 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to another Wikibon whiteboard, joining me for this segment, Brian Gracely. And we're going to drill in a little bit more on the private cloud. And what we talked about in one of our sessions was what is turning the kind of legacy environments into really our more strict or true definition of a private cloud environment. And we want to look a little bit at the layer cake underneath it. So the first piece I'll start at is something near and dear to my heart, the infrastructure. We say, what is really needed to be able to make my on-premises environment from an infrastructure standpoint something that really is cloud-like? And the first thing of that is, I don't want to have to think about it. There's a CIO I spoke with and he said, what we used to be good at with IT is spending two years and building that temple for my data. And what I need to be able to have with the infrastructure is something that I can spin up quick, something that is agile, and therefore the foundation for that is something that I should be able to get from a template. Really, that is a converged infrastructure or even the newer hyper-converged infrastructure that I start with. So Brian, you and I have worked on those solutions for many years. There's billions of dollars of converged infrastructure being sold every year. It was a good first step to really simplify, especially those days here or those standing up the environment. I can get it installed faster. I can operationalize it so much faster. And I think that's why so many people are using it today. Yeah, it's sort of a natural evolution. When you're trying to go faster, you're trying to take some of the variability out of what's going on. And the reality is people were spending a lot of time kind of building what we call snowflakes that in reality were probably 80, 90, 95% the same from business to business group to group, but somebody felt like it was theirs. And that thought process and the turning the nerd knobs was slowing things down. The more consistent you can make that on x86, converged network, converged infrastructure, the faster that they could move on to actual stuff that drove the business. Yeah, it's kind of sad when you heard the poor administrator where he was like, Scotty, I need more energy. I need a little bit more speed. I need a little bit more storage. And they're constantly have to run around and do things as opposed to, I should just have a really a platform for my environment that I build. And if we look up the stack, some of the stacks went really up the stack. So Oracle would sell you all the way up through the application. We've written quite a lot about what you get the further up the stack you go and the deeper you can integrate that, there's great value that can be owned. But most of the converged infrastructure, really management is a key component here. So let's talk a little bit about some of the management pieces there. Sure, sure. So a lot of different pieces to the management. I need to be able to discover what's there in the infrastructure because I may have some applications more compute heavy, some that are more storage heavy. So I've got to be able to discover what's under the covers. I want to be able to keep SLAs. I want to be able to basically describe that hopefully a business level sort of that or translate between business and technical. What do I want it to do? How available do I need it to be? How fast do I want it to run? So it's got to have an ability to do service level management and service level monitoring. And then all the standards things you need. It's got to be able to do monitoring. It's got to be able to keep track of data. Hopefully that data we're going to put into more analytics engines to be able to optimize it and be proactive with it. So really trying to manage it such that we're managing it to the business application. Right, right. And that's critical, Brian, as you point out here. It's really here is where I need to have, you said SLA, the service levels, where the SLO, the service level objectives driven from the application because that's the whole reason the applications there is to deliver for that application. One of the things we've seen growing from the infrastructure is if I was a convergent infrastructure and it's a box and managing multiple ones of those box has been difficult. Something I think back in the networking world we've had years of that as to how do I manage not just a switch, but a lot of them together. How do I manage it more as a pool? And that's what we're starting to see being done a little bit better over some of these infrastructure. Hyper-converged by its very nature is creating a pool. So really, we need this pool and this management to really come together and allow me to manage all of the pieces together. One of the market leaders in the converged infrastructure, VCE, they take their vision software along with, it's really at the background, the networking is a key piece of it through the Cisco partnership to create what's called VScale and then they can take converged infrastructure, hyper-converged, or even just technology extensions they call them, which is the compute or the storage pieces and plug them in. We're seeing other companies that are doing that to say not only is it one or a family of boxes that can put in, but maybe I create an API and I'm allowing other devices to plug into it and to be able to treat a greater selection of devices from that single pool. Yeah, and the simplest way to think about this is when you're buying technology, when you're buying it in a CapEx-centric model, you tend to be paying for that, depreciating over three to five years and that's fine, it's very standard. But if you think about it from a business perspective, I'm making decisions every quarter, maybe every year and I don't want to have to think, well, where am I in my hardware cycle, my refresh cycle? I just want to treat it like a pool of resources. So new business opportunities come along, there's a pool of resources there, I want to throw it at that and I want this sort of software logic, management logic and the application logic to say, cool. So that's why it's so important that we have this sort of consistency and be able to say when that next system comes on board that it runs like the rest of them so that my business doesn't have to think about technology depreciation, it just says give me resources to go solve a problem or go make profits or whatever they're trying to do. Yeah, it really is to turn this private cloud environment into more, I think of the public cloud. So when I add more storage, it's not, oh, how many boxes do I need? I just need capacity and I'm going to pay for that. I need performance, I pay for that. I need compute, I pay for that as needed. The question is usually on the private cloud, I usually have good processes on how to scale up but scaling down to a little bit tougher as to how I pay for that. Well, and scaling out was tough for a lot of people because the next iteration that you got was different and that's one of the nice things that VC Vision does is it normalizes that, it rationalizes it, but it also gives you the flexibility to say, well, if I still have some things that aren't totally consistent, can I at least manage them to some extent, whether that's a bare metal machine because I have to run a database on there or maybe you're doing some modern stuff like containers and you want to do that in a sandbox for right now. So you want to have that flexibility as well. Yeah, absolutely, because while you mentioned the VCE example was really good at first, Vblock was really one model, now there's a broad spectrum of solutions that can plug into this environment and the more differentiation I have in my environment, the more heterogeneous environment, the tougher it is to manage that all together and that needs to be software-led as to how that pulls all together. Right, and all that is infrastructure operations, infrastructure costs, but the same thing, if you're talking to the development team and you can say, look, I can consistently give you things, whether that's performance or availability and you can give them a common language, again, you're getting to that point where you've got consistency between application people and office people and again, that's time is money and that's valuable to the company. Right, absolutely, bottom line is it's giving the business the agility to be able to move forward and deliver that business value, which driven by getting those apps out faster and making changes more, absolutely. Great, all right, so stay tuned to wikibon.com for lots more research on this space and check out the YouTube channel for lots of videos from theCUBE and the Wikibon whiteboards. Thanks for watching.