 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. This is day three of three days live water well coverage of VMworld 2018. This is theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman and I co-host this morning is Justin Warren and happy to welcome back to our program two CUBE alums from the VMware Storage and Availability Business Unit. Yang Bing Lee, second time in theCUBE this week is the senior vice president and general manager of the group and Christos Caramonalus is the fellow and CTO. Thank you both for joining us. Great to be here. Great to be here. All right, so first of all, congratulations. A lot of news this week, a lot of excitement around it and we're talking off cameras. There's so much there that people don't understand, you know, some of the work that went into this and some highlights as to things that I know VMware thinks will be very game changing over the next couple of years. So we're excited to dig into this. Yang Bing, why don't you start us off with, you know, a little bit of an overview from your group as to the news this week. Yeah, happy to do that. I think so we are seeing a lot of customer energy around what we're doing in storage a little bit here. You know, there's huge momentum behind product like VCN and our customers are truly embracing HCI in very mainstream use cases and we've seen customer after customer have gone all in meaning they're taking HCI and made a determination to run that for all of their virtualized workload. So very exciting time, but what's more interesting is their expanded view on what HCI is about. You know, certainly we started with virtualizing compute and storage together on servers but we're seeing rapid expansion of that definition. You know, we've been a believer that HCI is fundamentally a software led architecture. I think now there is more recognition that and it's also going from just compute and storage to the full stack of the entire software defined data center. It's expanding into the cloud as you've seen from VMC on AWS. It's expanding to the edge. It's expanding from just traditional apps to cloud native apps. You know, we've announced beta for, you know, VCN to become the storage platform for Kubernetes in a vSphere environment. So a lot of exciting expansion around how customers want to see HCI. And if you look at HCI, hybrid cloud, SDDC, the boundary among these three is not very, very clear. I think they're all converging to work something that's very common. Yeah, Christos, I want you to help unpack this a little bit for us. I remember speaking to you a couple of years ago in your team, we know how many years of effort we went into set the groundwork for vSAN with the things, you know, just the underlying things that were happening with the APIs and development with your partner ecosystem. Taking vSAN as a foundation, oh, it's going to work with Kubernetes and cloud and everything. It's not a simple port. Like, you know, no offense to the hardware people, but oh, putting it on a new platform. I need to test it, integrate it, make it a couple of tweaks. But the software level, there's a lot of things that go on here. Talk about what the team's been working on. Some of the big architectural things that have been happening. Oh yeah, absolutely. There are some fundamental changes. We never stop. We never declare that we have finished what we're doing. Obviously, the world is changing around us. Not only the hardware, as you know, there are many important changes there with NVMe becoming now prevalent and the new hardware technologies appearing like a persistent memory. But for us, a focal point the last year or so has been how do we move our entire software stack that Yan Bing outlined earlier into any type of environment, including public clouds. So you see now with VMware Clouds and AWS, customers can run their applications there without having to replat from them. It's exact same environment. So a keystone of that, you know, that environment is the storage. How do you virtualize storage? How do you deal with any type of infrastructure? So this one was developed for physical devices, you know, SSDs and magnetic disks, more recently NVMe. Now, what we want to give is the option to our customers to use the cost efficiencies of cloud storage without those sacrificing the semantics, the properties of the vSphere stack. So we worked, we did a lot of engineering to make vSan work on top of EBS. So it may sound, you know, simple when you announce it at the keynote of VMware, but it took a lot of hard engineering to adapt a platform vSphere and vSan was designed for physical hardware to now work on virtual storage volume. So that is just one example. And obviously there are more examples for cloud native use cases, as you said. Yeah, I don't think people quite understand the implications of that. The fact that you can use things in the same way in multiple different locations, the whole idea behind multi-cloud is that if you can operate it in the same way as you can onsite, as you can in whichever cloud you choose, for enterprises who are used to doing things in one way and have made big investments in VMware, this just opens up an entire universe of opportunity for them. Absolutely, and you get the best of both worlds, right? It's, you have the same operational model, the same characteristics. I can run now on Amazon applications that use vSphere's AHA or remote and features that require cell storage. On the cloud, you do not have cell storage. EBS volumes can be accessed by one host at a time unlike storage area networks. And vSan brings those storage area networks semantics, all in software of course, on the cloud. So I can run my traditional applications as well, some new generation applications. And for us strategically, what we've done with EBS, if you think about that is one step into a much bolder vision, where vSan becomes this common storage platform that virtualizes any type of storage, physical or cloud or virtual. So, and which exposes the same operational model and the same storage semantics, two workers that run on vSphere plasmas. And this is, you know, just one