 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Welcome back to theCUBE. Our continuing coverage of VMworld 2017 continues. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined next by Jason Brown, a CUBE alumni, consultant in product marketing for Dell EMC's Scaleo. Welcome back to theCUBE, Jason. Thank you for having me. Good to have you here. So day two of the event, lots of announcements, lots of buzz. Talk to us about Scaleo. What's the current state of the business? Well, it's actually really exciting right now. We're doing really well. We're seeing great customer adoption. We're seeing massive petabytes of Scaleo deployed in data centers. And we're here at the show, really talked about customers for Scaleo for VMware. Cause everyone here is about VCN, obviously. They're doing awesome. We love it. They're doing great. But there's some differences and similarities between the two products that people get confused about. So we're here at the show, really trying to help ease the confusion, talk about how it's like peanut butter and jelly, right? Some people like peanut butter, some people like jelly, but most people like them both. So we're just trying to help people out and understand when to choose which and sometimes it's both. All right, Jason, cause right, I've got a history watching Scaleo since before the acquisition. Service providers that usually kind of fit their model a little bit more than VCN. So when I think Scale, I tend to think Scaleo, I interviewed ADP yesterday, big customer rolling out like 30,000 nodes of compute with VCN. So Scale's not only one piece of it. Maybe, you know, help us kind of understand some of the, you know, of course there's going to be places that overlap, but what is the, you know, kind of ideal Scale.io customer? What are they looking for? And how does that differ from the VCN? Sure, so in particular, if you're looking at Scale.io for VMware, there's a few things you need to understand. First and foremost, with Scale.io, we're talking about consolidating resources across the data center. So we're talking data center grade software defined storage, which can run in a hyperconverged model or not. And that's really key differentiator, cause you look at these enterprises especially, these large enterprises that built in IT organization of past 20 years, right? And so when you introduce HCI to them, you're transforming the architecture of the data center, but also the IT operating environment. And that's scary for a lot of people who have spent millions of dollars having a server team, a network team, and the storage team. So one of the key things for Scale.io in a VMware environment is, if you want to transform the architecture to software defined, but preserve that IT operating model, this two layer deployment we call it, you can do that with Scale.io. But on the flip side, you can also do a more modern architecture with hyperconverged as well. So you can get the best of both worlds. So whether today you're ready to go all the way, like the service providers, they'll go hyperconverged, you know, out of the gate. But enterprises usually start more traditional and then move to that hyperconverged. And Scale.io provides that pathway to get there. Yeah, bring us inside those customers a little, because I've talked to a couple of very large customers at Scale.io, actually did a case study of Citi. And Citi told me internally, we're just not ready to go fully hyperconverged. So they kept that their massive scale, talked to a large global hospitality company that once again looked more as kind of the storage usage of what they're doing. But I mean, hyperconverged V-SAN seems to be having, they've got 10,000 customers, they're all in that model. So what is it that gets a customer ready for that? What kind of pushes or pulls them towards being ready for embracing? Well, I think it's understanding your business goals and your desired outcomes. So with something like Scale.io, you're looking at once again in the data center. So you're looking for Scale, not 10s of nodes, where a traditional, I heard this said that traditional V-SAN employees eight to 16 nodes. VMware's everywhere, right? There's a lot of Robo, SMB, VDI use cases out there and that's not really where Scale.io plays. Scale.io is about data center. So tier one applications, databases, data analytics, it's looking at things like containers and microservices, Splunk, NoSQL, applications like that. So when you look at those types of applications and workloads, you have to understand that your scale will probably go from 10s to 100s of nodes. Your performance may go from a million IOPS to 10s of millions of IOPS. You may need six nines availability because you're running in the data center. Customers are replacing their SANA arrays with Scale.io. So you need all that enterprise class, data center grade functionality with the scale, performance and flexibility. The key thing is flexibility as well. If you want to run multiple workloads on a cluster, you need to be able to support VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Linux, Windows, so and Scale.io enables all those things and therefore that's why when you look at your business goals, business outcomes and what your data center looks like, you need to understand that functionally. Then you decide, okay, is it going to be VSAN or Scale.io or is it going to be both? Because I have both of those use cases there. So you talked about VSAN and Scale.io, peanut butter and jelly. Michael Dell this morning on main stage with Pat Gelsinger said VMware and Dell EMC are like peanut butter and chocolate. Both all good flavors in my opinion. I'd love to hear an example though of where, like to your point, before I ask the question, we just had the CTO of Dell EMC storage on speaking with Stu and I a few minutes ago and one year post combination and he said customers are starting to understand now the value of Dell EMC together. So with that a year later and customers now understanding the value proposition of this company that now also owns VMware, how much easier is the conversation away from VSAN versus Scale.io but I'd love to understand where are you seeing where they both those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches play together. What are some of the maybe industries or key use cases where a customer would need Scale.io and VSAN? Sure, so if you think about financial services, city as Stu mentioned one of the larger ones there, definitely plays there in healthcare. There's a few of large