 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Hey, welcome back everyone live here at VMworld 2017 behind us. We've got the stage here set on the VM Village. A lot of people hanging out. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Vishmal Chan, who's the Senior Director of Product Management, HPE, CUBE alumni, and Eric Bergener, Research Director at IDC. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much, John. Vish, a lot of storage action going on in VM where you see VSAN, the clouds here, true private cloud report from Wikibon is off the charts, showing a huge growth on-prem cloud operations. Storage is impacted. What's the dots that we're connecting here this week? What's the storage story this week? So clearly there's a lot of different things happening in the marketplace, right? Different modes of operation and that in itself then is demanding different approaches to infrastructure. So I think what you are seeing in the industry are a variety of different approaches in storage, right? Whether it's external storage, whether it's software defined storage, whether it's hyperconvergence, whether it's all flash storage, all of these things are coming together and trying to respond to the needs of data and how you want to process that data. We've been talking with, we've talked to you guys a lot at theCUBE, HPE Discover, and we always say software's eating the world, we just heard Sanjay Poonan from VM, we're talking about it. I'd like to drop that sound bite. We take it one step further, you know. He's a Harvard MBA, but we got the Babson mojo here. We say if software's eating the world, then data's eating software. You guys have had a software core confidence and you mentioned data. What is the impact the customer has? More and more data comes in from the edge. This primary, this secondary storage, this backup, this data protection. It seems to be like this melting pot of changing architectures. How are you guys handling that at HPE? So I think software's a very key element because it provides you with those capabilities, right? To really deal with the logical instantiation of assets. And in this very virtualized world, in this very dynamic world right now, gone are the days where you can do hardware type desegregation, right? Software gives you that speed, that agility. It gives you that flexibility. Gives you the change, ability to move quickly. Eric, you're at IDC, you guys, this is your job. You guys track the market share. You guys have the pulses, like keeping track of the baseball game. What inning, how the Red Sox do it? They in first place and the Yankees catching up. What is the current state of the server virtualization? Because certainly the game's changing a little bit. The world's going to cloud. What are you guys seeing in your research? Well, so obviously most mainstream computing is running on virtualization, whether that's in the cloud or that's on-prem. There's very little physical infrastructure left. There is still some of that, but clearly that is not the future. Virtualization is the future. So, I wonder if I may. So, you say virtualization is the future. So, I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit. Because the theme here is cloud. Everything's cloud related. Is your feeling, Eric, that that's sort of over your skis marketing, getting ahead of where the customer really is? I wonder if you could sort of elaborate. You know, I think what the customers are really looking for is an easier way to do their jobs for less cost. Cloud provides flexibility that you don't necessarily get if you're managing your own on-prem infrastructure. That's not 100% true based on some scale issues, but by and large, I think that's really what cloud brings to the table. It's a different payment model and a flexibility that you wouldn't necessarily have with on-prem infrastructure. So, what are you guys seeing? Do you feel as though the on-prem infrastructure, leaders like HP, there are others obviously, are going to be able to bring that cloud-like simplicity to what you call private cloud or whatever, on-prem. Is that happening? How fast is it happening? Is it viable? Yeah, so I absolutely think that's happening. In fact, that's one of the reasons why software defined storage is growing so fast is those types of products give you the kind of agility that you would normally get from a cloud environment. And if you're running that on-prem and you've implemented the right infrastructure around it, then you're getting many of those same kind of benefits. Now, you're paying for that hardware and software in a different manner than you do for the cloud, but you're getting many of those IT agility benefits that you might otherwise get from the cloud. And Dave, you know, HP's tagline is making hybrid IT simple, right? And so our point of view is that there is both on-premise and off-premise, just depending on what the usage models are and what the problems you're trying to solve, right? And bringing that simplicity where you may be going from a 100% on-premise to maybe 20% off. Well, we've also seen some people at 50% off-premise trying to come back a little bit on-premise, right? So both directions, I think, are very, very key. Is your point of view, and I wonder, Eric, if you could chime in as well, from HP's perspective, is hybrid IT sort of horses for courses, in other words, workloads on-prem versus workloads off-prem, or is it beyond that, some kind of federation model? So we see three key use cases, right? The first is, of course, wholesale applications running on the cloud. Office 365 