 Hi, this is Wei Wang from Port-a-Mort, you are watching The Cube. Hi, this is Christa Vanny from Data Robot. My name is Nenshaad Bartoli-Walla. I'm the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of PAXADA. Hi, this is Wei Wang from Port-a-Mort. Hi, my name is Amitwalia. I'm the Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Ultramanica. Hi, my name is Rithika Gunnar. I'm the Vice President of Data and Analytics at IBM. And you're watching The Cube. You're watching The Cube. You're watching The Cube. EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. And welcome back inside The Cube, along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. We're here at the Sands Expo as EMC World 2016 continues. And our Cube coverage continues with that as well here on this Tuesday. We're now joined by Yan Bing Li, who is a SVP and GM of Storage and Availability Business Unit at VMware. And Yan Bing, thanks for being with us. First time around The Cube and one of Business Insider's top most powerful women in engineering in the world. High praise. So tell us a little bit, because it is first time. A little bit about your career path, if you will, just to share with our viewers a little bit of your history and how you've wound up at VMware. Love to do that. I've always watched your program, so really excited to be here for the first time. I have been with VMware for eight years. Eight and a half, actually. So done lots of different things. And the interesting part of my involvement with VMware is I started in a company's headquarters in Palo Alto. But I had the opportunity to move to China and really started our China operation for R&D, a big part of that. And came back two and a half years ago and I have been part of the Storage BU since then. And it's all about storage for me now. And the fact that your storage and availability, you're wearing a couple of different hats there. And I assume, do you split your time down the middle or how do you balance that? Because they're very distinctive offerings. Storage and availability, they do go hand in hand. If I look at our portfolio in the business unit, we have one area that's all about vSphere storage, making the best storage stack for vSphere. And that has been there since the very beginning of vSphere. And the other element is virtual sand. This is our entry into everything about hyper-converged infrastructure and how to enable that exciting new growth segment. And then there is a portfolio that's around availability. We have product like Site Recovery Manager which has been very successfully adopted. But increasingly, we're also pivoting lots of our availability portfolio to provide capability for virtual sand. So, I wonder if you could take us back a little bit because VMware's always had some of the storage functionality. I mean, HA, DRS, SRM, all those wonderful things. And we've tracked at Wikibon for years how VMware and the storage industry go together. We actually said, when we did our first research on what we call server sand, which is kind of the hyper-converged space, we said, and the most important thing is VMware really becomes a storage player. Not just some of the supports and part of the ecosystem, but you're a storage player and you're making good moves in that space. So, can you talk a little bit about that pivot and how that you've been through through all that? So, you know, Stu, we love your Wikibon research. I used your beautiful chart of... We've got to have her back more often, Stu. This is fantastic. The movement around traditional storage and the rise of server sand for both you know, hyperscale use case or the enterprise use case. I think that's really the fundamental assumption that we've made in pivoting our business. Certainly, you know, with... I think even though we talk about software defined, a lot of the software defined is really fueled by hardware innovation. You know, with Flash becoming, you know, so high in capacity, you know, so affordable in terms of economics, you know, faster interconnect that connected to the server. So, now there is, you know, suddenly a disruption that's happening in the storage space where you just put Flash storage next to your server and you have really capable solution for storage. And so, I really think that's a foundation for the rise of the server sand-based architecture. And when it's about server, you know, who is a good player well-positioned to tap into that? You know, certainly that's... You know, VMware, we've given our success in virtualizing server. We feel this is a great adjacency we can get into and certainly with our product of virtual sand on the market for two years and gaining amazing customer traction. You know, that's really a validations of, you know, how well VMware is positioned being part of that pivot. Okay, so bring us up to speed then. So, you know, vSan, when it came out, you know, we said very important, really interesting. We called it the raising tide that was going to get everybody talking about hyperconverged. You know, I remember... Gosh, I think it was two years ago at VMworld. I went like every booth. It's like, you know, hyperconverged infrastructure. It's all over the place in everybody's word. But there were things