 So, Don, what's your role at VCE? I am the acting CTO. Oh, great. OK, good. So let's talk about convergence. I mean, it's a hot area. It's almost like if you're in that business and you're in your large company and you're not doing some kind of convergence, it is not playing the game. So talk about that a little bit. Yeah, we definitely see that. If we look at the way that NTR architectures have evolved over the last couple of years, we've become pretty unwieldy to manage. And looking at ways to get this convergence together from the storage, the server, the networking side, allows you to concentrate much further up the stack in the management, particularly around policies and software and application assurance, as well as making sure the workloads actually have an appropriate location to run, rather than worrying about all the plumbing underneath. I want to talk about we had Jay Sriulal earlier, who's CEO of Arista PurePlay Company. There's a big debate going on around best to breed versus integrated stacks. Obviously, HP and IBM and Oracle really are going with the integrated stack approach. Companies like Arista and Juniper, NetApp, have their PurePlay approach. You guys are trying to essentially take the best of both worlds and put it together. Can you have your cake and eat it, too, is my question. I think you can have your cake and eat it, too. I think the approach is to look at common elements that companies already have deployed in their data center. How can they fit better together and lacer around that a systems approach? If you have that systems approach, you can gain better visibility into what happens on the switch, what happens on the server, what happens on the storage, and make sure you get that correlation on the physical and logical levels, not just on a management piece of software, or a monitoring management piece of software layered on top. If you get those correlations, then you know that that port one, switch one, is really associated with a much greater purpose, and it understands that purpose, and you can do interesting policy-based things based on that. So that leads me to my next question. We've had Micah Pallas on a couple of times in theCUBE, and he always makes the point that, I like the way he describes it, Vblock is a logical block of infrastructure designed to support applications across the portfolio, horizontally, and it's optimized for the cloud. Why is it optimized for the cloud? Tell us, is that just marketing, or what's the technical reason, the technical angle on that? Is that marketing, or is that real? Well, I think a lot of the cloud issues around private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud is really around consistency of experience with your experience with your private cloud infrastructure internally, and your public cloud infrastructure externally. We believe that gaining the consistency of experience is really going to be the launching point for the future of hybrid or pervasive cloud as it emerges. To get that consistency of experience, you have to have greater visibility in the underlying infrastructure. That infrastructure almost has to act like objects in the object-ordering programming world, that each time it is configured, it runs the same way, provides the same capacities in terms of IOPS, in terms of availabilities. If you have these infrastructure objects, then you have the ability to enable a lot more up on the application tier. They can know that it's going to run the same way with the same consistency of experience each time. So, and Joe Tucci's made this point a lot. When you look at companies like Amazon, one of the reasons why they're so successful with their cloud is because it's homogeneous infrastructure. That's why they're costar low, they're agile. You guys have made the bet that essentially, a homogeneous infrastructure, for the reason just you just mentioned, is the way to go. Well, I think you could be mono-genius, having a single set of infrastructure, much like Amazon, or you can have much more consistent primitives. Those primitives would allow you to still maintain that consistency experience. When you build those building blocks together, you can lasso around a system and understand that the aggregation of those piece parts are going to give you the consistent result. So, talk a little bit more about that. You said consistent primitives. Specifically, what do you mean by that, and how do you leverage that at VCE? So, that's part of the convergence aspect. Understanding the IOPS capacities and capabilities of the underlying building blocks, making sure that there's glue pieces that they fit nicely together, and that they're appropriate for a particular workload. Those individual building blocks that are coming from VC and E, VM or Cisco EMC. We understand what they do, and we also understand how they fit together. Then we lasso around that systems approach. That's that platform. We make sure that we have the right elements in there that's appropriate for particular workloads. An infrastructure as a service workload is going to be dramatically different than a desktop as a service workload, or a VDI internal within your private cloud. They're going to have different ratios that are required from each of the underlying components. But you want to make sure that those components always fit nicely together, and that's really what VCE does. Make sure that the glue pieces are there, as well as the appropriateness for particular workloads. So, is my premise not correct that you're going after homogeneity? I guess, in a sense, no, because you've got different types of storage arrays that you support. Right. And so, I guess that's heterogeneity. I'll give you a little bit of a different dynamic. We're going for personalization, not customization. Okay. So, personalization built on a series of building blocks that are predictable, that are well understood, can give you a great variety of personalization, but each time it's not custom. So, today, most IT organizations are running in custom or custom infrastructures, or have a cloud where it's one size fits all. And we know certain applications aren't going to play well in one size fits all, whether it's from a policy perspective for availability, or from an IOPS perspective. We kind of fit that middle ground where we have underlying components that allow us to give a very homogeneous experience on the platform level, but it's built to be personalized for a particular workload. It's pre-engineered, pre-tested, it's a single skew. So, that I get. But as you extend, like, for instance, well, let's see, take management. So, you've got essentially a single management framework, and that's what you get with the block, and it's tested. Backup, I guess you have a reference architecture for backup, right? We have many reference architectures leveraging a lot of the great tools from EMC and others. So, backup, I have some flexibility in terms of my approach, is that right? So, you're not forcing a homogeneous backup approach, I can, or are you? Is it? No, we're really out of time. How do I back up 6,000 VAs? Let me ask you. Yeah, and the answer's always going to be, it depends. You know, it depends more on the policy aspects that you're