is the perfect example of that SharePoint drop box, right? That's one. Then there is what I would call disaster recovery as a service, where you may want to have your third site in the cloud, even though you've got two sites on-premise. Then there's also the third use case around archiving that says, how do I archive a portion of my data, maybe, into the cloud? So it is online, but I don't have to manage it and I don't have to maybe deal with some of the associated costs around it. So these are the three sort of cases I see. What are you seeing in the customer base, Eric? Well, so I completely agree that hybrid cloud is the way data centers are going to be built going forward. There are reasons to keep certain workloads on-prem. Generally, there's performance, security, or some kind of regulatory requirements that might make you put workloads on-prem versus putting them in the cloud. It also depends on how often you're using the data. So Vish mentioned archive use cases. So that's a case where you need a lot of storage capacity that you keep for a long time, but you may not necessarily be accessing it that much. If you're going to be accessing data a lot, that's another reason why you might consider bringing it on-prem as opposed to leaving it off-prem. And of course, the access, the costing access models that you get from people like Amazon and Azure are going to impact where you draw the line on that. So is there a difference between multi-cloud? I got a bunch of different clouds in my organization. I'm going to choose where to put stuff. And cross-cloud, sometimes you call it inter-clouding, or you can dual-source your cloud vendor. Yeah, either dual-source or federate or actually split application work. So I think I've seen several different aspects of that. So a customer has said to me that they need to move 20% of their data off-premise. To do that, they need two cloud vendors. And to get to two cloud vendors, they need to see four or five of them so they can narrow it down. And then they says, okay, HPE, all of the data that I have today is in your premise or with your equipment, how are you helping us broker that kind of arrangement? What are you doing to help federate some of that data and work with some of these cloud vendors? So I think that's an interesting customer ask. There's also a cost consideration because if you multi-source or you have the opportunity to multi-source, you've got a competitive environment that's going to drive lower cost for you as opposed to if you've just got one choice. The other issue there is data mobility. If I'm locked into cloud vendor one and it's very difficult, there's major switching costs to move, then that's another reason that might offset the potential price advantage I get from being able to go to any vendor. So you'll see a lot, there's a lot of vendors out there now, infrastructure vendors that are talking about making it easier to be able to move data on-prem to off-prem into different clouds from cloud to cloud. And I think that's something that creates a more level playing field that really is going to ultimately result in lower costs. That's a great point by the cost. I want to just double down a quick question on that. Where are customers tripping over themselves in terms of total cost on ownership? Because what you're getting at there is this hidden cost, right in plain sight. What are those tripwires, if you will? What's the pitfalls? What should they be looking for? So I'll give you a general answer to that but I think that it's very specific to workload type and the regulatory requirements that you're in. But I'll tell you, one of the cases where we see repatriation, workloads moving from the cloud back into on-prem is when you get to a certain level of scale. And the largest enterprises- Scale in terms of when to bring it back. Well, just in terms of how much data, how much data do I need to basically maintain in this environment and use on a regular basis? And the larger scale environments are the one where larger enterprises are able to actually bring back, create their own cloud infrastructure on-prem with their own environments and actually manage that for less cost than what they could otherwise pay a public cloud. So just to take it one step further to connect the next dot, the CXO, the CIO has to try to get some stability. And this is an uncontrollable thing. Certainly in retail, it's predictable that the holiday season needs bursting or whatever. So you do some things in the cloud. But that's a known pattern. So you're saying is that they're starting to recognize some of these scale issues for predictability, they bring them on-prem. Is that kind of what I'm getting? So the scale from a cost point of view. So if you're creating your own private cloud infrastructure and you're using the same kind of highly agile software to find storage designs to build that environment, you somewhat have the same ability to burst. Now, yeah, you have to buy the hardware and there's redeployment issues. And hopefully when we move forward towards much more composable infrastructure, that becomes a lot easier problem to solve. But that's some years in the future. But what I'm really talking about is it's the cost. If I'm going to be maintaining a five petabyte data set over a 10 year period, and I know what my access patterns are, is it cheaper to put that in Amazon? Or is it cheaper for me to build an infrastructure in-house and maintain that myself? That's a great point. That's huge. And Vish, what's your reaction? Because this basically validates all the action going on