that you had to get in the core functionality and enhancements. So bring us up to where we are with the product today. Yeah, I'd love to do that. I think one of the good thing we're doing with our engineers, we're really accelerating the innovation. The product was shipped two years ago, you know, 1.0. It took us a few years to get that, you know, out of the door. But we've been accelerating, you know, it took us one year to get 2.0 out of the door. And it took us six months each to get 3.0 and 4.0. And we will be on a six-month innovation and release cadence. So really exciting time to see, you know, how our engineering team is keeping all of that up. And with our, you know, a fourth edition that's just released now almost two months ago, this is really the biggest product release we've done. And the way I see it is now we finally get all the enterprise-ready capabilities there. And our customers are loving it. You know, with the fourth edition, we've got deduplication, compression, rate five and six, many data efficiency features. And so I think we're the product ready for prime time. And I think where the market is also ready for prime time. And I keep calling this year the year of HCI because customers are ready to embrace it for mainstream use cases. And every vendor wants to have a piece of their pie in this high-growth market. So we're very excited to see, you know, with our fourth edition and the customer traction, you know, how VMware is positioned in this space. Can you talk a little bit about how you balance, you know, it's both, it's the ecosystem. So, you know, the storage group, you've got things like V-Volls, working with all the storage partners. You've got V-SAN ready nodes and all the competitive, hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. You know, the vast majority of them are using, you know, VMware vSphere and their platforms. So how do you balance the, you know, VMware full-stack versus, you know, the various pieces of the ecosystem? That's a great question. And certainly that's sometimes what can be me up at night. If you think about, you know, no matter how much we love and talk about V-SAN, so today this is still a smaller footprint of what vSphere. And even if you look at the vibrant ecosystem around HCI, you know, it's still barely scratching the surface of all the virtualized workload. So I do think there is a lots of growth potential and, but, you know, that brings the importance of how we maintain the support for the broad storage ecosystem for vSphere. And that's why we invested in effort like V-Voll. And I was very excited sitting in the keynote speech this morning. And I think both the VMAX team and VNX team really highlighted their support with V-Voll and their integration with vSphere. So we definitely see that we continue to enable and invest in that space because, you know, honestly, that's where, you know, most of our customers are having their storage environment on. Obviously we do believe HCI is going to be a very high-gross market segment just like you guys predicted, and we're putting new investment in the space. And in the HCI investment, we're also taking a fundamentally different approach from any other vendors out there. I see now there is a bit of music chair going on. There's pure play HCI vendors, and every server vendor wants to hug their chair of their HCI solution. And we want to continue to be mutual, and work with all the server vendors. We work with 12 vendors providing more than 100 ready-node-based solutions. I think that's by far the most diverse set of ecosystem out there. Obviously we also have the appliance-based approach with the joint effort with VCE through VxRail. And that is also going extremely well from a customer reception point of view. So help us unpack a little bit. Bring us into those customer environments. What are some of the key use cases? It's my understanding a lot of those. It's not usually the storage buyer that's just looking at replacing an array. So explain to us who's buying it, why they're buying it. Great question. So the typical sales trigger is when customers are looking for some sort of hardware refresh, whether they're refreshing their storage environment or they're refreshing their server environment or they're doing both. So that tend to be a very good trigger for them. Let me evaluate this cool new thing called HCI. And the other type of trigger that a customer looking at VSAN is when they face the storage challenges, whether it's a scaling challenge, it's a performance challenge. But in terms of use cases where customers are looking at, I think when we launched VSAN, there is a strong emphasis on VDI, test dev, DR, essentially the VDI and lower tier data center use cases. But that has changed fundamentally in the past two years. Actually today, the most frequently requested use case for VSAN is business critical use case in the data center. So it's lots of your, you know, OLTP type of workload. There's the Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange, et cetera, and SAP and Oracle Rack. So we're very excited to see that move to really, you know, customer believing in the value of hyper-convert and using that to, you know, a vast majority of data