 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas. We're here at VMworld 2018. Number we've heard from VMware for many years is, you know, they've got 500,000 customers. This morning on stage Pat Gelsinger said that now over 15,000 of those customers are using VSAN. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with me as John Troyer. We're going to dig into a little bit of the VSAN discussion here. Joining me, first time guests on the program, we have Ernie China who's the director of VSAN, Worldwide Product Marketing with VMware, and also Brent Collins who's a global practice director with WWT who is a part of the distribution channel partner of VMware and many others in the ecosystem. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much. Thanks for having us. All right, Ernie, let's start. Sure. VSAN, when VSAN was first announced, I said this was the rising tide that will really lift and launch what we called hyperconverged infrastructure. Number of interesting announcements. Maybe, you know, give us the thumbnail of what happened. Yeah, so that's great. So we actually made some big announcements. First of all, we talked about how the momentum we've had to, to your point, write huge amount of adoption by our customers, especially our vSphere customers, adopting VSAN out in the marketplace today. And then we've kind of added to a lot of the things they like about VSAN by announcing a few things around the product with our current update one, which basically provided two categories of capabilities. One is some management capabilities that make it much easier to administer to manage a VSAN deployment. So being able to recapture any type of capacity that's not being used, for instance, it's a great thing for administrators are trying to manage. Also, when they're trying to do any troubleshooting or trying to do any management, they also have some great troubleshooting capabilities that we announced as well. And then I think for WWT and all the other partners, we also announced new incentives to allow them to be more profitable, especially as they start selling more VSAN compared to traditional storage. Some great ways for them to be profitable with VSAN as well. All right, Brent, we've had a few guests from WWT on our program in the nine years we've been doing it. But, you know, the company I know has gone through a lot of changes, just like everybody else in this industry. So I want you to talk about the VSAN stuff, but give us for a second, you know, WWT, how should we think of WWT? How do you differentiate from your peers in the marketplace? Yeah, so I think, you know, WWT is about a 10 and a half billion dollar technology integration firm. We started off a little bit smaller, so a lot of, if you haven't been around in a while, we've grown quite a bit in the last few years, but really we've built a company oriented around speed. So it's, how do we help customers get things moving a lot faster? So it's speed doing informed decision with our advanced technology center. So it's about a 200 million dollar playground that we use for everything from demos to proof of concept. So what we call lab as a service, which is a longer term proof of concept. We also have an integration facility. So we take that informed decision, we make maybe a blueprint. So talk a lot about VSAN, but it's in different consumption models. So we might package that together with servers, top rack switching in the rack and really stamp that out multiple times for larger clients. So we take that through the integration facility and we also have a world-class global supply chain. So we started as a supply chain company. Not a lot of people know that, but you take that, you prove it out, you run it through an integration facility and then you put it anywhere in the world. It's a really powerful set of capabilities for big customers. Well, Brent, I wanted to ask specifically around VSAN and you talked about the consumption models. One of the interesting parts about VSAN, right? You can roll your own, take the software, roll your own. VSAN ReadyNotes or buy it from somebody already fully assembled and baked. Obviously you're working with customers at a range of sizes and use cases, but can you talk about what in 2018, what are some of the common consumption models to people, are you pulling it all together with the full rack and rolling it in or what do people look to WWT as a VSAN partner for? Sure, it's a great question. So we actually get all of the above. So we focus on the enterprise space, so the larger clients and a lot of them want custom solutions. So we go prove out whatever they want to have in there and again, to the model I talked about earlier, we stamp that out and put it into their data centers. Now some of them want it in a VSAN, roll your own. Others want VX Rail and then others want a full stack like VX Rack SDDC. So and we see it for different use cases, right? So we look at VSAN in and of itself as an easy button, but when you package it in with the reference architecture, it's even easier for people to go, go roll that out and support different models whether that's VDI or general purpose virtualization or even enterprise applications. So we really like the ability to customize that depending on what the customer's looking for. All right, yeah, Ernie, which one of these things is everything GA that we've talked about here? Are there customers that have lined up and done some of these? Maybe get unpacked for us a little bit as to what's hitting the door, which one's already rolled out as to what piece of those, you know, 50 dozen customers. Yeah, so all these things that hit the door already, they're already out for a lot of customers. A lot of customers have actually, as we do a lot of times, have them tested out beforehand. So many customers are already actually using a lot of these capabilities today. Some of them are actually being at the show talking about some of the things that we've done here. Yeah. So one thing I'd love both of you to give us some commentary on. When we look at the difference between kind of my data center and the public cloud is, the public cloud, nobody calls you and says, hey, what version of AWS or Azure are you running? Right? Right. As opposed to, we know the history with vSphere. It's like, well, what version of vSphere? Well, you know, I've got my little lab. Yeah, they're testing, you know, 6667, things like that. But I still got that 55 deployment that, you