 San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMworld and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your host, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE TVs, live coverage from VMworld 2015 here at Moscone North in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host for this segment is Brian Gracely and very happy to welcome back Charles Fan, who's the SVP and general manager for the storage group inside of VMworld. Charles, you were on yesterday, new to theCUBE, I think, the first time, so you're season pro at this point, welcome back. Look forward to talking about storage at VMworld. Yeah, so it's interesting. I mean, Brian and I both worked with VMworld for many years and storage was one of those things that was hugely important always to the ecosystem, but VMworld's role has really changed over the last few years, you know, so let's dive right into it. First, can you just for our audience give us kind of your journey inside VMworld and the appointment as GM is relatively new? Sure, sure. So I've been with VMworld for six years and I just took over the storage business unit six months ago, so I'm six months into my job. Before that I was leading the R&D side of storage and before that I was doing the application platform and before VMworld I worked for EMC. I was a co-founder of R&D Infinity which EMC acquired back in 2005. Actually, we can talk and share notes on that. I'm very familiar with that through the EMC select process and then the acquisition that happened there. So for our audience, can you kind of walk through, you know, what's the scope of your organization, how many people you have, what products fall under your domain? Sure, so storage business unit is part of SDDC division, certainly central to the company strategy. I have about 550 people, now 90% of them are engineers, but I also own product management, product marketing and technical marketing, you know, whatever makes the product successful. All right, Charles, quick question. How many hardware engineers do you have working for you? Zero. One, actually, we are actually looking for an architect who will understand hardware so that our software would work better on them. But in terms of the actual engineering work, it's all software engineering. All right, and what are the products that fall in the suite? Sure, so obviously virtual sand is a big product for us and virtual volume is sort of the yin and yang of our software defined storage. One is for server storage, the other is for external arrays and both of them support a policy-based storage management platform, so the vSand, vVol, as well as SPBM. Now I also own the availability, SRM, product line, vSphere replication, as well as the core storage stack, so all the VMFS, vSCSI, all the vSphere storage goodies that you're familiar with, that's part of my team as well. Yeah, so I'm curious, what's the elevator pitch for VMware's role in the storage ecosystem today? So obviously storage is an integral part of a data center and our view is the entire data center is going through transformation, is going through the self-realization and virtualization of the data center that includes compute, storage, networking, and management. So storage is one of the four pillars of SDDC and we would like to be a catalyst of this transformation of data center. Yeah, so people look at VMworld and I think somebody did an analysis and said more than half of the vendors that are here from the partner ecosystem are either a storage company or storage is a major piece of what they're here. How's that relationship, it has changed over the last couple of years and how do you look at that? Sure, so we are very proud of the broadest storage ecosystem in the industry today. We have dozens, if not hundreds of storage partners as well as data protection availability partners and it's great to see them on the show floor. I think the number of the vendors, especially startups on the exposed floor is also an indication of the transformation that's taking place in the storage market. So it's a happening place. It's been a relatively stable market for the last 20 years but I think now it is being disrupted. It is a number of tectonic shifts are taking place and as a result you see all these startups coming up introducing new storage models to the customers. Yeah, as much as you can, we're seeing more and more storage companies who have either gone IPO or thinking about going IPO. So we're getting a sense of not only the number of customers but their revenue. As much as you can talk about it, where is V-SAN in terms of either number of customers or revenues and how do you stack up against some of these startups in terms of a branch? Sure, sure. So VirtualSAN is a hyper-converged storage solution and we have announced in the short 17 months it's been sold, we have over 2,000 customers. We believe of all the hyper-converged solutions out there today, we have the most customers and not only we have the most customers but we also believe we have the most widely deployed in terms of number of units. So there are certainly other good alternatives but they have been doing it for longer. So certainly credit to them for pioneering this market. But when you look at market today in the last 12 months V-SAN has been deployed in more servers than any other solution today. Yes, so I have to comment on this just because Wikibon focuses on this a lot has done a bit of research on it. So one of the challenges you have is comparing an appliance where I've got the full stack in there. Basically V-Sphere is probably the only thing let's say Nutanix, they're not selling the V-SAN piece, the VMware piece itself but the rest of that stack is all sold by Nutanix. Comparing that against a software only solution like yourself or Max, it's tough to do apples to apples. So units is kind of tough. We actually, in our numbers, we had from a revenue standpoint based on