 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. Welcome back, Jeff Rick here on The Cube. We're at EMC World 2014, the fifth year of The Cube being at EMC World and something special this year. We actually have two concurrent cubes going on side by side. So we invite you to stop by, hopefully say hello. We're right next to this beautiful video wall in the alumni lounge and the social lounge and the big stage next door. So come on by The Cube and see not one, but two, double the pleasure, double the insight. So for our next segment, we're going to keep diving into VMEX, right? We're going to go to VPEX, I'll kick it over to my associate here, Stu Miniman. Yeah, thanks, Jeff. Of course, EMC for many years, everything started with a V and ended in X, but they've kind of moved beyond that. But we've been talking about VPEX, talking about convergence, talking about moving up to the applications, orchestration, the whole kit and caboodle. And join us for this segment, chat done. Chat's senior director of VPEX business operations and chat, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. Yeah, so you've been involved in VPEX for a while and there's a lot of updates that are going on. And of course, VPEX is a collection, polls from the Federation and especially from the EMC product lines. And Jeremy Burton, of course, made sure that there was lots and lots of news to dig into. So can you give us, what are the announcements that EMC will mean to the VPEX line? Sure, well the big announcements that we've had this week as we've updated 11 of the reference architectures to now include the VNX-E3200, right? So that's the next generation of our VNX-E low end, mid-range products. And so all of the Microsoft private cloud solutions, the VMware solutions, the application solutions, all updated to use the VNX-E3200 now. Also, we've brought the data domain 2200, which was just announced today. That's also in the reference architectures as well. So we've refreshed our data protection portfolio at the same time. So can you give us an update? What's the mix look like in VPEX? I think you can do VNX and VMAX, you can do Cisco and Brocade, you can do Microsoft and VMware. What's a typical-ish configuration? What's the breakdown? Well, what a typical configuration looks like to me if I look across all the different solutions that we sell and what tends to be moving at the highest volume. Its configurations, they're in sort of that VNX-5400 sort of size from a storage footprint perspective. And it's usually on the order of four to six servers, whether they're blades or rack mount, redundant network switches of course, and VMware virtualization seems to be the dominant player from that perspective. And about 25% of the time, there's also backup included in those solutions as well. A lot of times as people deploy these in green fields or are updating from older infrastructure, they want to do backup at the same time, so they have all of that in one pane of glass in the new infrastructure. So that's typically what these solutions look like on average. But then we have outliers, we do have other very high-end configurations that we see that aren't as common. So we see things up on the 5800 line that could run into the millions of dollars from an ASP perspective. So it's really all over the place. Okay, and from your partner standpoint, let's talk about the network for a second. How much fiber channel, how much ethernet? Predominantly ethernet today, right? Because really playing in the mid-market space and up until now, up until the VNX-E3200, that was an ethernet-only product, right? So now it has fiber channel front end as well, which has been a surprisingly strong request from our partner and our customer base, particularly in APJ, where fiber channel is alive and well and I really sought after a feature. So, predominantly ethernet in the low end today, but we expect to see a lot more fiber channel with the 3200. Okay, well, Broke's got a big presence at EMC, we'll always, I'm sure they're happy to hear that. Happy to hear that. That growth's going on, of course, they play across both the fiber channel ethernet. Ethernet, does Cisco dominate that space like they do in the market overall or do you see a good mix out there? There's certainly the dominant player that we see from an ethernet attached perspective. It may not be as dominant as the market share suggests, but it's either typically Cisco or Broke8 in our IP configurations that we see. Yeah, it's funny, I mean, Chad, you and I go back to some of the protocol wars that you said, you know, oh, it's, you know, fiber channel is the solution for storage. No way, I scuzzy, it's going to be good or we should go block, we should go file. One of the things I found with converged solutions is protocol wars should be dead. The solution should just simplify the solution my reseller and my solution, you know, my environment dictates what it should be. And then, you know, it's just some of the guts inside that I might have checked when I set it up and I might have to tweak it if it breaks. But, you know, is it true? Is our protocols, you know, just part of the plumbing now? Well, they're moving in that direction and now the real differentiator is going to be how those hardware devices are going to interact with software defined networking things like NSX, like Cisco's NCME product. So the pipes are becoming, you know, less and less important and I think those protocol wars are by and large behind us. Okay, so is SDN part of the story with V-Specs now? Stay tuned. You know, obviously we have a pretty strong SDN play with VMware and their NSX product. And so we certainly want to be able to leverage that where it's needed, right? We don't really see it as much in the mid-market yet. That's still a fairly high-end solution for very particular use cases. But we expect that to come down pretty rapidly. Yeah, and I mean, there obviously is the virtual layer where I need to worry about the switching there. But for the most part, as a converged solution, I'm an end node and most of the network happens outside of my box regardless of what I choose. Yeah, that's the typical case, the typical case. Most of what we sell in V-Specs from a volume perspective, we see going into green fields in, you know, two, three racks worth of equipment in these deals. Okay, the other announcement recently that I think we want to dig into is a little bit of support. Can you tell me, you know, the progression of what a V-Spec support looks like? Yeah, we, originally when we launched V-Specs, we didn't do anything special for customer support for these configurations. So we would certainly honor the cooperative support agreements we have with the other vendors that are part of the ecosystem. But that was really it. And time and again, every partner meeting that I ever went to, you know, single-point of support had to be there. We need single-point