 We've talked a lot about the disruptions this week. One of the interesting data points that has come out pretty strongly is some IDC data that shows that now that virtual servers actually exceed physical servers. So everything starts to change. We've also talked about some other disruptive technologies. We've been talking about things that drive efficiency. We've been talking about flash technologies. We've been talking about security and automation. And this morning, we have two guests from IBM on. We're here with Claude Barrera, who's a distinguished engineer. At IBM, Claude, it's great to see you. Thank you. And Alex Yost, who's the VP and business line executive with the System X and Blade Center business is going to join us. Why don't you come in here? Why don't you come in and grab my spot? I'll get Pat Gelsinger ready. You grab John's spot. Alex, great to see you. Come on in. Hey, Claude. Hey, Alex. How are you? Good to see you. So it's great to have you guys on here at theCUBE. It's quite the setup here, right? Yeah, great. Good lineup here. Great location. Big day today. Number of guests like yourself, C-level executives. Just talking about some of the major trends that we see in the big cloud picture, VMware in particular. And so I'm really excited to have Alex, you on to talk a little bit about some of the server trends. IBM, obviously, world leader in that space. You guys invented the business. You invented virtualization. Kind of, I bet you wish you owned VMware, but that's another story. And Claude, you and I have known each other for a long time. For those of you who don't know Claude Barrera, just a real storage technology guru. So we've got the two key pieces of the stack, the infrastructure stack, at least two of the key pieces on the server side with Alex and the storage side with Claude. So maybe, Alex, we could start with you. Can we talk a little bit about, maybe start with what IBM's doing here at VMware, what you're talking about. What's hot? Well, thanks again for the opportunity to be here. It's an exciting time for those of you that are here live or maybe watching over the internet. The energy level here at VMworld is extraordinary. And I've spent some time down at the booth just talking to clients, talking to clients, talking to business partners. And the thing that I'm hearing more than ever, and I've been to several VMworlds in a row now, and more than ever, clients are saying, I'm virtualizing everything. And I said, you know, you're about the third or fourth person to tell me that. What do you mean by that? And they said, you know, it's not just consolidating those small apps to get more utilization out of a server. We're taking and putting our mission critical applications into a virtualization environment. And the impact now is that clients are getting more virtual machines per server. They're doing bigger virtual machines. And those virtual machines are more important than ever before to the operation of their business. And so clients have not only the confidence but also the requirement to do more virtualization than ever because you know, when you look at what CIOs are doing to make big changes in their business to get more out of the resources that are available, virtualization is on the top of the list for about 75% of them. So what's driving that requirement? I mean, obviously it's efficiency, but is it stopped there? Are we going beyond efficiency at this point, Alex? It's about efficiency. It's about management and having fewer physical resources to manage. And you know, one of the things that we've seen over the many years that IBM has done virtualization for clients is that if you can manage fewer physical platforms and get more out of each one, it simplifies your job as an administrator, as an owner, as a manager. And if we can do that on industry standard X86 hardware like our X5 platforms, clients can do more than ever before on a single platform. They can scale that platform so they get investment protection and flexibility. And that gives them the ability to run their business on fewer physical resources, consume less power, manage less things, and it gives them investment protection at the same time. So it's like there's no downside for them. So one of the things, I actually want to challenge that a little bit because one of the things that we hear a lot in the Wikibon community, and this is where eventually, Claude, I'm going to get to you to talk about the architectures to deal with some of these problems, that we hear that the downside potentially is that I'm going to stick a hypervisor in between my mission critical apps and my raw server power. I'm concerned the application development heads who are really driving a lot of the decision making are nervous, but you're seeing, and we're hearing it as well here, obviously, at the show, people pushing virtualization much, much harder. Is that right? Sure, absolutely. And again, keep in mind that for several decades, clients have been virtualizing their most mission critical applications on IBM servers. You get big honking mainframe servers, right? These little system Xs, but that's really, I mean, I'm kidding, right? Oh, sure. The system X business, I mean, it's just exploding in terms of power, right? And that's one area where clients are actually saying, you know what? The combination of VMware and IBM is what gives us the confidence to make that kind of a statement. We might not be willing to do it if IBM wasn't endorsing it, is I think the implicit answer. Right, so there's a lot of trust factor there, so. Sure. So Claude, I want you to talk about architectures. So I think that, generally, conceptually, people understand, if you put something in between the server and the application, it might slow things down, but the benefits that Alex is talking about seem to outweigh that factor, and there's things like flash and intelligent placement of system resources that are overcoming some of those performance bottlenecks. Can you talk a little bit about that? Give us your perspectives on what IBM is seeing there and your vision for how these architectures come forward, including flash. Okay, so first of all, I look at all these architecture questions through a storage I view, right? So I've worked in storage and that's right. That's right, it's the important perspective. And the major trend that's going on today, we've had virtualization on the server side, we've had virtualization on the storage side. The major trend that's in play right now is using the combination of server side and storage side virtualization to affect a better delivery of truly enterprise class applications. So we saw hypervisors and server side virtualization take off in environments like dev test or web serving, in which there really isn't a lot of enterprise class data or a truly mission critical data availability requirement. And now we see, based on people's familiarity with server virtualization and the management efficiencies of virtual servers, customers wanting to use those same technologies in big data mission critical environments. So the key issue that has to be resolved, and we've done this for years in mainframe, so it's certainly not impossible. In fact, virtualization lends itself well to mission critical. But the key issue is to make those technology layers work in concert. So let me give you just a quick example of the kinds of issues that you run into. Provisioning in a physical server environment means establishing either a direct connect or a sand path from a storage device to a physical server. Provisioning is something you do once in the lifetime of the server or maybe occasionally when something major changes. In a virtual server environment, servers move around. So the association of storage with servers has to move in combination with the expected mobility of the server. Now that sounds like it might be a hard trick and to some degree it is, but there's a big benefit in that you can now use the capabilities of server mobility for difficult functions like disaster recovery. So if I can move a server from one, move a virtual server from one physical server to another within a rack, I can use that same technology to move it across the country to my disaster recovery site. And with that capability, I can now simplify the operation of DR, which is actually a major complexity.