our understanding, you're at least a top five player, maybe even as high as number two or three, from a revenue standpoint, but you're working through a partner ecosystem, you're going through many different deployment options out there. Sure, so certainly there are different ways of measuring market share. Dollars is one way where we just sell the V-SAN software dollar part of it and compared to a full system, usually the dollars customer pay for V-SAN is between one fifth to one eighth of what they pay to a full hyper-converged appliance. When you measure units, we actually not only look at units that we sold but actually looking at the units we have deployed based on the customer surveys that we have done. So in terms of the actual units that we believe we are leading the market with, with the dollars we are not, as you mentioned. That's a fair statement. So, you know, product's gone through rapid growth. We've had some of your people talk about it. So can you just give us, you know, encapsulate the storage announcement for this week at VMworld? Sure, so we announced V-SAN 6.1, which is the third release of V-SAN and it's going to be available this month. We also announced a beta of the next version and that's going to introduce data dedupe, erasure coding as well as software checks on features. The main features for 6.1 is stretch clustering, as well as the improved vSphere replication, going down to five minutes of RPO. We also supported a new robo, two node robo deployment scenarios, as well as additional hardware choices with NVMe and UltraDIN. So when V-SAN was first announced, I mean, we went through this sort of flurry of announcements, it was eight node and two weeks later it was 16 node and another week later it was 32. Realistically, where's a good fit for V-SAN? Where do your customers sweet spot it? Where are they starting to push the boundaries? That's a great question. So from a technology point of view, underlying V-SAN is a distributed object storage system. It's very scalable, not really limited by any numbers. The reason for the actual limit on the number of nodes in a cluster is the reason we believe to do a really good hyperconverged solution, you won't have a single control plane with the actual hypervisor you're using. So there are actually no such thing as a V-SAN cluster, it's just a V-Sphere cluster. So the reason we were 32 in V1 or version 5.5 and 64 now is because V-Sphere cluster size increased from 32 to 64. So in some ways we are a native storage capability to a V-Sphere cluster that delivering the storage functionalities. So you'll see that we continue to scale by the V-Sphere cluster scales. Yeah, so talk to a number of users, including a couple this week on theCUBE for V-SAN. Scalability hasn't been a concern, it tends to be a much smaller number of nodes starting out, I mean everybody, I start with three and maybe six to eight seems to be about the sweet spot that I'm hearing. I guess a question I get all the time is where doesn't a solution like V-SAN or in your opinion kind of hyperconverged fit in today's market? We saw the journey with virtualization and there's always that starting point in growth of the market. So our motto is to go wherever V-Sphere goes. So it's a very horizontal use case as long as it's a V-Sphere environment. Clearly we do not address the other hypervisors today so that would be one limitation as you're looking at V-SAN as a solution. But as far as V-Sphere goes, our 2,000 customers span from the smallest customers to your largest customers and it cuts across multiple industries and across multiple use cases. In this customer survey that we got, one surprise is the number one use case is actually mission-critical production apps. Because we just started supporting it this year, it's already becoming the number one deployment scenario where over 60% of customers are using V-SAN for mission-critical production apps. Yeah, it's funny you say that because I think one of the biggest challenges for a lot of startups is, don't use it over here, we haven't finished testing it and everything. Are you a little worried about that? Some of the customers getting a little over their skis with some of what they're doing? Anything, how do you help customers from not hurting themselves? Sure, so this is the third release of V-SAN. When we released version one, we said we support VDI, we support ROBO, we support Test Dev and to our surprise is some customer already went ahead and put it into production. So we were like, oh, we need to keep a closed eye. But it turned out the product is in the VMware tradition, it just works. It's a software that's more reliable than hardware and we were pleasant surprised the lack of the issues that it showed up in the field. We continue making improvement with the second and third version in both the robustness and the performance of the product. So now we are actually very confident to stand behind the product for really the tier one mission-critical workload. Interesting, so you talked a little bit about V-Vols at the beginning. Can you help explain for us? My understanding is you couldn't have V-SAN if it wasn't for V-Vols, but compare contrast V-Vols for a V-SAN versus V-Vols for the traditional storage array. Sure, in my mind it's a triangle. On the base you have V-SAN and V-VOL. On the top, what you have is SPBM, storage policy-based management. So one is for server storage, one is for external storage and between V-SAN and V-VOL you enable a single automation methodology through policies. You can automate the storage provisioning and management, whether it's delivered from servers or external storage. We've heard a lot this week, we've had an entire track about DevOps. We saw a lot of announcements about containers this week from Kit Colbert. Pat talked about how new applications are changing. What's the sort of cloud-native modern application story for VMware storage? Things