 Everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante, day three from EMC World, Silicon Angles, theCUBE, continuous live coverage from Las Vegas. We're going to stay on this theme of converged infrastructure a little bit. I'm going to bring Stu Miniman from wikibond.org in. Stu is our converged infrastructure expert and Trey Layton is here, he's the CTO of VCE and we're going to geek out a bit. Trey, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, so big event here obviously, a lot of the companies that you are a part of bringing together a lot of customers. So what's the vibe like? What are customers telling you? What's the feedback that you've been getting here at the show? Well, you know, the great thing about EMC World is the customer conversations are back to back and there is so much excitement around what we're doing but it's not just the current customers, it's customers that are evaluating our technology against our competition and really excited about how we can transform the way that they're doing business and they're excited to hear about what we're doing in the future and the technologies that we're not only aggregating today but we're going to aggregate in the future and we're excited to share that vision with them because it's an exciting place and time in our industry and we're excited to be a key part of it. So specifically, what kinds of things are you hearing from customers this week? Some of the things they like, some of the things they want you to do? So a lot of conversations about Viper, a lot of conversations about ExtremeIO, a lot of conversations about scale-out storage in general, Pivotal and things that are going on there and all of those things fall into the category of things that we're very interested in from a technology perspective at VCE and we're going to bring a VMware Cisco EMC answer to our customers in the space of those technology solutions that are being innovated by our investor companies. So you're relatively new to VCE, well, you're not brand new but new enough, right? I was the number 60 employee, I think so. Okay, so talk about the changes in the past 12 months to the platform and what you guys are trying to accomplish and a little bit about where you're going. Yeah, so the product strategy is really, our initial foray or entry into the market was really to build the 300 and 700 systems to focus on enterprise service provider core data centers. We've had a project underway for a long time to develop a smaller form factor system that ultimately became the Vblock 100. There was a lot of conversation internally to say 100 is going to introduce an opportunity for smaller, more mid-market customers to deploy a core asset in their environment and 100 might not be right for them. So we engineered and built the 200 and released 100 and 200 together and that rounded out a portfolio of general purpose systems, mixed workload architectures to deploy and support in those environments. We also found that as we built this framework of standards to deploy converged infrastructure that we adapt to the many different use cases that customers have, but we found certain configurations, certain use cases in vertical market segments in an application segments that required us to build a specialized architecture to accommodate that unique use case and we found patterns of scale to be able to deploy that solution to many customers around the world. So we introduced the concept of specialized systems and so that rounded out our product portfolio where beneath that, we engage in conversations frequently about management of data center assets. And the challenge with managing data center assets today is customers assemble management technologies based on the use case that they're deploying in their converged infrastructure or just in their infrastructure in general and those management combinations today understand and are aware of component technologies and not necessarily the integration of those components unless you spend a lot of time educating those management packages on what's been integrated. And so we released VCE's first intellectual property in the form of software development, vision intelligent operations to really not to replace any management technologies but to enable customers existing management investments to see understand not only the products that are in a Vblock system but also the integration that we've performed and how that integration evolves as the customer's use cases emerge and evolve and they change the parameters that system to adapt to the unique requirements they have. Yeah, that's key. Stu, you've always said to me that what makes private cloud cloud is management and orchestration, right? Yeah, otherwise, you know, are you just expanding on virtualization? So Trey, I think back to kind of the early days of Vblock and how it was put together and since that time, one of the biggest changes from an architectural standpoint is how flash is disrupting the marketplace. So I was wondering if you could talk to us, you know, how are you guys looking at flash? Are you just kind of waiting for EMC and Cisco to deliver things into the portfolio? Or, you know, how will flash change what a Vblock looks like in the future? So I think flash everywhere is the answer. So when you think of flash on the compute side, you think of the hybrid array architectures and we've had flash in the arrays for quite some time. When you think about all flash array and ExtremeIO, it's something that we're very excited about to see and produce Vblocks architectural solutions around the current generation of Vblocks, as well as utilizing that technology in specific specialized roles and enabling current customers to deploy that all flash array for their unique workloads that can take benefit from that. Our flash strategy is comprehensive in that approach and we don't want to have any one particular approach with flash, but allow our customers to consume that technology in the areas that can most benefit their workloads. Okay, so interesting. One of the announcements this week was Isilon is now, I believe, sold with the Vblocks that I take, you know, existing Vblock and kind of Isilon goes with it. I think the internal terminology is like it's bolted on. So do we expect flash to start in that piece or will we see, you know, ExtremeIO in there instead of Vmax or VNX? So as ExtremeIO gets to the point of full release in Q4, you will see multiple approaches to our solution in that space, inclusive of an architecture around Isilon. So the interesting thing about scale out and those two arrays, they complement each other quite well and can benefit customers in very unique use cases in a potentially new architectural solution for Vblock systems around Isilon and ExtremeIO. Okay, one of the other things we've been hearing a lot at this show is talking about really storage, kind of expanding almost to be a platform. If you look what's going on with Viper, you know, we were at OpenStack a couple of weeks ago and I know VCE has some plays there. