 from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016. Brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to the Sands Convention Center here in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program, The Cube. We go out to the shows, help extract the signal from the noise. I'm actually remembering back to VMworld 2011, probably a yard or two away from where we are right now. We were doing a spotlight on service providers. That was the first time I was introduced to Virtue Stream and thrilled to have back on the program, Rodney Rodgers, the CEO of Virtue Stream. You know, Rodney, thanks for joining us. Always great to see you guys. So, what a whirlwind it's been, Rodney. You know, about a year ago it was announced that EMC was going to buy Virtue Stream. 10 months ago it closed over a billion dollars. Now Dell, you know, acquiring EMC. Where's your head out? Well, where are things going, you know, in your world these days? So, it's been a really busy year. Quite an extraordinary year. You know, through it all, we've maintained kind of our focus on our core, you know, go-to-market approach. The thing that's kind of defined us and led us, you know, find our seam in this marketplace to prosecute well against. And now it's really more of an issue of scaling that significantly. Our integration in EMC is largely complete. The integration, the planning process ahead of the potential closure of the Dell deal has been something that's been a bit of a lighter burden on us as you guys saw yesterday. You know, we're maintaining our operating identity as one of the Dell Technologies Group of companies and such. So, you know, Michael's been incredibly supportive of what we're doing and you know, his questions to me are more like what can I do to support you growing? You know, your growth, what are your impediments to growth? That type of thing. So, we have our charter. It's quite well-defined and you know, my mission is just to continue to prosecute it. You know. So, Rodney, the first day the press and analysts got a run-through of all the announcements. Right. And when it came to Q&A, you know, it was cloud, VirtuaStream, VirtuaStream. How's this fit? Can you walk us through, you know, what's new, what is just kind of emerging from stuff that you were doing before that now the various pieces that Dell EMC are taking advantage of? Sure. We have three infrastructures of service platforms. The first is what we call our VirtuaStream Enterprise Cloud. That is heritage VirtuaStream's platform. You know, our whole micro-VM technology, resource optimization, built for these IO intensive mission critical type of stateful workloads. That's kind of our core use case, our core go-to-market motion. Our VirtuaStream Federal Cloud is essentially the Enterprise Cloud certified up for FedRAMP, FISMA approval. We're IL-2 civilian agency certified. So we're one of maybe 30 service providers out there in that regard. We'll be one of a handful that'll be DoD certified hopefully by the end of this year at IL-4 off-prem. So those are the two sort of heritage of VirtuaStream platforms, what we brought into the acquisition. What we announced yesterday was the VirtuaStream Storage Cloud, which was really a project that was incubated inside of EMC for a single customer. For any of those EMCers, you'd know of it as Rubicon. And it was a multi-exabyte, hyperscale type of platform. And we brought it over into VirtuaStream, standing it now and connecting it to the various compute components of our Enterprise Cloud in support of common compute across all platforms. And ultimately hardened it. We wrote a layer of software similar to what we did with VirtuaStream, that layer of software of extreme, our CMP largely resides atop VMware's vSphere technology. We've written a layer of software that largely resides atop ECS, which is EMC's Object Scale Out Appliance. And we've hardened the data durability, 13.9s, standard markets about 11.9s, continuous read-write over full-site failure. So we'll be able to offer things like an infrequent access price for a, or offer a premium service or resiliency around an infrequent access price. You have standard pricing, infrequent access, pricing in that industry. And the big thing is we're tethered to EMC on-premises storage and data protection devices. So that's, I mean, it's an obvious strategy, right? EMC is dealing with the emergence of the public cloud, data moving to S3, Azure, and other clouds, other public clouds. So if our customers want a strategy of utilizing a public cloud for, you know, tiering of policy-based tiering, cold and frozen data, archiving of primary storage, long-term retention of backups, that type of thing, we'll have automated connectors. And you guys know how that works. It's just more efficient staying in the same software plane. And so all of that's available now. We're rolling, you know, we're starting with VMAX and the EMC Data Protection Suite and Isilon. We'll roll out, you know, Unity and VNX and Data Domain and those products throughout Q3. So, you know, you talked, either yesterday's keynote or the first keynote, one of these days, you said, you know, since the acquisition you've gone through sort of this, the word was sort of expansive scaling, right? Now that you're going to get in the, you know, the different side of the public cloud market, people are going to want to know what that means. Amazon tells you where their points of presence are. What does expansive scaling look like? Where, you know, where are the foot prints? Sure, sure. So the enterprise, the