 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC, redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. Hello everybody and welcome back. We're here on theCUBE live here at EMC World 2014 in lovely Las Vegas. Here on theCUBE with me this afternoon, we have a Cube alum, Bill Reid from EMC IT. Bill, welcome back. Thank you so much. And we also have a, I'm sorry, VMware Bob Goldsand, Bob Goldsand, staff partner from VMware. Bob, first time on theCUBE, but welcome. Thanks for joining us. First time, thank you very much. Well, we like to talk a little bit about the fact that EMC, both as, you know, is the vendor here, but also from a practitioner standpoint, Bill, you work in the IT shop, right? So, you know, you can lend a lot of insight to a lot of things that we're doing. This morning, we heard you guys release a press release on SAP HANA, virtualized on SAP HANA. Tell us a little bit about the release and kind of what we should be thinking about. Sure, it's the announcements exactly as you described, production support from SAP, joint venture with VMware and SAP about production support for SAP HANA on a vSphere platform. And I think that if you look back over the past decade of virtualization that I'll speak for myself and EMC IT, this was really the next step in that evolution. We had virtualized our data centers. We've been live in SAP for just shy of two years now in a fully 100% virtual stack, but SAP HANA was that side outlier that we weren't virtualized to our clients. And about six months ago, we really, actually about a year ago, we had been starting down the journey about saying, well, why can't we virtualize HANA? So at that point, we had reached out with our VMware colleagues. They were working with SAP about saying, let's push this, let's be the industry leaders, let's do what we've been doing for the past decade, take all of those lessons, learns and best practices to taking those workloads and apply to SAP HANA as well to get the same business value, the flexibility, the ease of deployment, et cetera, that we've been seeing on a virtualized environment. Great, Bob, can you tell us a little bit about what you're seeing from not only EMC, but other customers? They were looking to SAP HANA and why they wanted it virtualized and what it might have been some of the driving factors. Yeah, it's been quite a long journey, should I say. We use that vernacular often at VMware. And we started off about two years ago doing some initial performance evaluation. And first and foremost, we wanted to prove to SAP as well as our customers that there was really no performance, very little performance impact with virtualizing HANA. And we proved that without a doubt over two years of testing, as well as during this time, we also did a number of functional tests. We wanted the customers to understand that there was no functional tests associated with virtualization either. And a lot of customer feedback to SAP, a lot of customer feedback to us saying that HANA really needs to be virtualized to take off. And we were hearing that. Obviously EMC's been great, a great partner with us. They were very vocal in that respect. And we also, in one of our press release, Mercedes-Dimler also went live on virtualized HANA. Excellent reference, excellent use case. So the response has been great, really pleased. And as I say, it's been a long time coming. Very good. So Bill, just in your infrastructure, tell me a little bit about, if you look at the overall stack, you've got obviously EMC products and technology, VMware products and technology, SAP HANA. Can you give us kind of a picture of the stack, maybe the size, kind of some of the things you're doing with SAP HANA? Yeah, going back to our initial go live, which was July of 2012, we had deployed in a production landscape, it's about 80 virtual machines supporting our SAP landscape. We've got a very large ECC instance supporting the ERP core components from SAP, of course. We've got SRM, we've got FSCM, a lot of the SAP classic ERP modules. The entire span of that infrastructure spans across two data centers. Essentially, we built it out on a production V block in the Boston area. And in North Carolina, we have a non-production data center where all of our DR, dev, test landscapes are built out. All told, it's over 500 virtual machines supporting about 10 SAP landscapes. So it's a massive, massive amount of infrastructure supporting that. To have that outlier of SAP HANA, adding the business value, but still not being able to manage it in the same way was really the ultimate goal of how we were trying to grow forward and saying, we've got to do this too. We've got to give that same agility, we've got to be able to provision new landscapes, new environments to add that business value going forward. Very good. So can you tell us even a little bit more about other applications that you have running on top of SAP HANA that clients are utilizing and then kind of tying into? We had an upgrade planned for last year around the SAP BPC, business planning and consolidations. When we went live, SAP had come out with a new version. It was a little bit too risky for our initial goal life. So we said, let's postpone that for about a year. We'll go through that upgrade the following year. About that same time is when we had been engaged with VMware and the VMware team had been working in the labs with SAP saying, we can virtualize this. So we took advantage really of an opportunity that was somewhat unique in that we had a convergence of an upgrade, a desire from the business for more performance and an opportunity to prototype some of this SAP HANA on a virtual infrastructure stack. And what we did is we built out two instances. We built out one that was on the traditional OLTP data store and we built out one that was on SAP HANA. We gave our end users the application and we said, tested on environment one, tested on environment two and give us the feedback of which one you like. They obviously what would be. We were seeing performance of three, 400 times faster on the in-memory compute as we would expect. And that really drove us to say, we're not yet certified. And this was really late last year. It was October to November that we were doing this work. Well, we actually went live in November on that virtualized stack prior to SAP saying, you're really, you're out there. We knew we could support it. We knew we had VMware at our back and we had VMware engineering to support everything that we were doing. So we felt very comfortable. A, we're giving the business value. B, we've got the right support in line and we've got the right expertise on our virtual landscape that we should be doing this. Very good. So Bob, can you give us a little bit of insight now? SAP obviously, SAP EMC obviously is a very large customer, right? You guys have thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of customers. What kind of advice would you be giving practitioners as they start to look down this, hey, I want to start to do this. What types of things should they be thinking about first so that they kind of have a successful run? Well, first of all, SAP HANA is a great product and it delivers on much of the promises around speed and agility. And over these past two years, what we've learned in virtualizing HANA is it's much, many of the best practices associated with virtualizing databases that our customers are familiar with can directly be applied to HANA. So there should be no fear in associated with virtualizing HANA. Just follow