 Live from the Mendelebe Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Here with John Troyer, my guest host who's also the CEO of Tech Reckoning. Welcoming back to the program, Jim Gonfie, who's the vice president and general manager of the engineered systems group at Dell. And welcome back to the program for the first time here at VMworld this year, Yan Bing Lee, who's the SVP and general manager of the storage and availability group at VMware. Yan Bing, thanks so much. I know you're running around this show literally to go from meeting to meeting. In high heels. In high heels, of course. It's part of our Twitter handle. We would expect nothing less. So, give us the update as to kind of the presence of your group here and any announcements you can share. Absolutely. Thank you, Stu, for having us here. You know, what we're experiencing is absolutely the momentum around VCN. So, we're going to talk about that during my keynote tomorrow, but even just on the floor, you know, I was in the hands-on lab. There is a queue around the VCN lab. I was at the mid the expert. There is a queue there. So, certainly sensing this great momentum and customer interest around HCI in general, but specifically, you know, the VCN-powered HCI solution. So, very excited about that. And the other aspect is, you know, VMworld is always about innovation. So, how we continue to push the envelope. You know, Pat outlined our vision around the cross-cloud architecture. And certainly, what is going to be the role, storage play in our cross-cloud architecture? That's also going to be part of the theme for this conference. Yeah, it's interesting. I actually did a preview video for VMworld and we were joking that in the cloud space, they're talking about, you know, serverless. And, you know, when we talk about storage, it's like we've been talking invisible and everything like that. Maybe we should call it the storage list movement. So, you know, storage, of course, critical component, but in many ways it's held back where I can do changing it, managing and everything like that. Jim, maybe I'll start with you. You know, how do you see, you know, the impact of these, you know, new solutions, new packages on, you know, how important storage is and kind of changing role in IT? Highly. Well, first of all, before I start, how about a congratulations on VCN? We were looking at our joint business reviews and let's just say that Young Bing and I are smiling in terms of how customers accepting, but to answer your points distinctly on storage, hugely important because when we think about a true converged infrastructure or converged platform, it's got to have server, storage, and networking. The fascinating thing, though, is that storage is no longer traditional storage. It's storage that's actually sitting on the head node of a server. And so what our teams have been doing in partnership together is figuring out how can I treat that as not only a unified whole, but do it in a way that's not only defined and as you heard Pat talk about this morning, how can I do that with a management orchestration layer that lets me quickly stand it up and then if I need to reconfigure, or in some cases, send it to the cloud, which all of those assets are based on our VCN-ready products, the net is I can do that quickly, seamlessly, and I don't require an army of admins to do it. You know, as due to that, to add to your storage list point, you know, you think of a high frequency convergence. It's almost like, you know, replacing previously storage, you know, with software-defined storage. So I do think that's an important step towards storage list, but what's more importantly is to really make a zero touch as much as possible from a management ease of use, you know, intelligence point of view. And this is definitely an area that we're innovating not only to build the best, most robust data pass, give you the best performance, cost, efficiency and everything, and really to make management as painless as possible. So I think that gets you one step closer to storage list. And the next step of the evolution is how we take the view from storage being the data persistence layer to the data management layer. I think that's especially going to be more important for the cross-cloud era, because cross-cloud, you know, you don't want to think about your storage that's deep under here. You want to think about how your data application workload is moving and being managed, being connected, being secured in this cross-cloud era. So, you know, to me, that's yet another step further to get into what you describe as storage list. So when I think back to some of the early VSAN customers, it wasn't a traditional storage buyer. It was usually, it was a different buyer, a different admin, different use cases. Kind of fast forward, you've got over 5,000 customers according to the last public stuff that you say. Where are we today kind of vis-a-vis kind of traditional storage buyers and the applications and deployments that they're doing? Yeah, so VSAN, certainly we started small, you know, was some of the more fringy workload, but we're definitely prime in the data center today. In a recent customer survey, we've done 64% of the 250 respondents told us they're using it for business critical application. The business critical application is now, by far, the number one use case for us. And the way I look at it, if you have a workload that's virtualized running on VSphere, VSAN is going to be an ideal candidate for your storage need. And we're starting to see that happen. But obviously, you know, 5,000, we're extremely proud of where we are. Think about the 500,000 