 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2016. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to the VTUG here at Gillette Stadium. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon, and this is theCUBE, help extracting the signal from the noise. Our first event of the year, and what I love about this event is it's been showing kind of the maturation of where virtualization has moved towards cloud, and happy to have on the program for the first time, actually. Brian Knudson, who's a technical marketing manager for SimpliVity, but I've known Brian for a few years, Laura, more through the virtualization community. Brian, thanks for joining me. Yeah, absolutely, thanks for the invite. All right, so you look at SimpliVity, you guys sit at some of these interesting transitions. Many people like the term hyperconverge, talked about breaking down those silos which virtualization helped. Wikibon, we called it ServerSan, which really the direction of making software drive make it easier, and we've been talking a lot lately about how companies are building out their cloud environments, which means they're leveraging public clouds, they're building environments themselves that have more automation, better management, so I guess to start out, to give us just a quick synopsis, your background, what brought you to SimpliVity, and what brings you to the VTUG today. Yeah, so started off as a customer, back in the day was actually a web developer at the time. Slowly worked my way down the stack into the infrastructure side of things, and once I had got into that area, we started having data center issues, and like, well, let's figure out how we can make this smaller and fit better into the data center and VMware popped up on my radar, and it's kind of rocketed my career since then, made a stop through a bar for several years, and got to see a lot of different environments and do a lot of cool stuff, and came across SimpliVity and hyperconvergence in general as an option for customers, dug into it real fast, and like, this is exactly what my customers have been needing. You know, I've been investigated several of the other competitors, and kept coming to SimpliVity as the one that I felt was the right one, I started petitioning for them to partner with us, both internally and with SimpliVity, and ended up having one conversation after another that led to me talking to the CMO, and here I am. Great story, I mean, it's interesting that you came from kind of up the stack and worked right down as to a lot of people here, it was like virtualization to help them move, we were pushing them up the stack. Maybe talk a little bit about the dynamic of kind of the application and the infrastructure. What have you seen the last couple of years in your role in SimpliVity? How does that discussion go? Yeah, yeah, so as most people know, it's the requirements oftentimes are more than standard infrastructure can handle and causes some interesting changes and that's why we see stuff like flash arrays and the hybrid arrays, hyperconvergence comes in to help simplify a lot of the complication that's come in over the years. A lot of point solutions get introduced, we have a problem, somebody pops up, solves that problem, we move on to the next one, new company pops up to solve that problem. Over the years end up with this clutter of different devices out there. SimpliVity was kind of a look at, hey, let's step back from that, let's consider what we've built here and all the inefficiencies in there, let's drive those out, let's come up with a single platform that one is simpler to manage and two includes all of those functionalities so that you don't need hyper specialists on all those different things and you can make that whole environment a lot simpler and more cost effective for the company. Yeah, you're right. I mean, so often we have, is this technology a silver bullet? And therefore you get point products and you end up with, God I think is sometimes we call them cylinders of excellence or what we've often called bespoke infrastructure where I built a temple around a specific application but I need to do that over and over and over again and if we look at what the web guys have done is the application's drive by business, it's not the infrastructure so I need to make the infrastructure be more flexible, I need the business to be more agile and therefore I need infrastructure that can marry that. What are some of the entry points, what use cases, what applications, kind of start the road and is it a rip and replace, sweep the floor, how does that discussion go with customers? It kind of depends on the size of the customer really. The smaller and mid-sized type customers where they're trying to drive as, I mean everybody's trying to drive as many admins per VM or per server, when you have two or three people running the entire environment, they're journalists already, they're storage, they're network, they're servers, they're application, they tend to latch on whole hog for the most part, they bring in some civility and they may be looking to replace storage already or something is forcing them to take the look but they're able to remove more than just that one thing. Fairly common, we've had several instances where customer buys it for the storage and they say well we've already got backup, we're happy with our backup, we bought it last year and within a year they're ripping out that backup because the hyper-convergence model just makes everything simpler for them. You get into the higher mid-market enterprise type shops, sometimes it becomes a silo of its own to be honest, that's where it becomes more application driven, they want to do VDI, they have some performance issue on their SQL servers where they bring it in for that point solution and then it grows over time and they keep coming back for more. Okay, what about kind of the economic discussion? If I think about most customers, unfortunately, it's usually it's like okay, at the beginning of the year right now and somebody has given, they've said okay, well we've got our refresh cycles, we've allocated budget for this bucket or that bucket and when you look at something like hyper-converged, it can spread across lots of areas so how do you make the economic case and are you seeing users switching how they actually think about buying their infrastructure and in that case? Yeah, absolutely. So it comes in a lot of different ways and usually it is hey, we start with this main bucket. Sometimes that's enough to cover it because maybe it's just so old and they budget for some major expansion or complete