 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're at VMworld 2018. You're watching theCUBE with my co-host Justin Warren. I'm Stu Miniman and we're going to be talking about cloud and networking. Happy to, first of all, welcome back to the program. Mark Vaughn, who's the director of data center strategy, office of the CTO with Presidio. Mark, great to see you. Thank you, Stu. And welcome, first time guest, Bob Gaffari, who's the director of enterprise cloud networking with Intel. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, good to be here. All right, so we were talking a little bit off camera here. We know for this whole multi-cloud thing to work right, networking, absolutely critical. Have to say, from my own standpoint, when VMware bought NYSERA, I was pretty excited. The industry really got excited about it. It was a big acquisition. Solver to find networking was something that was a buzz, but it was actually the inter-cloud networking capabilities that NYSERA talked about that had me excited. And it kind of went quiet for a couple of years while we worked with the virtualization layer. But at this show, especially, networking back front and center and the whole discussion of public cloud. Maybe for those that don't know, I've had a long history with Intel. I think I see them at every show I go to. But the networking piece, where Intel fits into this whole picture of VMware cloud and everything there. That's right. If you go back in history and take a look at what Intel has really worked with VMware on is really getting service virtualized, right? So over a decade ago, we worked a lot in terms of getting service virtualized. And guess what? Compute was flexible. What about the network, right? And that's what we've been focused on over the last decade of really making sure that we can bring the networking workloads onto the Intel architecture and make sure they can run in a performance fashion. Because the last thing you need is for your network to be bogged down, for you to be able to not get into your applications, for you to not be in a reliable situation for your business. Yeah. All right, Mark. I've talked to Presidio for many years. Helping customers through a lot of these transitions, whether it was converged infrastructure and hyperconverged. But now cloud, a big piece of the discussion which is multi-cloud, where does Presidio play here and how does Intel and that fit together? You know, as we look at that world, we've always partnered very closely with Intel. They're a valuable piece of our on-prem data center practice. And the same things we've leveraged them for on-prem. You know, they're doing the same thing with AWS and with cloud providers and building that same performance into that public cloud. So now as we look at a hybrid world where workloads become more fluid and move back and forth, Intel plays a big part in helping make sure that we can have that consistency, you know, as we move from one side to the other. So Mark, maybe you could fill me in a little bit about what customers are doing on this networking side of things. Because the idea of running a multi-cloud environment is actually pretty daunting for a lot of the people that I speak to because they're wondering about, well, how do I choose where to put things and how do I actually move things around? The network is often a really complex part of that. So what are you seeing with customers about how they navigate this move to a multi-cloud world? The network is actually, you know, it's the transport layer. It's what makes it all possible. And with NSX, you know, that becomes very critical around the security of that. Because as workloads move back and forth, you can't have them become insecure on the other side simply because they've moved. And when you talk about workload placement, we're realizing that what you've moved to the cloud a year ago, criteria changed. It may not make sense to be in the cloud today and what you chose to leave on-prem last year may not make sense to be on-prem anymore. So we see that fluidity in that hybrid world becoming much more important. And we need a networking infrastructure that can really keep up with those workloads as they move back and forth and become more mobile. And to add to that, the whole consistency is really important, right? So I think one of the interesting use cases about how you can migrate VMs, disaster recovery, right? One of the key use cases, right? How you can really extend your on-prem environment to be able to have the flexibility, depending on where you're at in your business cycle, what you're trying to do in terms of seasonality. So that consistency that's been talked about a lot here, we work really closely with VMware to be able to help provide that consistency. No matter if you're really talking about the edge or you're actually talking about on-prem cloud or public cloud. Yeah, Bob, I think that's a great point. When I talk to the networking community, the big shift that they've had over the last few years is I used to own, control, cable my network. Now, a lot of the networking I'm doing is stuff that's outside my data center. I don't have control, but as you said, there's similar, I've got tools and Intel and VMware are some of the pieces that are giving consistency across those environments. Yeah, and what is really amazing is you take a look at, for example, the keynotes yesterday, right? Both Pat and the NSX keynote, right? So Tom Jules, who's the SVP of NSX and Security, he was talking about 80 million switches, right? Being shipped by VMware. One million firewalls being shipped by VMware. And by the way, he sort of mentioned 500% performance improvement with the work they've been doing with Intel, which is just fundamentally foundational to be able to bring the networking workloads onto this consistent architecture. Yeah, and the consistency is really important for the other trend that I'm noticing in moving to cloud, which is automation and being able to automate across this. The whole point of having a software-defined network means that I can automate it. I can use programmable tools to make changes to my network. So again to your point, Mark, about customers wanting to change their mind a year later after what they've already done, before that might've been that we'd have to actually rip and replace hardware. Whereas now, I'm hearing from customers that it's actually a lot more about just reconfiguring the software and making changes so that things just move around much more fluidly than they did before. Definitely, and I think that's part of the value prop for VMware Cloud on AWS is that it gives you a common platform, both on-prem and in the cloud. So now the automation work, the orchestration work that you've already maybe developed on-prem, as you