 Hello wonderful humans and welcome back to theCUBE's thrilling live coverage of AWS re-invent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm joined by my fantastic co-host, John Furrier. John, things are really ramping up in here day one. Yep, it's packed already. I heard 70,000 maybe attendees this year. Really? I just saw that on Twitter. Again, it continues to show that over the past 10 years we've been here, you're seeing some of the players that were here from the beginning growing up and getting bigger and stronger, becoming more platforms, not just point solutions, seeing new entrants coming in, new startups, and the innovation you start to see happening, it's really compelling to fund, to watch, and our next segment, we have multi 10-time CUBE alumni coming on and a first-timer, so it should be great. We'll get into some of the innovation. Not only has this guest been on theCUBE 10 times, he also spoke at the first AWS re-invent just like you were covering it here with CUBE. Without further ado, please welcome Ronan and Kevin from NetApp. Thank you gentlemen, both for being here and for matching in your dark navy blue. How's the show going for you? Ronan, I'm going to ask you first. You've been here since the beginning. How does it feel in 2022? First, it's amazing to see so many people, right? So many humans in one place flesh and blood, and it's also amazing to see it's such a celebration for people in the cloud, right? Like this is our event, the people in the cloud. I'm really, really happy to be here and be in theCUBE as well. Fantastic, it is a party. It's a cloud party. How are you feeling being here, Kevin? I'm feeling great. I mean, going all the way back to the early days of Spot Inst, which was the startup that eventually got acquired as Spot by NetApp. I mean, this was our big event. This is what we lived for. We've gone, I've gone from everything, one of the smaller booths out here on the floor to all the way up to the huge booth that we have today. So we've kind of grown along with the AWS ecosystem. And it's just a lot of fun to get here, see all the customers and talk to everybody. It's a lot of fun. That's the theme that we've been talking about and we wrote a story about it on SiliconANGLE more. That growth from that getting in and getting bigger, not just an ISV or part of the startup showcase or ecosystem, the progression of the investment on how cloud has changed the Liverpool's. You've been part of that wave. What's the biggest walk away? And what's the most important thing going on now? Because it's not stopping. You've got new entrants coming in and the folks are rising with the tide and getting platforms built around their products. Yeah, I would say years ago is cloud in my decision path and now it's cloud is in my decision path. How much is it and how am I going to use it? And I think especially coming up over the next year, macroeconomic events and everything going on is how do I make my next dollar in the cloud go further than my last dollar? Because I know I'm going to be there. I know I'm going to be growing in the cloud. So how do I effectively use it to run my business going forward? All right, take a minute to explain SPOT, now part of NetApp, what's the story? What, take us through it for the folks who aren't familiar with the journey, where it's come from, where it is today? Sure, so SPOT is all about cloud optimization. We help all of our customers deploy, scale, and optimize their applications in the cloud. And what we do is everything from VMs to containers to any type of custom application you want to deploy. We analyze those applications and we find the best price point to run them, we right size them, we do the automation so your DevOps team doesn't have to do it and we basically make the whole cloud server list for you at the end of the day. So whatever you're doing in the cloud, we'll manage that for you from the lowest level of the stack all the way up to the highest level of financials. Is this what you call the Evolved Cloud State? It is, in the Evolved Clouds a little bit more and Ronan can touch on that a little bit too, the Evolved Clouds, not only the public cloud but also the cloud that you're building on-prem, right? A lot of big companies, it's not necessarily 100% one way or the other. The Evolved Cloud is which cloud am I on? Am I on an on-prem cloud and a public cloud or am I on multiple public clouds in an on-prem cloud? And I think Ronan, you probably have an opinion on that too. I think what we are hearing from our customers is that many of them are in a situation where a lot of their data has been built for years on-premises, they're accelerating their move to the cloud, some of them are accelerating their move into multiple cloud and that situation of an on-prem that is becoming cloudy and cloudy all the time and then accelerated cloud adoption, this is what the customers are calling the Evolved Cloud and that's what we're trying to support them in that journey. How many customers are you supporting in this Evolved Cloud? You made it seem like you can just turn key this for everyone, which I am here for it, just to be clear. I mean, we have thousands of customers, right? Everything from your small startups, people just getting going with a few VMs, all the way to people scaling to tens and thousands of VMs in the cloud, or even beyond VM services and tens of millions of spend a month. People are putting a lot of investment into the cloud and we have all walks of life under our customer portfolio. You know, multi-cloud has been a big topic in the industry. We call it super-cloud because we think super-cloud kind of more represents the destination to multi-cloud. I mean, everyone has multiple clouds, but that's the brief defaults. They're not by design in most cases, but we're starting to see traction towards that potential common level services, fix the late, see if I still think we're on the performance game now. So I have to ask you guys, performance is becoming back in vogue. Speeds and feeds back during the data center days. Well, I would want to talk speeds and feeds and solutions. And then cloud comes in. Now we're at the era of cloud where people are moving their workloads there. There's a lot more automation going on, a lot more, as you said, part of the decision. It is the path. So they say, now I want to run my workloads on