those best practices. Today, in conjunction with the press release, we released a fairly substantial best practice document and it goes through all the best practices on how you should deploy HANA. And at the end, it is a fairly substantial document, but at the end, we include a checklist so that you can go through this checklist to make sure, yeah, I've done everything I should have done and I should expect unparalleled performance, availability and reliability when deploying on vSphere. So I guess the advice I would say is there shouldn't be any fear in virtualizing HANA. It's a solid technology, VMware is a solid technology as well, very mature. And again, many of the best practices that our customers are familiar with when virtualizing mission critical databases directly are applicable to HANA. I think that's some really good advice. I think there's a lot of fear and uncertainty when you're going to look at a new project, right? The fact that one, you guys have documented it and I'm sure through experiences with guys like EMC, they learn a lot, putting those into best practices and then being able to educate customers so they can kind of take that leap of faith, so to speak and not be too afraid that it is really good. So from a CAPEX and OPEX perspective, can you give us a little bit of, what have you seen by being able to virtualize SAP HANA? How's that really impacting the organization? Yeah, if you look at the traditional model that SAP had come out with for SAP HANA, you have a fairly expensive license to get you in the door based on the size of the memory that you're going to be running the application, the amount of terabytes of memory that you're buying and then you've got to go buy an appliance. So if you look at that and then you think about the utilization, there's a fairly substantial CAPEX opportunity that you can invest in just getting into the entry just to get you in the door. We looked at that as saying, we've got these V blocks with capacity, these clouds of capacity with compute, network and storage. Why can't we leverage that same principle that we've been doing for the rest of the SAP stack and carve out a HANA instance in the same? So that was the CAPEX reduction, if you will. We still have a physical appliance that we deployed a couple of years ago, that was about 18 months ago now. That was part of our initial SAP go live. Moving forward, we want to use the cloud that we've got. We want to be able to carve up new HANA instances and what we've been doing since then is we've been spending a lot of time on automating that build. We have the ability right now to use some of the VMware VCO tool sets to build and deploy a new HANA instance through push button automation in hours, minutes, really essentially compared to taking a week or two of installing on appliance, configuring it, installing the binaries, and then figuring out how you're going to partition it after that. That automation obviously touches the OPEX, absolutely huge savings in OPEX as you go forward. Automate and repeat. Standardize, automate and repeat. So Bob, from a monitoring perspective within VMware, you talked a little bit about the fact deploying SAP HANAs, you utilize some of the best practices that you do today with databases. Anything special inside of VMware for doing any special monitoring today, helping folks get an understanding both from a deployment and an overall monitoring perspective? Currently, there isn't, I mean, we were focused on performance, maintain, make sure that the performance was key. Yeah, especially with an in-memory database that has a large memory footprint and with some skepticism as to could we really virtualize these type of applications and we prove without a doubt we could. But in the future, as we make deeper integrations to our operations suite, we are looking at specifically monitoring at all levels so that we can provide monitoring from the virtualization layer, the storage layer, the application tier as well as the database tier and percolating those findings up to dashboards where you can do correlations and determine, well, what's housed by HANA databases performing? When should I look at providing more storage, provisioning more computer resources? Things of that nature. So really, an end-to-end performance techniques and also correlation techniques so that it isn't just a virtualization layer that you're looking at, it's not just the storage layer you're looking at, it's the entire stack. So Bob, just a little bit of a segue here. So first time on theCUBE, how many times you've been to EMC World? I used to work for EMC, so when I did, I was here quite often. I haven't been here in about two years. Yeah, two years. Great to be back. Yeah, so give us a little insight. I know this announcement for you guys today was pretty big, so I'm sure there's a lot of focus going on around that, but what else have you heard about the show that's exciting to VMware in particular? Well, a lot of the activity around VSAN and the certification of the EMC storage around HANA, which I hate to have a one-track mind, but that's... Well, hey, you know, I know it was probably a curveball, but I'm sure you've been pretty busy trying to get that ready and make sure it was ready for the show. Yeah, so, and that's huge, and they use this deployment model called Taylor Data Center Integration, which is essentially SAP opening up the storage layer to customers so they can leverage your existing infrastructure. So it's absolutely key that VMware is part of that certified storage, which they are for all their current storage, so it's great so our joint customers can enjoy deploying HANA virtualized on this model. Great, thanks, and so, you know, industry-acute-cube alumnus, as we said before, so again, I know you've been doing a lot of work, Cron getting ready for this announcement. What have you seen here that's been pretty exciting? I think just having the entire EMC Federation here in one room talking about it yesterday with David talking about the new product enhancements with Viper and the extreme family, having Paul and Pat today talking a little bit more around the Software-Defined Data Center. I actually just did a presentation just before now about how we're implementing the Software-Defined Data Center using the technologies of virtualization and automation and the benefits herein, and that really is a continuation of the discussion that we've been having here for the last 20 or 30 minutes around virtualizing SAP and all of the components included, including SAP HANA. I have to say, I've been pretty impressed. One of the things that kind of grabbed my attention, I too used to work for EMC, so I probably haven't been to the last couple, but hearing about all the openness and how EMC's really kind of opened its doors, and including VMware and kind of the sharing and along with a lot of the announcements and helping customers who've had a lot of end-user customers on theCUBE talking about how they seem to feel like they have a lot more flexibility these days and with applications that are being ported, such as SAP HANA onto, they have a lot more choice now, and I think that's one of the things that, I mean, this year is almost 15,000 people here, and you don't get 15,000 customers without providing choice and the ability to both test their breed but buck freedom of choice, so I think that's pretty interesting. So I want to say thank you very much, both Bill and Bob, we're here on theCUBE, we'll be back here live right after these messages.