trying to achieve than the technological methods of achieving those policy aspects. What we provide is that foundation that then enables choice both in the management tier, a respecting, a existing investments in infrastructure, like a CA, or best of breed approaches, like a NIM soft, or a title, or a new scale. But what we do is we enable choice there because the underlying capacity is a block, is a system, that those pieces are already pre-configured underneath. So it's really that balance of, we enable choice on the solution tier, we enforce consistency and predictability and consistency of experience inside the infrastructure itself. But as a customer, I don't have a menu of backup choices, right? We have solutions that we can provide that give you a menu or it can tie in to the existing backup policies and infrastructures that are already there. Oh, okay, all right, so if I want to- So it's not rip and replace what you have? If I want to choose whatever, I want to use my existing backup. So backup's sort of where you draw that line of dog matter. Yeah, it's probably that next estate right outside the border. Right, whereas a hypervisor, no, I mean, it's VMware. It's VMware. Okay. Sorry about this, a long discussion. Thank you for educating me. I'm trying to get to the differences between VCE and your major competitors. And I've said it's a two-horse race between VCE and HP. And I think in fairness, I think NetApp's done a really good job. Oracle, in its own way, it has a totally different strategy, but it's got, I guess, a V-block-like solution. But really, HP and VCE are the two big ones. And I'm trying to help myself understand the differences. Is it like Republicans and Democrats where the similarities are greater than the differences, or are there really substantive differences in approach? So that's why I was sort of asking you so many questions. I'd like you to answer that. What is the difference? Well, the way I would look at it is, a lot of the ways that we approach this are different. We've came up with convergence very early on. We've been advocating it out for more than six quarters now. We've been bringing this to the market, and a lot of the other providers are fast-following. Our approach is to look at ways to leverage the best-of-breed underlying components that everyone in IT is familiar with. Make them into a system that enables a lot of choice on the management tier, on the way that you achieve your policy objectives, but it's tuned and appropriate for applications. Now, others may be much more monolithic in their approach. Others may be much more reference architecture-centric in their approach of the underlying components. Our hypothesis is you've got to get these components to act like a system, and we've made the choice of taking best-of-breed components, the leaders in each of the spaces in storage and server and networking, as our pallet, our building blocks, provide systems that are appropriate for particular application purposes, whether it's enterprise-class applications, or infrastructure as a service, et cetera, and then enable choice on the solutions to go on top of it. And do it in a way that isn't just single-purpose of EDI infrastructure next to an IIS infrastructure. It is multi-tenant or multi-occupant, as we would say, multiple occupancies of applications. Those approaches are different than a monolithic approach, an approach that say you can choose anything underneath and then still try to call it a system, or approaches that allow you to tie into best-of-breeds that are already existing at home. It's kind of like iPhone and Android. I'm going to put you guys in the iPhone camp. It's integrated or closer. I mean, I know it's chalk and cheese, but generally speaking, you are fairly dogmatic about the configuration, and you're going to guarantee some business value on the other end. I think that's fair. I think the one piece that makes us slightly different is that IT organizations are already familiar with the way to manage a Cisco switch, an iOS and XSOS, or we're already familiar with the way to manage a storage subsystem or a server, UCS-Biliade. They understand those components, so it's not as foreign as here's a new black box device that you can't see inside. We provide a lot of that transparency below, but we then enable that systems approach around it. So they're industry-standard components, in the case of Intel, UCS, or they're de facto standards, if you will, in the case of VNX, right? It's a big enough install base. There's enough people out there who understand it that they can take advantage of it. And we think that that bridge between, the way things are run today and the way they need to be rubbed for much more flexible cloud-like infrastructures is a very big value proposition for us. We're not saying rip out everything that you have or learn completely new tools. These are the same tools that you have today, and you can build upon that and get that systems-like approach that we all long for. Yeah, the value proposition of a pre-configured, pre-tested, pre-engineered infrastructure is enormous. You know, a lot of clients that we've talked to have worked with SI, for example, where the SI created their own little V-block, and then down the road, when they had to do patches and the like, it turned into a bloody nightmare. You guys are taking responsibility for that, and that, to me, is the most interesting and exciting part of this, and the other piece is the question I asked before about why is a cloud ready. I mean, it's essentially infrastructure for the cloud platform. Yeah, it's built with that purpose in mind or enterprise-class purposes in mind. It really toggles between that. At its root, it's different workloads, and those workloads have characteristics. If you under the standard characteristics, you can get the system to be appropriate for it. My last question for you, Don, is what do you see for the future of that whole concept? Where's it going? So I think where it's going is, today we have convergence around the infrastructure. We have a lot of emerging elements around the policy and the management. We have a lot of the application. It's, I think, the next convergence or the ability to link all those together to enable an application to reach down in the infrastructure and take advantage of those objects to be able to provide the infrastructure to say, I have a spare capacity at this time, application, do you want to change the way that you're running? Can you take advantage of this capacity in a future timeline? Really distinguishing those borders. I think Steve talked about it right before. Stephen talked about it right before. Looking at ways to really provide that transparency between the virtualization tier and the infrastructure, the policy and the application. I think they're going to come together as we emerge to applications that are actually written for this type of infrastructure, versus applications that are written for previous infrastructures. Don, Norbeck, CTO of VC, thank you, first of all, for stepping in for Todd Pavone. Good friend. Tell him I said hi. Hi to him, and thanks for coming on the queue. Enjoy your next visit, as sure. Appreciate it. All right. Okay, this...