of support. And so, you know, exhausting all other options, we did the right thing and we actually implemented it. All right, so now, if you have a problem with your V-Spec solution, whether it's compute, network, virtualization, storage, you can call EMC first. If we can determine that the responsibility or the issue is with another vendor software, we will work with you and open that call ticket on your behalf with that vendor, assuming you have the supported title wants to do so. And EMC will stay with you through the whole process until it's resolved. So regardless of what you think the problem is, you call EMC first and we'll take care of it. Okay, so that had to have added a little bit of overhead to, you know, your team is, what was their headcount added to support this? There was. There's a whole new team inside Global Services whose responsibility is solution support for V-Specs. And that team, I believe, is 16 people strong right now and continuing to grow. But yeah, it certainly adds cost. It adds overhead to what we do. But we're in a solutions world now. We're selling solutions. Our partners go to market that way. We need to support these things like solutions, not as discrete products. So if one of the add-on pieces, like through the V-Specs lab certified, like we had Vistara on, you guys are over a single support for that or is it limited to the compute? No, they can absolutely call us with a Vistara issue. We have collaborative support agreements in place with Vistara so we can open calls on the customer's behalf. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, if you're going to be in the solution of the business, you've got to be in the solution of the business, right? Exactly. It can't be a solution up until the point where you actually sell it and then... And then it breaks and they want help, yeah. That's not my part. Yeah, so Chad, you know, it was pretty striking in the keynote this morning that EMC with both the VCE and the V-Specs solution have really strong market share out there. One of the observations that we've made on the marketplace is while almost every vendor out there has converged solutions, EMC really leads with those solutions and has worked with the channel to help train them, educate them and push them. Do you, when you're out competing in the marketplace, do you find that still that you're the ones leading the conversation on convergence then they kind of step up to it or are you still competing against built solutions or what's the competitive landscape look like? I really feel like we're leading with that solution selling message because it's one thing to build a conversion infrastructure thing that looks and feels like a product but if your partners don't have the ability to go out and sell and transact and support like a solution, you're not going to get anywhere. And the reason that I think we've been so successful with V-Specs is, you know, one, we believe they're superior products. I wouldn't work at EMC if I didn't believe that but what we also do is we add value to our partners in the reference architectures, in the go-to-market program, the single point of support, all those things that make them more successful and leaves them room to make margin and to differentiate and add value to those solutions. So you talked before to Gary Garcia about V-Specs Labs, partners will take these solutions they'll differentiate by bringing in different software, different hardware offerings and that's meaningful business for them. That means they can differentiate. So we get fantastic volume and fantastic traction from our partners because it's more profitable and differentiated for them. Yeah, the actual value and value added, right? Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so, Chad, what have you seen change in the last year and what opportunity, what do you think we should be looking forward to through the rest of 2014 and now to 2015 as the maturation of this solution set? Well, unless you've been under a rock for the last year, you know that all of a sudden it's all about third platform, right? Software defined everything, third platform, scale out. Really everything that EMC does right now is to make sure we're well positioned for that transition. You hear it from Joe right on down to a guy like me that needs to talk about third platform. So you see us do more things that are software defined like Viper 2.0, which we talked about today, like the scale IO products for software defined block storage and lots of other things that are coming. So you're going to see us invest there from both a product and a solutions perspective. So, Chad, can you say the V-Specs team, what are you guys showing off at the show? I believe it was that mobile solution, I believe, part of what other interesting things does the V-Specs team have going on? So V-Specs is all over the show. We've got presence in, I think, 17 different spots around here in the partner lounge out on the show floor. Where there's some really interesting stuff is in the Avnet booth. The Avnet has their mobile data center solution. You may have seen this. This is a fully hardened, powered mobile data center. It goes into disaster zones. It's fireproof. It's weatherproof. So if you need to stand up a data center in a disaster area, you can basically roll this thing in and turn it up and that's a V-Specs reference architecture. They're also showing live demos of the VNX-E3200 and the Data Domain 2200. So those are live and functioning in the booth. You've got to go check those out. And there may be some solutions in there that might not yet be announced, but may be in the booth. There might be in the booth. But it might be in the booth. It's the benefits of coming to the show, right? One of the benefits of being at the show, but you won't have to wait long. So there are a few other things that are going to be coming tomorrow. That are going to be pretty interesting. All right, Chad. So, you know, last question I've got for you is, you know, let's take off your V-Specs hat and you're looking around. What's getting you excited about the industry at the show in general from a technology standpoint? It's anything to do with third platform right now. It's, we're working more and more as V-Specs working with our colleagues at Pivotal. And now I'm being less exposed to our traditional mid-market applications, which, yes, we know them, we love them, we might be a little bit used to them. But now we're looking at things like GemFire and Cloud Foundry and some of these new technologies that as a technology guy all my career, I'm really anxious to get engaged with and play with. That's very interesting to me right now. All right, hey, thanks so much, Chad. Always appreciate catching up with you. Glad you could join us here on theCUBE or keep an eye out on what's happening on V-Specs. And we will be right back with our next guest here from EMC World 2014.