on the private cloud right now. On-prem activity, they're setting up the cloud models. They can't do that unless you have the operating model. So I'll talk about two things, right? One called Cloud Bank. Another one called Nimble Cloud Volumes, and soon to be called HPE Cloud Volumes, right? So Cloud Bank allows you to take on-premise data, say running on a three power array, and actually take a portion of that data onto either an on-premise object store, or an off-premise object store, right? And we call that Cloud Bank working together with something called Recovery Manager Central and StoreOnce, bringing that cloud picture together. Now, the HPE Cloud Volumes or Nimble Cloud Volumes, another interesting concept where you have a cloud service, it's block storage service, but it gives you the 6.9s SLA. It gives you the ability to do snapshots and transform data without the lot of charges that Eric talked about. It gives you the ability to move the data to different clouds because it's disaggregated from the major cloud providers, right? It's connected via a close proximity connection. So these are just two examples, I think, that show you how we're putting these use cases into action. Hey, can we geek out a little bit here? Aren't we geeking out now? I mean, really, go deeper. So people want simplicity, we know that, right? We're talking about bringing cloud on-prem. How do they get there? One of the ways is V-Valls, we've sort of been talking about this. They haven't really taken off. Eric, you've written some content around this. Like you said off camera, customers don't wake up in the morning and say, hey, I got to get me some V-Valls, but they do want simplicity. So what are V-Valls? Why do they matter? And how does it relate to simplicity? Okay, so yeah, let's talk a little bit about that. So what everybody, no matter whether they're putting storage in the cloud, they're building on-prem, they're building a private cloud, everybody wants to be able to manage their environments more easily, more intuitively. And one of the things that we've seen as a trend over the last five years is in general across the industry, storage management tasks are migrating away from dedicated storage admin teams more towards IT generalists. In many cases, those are the virtual administrators. To enable that kind of a move, you need to make storage much easier to manage. So the whole idea behind V-Valls is to basically allow a non-storage person who maybe thinks about things in terms of, I'd like to do this operation to an application. For example, I've got Oracle running, or I've got this file system here, and I want to create a snapshot of it, or I want to do some other task on it, to be able to just select it at the application level and perform that operation. That's very intuitive, it's easy for a non-storage person to understand, and V-Valls effectively enables that kind of an ease-of-use management in block-based environments. And an application view of the storage. That's right, and I mean it's effectively, it ties storage operations to a single virtual machine, and basically you're running an app on a virtual machine, and so that's how you get that tie-in in that way. But one other thing I'll say about V-Valls is that, so it's not just what VMWare provides, right? There's some work that needs to be done on the storage array side to integrate with that management framework, and then how that vendor has chosen to integrate with that framework is going to determine the functionality that you have access to when you're using that V-Valls API. And how have you chosen to integrate with that framework? Yeah, so Dave, if you look at V-Valls, both HPE and HPE 3-Power Nimble have been very, very strongly focused on V-Valls. In fact, we've been working with VMWare, gosh, over the last five years now, on the reference architecture for V-Valls. Most recently, we've now introduced replication support for both 3-Power and Nimble platforms with V-Valls, and I think that capability now within V-Valls is a very important watershed capability because everybody needs resilience, disaster recovery, right? Automation's right around the corner, orchestration, all big topics here at VMworld. Correct, correct. And so that's a very, very key piece, right? And I think if you look at sort of, to Eric's point around simplicity, V-Valls is one key area. Two other areas I maybe I'd like to highlight as well. Number one is the visibility to what the application sees. And within the Nimble community, they've talked about this app data gap, right? Which is the application's not knowing why they can't get access to data. And so this notion of bringing that level of understanding, visibility to that gap, saying is it in your compute infrastructure? Is it in storage? Is it in the network? So this notion of VM vision info site that Nimble brought on, which we're going to bring on to the rest of the HPE portfolio, I think is very key around simplicity. Then the third thing, let's not forget, is VMware has built a whole ecosystem of management platforms around V-Center, V-Realize operations, a lot of orchestration and automation pieces. And so continuing to integrate and offer customers that view is very, very key, right? So three prong vector, I would say, on making things simple. Awesome, HPE discovers coming up in Madrid shortly. Yes. Congratulations, good to see you, Eric. Thanks so much for stopping by and sharing the ideas. Thanks very much, John. Yes, great job. Live coverage here at VMworld 2017. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break. Thank you.