chief Architect. Thanks for having me. We're excited to have you guys here. So, waiting with baited breath, a lot of folks have for what our VMware and AWS going to actually announce product-wise. Really exciting to see Pat Gelsinger on stage with Andy Jassy today. Talk to us about as the world of hyper-converged infrastructures changing, what does VMware cloud on AWS mean for not just VMware customers, but new opportunities for VMware? Yeah, that's a great question, Lisa. Let me get it started. You know, I think my biggest takeaway from the exciting keynote, a couple of things. One is private cloud is sexy again. You know, so we've been talking about cloud a lot, but there is so much opportunity and tremendous growth associated with private cloud. And certainly hyper-converged infrastructure being the next generation architecture shift is going to drive a lot of the modernization of our customer's private environment. So that's sort of very exciting. The other aspect of the excitement is how that same architecture and consistent operating model is extending into the cloud with our AWS relationship. And this is also why I have my colleague, Matt here, because he's been the brain behind a lot of the things we're doing on AWS. Yeah, thanks so much, Ann Bing. And I tell you, for years it was like, ah, storage is sexy, storage is hot. Cloud's kind of sexy and hot. So we found a way to kind of connect storage into that. Matt, a lot of people don't really understand what happened here. This isn't just, oh, we're not layering VMware on top of the infrastructure as a service that they have. Last year we kind of dug in a little bit with Cloud Foundation, talked to us, what did it take to get this VMware cloud onto AWS? Bring us inside a little bit, you know, the sausage making, if you would. You know, I think Andy talked about this a little bit at the keynote this morning where it's really been an incredible collaborative effort between both engineering organizations. And it's taken a lot of effort from a huge number of people on both sides to really pull this off. And so, you know, as we started looking at it, I think one of the challenges that we faced, and Andy mentioned this this morning, was there was this really binary decision for customers. If you had vSphere workloads, you wanted to bring them to the public cloud, there was nothing that was compatible. And so we really sat down with Amazon and said, okay, how can we take advantage of the physical infrastructure and scale that Amazon builds and provides today, and make it compatible with vSphere? And if you look at what we've done with vSAN on-premise as an HCI solution, it's become a sort of ubiquitous storage platform. And it offers customers an operational and a management experience for how they think about managing their storage. And we can take that and uplift it in the cloud by doing the heavy lifting of how do we make vSAN run, scale, and operate on top of AWS's physical infrastructure. One of the things that I found was really interesting this morning was seeing the, I couldn't see it from where I was sitting, the sort of NASCAR slide of customers that were in beta. Talk to us a little bit about some of the pain points that you're helping with the VMware cloud on AWS. What are some of those key pain points that those customers were facing that from an engineering perspective, that you took into the design of the solution? Sure, so I think if you look at it, some of the benefits that we see of public cloud infrastructure that our customers really want to take advantage of are flexibility and elasticity, right? One of the challenges that you have on-premise today is if you need new hardware, you have to order it, it's got to ship on a truck, someone's going to rack it and hook it up. And if you're trying to operate and keep pace with your competition and you have a need to allocate a lot of capacity to drive a project forward, that can be a huge impediment. And so what we wanted to do is make it really easy for our customers to configure, deploy, and provision our software. And so one of the really interesting things about VMware Managed Cloud on AWS is that it's a managed service. So some of the things that, you know, we've talked about VCF and the things that we've done on-premise to streamline physical infrastructure management is taken to the next level. Customers don't have to worry about managing the VCF software life cycle. VMware is now going to do that for them and Amazon's going to manage the physical infrastructure. And that removes a lot of burdens and gives customers the opportunity to focus on their core business. Yeah, so if you think about, you know, through your charge fund cloud foundation, you know, we were using cloud foundation to automate how our customer consumed the entire software-defined data center stack. And you think about moving that same goodness into, you know, the VMware cloud on the AWS. And, you know, really removing a lot of the complexity around managing your own infrastructure. And so that customer can truly focus on their value as through, you know, developing the next generation application that enabled their business. It's been, you