customers we have, you know, represented here. It's even more amazing, you know, the opportunity that we have ahead of us. And by the way, if we look at both of our joint businesses, because obviously our teams are doing a lot around customer wins and testimonials, we're seeing a lot of success in financial services. We're seeing a lot of success in the manufacturing area. We're even starting to see some success in what I'll refer to it as civilian public sector. So again, the whole concept of, how do I make it easy? How do I make it simple? How do I make sure that people who need access to the data and I want to be able to reconfigure it? That's what our two teams are able to put in place. And frankly, why we've been successful so far. With more to come. So one of the higher level conversations that I know Pat had this morning is in this digitization, you talk about, you know, modern applications and kind of replatforming. Absolutely. How does the whole, you know, hyperconverge fit into this? Most of the deployments I looked at, it was kind of, you know, vSphere in a San environment. And now I've just have kind of different packaging model. What about modern applications? How do they fit into something like that? Great questions to do. I think that will set up very well for tomorrow. You know, Kit Coburn is going to come on stage to talk about, you know, our enterprise container strategy. Because we're seeing, you know, containers are here to stay and they're trying to become, you know, widely adopting an enterprise. So how do you provide that enterprise level capability associated with the next generation applications? And certainly from a storage point of view, we're very well aligned with VMware's approach toward next generation applications. You know, take a look at vSphere integrated container. This is what, you know, make containers seamlessly work on top of vSphere. And vSAN is already the default storage platform. You know, forward looking to vSAN to the photon platform. You know, this is providing more native container support. And we are actually working on and we'll be previewing our support for photon, vSAN's support for photon where, you know, you get all the goodness of vSAN, all the rich data services and capabilities without the dependency on vCenter. So we're definitely making this a huge priority from a hyper-conversed infrastructure point of view. And I fundamentally believe we will have a role to play. And by the way, you know, to add to Yang Bing's comment, when we look at this, it really is a continuum. So case in point, vSAN is at the core of some of these. But if you add some of the capability of vSphere and then, you know, case in point, how do I turn that into something that can quickly go deploy VMs, manage VMs, and in some cases take them back down. And then back to the whole connect cloud and then cloud foundations, you add vRealize and then public and private partnerships for clouds. That's how we get to this end state of a truly hybrid cloud and multi-cloud world. And if you come back and talk to us tomorrow, we're going to have a couple of announcements that make that real. I love the term zero touch. And, you know, we are increasingly getting to this higher level of capability in IT, but still their skills building need to be done. And what I loved about my time at VMware was all the investment that VMware puts into training of the ecosystem and enablement from professional services and all the IP that they generate and the reference architectures and the methodology and the certifications and the tech marketing. And I can go on and on and on. How much are you seeing the adoption in the ecosystem driven by, you know, the existing, enablement of the existing IT admins? How is the, how are the customers finding it? Is it, it seems like it's a natural evolution of what we're already doing, but yet there's still offerings by the whole ecosystem. Absolutely. Yeah, so John, clearly, you know, your time at VMware shows that VMware success is truly built upon our ecosystem. So from a virtual standpoint of view, we have two types of very, very important ecosystem. You know, certainly the ecosystem of hardware vendors. And we are very determined to become, and we are the software defined storage solution that's most widely supported by hardware vendors. You know, we have 15 server vendors and we're working with a little, even more number of component vendors. So really, you know, we want to make the solution available on every hardware platform. So that's one type of ecosystem. The other type of ecosystem is our vast channel. As you said, you know, so even though vSAN is ridiculously simple being part of vSphere, there's still going to be knowledge and training and go to market. We won't be able to scale without the ecosystem partners. And today we have 900 channel partners already transacting vSAN. And certainly, you know, looking at Jim and our up and coming merger and acquisition, you know, I'm excited that we will also be able to leverage the vast channel that Dell is able to bring. And systems integrators. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so clearly, you know, fully leveraging ecosystem is absolutely our priority. All right, well, Yen Bing and Jim, thank you so much. We actually put out some new research on the Wikibon site about where hyperconverted is in the marketplace. VMware is very well positioned. Dell has many, you know, plays in the top leadership positions. And good luck with the rest of the week. And thank you so much for watching theCUBE. Our pleasure and look for our announcements tomorrow. Thank you, Stu. Thank you, John.