physical cloud node footprint for our enterprise cloud and for our storage cloud is pretty similar. In fact, we're in a lot of the same facilities. We obviously work to try and make that as efficient as we possibly could. In North America, we have full coverage over multiple zones. In Europe, we're in the UK, Netherlands, France and Germany, we're just lighting up France and Germany literally this quarter. And we'll expand in Asia pack in the second half of the year. So, you know, pretty strong presence through Western Europe. My next focus market's going to be Japan and Asia pack. I actually think for what we do, Japan could be a second or third largest market for us. Yeah. The other question that didn't, I don't know if it got the answer, what does pricing look like for the storage cloud? Yeah, so we'll announce that on May 10th when it GAs. But it's quite interesting, we'll be priced, you know, so if you take like a 50 terabyte standard volume, we'll be priced right at where, you know, Google's a little bit lower right now on unit price. Azure is a little bit higher to equal S3. AWS doesn't have an infrequent access premium service. You know, Azure has a premium service for infrequent. But the data points are well known, they're well published. So we'll price right at where S3 will be priced from a unit price perspective. However, we're going to include 20% transaction in egress volume within that price. So one of the tensions in this space is sort of the toll booth that exists on data coming in and out, right? And we're going to include 20% of that volume as just packaged with that unit price. So the unit price will look similar, but if you look at the absolute value cost curve, and this will be each client's sort of own cost curve, they'll have to determine how much they're going to access this data and where on that price curve we can be advantageous. But our price curve should be lower in most cases. We put a lot of thought into that. We figured just pricing unit price at the same transaction cost philosophy would underserve what we're doing. And so we have something out there that's quite unique from that standpoint. We'll see how it works. Right, right. The other thing that got announced was Pivotal Cloud Foundry Umbridge. Where does that fit in the portfolio? Is it on the enterprise side? Is it on the storage cloud side? It's on the enterprise side. It's actually, we have a Mirantis OpenStack compute system that supports the storage cloud, right? So from an underlying compute perspective, we'll connect PCF to our enterprise cloud, which would be the vSphere API, and then we'll use an OpenStack API for more self-service oriented stuff versus managed SLA stuff. And it's interesting, we have a lot of intersection with Pivotal. Pivotal's done a phenomenal job of penetrating large enterprise to sell platforms, develop cloud native apps. So as we looked at this and prioritized our roadmap, we had a lot of intersecting customers, right? You know, where we're both in there doing stuff. You saw, you guys saw Coca-Cola on stages, those kind of brands, you know, it's kind of the big stuff. We've been able to kind of gain credibility, improve our platform there in that genre of customer, and they have as well. And it's interesting, you know, when these customers look to develop cloud native apps, they're looking for a more robust supporting infrastructure. A lot of them will actually implement PCF in their own data centers, right? And so what we're doing is more emulating that on-prem experience with our enterprise cloud, but allowing them to not provision hardware themselves. So same sort of value position you had with the SAP. Yeah, and so we're not, you know, one of the things that we're very, very careful to do is not attempt to present ourselves with something or not, right? 2009 when we started, everybody was out there chasing, you know, that distributed general IaaS utility, distributed app in general is IaaS utility. That worked out really, really well for like two people, and it worked out horribly for just about everybody else. We chose not to go down that path. I felt it would be venture capital suicide. In cloud native, again, we'll start to expand. We can run these types of apps. We're just optimized for our core use case, IO intensive, more scale up, performant type of requirements. So our path here for cloud native was first and foremost, getting a platform to develop cloud native apps and support that with the infrastructure. And then how we expand our use case, we're just going to do that really carefully in terms of how we deploy and run these apps. So, Rodney, last year, there was a plan to put the Virtus.treme and the vCloud Air vCloud network on that single roof, so, of course, there was a little bit of pushback and that came undone. So can you give us kind of the compare, contrast, adoption of Virtus.treme, you know, how's the relationship with kind of vCloud Air and the vCloud Air network? Yeah, so that was a, you know, there's a lot of things I can't say publicly about how all that went. I would tell you, it was a very well-intended, a very well-founded strategy. When we were being acquired by EMC, we were very well aware of this. You know, we, first phone call, you know, we got was from VMware, you know, on this thing. And so, VMware was looking to participate in this endeavor. So when we were just the speed of the deal, we felt it was necessary for EMC to follow through with a full acquisition. And then we set about structuring this joint venture where VMware and EMC would own us