the better, faster infrastructure. No developer wants to run their apps on the slower hardware. I think that's a toss up for you, Ronny. Go ahead. I mean, I put out my story. No developer ever said, give me the slower software performance and pay more. Fast, fast, or fastest, buy two fastest. Speeds and feeds are back, right? And performance comes in different parameters, right? I think it is come through throughput, it comes through latency. And I think even a stronger word today is price performance, right? How much am I paying for the performance that I need? NetApp is actually offering a very, very big advantage for customers on both the high end performance as well as in the dollar per performance that is needed. This is actually one of the key differentiator that FSX for NetApp on top is an AWS storage based on the NetApp on top storage operating system. This is one of the biggest advantages it is offering. It is SAP certified, for example, where latency is a key item. It is offering new and fastest throughput available, but also leveraging some advanced features like tiering and so on. It is offering unique competitive advantage in the dollar for performance specifically. And why is performance important now, in your opinion? Obviously besides the obvious that no one wants to run their stuff on the slower infrastructure, but why is some people so into it now? I think performance as a single parameter is definitely a key influencer of the user experience. None of us will compromise our experience. The second part is performance is critical when scale is happening, right? And especially with the scale of data, performance to handle massive amounts of data is becoming more and more critical. The last thing that I'll emphasize is, again, is the dollar for performance. The more data you have, the more you need to handle, the more critical for you is to handle it in a cost effective way. That's kind of in the secret sauce of the success of every workload. There isn't a company or person here who's not thinking about doing more faster for cheaper. So you certainly got your finger on the pulse with that. I want to talk about a customer case study, a little birdie told me that a major U.S. airline recently just had a massive win where, according to my notes, response time and customer experience was improved by 17X. Now that's the type of thing that cuts cost big time. Can one of you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah, so I think we all flew here somehow, right? Exactly, airlines matter to probably most folks listening. They're doing very well right now at airlines. Yes, and I think we all also needed to deal with changes in the flights, with really enormous amount of complexity in managing a business like that. We actually rank and choose what airline to use, among other things, based on the level of service that they give us. And especially at the time of crunch, a lot of users are looking through a lot of data to try to optimize. Well, that's all of them who just worked this holiday weekend, sidebar. Exactly, right. And Thanksgiving is one of these crunch times that are in the middle of this. So 70X improvement in performance means a lot. 70 or 17? 17X, right? And especially when we're talking about, it looks like 50,000 messages per minute that this customer was processing. That's a lot. That's almost 1,000 messages a second. Wow, I think my math teacher's up there. Yeah. It does allow them to operate in the next level of scale and really increase their support for the customer. It also allows them to be more efficient when it comes to cost. Now they need less infrastructure to give better service across the board. The nice thing is that it didn't require them for a lot of work. Sometimes when the customers are doing their journey to the cloud, one of the things that kind of hold them back is either the fear or maybe is the concern of how much effort will it take me to achieve the same performance or even a better performance in the cloud? They are a live example that not only can you achieve, you can actually exceed the performance that they have on-premises and really give customer a better service. Customer a better service and reliability is extremely important. They're 99.99% 99, yes. That second line obviously being very important, especially when we're talking about the order of magnitude of data and actions being taken place. How much of a priority is reliability and security for y'all as a team? So reliability is a key item for everybody, especially in crunch times, but reliability goes beyond the nines specifically. Reliability goes into how simple it is for you to enable backup in DR. How protected are you against ransomware? This is where NetApp and including the FSX for NetApp on top, richness of data management makes a huge difference. If you're able to make your copy undelittable, that is actually a game changer when it comes to data protection. And this is something that in the past requires a lot of work, opening vaults and other things. Now it becomes a very simple configuration that is attached to every NetApp on top storage, no matter where it is. We heard some news at VMware Explorer this past fall, early fall. You guys were there. We saw the Broadcom acquisition. Looks like it's going to get finalized. Lots of acquisitions. So a lot of speculation around VMware, someone called the VMware, like where is VMware, where they'd be around? Nice pun. It was actually Nutanix, people, they go at each other all the time. But Broadcom is going to keep these fear. And that's where the bread and butter, that's the goose that lays the golden eggs. Customers are there. How do you guys see your piece there with VMware Cloud on AWS that integrates solution? Also, you guys have a big part of that ecosystem. We've covered it for years. I mean, we've been to every VM world, now called VMware Explorer. You guys have a huge customer base with VMware customers. What's the outlook? Yeah, and I think the important part is that a big part of the enterprise workloads are running on VMware. And they will continue to run on VMware in the future. And most of them will try to run in a hybrid mode, if not moving completely to the cloud. The cloud gives them a parallel scale. It gives them DR and backup opportunities. It does a lot of goodness to that. The partnership that NetApp brings with both VMware