know, a great extensions of what we're solving on premise to the public cloud. Yeah, I wonder if we can drill in a little bit deeper on this. So, you know, most customers think, understand, okay, if I needed to set up a vSAN environment, right, I got to get my servers, how long it takes, what skills that I had. Virtualization admins have been doing this for a few years now and congratulations. You've got the number of here in 10,000 customers, which is, you know, great milestone there. Walk us through, you know, when we're saying, okay, I want to spin it up, you know, if I know swipe a credit card and turn on a VM, is it as fast and what is that base configuration, what kind of scale can it go through, you know? So to start with what was announced today for initial availability, you can come to the VM, the VMware portal, so you come to our portal, you give us our credit card, obviously, and then you can provision between four and 16 nodes. So you pick how many nodes you want and you give us a little bit of networking related information so we can understand how to lay out IP address ranges so we're not going to conflict with what you have on-premise. And then you click provision, and in a few hours you'll have a fully stood up STDC. And so that's going to include a vCenter instance that we've installed, all of the ESX hosts we've provisioned from Amazon, we install ESX, we configure vSAN for you. And it's basically like getting a brand new vSphere deployment and you can start provisioning your VM workload as soon as it's ready. And then once it's there, if you want to grow your cluster, you can dynamically add hosts on the order of about 10 minutes and if you want to remove capacity, you can remove hosts as well. So it gives you that elasticity and flexibility from the public cloud. Awesome, so we're early with some of the early customers. I'm curious, do you have any kind of compare contrast as to what they like about, you know, doing it in the Amazon, you know, VMware cloud on Amazon versus my own data center. Of course there's things I can say, okay, I spin it up faster but I can turn it off and then I have to pay for it. What, do they, are we at the point we understand some of those use cases as to why they might do one versus the other? Yeah, I think a lot of the customers interested in this new model really liking that common operating experience. You know, some of the flagship customers you've heard about this morning, you know, Metronik for example, they are a VMware Cloud Foundation customer, they are running entire, you know, SDDC through VMware Cloud Foundation but because they really enjoy that experience and the simplicity that brings, now they're extending that into the cloud. So they're also one of the earlier customer for VMware Cloud on AWS. So having that common operational experience is a big value prop to our customers. Yeah. And I think we really see customers wanting both, right? They're customers, you mentioned before, the private cloud is sexy again. They're customers who have a lot of workloads that makes sense to run in a private cloud but they also want the flexibility of how they can take advantage of public cloud resources. And so depending on the problem that they're trying to solve, they view this as a compliment to their existing infrastructure. And I have to think some of the services I have available are a little different. So things like disaster recovery if I'm doing it and kind of that cloud operating model is a little different. I know of Amazon services I can use and VMware announced a whole, what was it, seven new SaaS services which kind of span some of those environments. Yeah, so the SaaS services, you know, we announced they're truly cross cloud because they not only limit to a vSphere power cloud, they truly are extending into this cross cloud, multi cloud world of, you know, heterogeneous type of cloud environments. And now, you know, you spoke about DR and certainly for someone coming from the storage and availability background, you know, in terms of our be used role that we're playing in our cloud relationship, you know, certainly we are trying to provide the best storage infrastructure as part of our cloud service. But we are also looking at what are the next levels of data related services, whether it is data mobility, application mobility, disaster recovery or the futures of other aspects of data management. And that's what we've been focusing on. You know, we have a lot of customer, you know, even thinking about what's happening with, you know, Hurricane Harvey. I still remember the hurricane Sandy days. A lot of our site recovery manager customer told us, you know, how SRM has saved their day. You know, we're seeing the power of a disaster recovery solution. And now with the cloud, you can totally leverage the economics and the flexibility and scalability that cloud has to offer. So those are all the directions we're working on. So we're coming up on the one year anniversary of the closure of the Dell acquisition of EMC and its companies. Would love to understand looking at this great announcement today VMware cloud on AWS from a differentiation perspective. What does this