of the big partner network companies that have come together to be successful there. Telco, Verizon, Comcast, right? Not only just private cloud but public cloud as well. So when you look at your data center, you're going to look at the whole thing. So for your VDI, your Robo, your SMB, maybe for a few of your enterprise applications that only need 50,000 IOPS performance for your VMs, then VSAN is going to be great there. But then you look to the other side of your data center and you've got something like SAP, HANA, any other Oracle, et cetera, or you're looking to build a private cloud of hundreds of nodes. Well that's where Scale.io is going to sit over in that corner. So it really is understanding what your workloads are and where they play. It's important to note too that for Scale.io, our primary use cases are array consolidation. So you've got silos of arrays in your data center and you want to stop managing silos of arrays and you want to bring everything together into a single resource, single cluster, boom, Scale.io. You want to build a cloud environment, whether you're a service provider building a public cloud like Swisscom for example, who build a public cloud based off of Scale.io or a private cloud like Citigroup for example, it's pretty much a private cloud, mix of array consolidation as well. And then something like a gaming company that we've worked with where they are doing this next generation DevOps containers, microservices. Well Scale.io is great for that too because it has the flexibility to start small and grow and support the various things that they need to be able to deploy their applications 32% faster. So it really encompasses the whole data center. Yeah, a bunch of interesting points that I want to unpack a little bit there. Specifically, you're talking about all the new applications and the new technologies that people are doing. One of the challenges most people had, the stat we've been using I think for my entire IT careers, we spend what, some between 70 and 90% of our time keeping the lights on. And what the wave of kind of software defined, all of these type things supposed to be, we need to simplify our environment. And therefore I can take those resources and reallocate them, retrain them, put them on cool new things. What are you seeing from the customers? Just organizationally from what happens to the storage people as well as how do they take advantage of some of the tougher things like application modernization? Good question, good question. So it depends on the company, right? There are some, like you said, there are some customers that want to keep them separated and that's perfectly fine. There are tools that you can use with Scale.io so that you can manage the storage independently of the compute, but then you've got things like our tight integration with vSphere where the VM admin can manage the storage as well. So it depends on the preferences as well as the maturity of the organization and the skill set of the folks that are managing it as well. If you can have a storage admin become more agile and be able to manage the compute and the VMs as well, then perfect, they become more generalist, right? We talked about how these specialties become more generalist in these types of HCI and next-gen environments. So if they have that skill set, then perfect and both Scale.io and vSync can enable that, you know? And then if you're looking at app modernization, you know, what do you need from an infrastructure storage perspective to achieve that? And how can you enable your application developers access that storage even faster? And that's really what Scale.io does with the whole automation points behind everything with be able to add resources on the fly, remove resources on the fly, reallocate on the fly. So being able to be flexible for what they need when they are all of a sudden ramping up a new application is really critical. Yeah, I just, I'm wondering if you have any specific examples, one of the critiques if you talk about, you know, storage admins, fast is not something that usually you think of. I mean, flash is fast and everything like that, but how do we keep up with the pace of change? How do I move things? How does Scale.io help, you know, change that equation even just specifically for storage? Well, I think that in order to be able to keep up with that change, right? It's about, as you said, simplifying the dare job and making it easier. So if you've got the tools and the functionality in the product itself to be able to help them learn faster, be able to press a button as opposed to being able to allocate a raid group in the lawns and things that have an architecture that makes them be able to achieve that as well, that's really how you do it. You know, I haven't talked to any storage admins lately, unfortunately, so I can't give you a specific example, but that's really what we see at kind of the 101 level. And if I'm on buyer's journey perspective, so much has changed and shifted towards this C-suite. When we look at things like data protection, we, you know, some announcements about that yesterday, storage, and you said you haven't spoken with storage admins in a while, there's a lot of data that show that data protection storage isn't an IT problem, it's a business problem. So how has the conversation now with Dell EMC, with respect to, whether it's Scale AO or whatnot, shifted upstream, if you will, talking to more senior executives rather than the storage guys in Galaxy that are managing specific pieces. Tell us about that conversation and maybe cultural shift. Well, when you talk to any C-level executive, what's the top of mind, right? Security, saving, cost savings, budget, right? So when we're talking to executives, we're really talking about, you know, data center transformation. How software defined storage enables that, both at the architectural level and at the IT level, but also about how it can make their business easier to run and how it can save them money. So if you're able to get all this great flexibility and scalability and all this, you know, performance and, but that'd be able to preserve the features that you need, like compression and snapshots and be able to connect to your data protection suites as well. So if you can tell them all that and say, hey, and you know what, we have customers saving 50% five-year TCO by doing that, without needing to do data migration or tech refreshes anymore, they're like, all right, sign me up. Because you have to understand too, when you talk