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, how things like OpenStack or storage, software-defined storage are going to change or impact VCE? Yeah, so software-defined everything is coming to a data center near you, right? And we at VCE very much want to promote and enable our customers to consume the software-defined strategies of each of our investor companies. You know, VCE is a Cisco networking company, Cisco Compute company, a VMware virtualization company and an EMC storage company. And so the software-defined technologies that emerge from those companies, you will find and be able to consume inside of the Vblock system architecture. Now, an important piece of Viper and being that announcement this week, it's going to enable us to do incredibly new things with the Vblock system architecture as it relates to multiple array-based personalities from EMC being in the context of a logical Vblock architecture and also enable us to potentially address new use cases in commodity-based storage in such Cisco UCS servers to accommodate unique use cases in different vertical market applications for smaller than 100 use cases. Oh, and this would also bring object capability to Vblock too, correct? Absolutely. And so as we get into that realm or space of things, I'm excited to see, you know, when you look at the things that are going on in Amazon, PayPal, Google, these large organizations that are building cloud-scale, web-scale architectures, it's fundamentally materially changing the architecture of the data center of the future. And doing a massive land grab on data center assets or something that enterprises are going to deal with, I think a great quote from Paul Moritz in his pivotal speech was 44 terabytes of data on a transcontinental flight that could very easily be analyzed to provide real-time information analytics to consumers of that information. There are lots of transcontinental flights of which I fly on quite frequently, taking all of that data and putting it in an enterprise to enable them to transform their business processes is very much an infrastructure challenge that we want to address at VCE. And we're excited about the investor companies, their technologies that they're bringing to enable that to become more of a reality for our customers. Trey, we've been talking a lot this week about the old multi-vendor world, you know? You might remember, you know, if many of you in the audience as well, we used to always talk about multi-vendor and it used to be, you know, connect to mainframe or VMS or Unix. The platforms now are different, but we're still talking about sort of open and choice. It's sort of new words, but then the platforms have changed. It's maybe VMware, it's OpenStack, it's Pivotal. So how does that affect VCE going forward? I think it strengthens VCE because one of the things that we do is we're one of the only companies that product ties integration of best-in-class technologies and then support that integration. Now, our investor companies are each investing in the OpenStack initiatives. We want to bring together the OpenStack aggregation of their strategies together in the context of VC and E so that our customers can consume those strategies at an aggregation level. And there's lots of choice in hypervisors out there. I mean, VCE has been supporting other hypervisor choices by customers for different workloads and unique workloads. We do the world's most advanced engineering and integrating VMware's hypervisor and we believe it to be the most advanced in the industry, but we understand that customers will have requirements to deploy non-VMware hypervisor technologies within the frame of the VBlock system architecture and we have customers around the world that currently deploy that. So openness in the context of that in utilizing the framework of technologies that we have from the investor companies, we're going to continue to do that and we're excited about that. Pivotal's openness candidly enables us to develop fast data, real-time analytics, infrastructure applications to support some of the work that they're doing in that space of software development in the context of customers who have those fast data real-time analytics application requirements. So you mentioned OpenStack. I mean, do you envision committing, supporting, compatibility with what do you mean by sort of working with OpenStack or participating in that, what does that all mean? So what I mean by that is a customer wants to deploy OpenStack on a VBlock. We have every intention to enable them to do so in the context of the strategies that our investors are making investments in and their OpenStack initiatives. So an aggregation of each of our investor company technologies within the OpenStack initiative. So it's safe to say that you will, whatever VC and EDU for OpenStack will- We will aggregate it together and integrate it and productize it. So but just like you have your own IP, do you envision actually VCE going even further perhaps than what VC and EDU independently? Is that a possibility? Where there is opportunities, we would absolutely go in that space. Yeah, I was just going to ask, kind of behind the curtain, how does your group, the kind of the CTO office of VCE, what's that relationship with the parent companies and something emerging like OpenStack? So within the office of the CTO, we actually exist within the product development organization and actually play a key role in conceptualizing new areas that we will pursue from a technology perspective. The interaction with our investor companies and their product groups is robust and a great dialogue between us. That continues frequently and what's interesting is it's a two-way street. We reach out to them to understand how they're adapting their go-to-market strategies with their innovations that they're bringing to market. As we begin to aggregate those technologies within the product development organization, within our platform engineering group or within conceptualizing new ways to address new business or use cases, within my group, we influence the development and roadmaps of where they may go with their individual component technologies to make sure that we're harmonizing together at a better end state for the three companies in partnering and working together. So what's got you jazzed these days? What are you really excited about? What are you working on? What's next? So what I'm most excited about is where we are going with large data center, cloud scale, web scale infrastructures and how Flash, existing storage technologies will all integrate into that and how the network fabric and some of the technologies that we are able to, if you think today about what is possible when you begin to do software to find everything, you begin to produce a new layer of automation to be able to react to minuscule minor micro changes within an infrastructure and adapt programmatically configuration changes of component infrastructure to better respond to the changing conditions a workload may need in a dynamic sort of fashion. And I'm excited about how you combine automation, programmatic APIs and component technologies and where analytics is going to push not only the storing of infrastructure but the analysis of that information infrastructure as it's being stored. Programmable infrastructure and meets big data. There you go. Excellent. Hey, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Great insights and perspectives as always. Congratulations on all the progress and we'll be watching. Good luck in the future. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. We're going to go deep with a VCE VBlock customer and unpack some of that TCO stuff that we're talking earlier with Provene. So keep it right there. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this message.