 Okay, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the evolving capabilities of VCF on VxRail, VCF being VMware Cloud Foundation, obviously VxRail from Dell Technologies. Samuel Nimi is here, product manager of VCF on VxRail. He's got the keys to the kingdom. He is going to give us the update on what's going on. Obviously with all the major IT operational conversations going on with Cloud, Cloud Native, how to get the best excellence out of the organization as we come through the pandemic. Big stuff happening. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, happy to be here. In June, you guys announced some major updates that's coming on to VMware's Cloud Foundation on VxRail that would allow customers to extend their capabilities and their ability to innovate in the landscape and with external storage. Can you take us through what's new, what's the situation and tell us what's happening? Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, if you're, for those who might be watching who are not familiar with VCF on VxRail, VxRail is our hyper-converged infrastructure system that allows for massive data center scaling at, from no to no to no. VCF on VxRail specifically is the VMware SDDC software suite that allows us to create a private cloud with VxRail deployments. So instead of saying, I wanna manage this cluster and this cluster and this cluster, VCF allows us to manage VxRail clusters and deployments at a big scale. So, VCF and VxRail, you know, we've gone from in the last two and a half years or so that we have been available as a product. We've gone from nothing to tens of thousands of nodes deployed across the world. And it has been a roller coaster of a ride. And we're just thrilled with the success that we've had so far. And what's been new since the release in June? What's new? Absolutely. So, you know, one thing that we've realized from a VxRail perspective is that, you know, as we grow and as our data center and enterprise scale customers continue to grow their VxRail environments, VCF on VxRail has to evolve as well. And in June, we announced an ability for Vcf and VxRail to consume external storage. Now, hyperconverged means, you know, storage, networking, network virtualization, I should say, your server all in one box. External storage gives us the ability to utilize your existing Dell EMC storage arrays and use that data-centric kind of storage deployment with your existing or net new VCF on VxRail deployments. It's really exciting stuff. And we're, you know, really looking forward to be able to even better provide solutions for our customers at that big enterprise scale. So a lot of change happening. Scale is a big word here, right? We've seen scale, modern applications looking for environments, talking about hybrid private cloud. I mean, essentially cloud operations is private cloud, if you will. I got to ask you on this big product that you have VCF on VxRail, what are the drivers behind making this option viable for customers? What are they looking for? Why are they consuming it this way? What are the key aspects of driving this force? Absolutely. So, you know, what we've found is that with VSAN, which has been widely successful on VxRail, it's fantastic for general purpose workloads. And we don't see that changing. What we see is an ability for our customers to leverage the extreme speed of our PowerStore T, our PowerMax and our Unity XT storage arrays so that you can get that sub millisecond latency that you're used to out of those storage arrays and have the same benefits in a, say another workload domain of your existing VSAN deployment. Now, my favorite example of a use case for that is when you have sub millisecond latency that's something like a PowerMax can provide. Let's say you're standing at the gas pump. You know, it's cold. I'm here in Minnesota. It was three degrees here yesterday. When I'm standing at the gas pump, swipe my card. I don't want to wait and wait and wait for that database hit. For my card to go through, I want it now. PowerMax and our, you know, PowerStore T, Unity XT with those crazy low latencies, they allow our VCF and VXRail customers to not have to wait at the pump. So when our enterprise customers have those things deployed with that crazy low latency for database hits, you're not standing at the pump. You're not waiting awkwardly at the grocery store for your card to go through. You really get that extreme speed that those big storage arrays can provide. Yeah, I saw the weather and some of my brother lives in that area too, who's complaining about it on the family text. But this is an edge case, whether you're swiping your credit card on the pump, this latency discussion, the edge is really a key conversation because that's what you're going to get cold waiting, but still you could be, you know, key data store for say some equipment in a manufacturing operation or on a farm or somewhere. So again, this brings up the whole edge. Is that an area? Is that the driver and one of the drivers? Or is it also just in general, the performance? You know, I would say it depends on what you need out of your storage array. If you need that performance at the edge, you know, VCF can deploy remote clusters in a metro distance within 50 milliseconds so you can have your center and you can have your edges. You can put storage arrays behind those edges. You can have that kind of, you know, speed from place to place to place to place, or you can use traditional vSAN storage. So it really comes down to what your storage use case is. Maybe you have a need of the data replication that PowerMax can provide from one site to the other and that's your backup for your edges. Those kinds of things can all be utilized with VCF and VxRail and remote clusters at the edge. What are some of the customer use cases? While we have some examples of customers that you have and what they're interested in, what kind of advantages they're seeing with the capability? Certainly. So