 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Well, welcome back inside Mandalay Bay as we continue our coverage of VMworld here on theCUBE along with Peter Burris. I'm John Walls, and I was joined by David Convery who's the Solutions Architect at CDW and Lee Caswell, Vice President of Product Storage for the VMware Storage and Availability Business Unit. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. Good to see you. Great to be here. How's show doing so far for you? Oh, it's on fire. I mean, we have a tiger by the tail here. It's been great. Don't let go. Don't let go. All right, Dave, you've been doing this for a long time. And we were just talking about your history and your background. I said, yeah, I first got into virtualization back at Y2K. Wow, I remember that. How far we've come, huh? And yeah, yeah, again, I did it. I used it for Y2K testing. And then from there, I worked for a disaster recovery services company and we had these customers, Katrina, Rita, 9-11, they just came in with their stuff and they didn't have enough physical servers to, you know, in their contract to recover their businesses. And they were taking out VMware evaluation licenses to get their businesses up and running. And VMware was super supportive of that and they knew, you know, the licenses would come and wow, yeah, it was like thrust into ESXi or ESX at the time, you know, just crazy. And as we think about what's happening on hyperconverge now, right, it's the same idea, right? I mean, it was actually practicality, you know, the necessity, right, of using VMware because gosh, I needed to do it for kind of TCO reasons. And what happened was ESXi started out at the fringe almost, right? And then came roaring into the, you know, into the core as people realized, hey, I really can run like mission critical applications, business critical apps. The same trajectory is happening now with VCN, HCI, right? And our VCN rating notes, we're starting off like outside startup VDI, test and dev, right? You know, all the management clusters, right? But now what's happening and the majority of applications mainstream business apps, right? Yeah, yeah, it's, I firmly 1000% believe, you know, any application can run over ESN, you know? And as we were talking about this, I still have customers, they talk about running exchange or SQL on physical servers and I'm like, why? So now you take all those benefits of virtualization and you add VCN on top of it and make everything totally portable on just, you know, commodity based hardware. And, you know, pretty soon our job as storage architects building, figuring out SANS and RAID groups and, you know, how big my LUN is supposed to be. Who cares? Throw some storage in the server, add them as you need and keep going. Well, to that point, Lee, you're talking before we went on the air here about how people, you know, professionals coming in and saying, I want to get my attention from here to up here, right? I want to be able to look at business and not so much about what's going on behind the scenes in the back office. It's interesting, I was even at CDW recently, right? We were talking about how long it takes to train someone on enterprise storage. Versus, you know, actually the less you know about storage, the more a hyper-conversion system works the way you expect. I had a note, yeah, of course it gets bigger, right? I mean, why wouldn't it? So the idea that you can get people trained up, not just using the product, but actually selling the product, I mean, it's actually a very interesting dynamic. One of the other interesting things we're seeing right now is just the overlap of flash, right? All flash, right? Which first, you know, blue, you know, came blazing onto the scene for performance, right? For an application is now coming in because customers want to spend less time, actually man, is that looking down? I don't want to look down anymore, right? And so the idea that the customer sat numbers for all flash users is just off the charts because the risk of misconfiguring something actually is really low, right? I mean, you don't spend nearly as much time and you don't worry about it. Right, right. So you have the performance you need, you have the space you need, you know, you get the deduplication and it just, as you, you need more performance, you need more space at another node. And on top of that, you get compute memory and everything else. So there's still some challenges associated with application and selecting new technology and there's a lot of transformation and transition. There's a lot of new technologies coming online. That's right. Even in the storage world. So how is virtualization helping customers or helping protect customers for making bad choices with current products? Yeah, one thing you want to look at is like, where do I manage this from, right? How many silos do I have, right? And so the extent that you can leverage vCenter, for example, right, is a common management domain, not just for storage, by the way, right? Well, we started off with compute, right? We got storage, but you also have networking, right? So