step. And it's certainly, there is the common operation model that's very appealing to all of the enterprise customers. But we're truly marrying the strengths and the capabilities of vCN and vSphere and the VMware platform with what EBS uniquely provide. That's elasticity, scalability. But you know, we have a much richer set of data services that we've already built into the whole VMware stack. Yeah, and bring up some really interesting points. When we put our critical analysis hat on, when the partnership was announced, it was like, well, Amazon's got access to 500,000 VMware customers. We're going to start getting customers comfortable with Amazon. Great, they can start moving over. The thing that really caught a lot of our attention is it's some of the Amazon services that are now coming to the VMware customers. So, EBS is a really good one. When you talk about the database capabilities that Amazon has that now I can do on-premises, this is a partnership, a two-way street. It's not, you know, just a one-way. Maybe you speak a little bit about that maturation. And you know, I know definitely want to get from Christos also, there's questions about some of the technical ways of how that works. Yeah, what I'm excited is exactly what you described. This is not a one-way street. It's really bi-directional. And the levels of collaboration is not just superficial. It's deep levels of integration and leveraging each other to strengths in terms of both technology as well as customer reach. I think that's what makes the partnership is, you know, people can see that he's taking to a whole new level. And Christos has been very deeply involved with the various solution architects when we examine how we take RDS back on-prem to a VMware environment. I think he can tell a lot more, stories behind that. For us actually it was a great learning experience, I must admit, because obviously we see strongly the desire of our customers to start moving from managing the low-level integrated details of the physical IT infrastructure, which were traditionally helping them to do, to moving up the stack. Many of them now, they want to help their own users, their own customers, internal customers, to run workloads applications. And what are the most critical components of business critical applications? They are databases, right? So how can we make the life of our customers easier? How can we provide them the tools to offer data databases as a service to their own users? So this has been our high-level objective. And of course our partnership with AWS helps us deliver some of those properties. Chris, I want you to go one level deeper for us, because some people it's like, wait, RDS, that's the cool new databases in Amazon. Wait, I can do something on, is that an extension? Am I putting things back and forth? Those of us that have lived through the virtualization while getting databases just virtualized took years and a lot of hard work. And I can't just have a database spanning between these and moving back and forth. We haven't broken the laws of physics. We have not, because here. Help us explain what is and isn't possible today. Absolutely. First of all, let me highlight what are the main pain points of customers. It's one thing to set up your application, install it and run it. But then there are all the day two operations, right? How do you patch the software, the operating system, the database? How do you scale it up or down? How do you even monitor the performance? How do you do data protection, backup, disaster recovery? Those are really painful, difficult tasks that involve a lot of work from expert database administrators that they'd rather be doing some of the important things that address the business that needs, right? So our objective is to address this. Now, to your point, how do we, what about those laws of physics? How can we have services on the cloud and services on the premise? What we announced here, this RDS, Relational Database Services on VMware, is a fully standalone service that runs on VMware environments on premises. There are no dependencies on the public cloud. You have your data sets and your own data centers and this is actually a major requirement of customers, whether it's for compliance reasons or security or company policies. We ensure that your data stays in your data center while you still get all the benefits of a managed database that you don't need to do all those little tedious operational tasks I mentioned earlier. Moreover, we support data protection using actually underlying v-sphere features like HCA and clustering or even data protection by creating copies of your database in another availability domain within your data center. And this is a lot of work that VMware did to make this happen, as you can imagine. So that's a lot of infrastructure work but we support the full range of features that you get in AWS without having to go over the wire and build those laws of physics. I don't think people have quite understood how profound that is. And I mean, we're here at a VMware show. I spent a lot of time with developers and the developers are going to love this because now they can use exactly the same way that they operate in public cloud which they've loved for many years. Being able to do that on site, the way application development is going to happen inside enterprises where they want to keep it on site. They want to keep it under their own control. They want their data secured inside their own data centers. The ability for them to do that and still develop applications in the same way that they could as cloud native. Cloud native now means that it runs on site. That's, this is going to be amazing. Right, absolutely. Our customers are explicitly tell us that they want to consume not storage, but data. Those abstractions that matter to the application. So much so that they have been asking us already, hmm, what is next, right? Can you offer us some of this new generation databases? You know, the Mongols, the Cassandras on the world. Can we have some similar experience with those because they're very painful to deploy and manage in the data