we have a number of customers who have high level of data resiliency requirements that, you know, we have that 99 point, lots of nines resiliency that the PowerMax, you know, and it's four bears VMAX have provided for in 20 some years now, those customers say at our financial institutions where they have to have massive levels of resiliency. We have customers who frankly have separate buying cycles where they buy their compute one year and then maybe two years later that's when their storage comes up for renewal. So those customers are able to leverage both VCF and VxRail and their external storage. You know, I'm not gonna drop customer names. I've got a couple that come to mind, but I'll say in the financial institution and in healthcare especially is where we see. What problem are they solving? You don't have the name names because I know it's helping the company and everything, but you don't want all the reference stuff. But what's the anecdotal, what's the main problem? What's kind of the use cases that jump out and people are watching might think that they should be using this. What signals and signs should they be looking for? Absolutely. I would say first off data resiliency. You know, I'm just in love with PowerMax. So that's the first thing that jumps to mind. Extreme performance, whether it's databases or having a need to get data out to their customers as quickly as possible. Replication comes to mind. Those are the big three. And then of course, where you maybe need a little bit of compute and a lot of storage. Our dynamic nodes in VCF on VxRail means that we can sell our nodes without any storage. And that really gives us an ability to just say, I need a lot of compute. I need a little compute. Whatever it might be, I'm going to scale my nodes and my storage independently of one another. Where can people get more information to find out? Sure, absolutely. So for more information, you can always go to Dell.com. You can reach out to your sales team and talk to your VMware sales team as well who are well versed in VCF on VxRail deployments. But we're always here, Dell.com and we're always just an email away. So while I got you here, Sam, I want to ask you about this notion of simplifying the IT operational experience. In your view, as you look out on the horizon from your perspective, being the product leader on this area, what's on the mind of the customer? What's the psychology out there? What's some of the environmental conditions that they're facing relative to their landscape? Is it do more with less, the classic cliche? Is it actually a replatforming? Is it refactoring? Is it application developers? What's some of the big drivers there in terms of the customers that you're seeing? So as a customer today, I have so many options for where to put my data and where to put my VMs and my development. I want to look at what is the best route for my business? Is it a hybrid cloud offering? And if yes, what's the easiest way to manage that? Because at the end of the day, if I'm spending money on maintenance, spending money on staff who are not accelerating the business but just keeping the thing going, what's the best way to do that? And VCF on VxRail today really allows our customers to deploy a private or a hybrid cloud rather and maintain the entire thing through one interface, that interface being SDBC manager. When we look at the benefits of it, VCF4 on VxRail today provides Tanzu. So for customers who need to have a development platform in their hybrid cloud, Tanzu is the easy option or the easy answer for that. So it is a big answer, what's driving this? Lots of things, but really it's data center modernization. It's moving from a traditional servers with virtual machines on them into the hybrid cloud. Yeah, and you were mentioning resilience here on the data, I think that's awesome because at the end of the day, it's data driven. Everyone wants more data. Database has been around for a while. So making that go faster is really critical. Awesome, awesome conversation. And now on the VCF on VxRail, what's the bottom line? If you had to summarize the evolution capabilities that are coming on, they're evolving. You're the product manager, you get the keys to the kingdom. What's next, what's happening? You know, if I'm looking at VCF and what's next and what's on the way, really life cycle management. So when our customers talk about what it looks like to life cycle their systems without VCF on VxRail and the complexity of doing that without VCF, it's life cycle management is the reason for being. We look at everything we life cycle from the hardware of the VxRail nodes including disc firmware, HBAs, NICs, NIC drivers, et cetera, to the VCF, SDDC software suite. All of those components there in V-Sphere, V-Center, ESXi, I'm going through the checklist in my head here. The V realized components, getting all of that life cycle to a good continuously validated state is really, really tough. And then you add storage. That's one more thing. So I wanna be able to just have a single click that will go through LCM, my entire hyper cloud environment from hardware to software stack so that I can manage that external storage that I just added to my system without adding more pain. So really with VCF on VxRail, it's the only jointly engineered solution from an HCI vendor like VxRail and VMware to deliver that single click, soup to nuts hardware to software suite LCM. LCM is the name of the game and we're going to continue to make that innovate on that in new ways that I can't even say yet. I can't wait to hear the innovation is a great model. Putting that out there, getting the environments all scaled up. Sam Nimi, product manager VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail with Dell Technologies. Thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. Absolutely, thanks John. Okay, it's theCUBE here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier host. Thanks for watching.