rip and replace of the storage array and maybe they think they need all flash so they include a higher price point. Sometimes it fits completely within there. Sometimes they may be looking at multiple buckets but they're going to have to replace. Sometimes they actually, some customers tend to be really forward looking and the TCO model really works for them. We show them hey, if you put this in here you won't have to buy this next year or this the year after that or this the year after that and they're able to say okay, I can take that to my board of directors and they can get more money allocated to cover any delta that may be there. They see the efficiencies and some customers are smart about how they deal with their OPEX and they decide hey that's, we can see that this is a long-term investment that we'll save money later on so they look at that. Cloud's an interesting one because there's a lot of economics in there and we've done some calculations where we can beat AWS in a lot of cases for the cost of a VM running for three years. Yeah, okay so the devil's in the details on a lot of those analysis so three years seems to be a magic number for a lot of people. I guess if I have a well-understand environment that's going to say I guess relatively stable over three years, is that your analysis? Can you help us understand? Because there's obviously got to be cases. If I need it on today and I need to use it for an hour, it's probably not going to be as fast to bring in something new but where are the best fits and where are the fits that you guys would say, hey, we work with Amazon, we work with Azure, you should use this for this application. Yeah, and we definitely have connectors in AWS for maintaining more of the archive type data so our built-in data protection aspects can push stuff out to AWS for a little bit cheaper storage. Three years is kind of the magic number we all use because that's kind of the minimum that you're going to buy any piece of infrastructure for on-premises. When it comes to the real world though, most of us know the pain of having a five-year-old array and then having to force the company to give you money to replace that one, knowing that that's on its last legs and it's gotten, you know, by then the storage vendors are trying to price out the renewal so that you do have to buy something new. So there's a lot of games that get played there that actually do results in it going longer but three is kind of the minimum so that's kind of what we look at. You know, we look at a lot of the different pieces of the infrastructure that we replace explicitly and bring those into the model as well. When you look at what's going to go where a lot of customers looking at hybrid, it's a trend I think pretty much everybody, I know Wikibon agrees with that approach, that you need to put stuff in the right place and putting it out in the cloud means you've got less stuff to manage. You don't have that high cost of managing the infrastructure. You put your applications out there and they run. But there's concerns with security and the bandwidth needs and all that kind of stuff that goes into, well, we still need some stuff on-premises. So having that mix is important. We're not a consulting company from that perspective so we rely and we do all of our business through the VAR community. Oftentimes they do have those practices and can help customers with that and we work alongside with that to make sure that it's the right solution for the customer. Yeah, so a lot of things to digest there, absolutely kind of the discussion of CAPEX versus OPEX and then that transition. One quick follow-up on that, when you talk about refresh cycles, do you see customers shortening their refresh cycles, five to seven years kind of used to be, especially on storage kind of the refresh cycle? If I go cloud, they can kind of manage that even if I go to some managed hosted environments, they can manage it, but three years almost seems to be where we're kind of pulling some of the compute cycles and even storage cycles down to that so that I can take advantage of new technology and the rapidly changing economics. Yeah, yeah, and things change so fast and we all know that mantra. Something that you bought three years ago is sometimes hard to upgrade or to expand in a storage-rate perspective because of mismatches and things that just may not balance properly at that point. I wouldn't necessarily say that we're seeing it shorten, per se, but one of the things with hyperconvergence that we found is that the ability to easily add in new building blocks to expand things makes things very easy so customers can right size for today and then as they need more things, we try to make sure that the new technology will fit with the old technology as best as possible. Sometimes there are challenges around the balancing aspect of things when you've got a really big node sitting with a couple of smaller nodes that from a time perspective and Moore's Law just caused by nature, but ensuring that that building block approach continues through the futures is an important thing especially in the hyperconverged days that we definitely focus on. All right, so last question I have for you, Brian, is when SimpliVity first launched, it was very much a solution for VMware environments. Okay, talk a little bit about today as to what SimpliVity's doing and what you're seeing customers as you look at Microsoft, Red Hat, Microsoft both Hyper-V and Azure, and even AWS, what have you been seeing in the trends in the customer discussions? Yeah, yeah, as I talk to customers, they all want to know what we're doing with Hyper-V, what we're doing with KVM, how well we're integrating with AWS, and this whole virtualization thing has always made the mobility of the data a lot easier. Some of what we built the platform to do is to enhance that even further, the way that we deal with data enhances that and makes it easier to move things around. Our goal really has been to make sure that that happens and today it's a vast majority of our implementations are vSphere. We're seeing some KVM deployments starting to happen. We have some support there. Hyper-V is on the near road map and that's hopefully you'll hear some stuff from us on that this year. Some really cool stuff happening and it's going to be an exciting year for SimpliVity in that regard. All right, well Brian, appreciate you coming and taking time. I know you're going to be giving some of the breakout sessions here to the users. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the VTUG at Gillette Stadium. Thanks for watching.