as well as AWS, as well as other cloud vendors, is actually a game changer, because the minute that you go to the cloud, things like DR and backup have a different economics connected to them. Suddenly you can do computeless DR. Definitely on backup, you can actually achieve massive savings. NetApp is the only data store that is certified to run with VMware cloud. And that actually opens to the customer's huge opportunity for unparalleled data protection, as well as real, real savings, hard savings. And customers that look to them, they say, I'm going to shrink my data center. I'm going to focus on moving certain things to the cloud. DR and backup, and especially DR and backup of VMware might be one of the easiest, fastest things to take into the cloud. And the partnership between AWS, VMware, and NetApp might actually give you a great solution, FSX there. I think you guys got a real advantage here. And I want to get into something that's kind of a gloom and doom. I don't have to go negative on this one, Savannah. But if you look at the economic realities, you've got a lot of companies like that are in the back of a Druva, NetApp, Druva, Cohesity, Rubrik, others, they're generational cloud. Who breaks through? What's the unique thing? Because there's going to be challenges in the economy and customers are going to vote with their wallets. And they start to see, as they make these architectural decisions, you guys are in the middle of it. There may not be enough to go around and the musical chairs might stop or not. I'm not sure, but I feel like if there's going to be a consolidation, what does that look like? What are customers thinking? Backup recovery cloud, that's the unique thing. You mentioned economics. It's not, you can't take the old strategy and put it there from five, 10 years ago. What's different now? Yeah, I think when it comes to data protection, there is a real change in the technology landscape that opened the door for a lot of new vendors to come and offer. Should we expect consolidation? I think macroeconomic outside and other things will probably drive some of that to happen. I think there is one more parameter, John, and I want to mention in this context, which is simplicity. Many of the storage vendors, including us, including AWS, you want to make as much of the backup NDR basically a simple checkbox that you choose together with your main workload. This is another key capabilities that is being bringing and changing the market. It also needs to move up, so it's not only simplicity, it's also about moving to the applications that you use and just having it baked in. It's not about you going out and finding a replication. It's like, Ronan said, we got to make it simple and then we got to bake it into what they use. So one of our most recent acquisitions of Instacluster allows us to provide our customers with open source databases and data streaming services. When those sit on top of ONTAP and they sit on top of SPOCs, infrastructure optimization, you get all that for free through the database that you use, so you don't worry about it. Your database is replicated, it's highly available and it's running at the best cost. That's where it's going. Awesome. You also recently purchased Cloud Checker as well. Yes. Do you just purchase wonderful things all the time? We do. We walk around and then we find the best thing and then we break out the checkbook. No, but more seriously, it rounds out what customers need for the cloud. So a lot of our customers come from storage but they need to operate the entire cloud around the storage that they have. Cloud Checker gives us that financial visibility across every single dollar that you spend in the cloud and also gives us a better go-to-market motion with our MSPs and our distributors than we had in the past. So we're really excited about what Cloud Checker can unlock for us in the future. Makes a lot of sense and congratulations on all the extremely exciting things going on. Our final and closing question for our guests on this year's show is, we would love your Instagram hot take, your 30-second hot take on the most important stories, messages, themes of AWS re-invent 2022. Ronan, I'm going to start with you, Steve Smerk. And you do it one day ahead of the keynote. Thank you. You can give us a little tease, a little preview. I think that pandemic or no pandemic, face-to-face or no face-to-face, the innovation in the cloud is actually breaking all records. And I think this year specifically, you will see a lot of focus on data and scale. I think that's, these are two amazing things that you'll see, I think doubling down. But I'm also anxious to see tomorrow, so I'll learn more about it. All right, we might have to chat with you a little bit after tomorrow as a keynote, somewhere not coming up. What about you? I think you're going to hear a lot about cost. How much are you spending? How far are your dollars going? How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities? How efficient are you being with your dollars in the cloud? I think that's going to be a huge topic. It's on everybody's mind. It's the macro-economics situation right now. I think it's going to be in every session of the keynote tomorrow. Every session. Every session. A bold thing. John, we're going to half-page. Hold it to it. Hold it to it. But all the made-ups in general are bold. You guys have all the daddy and go look up what I said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll go back and look at it. We're going to check on you on that. The record now states. There you go. Ronan, Kevin, thank you both so much. We hope that it's a stellar show for Spotify NetApp and that we have you 10 more times and more than just this once. And yeah, I can't wait to see if, well, I can't wait to hear when your predictions are accurate tomorrow and we get to learn a lot more. No, you're going to go to all the sessions now just to check his math on that. Yeah, no, exactly. Now we have to do our homework just to call them out. Not that we're competitive or those types of people at all, John. On that note, thank you both for being here with us. John, thank you so much. Thank you all for tuning in from home. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada here at AWS Reinvent with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching The Cube, the leader in high-tech coverage.