provide to VMware as part of Dell EMC this big partnership with AWS? Yeah, so let me, you know, maybe take it back a step, not just the AWS relationship, but really look more broadly what we're doing together with Dell. And certainly, you know, starting with the storage business, you know, we're doing amazing work around our entire portfolio of software defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure. And the good thing is, you know, as Stu pointed out, we're seeing tremendous growth in our core business around VCN. You know, 10,000 customers expanding rapidly, but we're truly firing from multiple cylinders of both consuming it as a software model, as well as working with partner like Dell EMC on turnkey appliance, such as VxRail. They're seeing tremendous success. So we are extending into our partnership around data protection. This is why I'll be coming to theCUBE with Beth Phelan to talk about all the great things we're doing around data protection collaboration, both for on-prem as well as in VMware cloud for AWS. So lots of things happening in different parts of the business unit. So, but coming back to VMware on AWS, I think, you know, we're thinking about leveraging the strengths of our portfolios. So this is not just a full VMware stack, but there's, you know, some of the Dell technology IPs that we're pulling in. So for example, data protection, they're part of our ecosystem being one of the very first partner enabling data protection on top of AWS. Yeah, so Matt, anything to add? Yeah, I think, you know, when we look to, when we look to what's made us so successful on-premise, it's been that extended storage ecosystem of which Dell EMC is a huge part of. And we continue to see that value as we go to the cloud. Young Bing mentioned backup and disaster recovery as sort of the obvious starting points. But I think beyond that there, there's a bunch of technology that they have that's equally applicable, whether or not you're running on-premise or the public cloud. And the tighter we can integrate and the more we can take advantage of it, the more value we can drive for our customers. Yeah, so VSAM 6.6 is now out, you know, maybe any other things that we haven't talked about that you want to highlight there and any roadmap items that you can share that are being kind of publicly discussed, you know, here at VMworld. So yeah, 6.6 was definitely a big hit. You know, with encryption and also a lot of the cloud analytics and things we're doing has been really hitting, you know, the hardcore of what our customers are looking for. So going forward with VSAM, you know, we talk about AWS, our relationship with AWS for a long time, but you know, the fundamental product level innovation is happening inside VSAM as well. One of the big focus is really looking at a next generation architecture that truly enables the leverage of all the new device technology. You know, I keep saying, a software-defined product is really driven by sometimes hardware innovation and that's very true for VSAM. So at the foundational layer, we're looking at new hardware innovations and how to best leverage that. But moving up the stack, we're also looking at cloud analytics and, you know, proactive maintenance. I was just talking to one of our customers about what it takes to support, provide support in 2017 is all these automatic intelligence, proactive, you know, you've heard Pat talk about Skyline. This is a new proactive support approach we've provided and there will be a lots of cloud analytics that's driving a technology like that. So, I was going to say, on the analytics side, are you, what are you hearing from customers with respect to what they're needing on analytics? Is they have this big decision to make about cloud, private, public, hybrid? What are some of the analytics needs that you're starting to hear from customers that would then be incorporated into that roadmap? So, from our BU, we're looking at a lot of the infrastructure level analytics. Certainly, there is also a lot of the application level analytics, but from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to Matt's earlier point, you know, customers do not want to really worry about their, you know, the plumbing around their infrastructure. So, we're gathering analytics, we're pumping them into the cloud, we're performing, you know, intelligent analysis so that we can proactively provide intelligence and support back to our customers. I think it really, it helps customers to understand things about how they're using their storage, how they're using their data, what applications are consuming storage, who needs IOPS, who has latency constraints, all that type of data, and being able to package that up and show it to customers in real time and help them both understand what they're currently doing and future planning we see a lot of value in. Matt, I'm curious, one of the challenges you have as a software product is you need to be able to live in lots of different environments. Amazon is kind of a different beast, you know, they hyper-optimize is what I said, there's kind of misconception out there, oh, they take, you know, white box and do this, I said, no, they