center. So I cannot make any commitment, of course, but this is an indication of how much interest there is in this type of services. Yeah, it really does show, I think, some of the strategic intent from VMware. And this is a very clear move for what is going to be possible for customers to be able to do on site. It's really quite exciting. And for us, you know, our role providing, you know, all the storage related capability. And we've been certainly, you know, expanding our application footprint to cover the Hadoop, the Cassandra, the MongoDB type of application, as well as containerized applications. And, you know, we have introduced a lot of new capability or solution that address exactly like that. Yes, containerized applications, for example. Against an announcement, I think we didn't receive the attention that, in my opinion, deserved is supporting natively in vSphere and with vSan, specifically cloud native use cases. Actually, we're introducing a control plane. We're expanding our storage control plane to manage natively container volumes, right? So now, the same way today, our customers have visibility through the UI or APIs and have management workflows for virtual machines and virtual disk VMD case. Now, they can also manage volumes of containers. And as you've heard also, we are working with Kubernetes being our main focal point and with PKS to support natively Kubernetes on vSphere down the road. Yeah, great point. I wonder since we're talking about storage here, you talk about Kubernetes, we talk about what's in the cloud and on-premises. Give us the update of you, how VMware views and how you're helping customers with data can't, I can't just move data anywhere. So while it's good to have similar frameworks and different similar tools there, but still where data lives and what I move, how I move it, do I move it, how that whole kind of data locality is seen today. Yeah, and certainly we have been very keen in defining what we do in the broader category of data management, from data mobility to protection to analytics to life cycle management, a whole slew of that. And we've been starting by building a lot of it. First of all, our job is to make vSAN a storage platform that can enable these different demands of data. So we've expanded vSAN's role from purely delivering block storage now to offer file and down the road object because a lot of the new data will be consumed in an object like format. And we've also been painting our roadmap for the broader data management, so. Yes, so exactly, on one hand we provide a platform for primary storage that serves more than needs so the applications, block, file, object, we even may consider a native file interface actually for zero data copies since you're asking about the technical details. We're, I'm very excited about that. You know, we'll see, you know, some of these things will come in the future. But then, given that we have the platform, what we're building on top of that is data mobility and data protection workflows that are driven by policies. The very first step in that direction is our disaster recovery as a service we offer for hybrid clouds. There, the new model is that even how you manage your data is as a service, not the traditional model of installing software and handling different bits and pieces that have to integrate with each other and operate. Very simply, you go to a portal and you manage your data. In this case, starting with disaster recovery use cases, you specify policies like recovery point objectives. Down the road, we may also give you options for recovery time objectives. And also, specify by policies, what of your data want to be archived and stay on your data center? What of that data can go to the public clouds through your, you know, this hybrid models of cloud model we offer? So, our goal down the road is quite ambitious in offering comprehensive, uniform data management across clouds that goes all the way from the edge, your remote office, your oil rig, all the way to the enterprise data centers to the hybrid clouds. And data mobility varies, you know, using our data transports, our archival capabilities that are coming with these son natives, not so that we also announced in this VM world, these will give you the ability to manage your data across all those environments. All right, so last thing I just want to say, it's interesting to watch this space because we say there's a lot happening under the scenes that people don't understand. I was seeing some research lately saying like, where AWS lives in the storage ecosystem? I'd written an article a couple of years ago, they were the quiet billion dollar, you know, storage company and one analyst firm said, oh, they're number three and they'll be number one in storage. Wikibon actually published a report this month talking about what we call true private cloud. And in our support where we look at the software ecosystem. Yanbing, do you remember who we had number one on the list there when you think software plus the ecosystem around there for true private cloud? I remember it clearly, you said it's VMware. Yeah, so, you know, it surprises some people when you look at there, but I'm no surprise to you and your team, I'm sure. Certainly, you know, what we've started with VCAN is it's quickly becoming a big way of, you know, how all of these fear customers consume storage. And certainly that has been our initial focus, but what we are doing for the cloud, what we're doing for the next generation applications, I think we are, you know, reimagining a lot of the things. And it's great to have people like Christos, you know, who started this journey many, many years ago and continue to expand our horizon. And yeah, this is an exciting time for our business unit and certainly for VMware and our customers. All right, well, Christos and Yanbing really appreciate us being able to geek out, dig into some of the really important innovations happening in this space. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Still a full third day live coverage here from VMworld 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Thank you.