what we have today with NSX, right? Integrating that together. We've heard what we announced at the show here, right? It's this VMware cloud foundation. Great way to go and integrate, right? All the rich features functionality and now you've got it in one user interface, right? That simplifies the deployment and then the support, right? Making everything easy. So, you know, putting everything together, plug it in, run a wizard, everything's set up for you and it's set up the way it should be. Yeah. So it's not as dependent upon the underlying type or choice that you made about the storage. It's now more what does the application need and let's just point the application at the pool. Yeah, so there's still, I still see, you know, there's going to be those needs where that super low latency, super fast shared storage is going to be critical and is going to be needed for specific applications. But all that other stuff, all that normal day-to-day, web servers, applications, email, file shares, all that stuff, you can just throw it on there and it works. You don't have to worry about all the silos and all the different management people that you need. So going back to John's question, based on your point, Lee, the idea that getting people to raise up their perspectives. Dave, how much time are you now saving, not doing the physical stuff, to actually starting to talk to developers that people are taking all of this data, all these assets and turning it into business value? Are you able to spend more time and directly supporting them as you go into customers and design these capabilities? It does seem like that shadow IT or DevOps or, you know, the people that aren't depending or depend on IT, the consumer, is becoming more of the decision maker or at least the influencer. And what V-SAN brings to the table for those kind of people, especially with the automation and the whole private cloud piece of it, it takes down that, I call it the IT stop sign, okay? So, you know, why is DevOps going to the public cloud? Because it's easy. So you have to be as easy as wherever they're going in order to bring them back and keep that governance on your data and keep your IP where it belongs, whether it's in that private cloud or often to a secure, more secure public cloud or through a hybrid cloud or whatever. V-SAN kind of keeps everything contained for that. Yeah, and I think there seems to be a trend or at least a thread here that I'm hearing in a different conversation here about simplicity, right? It's just about keeping things simple for people, letting them focus on their core competencies and what they're really, what they're paid to do and not distract them away from having to learn. Like you said, you get up to speed in 15 minutes as opposed to hours or weeks of training before. Three clicks, you have a visa, is it three clicks? Yeah, three clicks, you have a visa. I ask customers pretty routinely now, is your budget going to be, is it higher or lower this year? The answer is like, it's lower, right? Yeah, it's always lower. And you're like, do you have more people or less people? And I'm like, well, less people, they're shrinking data centers, right? And all of a sudden, and then you say, well, and how many projects do you have? Like, every project now has an IT component, right? So now it's the pace of change, right? And so if you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure as much, now all of a sudden, it just becomes easier to start worrying about, hey, how do I go on scale? We had a customer this morning I was talking to, right, that was talking about, well, you know, the other thing it does is it gives me the opportunity to have kind of bite-sized chunks, right? So the risk of making the wrong decision is actually low, right? I buy a set of servers in as opposed to, you know, I buy something that's this big where I have to basically predict what's going to happen for the next five years. And this looks more like, hey, you know what? I kind of have to know what's going to happen over the next six months, and then we'll figure it out from there. That's today's mentality. So easier to change one piece instead of the whole puzzle. Exactly, right? I don't pay the tax for that. That's a great point. There's not that many IT shops that are refreshing their entire data center. There are, but there's not that many. Usually it's a silo, so, but there's always projects. VDIs, some sort of new SAP application or, you know, we're migrating to a new version of Exchange or whatever it is. So, okay, let's start there and let's just slip it in, try it out, and you'll see you'll like it. It's like, sorry, it's like crack. Everybody needs more, right? So, slip it in, try it out, and you'll see you'll like it, and then from there it'll just roll. And as the old siloed equipment starts to age out, they'll just easily transition it into vSAN. That's what I think, we just did a survey. Be motioned over, add a new server, shut that down. We just finished a survey of 250 vSAN customers, and one of the things that we were watching is, so what about the applications, right? Because