 With me now are Manish Agarwal, Senior Director of Product Management for Hyperflex at Cisco, at Flash for All. Number four, I love that on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the Director of Business Development and Sales for Cisco, Mr. Hyperflex, at Mr. Hyperflex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news in Hyperflex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks a lot, Dave. Thanks a lot. Hey, Darren, let's start with you. So for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversion provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud and they're building it with hyperconvergence in particular hyperflex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. Darren, let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? So there's many things they're trying to achieve. Probably the most provable on this is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer. But I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see, obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconvergence and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence. Very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconvergence. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer. Ease of management. To make it easier for their operations. Again, we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model by deploying Hyperflex. Also around the time savings they make. Massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged. Especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the Edge without the big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key bit. And again, not always, but obviously there's our case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for, yeah. Great, thank you for that, Darren. Manish, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyperflex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? Yeah, thanks, Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called Hyperflex Express. This is Cisco Intersite led and Cisco Intersite managed eight hyperflex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD rack, UCS AMD rack. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local containerized witness and let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for edge environments. So this leverages the Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyperflex configuration that we have is a two-note configuration which is primarily used in edge environments. Think of a back home in a department store or a oil rig or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these two-note configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for hyperflex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witness is to when the infrastructure is going down. It basically breaks sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even at Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any care and feeding of that infrastructure, you can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. So I want to ask you about hyperflex express. Obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can hyperflex express help customers respond to some of these issues? Yeah, indeed Dave, the primary motivation for hyperflex express was indeed an idea that one of the folks on my team had which was to build a set of hyperflex configurations that would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that there is something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for hyperflex express. These are still hyperflex configurations and you would at the end of it get a hyperflex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these. These are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. We've also added an attractive price line for these. And of course, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that we are using components that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective. For partner and sales, this represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disk friendly configurations which they would find very easy to stock and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the disease as well. This is interesting, Manish. I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, I mentioned them at the top, more than 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about Manish AMD? That's new for hyperflex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? Yeah, Dave. So in the short time that we've had UCS AMD RAG support, we've had several record-making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And hyperflex, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage. And this we are hoping that it will basically unlock a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. Yeah, cool. So Derek, can you give us an idea as to how hyperflex is doing in the field? Sure, absolutely. So both me and Manisha have been involved right from the start, even before it was called hyperflex. And we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking and where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on, they're using different use cases on there and from an edge perspective, more numbers of sites. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we're the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. I think one key example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience, is the Super Bowl. So the SOFIC stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyperflex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4K video distribution and it's completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big news article, but it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, were able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes across a few racks and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's the wind for us. So we really are really happy with the hyperflex, where it's going, what it's doing and some of the use cases we're gonna involved in, very, very excited. Come on, Darren, Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. It is, I follow NFL. It's invading London. Of course, I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, but anyway, last question from Manish. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyperflex? Yeah, so, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with hyperflex since the beginning. But I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for hyperflex. One is, Intasite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're gonna take this beyond the life cycle management, which is for hyperflex, which is integrated into Intasite today and element management. We're gonna take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops. Because Intasite really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as customer valued actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the hyperflex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third-party server platforms and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there, one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X series. X series is another thing that we're gonna be able to, you know, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X series, we'll have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyperflex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyperflex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And you'll see the hyperflex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, recording performance from. You'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient and we'll optimize it for, you know, containerized workloads meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities and optimized for public cloud. So those are some things that the team is busy working on and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are going to love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on theCUBE. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.