like object storage and some of the other different non-block storage that's out there. Yeah, I actually read a Wikibon report and I think that's a report that's very helpful to showing the world is changing from the traditional storage architecture to a server-based architecture and there's both the performance tier and capacity tier. We believe much of the capacity tier will be delivered from the cloud from the more hyper-scale solutions where much of the performance tier will be delivered by hyper-converged solutions like VirtualSAN. Okay, great. Wow, thank you for mentioning the report there. Talk a little bit about how your team works on the packaging and the solutions, the interoperability. Is that inside your team? Is that outside? What kind of feedback are you getting from the partners that are doing things like vSAN ReadyNo to Evo and the like? So storage ecosystem continues to be a great asset of VMware as well as for the storage group. For example, with VirtualVolume, we have 29 partners who have signed up to support this model of managing storage. For VirtualSAN, we are working very closely with our ecosystem partners in terms of qualifying ready notes. We have over 90 ready notes available from all the familiar names, the server vendors you are getting your servers from. We also support hundreds of hard drives, hundreds of SSDs that you can use for your vSAN product. We also work very closely with the software providers, whether you're delivering data protection solutions, data archiving solutions, copy data management such as Catalogic as well as other copy data management solutions that we are working with today. So we're very proud of the ecosystem partners that we have created. We'll continue working very closely with them for both vVolume and vSAN in delivering this new world of software defined storage to our customers. So I'm wondering, a little more detail on kind of from the go-to-market standpoint, you've got a few different options. Is it, let them all fly and we'll kind of see what sticks. What have you seen over the last kind of 18 months and what learnings do you have going forward? What we are seeing a lot of traction with vSAN ready note for the vSAN product. Now obviously vSAN is a software product that have multiple ways of consumption. You can consume it as appliance through Evil Rail. You can consume it through a software either on a ready note or on components that you assemble yourself. The fastest traction so far are the ready notes because that gives the best balance, maybe not the best balance, give the most balance between flexibility in terms of server choices our customer have and the ease of use where ready note is pre-configured for you. So we definitely seeing the largest number of our deployments happening on top of the vSAN ready notes. Yeah, one of the big things a lot of our clients will come and ask us about is they'll say, look, how fast is this trend happening from disk based to hybrid, sort of a mix of flash and disk to all flash. You guys obviously are software, you can run it anyhow. What are you seeing? What trends are you seeing? What market differentiations are you seeing from a vSAN perspective? So flash I believe is one of the three major trends happening in the storage market today. It's flash as well as the newer solid state storage such as 3D cross-point we're seeing from Intel and Micron, both are great partners of ours. And the other two trends I believe are the hyperconverge model and the hyperscale cloud delivered model. So between those three things, we think that that's kind of changing the landscape of the storage technologies. Are you able to estimate how much of your installed bases is hybrid versus all flash or all disk? So we just announced the flash model earlier this year with our version 6.0. Right now we still have more customer deploying in a hybrid configuration than the all flash configuration. But we definitely see the highest growth happening with all flash configurations. So Charles you brought up one of the big trends is cloud. I'm curious, how much interaction is there between what you're doing in the storage team, what's happening with vCloud Air, similarity of management, should we think of, does vSAN fit into that hybrid cloud discussion? Yes, that's a great question. I'm sure you saw the keynote on Monday and you saw Yan Bing up there. Yan Bing actually both worked for me as part of the storage division, storage business unit, and worked for Bill Fosers as part of vCloud Air. And she's the one who delivered the object storage services for vCloud Air, as well as the one leading all my engineering team delivering vSAN. So we have close collaboration between the cloud division and the SDDC division and making sure our story solutions work with each other perfectly. And in our vSAN design center, you will see more features, how we take advantage of the cloud storage as a capacity tier, as an archival tier for vSAN. All right, so Charles, the last question I have for you is, tell us a little bit about your team. When you kind of look at VMware, what's the storage group like? What do you look for when you're hiring? And just give us a little bit of insight as to that makeup. Sure, so VMware is known for the quality of its engineers. And it's a privilege for me to be part of this team. I was working at startup, acquired by EMC 10 years ago. I never left the EMC Federation. And I think the single most important reason are the people that I work with. The engineers, the leadership, and it's a true privilege to continue working at VMware and leading the charge of self-redefined storage as the whole market is being turned upside down. Well, definitely in an area that everybody's watching, Charles, I really appreciate you sharing what's going on in the storage business unit at VMware. And we will be right back with more coverage here from VMworld 2015. Thanks for watching. Thank you.