when we started, like it was, hey, I'm going to try this in test dev, I'll try it over here, or DR is a good one, right? I tried and, you know, it's not, I'm not running like my real stuff on it, right? You know, now what we're finding is like, this year it's switched, right? So we flipped into the majority or now, business critical applications, right? They're running SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, the whole Microsoft stack. They're running Oracle databases, right? They're running Percona, right? I mean, they're my SQL variants, right? It's really interesting. And so all of a sudden they're like, you know, there's no real hesitation, right? And it's the economics that drive this, right? Once you started looking and saying, you know, here's how I can go and do this in more bite-sized chunks, it starts to become more, you know, it's more cloud-like, I think, from that standpoint. But it's also the risk, because, as you said, you make a design decision, it's not going to be the right design decision in 18 months. You make a product decision today, it's probably not going to be the right product decision in 18 months. You make the right, you know, you want to, your company decides to buy a new company, or wants to diversify the best of itself, you don't want the infrastructure getting in the way of those business decisions. So it's certainly the economics, but it's a lot of it has to do with the fact that, as you said, the pace of change is so great that the only way you're going to make a decision so great that the only way to ensure that you can keep up is to focus on where the change really needs to be and diminish the focus on where the change isn't as required, does that make sense? It does make sense, and you know, one of the things that, you know, degrees of freedom that customers also want is we're finding, you know, they're pretty used to being able to configure servers and choose their own server, right? So the idea that we give choice, right, running software on a server where you get to choose, right, I mean, we have what, 15 different partners, right, server partners building something called a vSAN-ready node, right? So you can take our software, pre-configured, right, to strip out the integration risk, if you will. Now, there's also some customers who just want, like, the simplest, easiest, fully integrated, and we're working with EMC, that VX Rail product is an integrated, CDW offers both of these, right? So if, you know, for customers who want just to say, I want a single point of support integrated backup, I mean, that's a world-class product, right, as an integrated appliance, that's one way to buy, right, one way to deploy. But on the other hand, if I'm a UCS shop, I can go and say, hey, here's how I get a UCS. If I'm an HPE shop, here's how I do that. Lenovo, right, it all works, all pre-configured. Or Dell? Oh, yeah, the up-to-Dell, yeah. Of course, right. I've heard of it, guys, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you for that, by the way. No sweat. I may be back, yeah. I'm happy to be here, the value out of the cube. All right, there we go, exactly, yeah. Whoo! Good career advice. Just flash before your eyes there for a moment. Yeah, it's all good. Right, right. But this choice, right, I mean, it's interesting because certainly customers are looking at, what level of choice and flexibility do they want? And this server choice, right, is a big one. Yeah, yeah, there's the reason why people buy servers isn't because it's a specific brand. I mean, if you look at, if you open up servers and you look inside, it's really, it's Intel processors or maybe an AMD processor, a bunch of RAM and some disks. The software that the vendors offer to manage those are what's important. And it's funny, since vCenter, even before it was vCenter, you know, just, I guess, two O was it? Being able to integrate the management of the servers into vCenter and having all those sensors and all that stuff kind of bubble up into vCenter is huge. And being able to hook in and take, like, vRealize automation or vRealize orchestrator and make it deploy the physical hardware as well as the virtual, it's big. Tie that in with vSAN, it just kind of makes it easy. So Dave, you're working with a lot of customers every single day. They are also starting to deploy cloud or at least procure cloud as part of their core strategy. Talk a little bit about the challenges associated with inter-cloud communication and the role that virtualization plays there. Yeah, yeah, so it's still kind of the Wild Wild West out there with that. I know VMware with NSX trying to, and now with the new announcements, and I haven't fully digested all this stuff from yesterday. None of us have. Just the idea of providing that kind of peanut butter of policy for security and networking and all that from whatever you need to keep. But by the way, that's a technical term. Peanut butter of policy. I like that a lot. I have more. Peanut butter of policy. In your private cloud and being able to kind of spark that up in whatever public cloud you choose to use kind