move to the cloud, you can continue to leverage that investment and to gain value from what you spent the last year or two doing. And also knowing going forward, when you write something for either on-prem or cloud, it's going to be usable on both sides. Yeah, and when you look at it from an application standpoint, the application guys are really trying to make sure that they can drive things that matter to the business. But if you have, it take 45 days to get a firewall configured for what you want, right? You know, that's a problem, right? And I think what was talked about yesterday is like the goal is and where we're at today is 0.45 seconds. And what this really means is you need to have the infrastructure that does what you needed to do when you needed to do it, right? And so this is, you know, quite important to make sure that we can help enable the businesses be agile. So you can have infrastructure at the speed of business. That's right, yeah. We transitioned to a world with virtualization where a machine can be stood up in five minutes and that created a challenge for security. Well, now we live in a world where the entire server can be stood up in 10 minutes. So again, you know, we just continue to lean back on security and how to create an infrastructure where we can maintain that footprint. Yeah, you both talked to a lot of customers. VMware Cloud made a lot of progress in the last year. There's obviously how this helps customers along the multi-cloud journey, but I'm wondering if there's use cases that are bubbling up as to any customer examples or lighthouse things that you can point to as patterns that other could follow. There were the use cases we expected to find of people who just want to expand their network or their data center into another location. And then we're also coming across some customers that are coming to us and saying, you know, I've decided I don't want to run a data center at all, but I don't have the time to invest in refactoring all of my apps and making all new IT decisions on my infrastructure. I want to be able to move without making any changes. And so VMware Cloud on AWS is really the first opportunity we've been able to present to customers where you can make a bulk move in a very short period of time with very little change. And we've had examples of customers that like for example, either in the healthcare space or in the manufacturing space where they've basically been wanting to really get a lot more flexibility in their environment, right? They've had whatever was their old on-prem environment. They were doing a lot of things in the public cloud. They wanted to be bringing back workloads on-prem, but they wanted to have all the tools that the cloud guys have. And they also wanted to have the security policies and the same kind of single pane of glass, if you will, from a security policy standpoint. And so for them, that was quite interesting. And I think one of the key things there from a security standpoint as well, in some cases, your on-prem will have a harder security requirement where performance matters. And I think then you have the ability to be able to cater your platform, your environment, to give you that kind of performance that really requires it. And Stu, I'd add to that. Up till now, hybrid cloud always meant finding a way to make something on-prem, work with something off-prem. And there'd be some translation or something that had to be put in the middle. And for the first time, we really have something on-prem and off-prem that are the exact same. And so there's no translation anymore. It's like for like. It's getting two things that are identical working together. Right. How do you see that extending into the world of edge computing, which is definitely a trend we're seeing more and more in the last couple of months, where companies, it's not just one cloud. It then went to multi-cloud. Now it's just like everything is cloud. The cloud is everywhere. That's right. And I think that's such an exciting space. And so, we saw a lot on the last day or so about that. We've been working very hard with a lot of the eco players and more specifically with VMware, VeloCloud and what they've been doing in this space. And it is phenomenally quite exciting. It could start with something as simple as just software to find when. Right. But I think the need to be able to do more on that edge that sort of goes to network security. And then you basically talk about application delivery capabilities. And then you're also talking about just analytics on that edge. Depending on what kind of business you're in, you want to make quick decisions, right? You don't have the ability to be able to bring things back and wait for that round-trip latency to be able to make what is critical for your business. So I think those are really quite interesting things. And what we've been really trying to do is make sure that not only are we effective from an application control packet standpoint, but we're really bringing the machine learning capabilities, the analytic capabilities into our platforms. Fabulous. Yeah, I want to give you both an opportunity just closing thoughts. There's a lot of new things that were talked about this week. You talk to customers, give a key takeaway or two that they should have when they walk away from VMworld 2018. I think we've seen VMware respond very quickly with VMware Cloud on AWS. We've seen features added much faster than they were originally roadmaped for. And just this week, we heard the announcement of now the three node minimum environment. And so they're recognizing this isn't just a solution for large enterprises, but we're having many in the SMB and commercial space come to us and say, you know, I would like to do that too. My environment's not quite as big, but I see the value in that. And VMware is responding quickly with, you know, adjusting the offering to what the customers are asking for. And I would say that, you know, first look at the business problem you're trying to go solve and then look for planning for what you need tomorrow as well, right? Don't make decisions that, you know, you would regret, you know, six months down the road, right? We already know that you need flexibility, right? We know that you basically need a little bit of headroom depending on what you're doing, especially on the edge. So I would say look at the big picture, make sure that you're planning, you know, for, you know, not only today, but also for tomorrow. Mark and Bob really appreciate the updates, you know, really a fast moving space. And thanks so much for sharing all of the updates. Great, thank you very much. All right, for Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll back with more coverage here from VMworld 2018. Thank you for watching theCUBE.