center workload. So this is why I'm calling it, it's really starting to go mainstream because it's gone from just a niche set of use cases now going fairly broad. Yeah, that's tremendous, you know, progress really fast. I mean, we were talking to John Gilmartin about, you know, from the early days of virtualization, what application can I virtualize? Do you see customers, I mean, are they, you know, the old term sweep the floor, you know, when I do my refresh, is VSAN my infrastructure for the entire data center? We have actually seen that, you know, one of the customer who was a reference in our Q4 earnings release, so this is a large U.S. retailer, they started VSAN with a million dollars of, you know, software license of VSAN alone in 2014 and that's quite a lot of licenses and they essentially deployed that in all of their retail location and claiming they're saving roughly, you know, $5,000 per, you know, cost per store and they like it so much, they're now moving into a data center so they acquired another multi-million dollars of VSAN at the end of 2015 and really trying to apply that to their entire data center and so we're seeing this type of land and expended motion playing out very nicely, just like early days of vSphere and, you know, the way I'm excited about this is, you know, VSAN is very disruptive in its nature, you know, how it's doing storage fundamentally differently, but it's how non-disruptive it is in customer adopting it. You know, you can start with just a few nodes as you're doing your refresh of maybe a small part of your environment and as customers start to get used to it and love it, they expand more. They have customers buying every month as if they're on drugs, I think. That's what we want to see and this is just also mirrors the pattern of, you know, how VMware's customers adopted vSphere so we're very excited about, you know, that correlation. And letting them wade in like that, tip a toe in the water, maybe go a little bit deeper, a little bit deeper. I mean, do you find that the receptivity increases or there's an exponential gain of some type there because once you put it into practice for yourself, you realize that there is more. And like that drug, if you will, there perhaps there's a greater benefit for the enterprise. Yeah, I definitely think, you know, customers are seeing that benefit. You know, a lot of the time there is this misconception of, oh, you're buying a new software, it must be expensive because we're paying more for new licenses. But as customers look at, you know, the comparisons of total cost of ownership of the entire hardware, the software stack versus the old way of them doing storage and server virtualization, I think the TCO value proposition tend to be very compelling. And then they realize, boy, this thing not only is cheaper, it's also simpler because, again, you know, the simplicity of, you know, vSphere admin manages everything in a single pane of glass through vSphere and vCenter. So rather than, you know, the complexity of managing your compute and storage separately. So simplicity now is becoming kind of the number one reason where customer claim they love vSan is, you know, it's simple to use and it's simple to scale out. You know, any time you want more capacity, you just add another node. So it's very, you know, this is totally disruption in a very non-disruptive fashion from a user experience point of view. Seems like they don't really go together, but they do, you know. Kind of the elephant in the room this week, obviously, is, you know, what's happening in terms of the big picture here at Dell and EMC. You know, your thoughts, you've got a pretty good seat of what's going on right now, pretty good observations of that. What do you think? I'm excited, I'm excited. So certainly our relationship with EMC was the launch of VxRail and the fact that we both ended, you know, the first quarter of the year was amazing success in both business. I think it really validated the strengths of VxRail as a common software enabling both the software consumption model as well as the appliance consumption model. So we're doing very well together with VCE and I see that carry forward with the integration with Dell because, you know, Dell with their experience with other HCI vendors, I think they're a big believer in the success of HCI and the value of HCI and they're also a vendor that know how to sell this thing. So I'm excited about, you know, what's in the future for us together. So Michael has been paying personal attention to how we're doing in our business and we're very excited to see, you know, all these possibilities of how our product get integrated better and how we unleash the power of our joint go-to-market machine together. So I can't wait. Great, well thank you for being with us. We certainly appreciate the time and I think the Twitter handle, because we talk about blending high tech and high heels, your Twitter handle is... Yeah, YB high heels. Yeah, so that's very authentic to who I am. They do match. Thanks for being with us. We appreciate that. Thank you so much both and great to be here. Great, thank you. We'll be back with more from the Sands Expo here in Las Vegas, the Cube covering EMC World 2016.