of brings that core, you know, so VMware's message was always, whatever hardware you have your choice, now it's whatever cloud you have your choice. So it kind of makes sense, you know. And yeah, security and the networking is the biggest piece of it. And if you look at the NIST official version of hybrid cloud, it's being able to move things back and forth seamlessly. And that's what it brings to this table. A big part of this cross-cloud message, right? And there's an obligation and it turns out, I'd argue that your most strategic engagement with the cloud is actually data, right? VMs you can spin up, spin down, right? They're transitory, it's on and off. But the decision about where you place data is longstanding. And what data? And what data? Sovereignty issues about, you know, it takes, you know, data's not quick to move anywhere, right? So it takes time and it takes, you know, from a cost standpoint, right? You all of a sudden lock yourself in on data to keeping it going, right? So those sort of issues, and if you want to take it back, by the way, there's some egress fees and other things to go and manage. So what we announced right in this cross-cloud world about how we're running, for example, in IBM SoftLayer, right? You can now spin up VSAN in SoftLayer, right? And see the same policy-based management, right? Across the cloud now, right? I mean, that extension, right? Into the public clouds, right? Is a really interesting way for us to go and talk about, you know, moving from just a storage, you know, into a data services, data management, right? That becomes a key element to go forward. How do you convince people to be early adopters, then, of that? Because now that they're making decisions that, well, not that they all matter, that those matter maybe a little more. Is it really early adoption, though? This far into the game? I mean, there's not always... I mean, we should talk about a transitory element. Yeah. You're thinking, okay, I want you to take another step. Yeah. I want you to go a little further out. And so that's what I was saying. Well, here's where I'd, let me add a little bit to that. Here's what I'd say is that, you said data management. Yes. I would say data asset management. That's fair. That's a good term. So, you know, we were talking earlier, digital business is about how you're going to apply data differentially to retain and sustain your customers. And so this whole notion of data as an asset really elevates this conversation about what data, where, when, who, all those other things. And to the degree that virtualization simplifies those conversations, it's going to have a major impact on business flexibility, agility, even design. That's right. You guys agree? Totally agree, yes. So think about it. And I have to credit VMware SE, his name is Paul Irwin. Think of NSX as kind of a bodyguard, okay? And every chunk of data, whatever it is as a bodyguard, kind of leading them, leading the way and protecting that piece of data from whatever it is that it needs protected, wherever it goes. And that's really a real simple analogy. So it's not just, I have to configure a firewall over here and make sure that if it goes into cloud that that firewall has the same rules. It doesn't matter anymore because my bodyguard's gone with me and that bodyguard is making sure that all the policies are applied no matter where I am. It also opens up new areas, you know, when you talk about data asset management, now I started thinking about, well, you know, maybe I want to do some big data analytics on where my data is, right? Where do I locate it, right? And you could locate it at different places for sovereignty, security, local performance, for example, right? Back up any geolocation issues, right? And then I also started thinking of a policy base, or maybe we call it storage policy based management. And that sort of, now it says, you know, it's not just capacity, right? I maybe want to be thinking of performance, right? How do I think about allocating performance? How do I think about managing performance across different assets, for example? I mean, this is what's exciting, I think, is once you start where we've started from, which is at the hypervisor level, you're at a natural architectural injection point to go and say we could take all of these pieces in and very efficiently go and manage them, provide new functionality, right? That's a really interesting way, as customers try and assess, like my data may not just be here anymore, right? Maybe out here, maybe out there, how do I go in and get a handle on that? That's true, once you hit that inflection point where the industry starts coming to you. Right, that's right. VMware has clearly hit that point, and then some. Yeah, interesting. Well, we've had peanut butter policy, we've had bodyguards, I wish we had more time to get more pearls of wisdom today. We'll get the big IT stop sign. I like that too, all right, good. Thanks for joining us, guys. Thank you, guys. Thanks for having us. Have a great show. All right. Our coverage on theCUBE, VMworld continues in just a moment here from Las Vegas.