will build a very specific architecture and build 10,000 nodes or more. Without sharing any trade secrets, any lessons learned or anything, you know, that kind of is like, wow, this was, you know, an interesting challenge and here's what we learned when you talk is that the challenge of our time is building distributed architectures and I'd have to think that porting over to Amazon was not a, you know, oh yeah, I loaded the code and everything worked day one, so what can you share? This goes back to sort of the really interesting and tight collaboration from the engineering aspects and it's really been phenomenal to see the level of detail that Amazon has in terms of how they operationalize hardware and what they can tell us about the hardware that they're building for us and so I think it really highlights some of the value that you see in the public cloud which is it's not just about having physical infrastructure hosted somewhere else, it's about having a company like AWS that's understood how to deploy, monitor and operate it at scale and that goes to everything from how they think about, you know, the clips that are holding power cables into servers to how they think about SSDs and how they roll out firmware changes and so from an engineering standpoint it's been a great collaboration to help us see the level of detail that they go to there and then we're able to take that into account for how we design and build solutions. Yeah and we are definitely taking all that learning into how to build cloud-scale solutions that truly empower, you know, cloud-scale operations and lots of the operational learning, you know, that we get from this exercise has been just tremendous. Yeah, one of the bits of news I saw is that VMware's IT is now running predominantly or all on VSAN, right? What can you tell us about that? Are there still storage arrays somewhere inside the IT or is... So we're extremely excited about this and we have a visionary CIO, Baskier. I know he was a CUBE guest as well so he's been really pushing this notion of VMware running on top of VMware so we have 119 clusters, you know, 30,000 VMs, probably close to a thousand hosts and seven petabytes of data running on VSAN and so if VSAN as a product doesn't hold up, you know, I get to experience it firsthand so it's been pretty phenomenal to see that happen. We are also deliberately running a range of different versions of VSAN. There's some that are G8 version. There are some that are cloud-additioned that's yet to be made GA to our customers so this really help us develop much more robust software. If you see what's happening here in the hands-on lab, that's being powered by VSAN as well, behind the scenes. VMware's done a great job of leveraging kind of core competencies like VSAN for the software-defined data center. As you mentioned, 10,000 customers. I think Pat said adding 100 a week, not sure if I heard that correctly, well that's phenomenal. So another thing that he said that was interesting before we wrap up here is we're moving from data centers to centers of data. As customers are transitioning and really kind of figuring out what flavors of cloud are ideal for them, are you seeing any industries really leading the charge with respect to, for example, VMware cloud on AWS? Are you seeing it in, you know, we saw in Medtronic, but healthcare, financial services, any industry specificities that you're seeing that are really leading edge that need this type of infrastructure? I think it's happening across many different industries. So tomorrow I'm going to be in a session called Modernizing Data Center, but there is also a lot of emphasis what's happening on the edge. So I have been exposed to customers from healthcare, customer from airline customers, you know. So we're going to be to probably talk about examples of Airbus 380, you know, the biggest airplane that's been ever built. And they have 300,000 sensors on the plane that's generating a tons of data. And those data are being processed by technology like VCAN. And just the, you know, stories across different industry. And I think that data center to edge stories are very powerful. And this is also why the next generation architecture such as HCI make it happen. Clearly we've seen tremendous adoption in the data center. Now we're seeing adoption in the cloud. And I have to say it's not just VMware cloud on AWS. We have about 300 cloud provider partner to VMware that has adopted and deployed VCAN to different degree. And now we're seeing it go to the edge. As we have some amazing announcement this morning around a HCI accelerator kit that is really providing a much more affordable solution to enable broadly edge use case. Fantastic. Well, tremendous momentum, great growth. We wish you guys the best of luck. Congratulations on everything announced today. And we hope you have a great rest of the show. Yan Bingli, Matt Amdler, thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. Thank you very much for having us. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. And we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman live from day one of VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back.