to them, they don't need to go buy and array the next day and spend a couple million dollars on something they may be able to utilize in the future or not. They can start very small, three nodes, four nodes, and have this pay-as-you-grow licensing. So they love that as well because it grows on their terms, not on our terms, on their terms. And that's really important for, you know, people in those C-level suites that are trying to maximize the efficiency of the business. All right, Jason, one of the things, when customers buy into a solution like this, it's more of a platform discussion these days. And of course, one of the things they're looking for is, where are you taking me down the road? So it's great, here's what I can do today. One of the things I love this whole wave of it is, you know, upgrades and migrations. We're like, you know, the four-letter words. Anybody in storage. And I said, you know, when we have a pool of resources and I can kind of add and remove nodes, it was like, oh my God, that was, we conservatively estimated like five years ago that 30% of the overall TCO was based on that alone. And wow, I scrapped that. Last time you were ever going to need to, you know, migrate once you get on this platform. But I want you to talk to us a little bit about, you know, a little bit kind of the vision and roadmap. What are you talking to customers about? Absolutely, so, you know, with that product like this, it's constantly evolving and innovating. So when we talk to customers about what's in the future, well, you have to first think about data services. Data services are always very important. And with Scale.io, you know, admittedly, we're a little short on some data services because we borrow focus on scalability and performance and make sure that we have a six-nines architecture. So the first and biggest thing that's coming very soon, if you were at Dellium Sewer with Scale.io.next is compression. So being able to, you know, for your block storage workloads, being able to maximize the efficiency of your storage even more with some inline compression, very important, so we're doing that. We're also enhancing our snapshots functionality so that, you know, when you talk snapshots in SDS, you know, you compare it to an enterprise array, probably not up to snuff. Well, what we're doing now with our, with our snapshot capabilities in Scale.io is we're actually going to have them be better or even much better than something you'd find in like an all-flash array. You know, where you can have, you know, thousands of snapshots in a VTRI and things like that. But it also goes to hardware as well because there's always hardware, right? And with the innovation within Dell EMC with Dell PowerEdge servers, with our friends in CPSD, we're able to innovate a lot faster with Scale.io and SDS. So, the 14G was announced. Well, Scale.io is going to be one of the first platform products within Dell EMC through our Scale.io Ready node to support NV-DIMS and NVME. So as you know, we support NVME today, one of the few software-defined storage platforms out there today that supports it in a role of your own server model. With the Ready node 14G coming out later this year with the Scale.io Ready node, immediately out of the gate, NV-DIMS and NVME technology in a Dell EMC hardware product because it's already, you know, it's Dell PowerEdge servers and Scale.io software. And then helping our management capabilities as well. So, introducing VVOLs, you know, for our VMware customers. Being able to provide something called AMS, which is our automated management services for the Ready node, so that you can deploy, configure, manage, upgrade, not only the storage software, but the firmware as well as the ESX hypervisor, all in a single button, in an all single interface, so we're doing that as well. So it's all about, you know, taking advantage of next generation functionality from the hardware perspective, simplifying the management, then introducing critical features and functionality that our customers have been asking for. And just to make sure I'm 100% on this, things like the data services, that's software. So everybody that's got it today be able to upgrade it. The, obviously the next generation of hardware always helps along the way, but you know, you manage those a little bit separate even though you want to handle both of those vectors. Yes, exactly. So when you upgrade to the scale.next, when it comes out, you'll get that feature functionality. Now, there's a few things you need to understand, right? You should have NV-DIMS and some type of flash media to support it, because you're trying to maximize scalability and performance while providing these features. There's some dependencies there, but yeah, you know, out of the gate, those features will be available. That's why it's called software defined storage. It's all in the software. All that's where all the goodness is. Okay, so take me upstream, let our new features functionality coming out. What are the new business benefits? If I'm the CEO of Swisscom, then I'm going to be able to achieve from that. Well, I think definitely increased performance, definitely increased efficiency of your storage with things like compression and the snapshots. Now, if you're able to compress that data, get more out of your system. What kind of like, in terms of TCO, how am I going to be able to reduce? Oh, well. What are the factors of? You know, we haven't run the numbers yet, but you know, the fact that we already can achieve 50% TCO, it can only get better from there when we're introducing these types of features where you maximize the efficiency. So we expect it to bump up a little bit. We're hoping that we can work with you guys to get some good numbers that come out of it. Excellent. So continued strengthening of those business outcomes of what you're talking about. Making sure that the customers that want to move to software defined storage in their data center are able to achieve that in the most seamless way and be able to reap the benefits. Fantastic. Well, Jason, thanks so much for sharing your insights, what's happening, peanut butter and jelly. It makes me hungry. It's like it's time for lunch. And it is lunchtime, yeah. We thank you so much for coming back on with you. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it. And for my co-host, Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You are watching the Cube Live day two of our continuing coverage from VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.