together. That would have meant we would have taken vCloud Air and consolidated it with our Virtus.treme IaaS. This just, it just makes sense on the most basic level. You're consolidating your as-a-service in one place and we were going to move our software portfolio to VMware. This is all public information, it's well-known. VMware's top enterprise software company, they're going to sell a lot more software than we would have, right? You know, in that original construct. And, you know, all of this was fundamentally done predate Dell deal economics. You know, the Dell deal came along as a larger deal and it's the end of the day. It just fundamentally structurally and from an economic perspective made sense to not do it. We had relatively well integrated. We had to unwind that. And, you know, as it relates to how we collaborate with VMware, we're very close to VMware still. You know, we run 90 plus percent of our workloads on underlying vSphere VMware technology. We're integrating NSX. That's one of the other roadmap items. We will use NSX for network automation here by the second half of this year. So we maintain a very close relationship. VMware has, still has VCloud Air in its portfolio. They've kind of, you know, they publicly stated that they're kind of going to take a very focused use case around VCloud Air and we're kind of letting them do their thing. Quite frankly, Stu, you know, we didn't compete. VMware and VCloud Air didn't often compete. Really, very, very, very rarely. And that was one of the things that, you know, the combination was largely accretive in terms of customers and use case and things of that nature. Yeah. So obviously the original VirtuaStream use case was enterprises trusted you to run there. You were running their operations. You know, there are still going to be companies who say, I understand that concept. I like the concept, but I have to have data local, you know, on-prem or whatever reason. You know, we're seeing Oracle get in that space. We're seeing IBM with IBM local. I keep hearing around the floor that you inherited this managed service. When are we going to hear more about what that's capable of? For customers who say, you know, I can't do operations, it's hard. Chad talked about how hard it is on the keynote. When will we learn more about that? That's a great point. You know, we tend to talk a lot about the technology, not the service that's running the technology. We did. We brought in 1,200 people or so into Virtstream from EMC's managed services group. And these were professionals that largely managed on-premises EMC installations. And we have brought that in. We've integrated our managed services team at Virtstream. So the Heritage Virtstream, we had a managed services group that largely manages the apps and these three-tier application architecture landscapes that reside on our cloud. So we've brought that in. EMC had great people, a lot of maturity around methodologies, tools, service desk, ticket processing, all the things that you a lot of times lack as a young company is one coming up. So we've taken great advantage of that and we've gotten that hardened. And the point, you know this, Brian, our point of view has always been we never got involved in those religious debates between public cloud and private cloud. We always felt that was a bit silly. Your use case, your consumption is going to need to be which is simply driven by where the economics dictate what regulatory requirements are there, what latency requirements are there. You know, it's just like, I just get a kick out of, you know, you listen to the purists talk about if an app's not architected, you use a public cloud and you need to rewrite the app. I've seen that very rarely actually occur. You know, at least in the stuff that's running the live ammo production workloads and such. And so, you know, we need to just be prepared to support the app wherever it's running. And that's our objective. And you know, this is a group that we, again, fully intend to scale, you know, thousands of people. All right, so Rodney, I can't let you go without asking you the big question of course. Heat, still alive, LeBron still alive. Do you have any torn, you know, allegiances there and you know, who's going to win the finals this year? Well, the heat will clearly win the finals this year. You know, I don't think Olin stands much of a chance. I say that tongue in cheek. We had a couple of great years with LeBron down in Miami. You know, when he left Cleveland, they were burning effigies of him, you know, there and stuff. And when he left Miami, it wasn't really like that. You know, everybody was kind of appreciative. They kind of respected his reason for going back to Cleveland. I did, you know, we're sorry to see him leave. Dwayne Wade has had a total resurgence. I'm not sure what happened there, but he's playing awesome, man. So, you know, we've got a good young team, you know, Whiteside and Richards, you know, those guys are pretty, pretty, pretty good looking team at this stage of the game. So, we'll see how far they can go. They won against Toronto. My schedule at this thing is, you know, starts at 7 a.m. ends at midnight. So, I couldn't even watch the game, which is like sacrilege for me, man. I'm hopeful. And yeah, he will win it. You heard it right here. He won the NBA championship. All right, well, Rodney Rogers, really appreciate it. I know everybody's going wall-to-wall here at EMC World. Hope to catch up with you much more soon. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE. Looking back at...