 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles Continuous Coverage of HP Discover. We're in Frankfurt. We're covering two days wall-to-wall coverage of HP. We covered all the big announcements from infrastructure all the way through the software side. We've got a number of guests coming up later on today. But right now we're going to talk about VMware and HP generally, but specifically around the storage piece. We're here with Gary Green, who's the vice president of Global Strategic Alliances at VMware. And Craig Nunes is back, our good friend Craig. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE and taking time out of your schedule. Well thank you very much for having us. Hey Gary, we're talking off camera. Congratulations, 10th year anniversary at VMware. Wow, what a ride that's been. It's been really great. 10 years on last Friday. I was brought on board by our founder and CEO, Diane Green at the time, to build the relationship between VMware and HP because we realized back then how important it was to have a strong partner like HP. Now we started just from the server side of things, but what was really important as we became more than a server virtualization company at storage virtualization was going to become critically important. And I think a lot of people might not realize how strong our partnership was with 3PAR ever before they were acquired by HP. Well I mean you look at the sort of history, I mean it's been an amazing history of VMware, but when you really started to have customers attack that server virtualization problem, it became very clear there was another problem that needed attacking and that was storage. Craig, you and I have talked about that a lot for years, right? You'd virtualize the services and say, oh no, now I'm spending all this money on storage. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, virtualization brings all kinds of storage challenges that storage vendors had to react to. So Gary, it's just interesting to say that you, so you worked with 3PAR before it was HP. Now VMware, you know, it's limited resources even though you're a big company, and storage was always one of these areas that you couldn't service everybody, all the partnerships. I mean you guys are big on partnerships. You had not Todd Nielsen on theCUBE number of times, he says that for every dollar spent on VMware licenses, something like 13 or $15 is spent within the ecosystem. So you've always put a high priority on that, but sometimes some of the smaller storage startups would complain they couldn't get an SDK soon enough, and you just didn't have the resources to service them, but 3PAR somehow always, like, would you guys cut the line or how did that happen? How would that, how did that relationship start and how was it that you guys at 3PAR were so effective working with VMware? Yeah, I'll give you kind of the perspective from the 3PAR side and jump in, Gary, the approach. The approach, I mean there's obviously in any company there's only so many resources to kind of get stuff done and being a small company and without the market reach that a lot of the global partners had back in the day. The thing that we did bring to the table was the incredible coverage of the service provider space and I think it dawned on our partners at VMware that every time they were getting into one of these big deals 3PAR was showing up and so I think we kind of came in through the cloud door and so it wasn't a total market perspective, it was a hot segment perspective where we were bringing something kind of special. The other thing that's really interesting about the relationship with 3PAR and I agree with you the way that we came together in front of a customer, say with the service providers but because VMware is such a technology oriented company, very strong engineering environment as our culture is that when we can find a partner that's very agile specifically in the technology area it makes it easier to work with and that's what we really found that there were no barriers to entry from an engineering or product management to product management perspective to get the teams together to decide what we really wanted to focus on. What were the challenges that the customers were looking at and then how can we solve those as quick as possible within sharing roadmaps and that's one of the great things that we've done with 3PAR and in general with our relationship with HP is because we have deep roadmap sharing so we'll sit down on a regular basis and be able to take a look at where 3PAR is going from a storage perspective, where we're going with vSphere where we're going with our new vCloud suites that we've brought into the market earlier this year and then to make sure that we have alignment not just for the next six months but for the next three years what are the challenges, what's not available and then how can we work together to make sure the integration. But you got to make a bet on 3PAR because I mean, betting on HP or IBM, that's easy bet. They're going to move a lot of software licenses for you. 3PAR was a small startup, right? Many small startups don't make it, right? So you had to make that bet so basically what I'm hearing from you is you saw the technology potential, you understood the problem well and you decided to put resources on it. You don't have unlimited resources. You know, and that's one of the things that you have to do is a successful company like VMware is to really figure out where you're going to place your chips or your bets. And it was very easy that there was great alignment at the executive level, great alignment at the customer level in the field but from a technology perspective we realized that if we placed a bet there we'd be able to see the implementation and execution of it as quickly as possible. And over the years it just really turned off. Yeah, and the other thing I'd add too is that technology momentum continued when 3PAR became a part of the HP storage business but one of the really cool things that's kind of come together is beyond technology. You know, we've really embarked upon some, I think breakthrough go-to-market work around our get virtual guarantee, well guarantee by replacing your old storage with 3PAR you can double your VM density and that is a message and a value that resonates not just with storage guys by the way very much from server and virtualization side and that's been a great program for our sellers, right? So let's talk about that a little bit. So VM density, you're going from physical to virtual and now you're running in number of virtual machines that you can provide provision to your customer base. The VM density guarantee, get virtual guarantee you're guaranteeing that you can double the number of virtual instances that you can provision and support relative to where you are today, is that how it works? Yes, you know said another way, you can double the virtualization work you're getting out of your servers just by running 3PAR. Okay, and so it seems obvious but tell us why that's important to your customers. Well this is great because you know you take different application workloads and what they want to be able to do is to be able to get the greatest VM density is possible and there's a lot that you can do with memory on the CPUs itself but from the storage perspective that's really where one of the big challenges has always been. And so with this get virtual guarantee that we started last May so it's been running now for over six months from a channel partner perspective it's a great opportunity for them to be able to go into the customer and do an assessment of what their infrastructure looks like and then be able to where a customer might only have been looking at maybe upgrading to a new ProLiant server they can then show them by you know bringing in 3PAR storage you can get greater VM densities which is the things that they want to put the mission critical workloads on to do VDI for desktop computing and now if they don't get what is being promised HP is guaranteeing that through their channel partners to be able to the customer. So what do you do if they don't if I don't get finally get two thirds of what you said I'd get, what do