know, we have plans, but it's going to take a while. How does vSAN sit into that picture? And, you know, how do you help customers stay on the rev or upgrade or do you, once you sell it or you kind of done and they deal with VMware? How does that dynamic work? No, I think the value of the channel is really making it easier for customers to buy, easier to deploy and easier to manage. So we do all the above. I think one of the things that we were talking about earlier is I think people look at cloud as the easy button and it is, but there's an interim step there. So for customers that say, hey, I want it easy, you have the option to do it on-prem as well as in the cloud. So it's really, you know, when I look at my business, it's I'm in the computation and data management business and vSAN fits into really that data management side. The different question when you incorporate cloud is it's not a question of, you know, are we still doing the same thing? It's where is it and how do I buy it? So I really like HCI. I think it's, it really is that interim easy button for people that say, I want the simplicity of cloud but I want it on-prem, so. Ernie, getting commentary on kind of the management. Yeah, so from the management perspective, we're making it very, very easy for customers to go from whatever version they need to. Obviously, the fact that we have all these great new features coming in, it really gets sense a lot of customers to want to move to the latest capabilities. But in general for them, for customers, we make it really easy for them to be able to move up to whatever level they need to. Nice. Brent, I wanted to ask, you talked about HCI being the easy button. A couple of years ago when HCI architectures were just coming in, it was, the industry always is a little bit black and white. It's either going to destroy everything or save everything and it's going to be 100% one way or the other. Turns out, you know, there's a mix of use cases for traditional storage as well as HCI. What do you particularly like as use cases for VSAN and your customer base that you roll out? When do you really say, you know what? You should really look at this hyper-converged infrastructure that we can build you versus a more traditional, different array, bigger array, separate array, sort of storage. Yeah, you know, I'll give you the answer to everybody hates, which is it depends, right? So I think, you know, VSAN is a great platform and we see it for a lot of different use cases. So a lot of it depends on, you know, what's the customer looking to do? What's their, what investments have they already made? And then where does it fit best? So from a technical perspective, I mean, I think we all know that general purpose virtualization and VDI make their great use cases for VSAN, but we're starting to see that creep into other use cases. So you start here and then you go, wow, you know, when I'm refreshing over here, maybe it makes more sense to take a look at something different. At the same time, some people say, hey, maybe a traditional storage array still makes sense for us. So we kind of see it both ways. But again, as people to Ernesto's comment, as people start with VSAN, they try it out. The simplicity, the ease of management and the cost effectiveness, they really look at it. And also the integration, we don't talk about it a lot, but the integration with all the other virtualization tools makes it really easy all in. So those are some reasons why people might take a hard look at that versus a traditional storage array. Yeah, just to add to that, we started off with VDI. Everyone was in that particular use case. Then remote office came in. So the edge was a big one that started to grow. Now a majority of our use cases are on business critical apps. Most of the customers are SQL, Oracle. They're starting to deploy there. So actually expanding quite a bit. And the nice thing actually for our partners is in many cases, the services are now starting to catch up as you start going into these business critical apps. Actually, the services get bigger. So going back to that whole profitability element, it makes it more profitable for partners as well. All right, Brent, VSAN isn't just a standalone product obviously it's always with the hypervisor, but it's an important piece of the VMware Cloud Foundation. Is WWT involved in any of those solutions that, you know? Yeah. We don't do any of that. Yeah, it's real straightforward. So VMware Cloud, is that something you talk to your customers about? Of course, we do all of the above and significant investments in the Cloud in general. So a lot of what we're finding actually not to pivot too hard off of what we're talking about today, but when we look at VR automation, for example, a lot of customers have purchased it but aren't taking advantage of all the different features. So when we look at the entire stack, part of our methodology is working with customers to figure out what do you have and then how do we deploy and help you take advantage of what you have and then come back to the real question which is, let's take a holistic view out of all of those things and figure out how to maximize it. So it might be VRA, it might be VSAN, but in general, let's tie all those things together into something that makes more sense as a platform for what that customer's looking to do. Okay, Ernie, want to give you the final word? You know, a lot of pieces, people are always trying to do it through. What's one thing that people should look at from VSAN that they might have missed? So I think from VSAN perspective, as they start to look at modernizing their infrastructure, they start looking at this whole idea of digital business and how we can become more agile. I think actually kind of pivoting a little bit off the point that was just made, VSAN is a great way to get started. So it's a great way to be able to bring in some of those capabilities and then it's a great start then to bring in the rest of our portfolio that really adds a whole stack of solutions that really make that a reality and all along the way we make it very easy for especially vSphere customers to be able to deploy that. All right, that's a real important point. Thank you Ernie China, Brent Collins, appreciate all the updates and the user perspective. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Minin, back with lots more content from VMworld 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. Thank you.