you do? I'm going to, I'm going to pay for the hardware and software to get them there so when you buy in you bought twice the virtualization workload out of your existing server platform. Just to get to where I can double my VM density. I sign a contract. Fine print doesn't say you know unless it's Monday through Thursday. No. None of that stuff. None of that stuff. Good, have you had to pay out on that? Never. No, so you've Never. That's good. Yeah, these, I tell you these programs that you know my customers are smarter than me and they are the ones who've told us, wow you know I have this incredible experience with your stuff. This happens when I connect your gear to my virtualization environment and it was really through that learning and why and how and understanding that that this program came to pass. Cause to be honest in our industry when us marketing guys talk to the industry about this kind of stuff, it sounds sort of impossible, but it is possible and that's why we kind of put this program in place and you know frankly it becomes a something that we can then go with our partner and do together frankly, so even better. Okay good, let's talk a little bit about this software defined, both HP and VM where we're talking about software defined whether it's networking, now software defined storage, talking about the software defined data center. Help us squint through the marketing language and what that actually means for customers. So Gary software defined data center, software defined storage, what does that mean to VMware? Well the software defined data center so that over the last couple of years we've been kind of talking about this concept so we've been with our partners and our customers in particular talking about a journey to the cloud with multiple stages where you started first with trying to be able to deal with server virtualization and from there being able to move forward and take a look at what are the things stopping you to get to the cloud which were mission critical business application, how do you virtualize those? And then finally when you get to the cloud what does that really mean? And what we saw is the impediment to really move to building out the private cloud infrastructure was the ability to take the service layer from all the physical infrastructure itself either that is the server, the storage or the network or the security areas is to be able to abstract the software layer out so that you can then increase the efficiencies, the agility and the productivity for the IT organization. So in the past what we've always seen is that IT has spent so much time on maintaining the infrastructure and not trying to innovate. By creating the software defined data center where you have the service layer extracted out you then can optimize all the infrastructure underneath and then you can take policy driven management software that's going to allow you to increase your service level agreements to the business unit owner. And that's really what we want. The other key thing around that is not only is the customer trying to build an on premise private cloud but they are going to maybe want to go out to a public cloud with a service provider and they want to have a federated hybrid approach. So that's what software defined data center means to us and when we work with HP specifically one of the announcements that HP has just made is around cloud systems and converged infrastructure and how they're optimized now specifically with our vCloud suites. So that they have great converged infrastructure that is now optimized for a software defined data center using a VMware environment with a vCloud on suites. Okay, now Craig how do you guys plug into that vision? Yeah, so stepping back from storage, I mean obviously, we are on software defined data center from the perspective of delivering products across the board today. I mean, I think we're very clearly in position with our store virtual platform delivering, you know, virtual storage appliances today, our networking business delivering virtual, our software defined networks today and even the server team is in that game. And so it's, and I think Dave Dantelli kind of commented, you know, in terms of across IT having a very rich portfolio. The notion is, you know, software defined today in, you know, at the end of 2012 and for everybody but there are a lot of folks, CTOs, independent public cloud companies. We see very much decoupling the killer services they might need from the underlying hardware infrastructure and we've talked before on theCUBE about, hey, storage is all about software, right? So this is kind of, you know, distilling storage down to its purest form and, you know, giving those guys an opportunity to take advantage of, you know, what they view as the best storage services for their environment. So it's okay, so it's as services led, you know, through software approach, you know, he said decoupling now for years, I've seen software alternatives to hardware. I think of Veritas, I think of things like software RAID. The problem was, of course, always it didn't scale well and it maybe didn't perform well. It was sort of those two issues because I had a physical box that I had to put it on. I needed to provision that. Now virtualization takes care a lot of that. I can scale, let's say, virtually infinitely. So software defined or software led becomes more viable. Do you see the day where you're actually extracting virtually all or most of your storage services and running those in software? Or do you still need that tight coupling with hardware to get the maximum performance? So I'll answer it with a today example. So with StoreVirtual, that is our lead play in software defined storage. And that starts with a VSA. You talked about performance challenges. Boy, there are some hot servers on the market today. And five years ago, processor technology wasn't what it is today. And there is performance in those systems and we just added support for second virtual CPU in that VSA, so the performance levels are coming up. And by the way, as you decide that maybe you've hit the limits of performance a VSA can provide you, we've actually taken that software and dropped that entire stack down on industry standard servers. We've chosen our own Converge Infrastructure, Perliance and brought together a better together kind of platform folks can grow right into. So, but again, it's running in a VM or industry standard server and really decoupled from the underlying hardware. My last question, and I'll start with Gary and Craig E. Chiaman if you'd like, 10 years. How has infrastructure and infrastructure management changed in the last 10 years? And how do you see it 10 years from now? What's it going to look like? Well, I take a very interesting perspective of it because 10 years ago when I started with VM where server virtualization was something that people looked at from a mainframe perspective and said it wasn't possible to efficiently virtualize an x86 server. And if you were going to do it, you were only going to put maybe print and file applications on it. Today we've seen that the majority of all application workloads are virtualized today. And what we're seeing in the concept as I said the software defined data centers that we're seeing disruptive technology like in the area of software defined networking with the recent app position that VMware has done with Nasera on our network virtualization platform doing what we did in the server space now in the networking world as well. So we see that from a software defined data center that the services that you could have only provided in the past in a physical infrastructure environment will be abstracted into a software environment to give you more agility, efficiency, productivity and make IT a proactive, you know, business environment instead of one that's being reactive. So that's what I see quite cool. Okay, cool. Great, gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate you spending some time with us. Okay, we're live from HP Discover. This is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest. Keep it right there. Right, thank you, Gary. Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.