 This is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org, here with SiliconANGLE TV's live continuous coverage from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. And joining me for this segment is Scott Lowe. Scott's other Scott Lowe on Twitter. He is an author. He is the founder and managing contributor of the 1610 group, and he's also a contributor of the wikibon community. So Scott, first time on theCUBE, welcome. Thank you, I'm happy to be here still. Great, so what we try to do on theCUBE here is we find the smartest people we can find out there. I mean, we try to extract the signal from the noise and share with the community what's going on. And you are one of those great community sharers. As I said, you've written for, it was like CVS multimedia, kind of the ZD net stuff. You're working with us at wikibon. You've written a couple of books. And really from an expertise standpoint, some of the things we're going to talk about today is Microsoft. Yes, we're here at VMware Show, but we're going to talk a little bit about Microsoft. Flash, VDI, and some of the other transformations going on here. So first of all, have you been to VMworld before? I have, this is actually only my second VMworld, but it's a great show. There's so much here. It's bigger than the last one I was at, by far. So, and this year you were actually named a VMware vExpert? For the first time, yes. So congratulations, but you've been a Microsoft MVP for how many years? I have actually never been an MVP. Oh, really? I have not. Okay, so just that you've written a bunch of books. That's okay. So if we look at the discussion of VMware, one of the underlying back discussions is, VMware dominates in the hypervisor market today, but we've been talking for the last couple of years is, is Microsoft closing the gap? Is it good enough? Does the ecosystem need to partner with more than one? And we just had HP on, and HP is hypervisor agnostic. We're going to do multiple hypervisors. You go to some of the Microsoft shows like TechEd and everything. You've been doing some writing on kind of the latest of Hyper-V. So where is Microsoft in the hypervisor market? What's your lay of the land for VMware and Microsoft? Yeah, as I look at where we are today and where we're headed, I see Microsoft is very much a force to be reckoned with and something that VMware's going to have to make sure that they're able to counter in some effective way. In fact, I wrote an article recently for Wikibon and have some stats that show that of the respondents that responded to a survey by Wikibon, we had 57% of the respondents were running more than one hypervisor. All of them were running VMware, but another 57% or a majority of them were actually running a second hypervisor and the hypervisor that was in the lead in the secondary spotless hyper-V. As we see with Hyper-V 2012 coming out from a feature by feature perspective, it significantly closes the gap with vSphere. So I think we're going to see a lot of competition for Microsoft. The war of marketing, the war of words is already escalating. There's a lot of marketing collateral being released and there's a lot of testing going on. Of course, hyper-V has not actually GA'd yet. Hyper-V3, can you say? Hyper-V3 has not actually GA'd yet. So the proof is in the pudding. We'll see what happens once it GA's and what kind of uptake it gets, but there's a lot of interest out there about hyper-V. So Scott, I want to poke for a second at what we call kind of the multi-hypervisor environment. So you've been a CIO before. And what you tend to give from a viewpoint is what should CIOs do? The discussion point we've had in data centers for a while now is the difference between kind of like the pure cloud environments like the Googles and the Facebooks, they only have a couple of applications and they have a homogeneous environment. And the mess of the enterprise is because we have silos and multiple vendors and everything else like that. So should customers standardize on a single hypervisor? Why are they doing multi-hypervisors? Is it a good or a bad idea in your opinion? It really depends on the situation. If you look at a large enterprise where you're gonna have environments that can't be well supported by hyper-V, they're obviously gonna be running VMware. They may run hyper-V in some test beds, you may see developers running hyper-V, particularly once we see the next wave of windows hit because you're gonna see hyper-V built into the client now. I think that's gonna help push hyper-V a little bit as a secondary hypervisor for many organizations. And it may help drive it into the enterprise a little bit, but those large organizations are running workloads that might not necessarily translate well to hyper-V. So they're running VMware because it's a much, much broader platform from a support perspective than hyper-V is currently. Whether that's good or bad really depends on if it's able to be supported. If the organization's meeting its business goals, great. Pick the solution that makes the most sense from that perspective. It really depends on the dollars and cents and the solution that's gonna work. So a lot of it does come down to the dollars and cents. If you look at kind of the open source environments, it's kind of free hypervisors. Many people have said really that the hypervisor is commoditized today. You've looked really closely at hyper-V. Is there a lot of air gap between kind of a standard, kind of the essentials plus VMware versus hyper-V or has Microsoft closed the gap? With hyper-V three, Microsoft has closed the gap in a number of significant ways. From a scalability perspective, it rivals VMware at this point. So when you talk about that monster VM, hyper-V can support the monster VM these days. When you look at some of the enterprise-grade features that are necessary in a hypervisor, particularly no downtime, live migrations and things like that, whereas Microsoft did not generally have an answer for that in the past. With hyper-V three, those issues go away. In fact, they've been really trying to push the envelope on some of those features in the recent release of hyper, or the recent, the coming release of hyper-V, I'm sorry. And you're going to see some of these things like shared nothing live migration, like what was introduced in vSphere 5.1 yesterday. So we're starting to see, I think the competition is good for both VMware and Microsoft and ultimately good for the customer. Yeah, no, that's great commentary, Scott, because VMotion has been, for the last decade, really that kind of secret sauce, kind of the premium functionality that they do, that they kind of pull customers in for. So that's interesting. So should VMware be scared of Microsoft? What have you heard at the show here? Is this a response to Microsoft? What they're doing? Are they still kind of the dominant lead dog, or are you seeing things from the elimination of the VRAM or VTACs? Is that a response to Microsoft and kind of the threat that they see from below? I do believe that's actually a response to Microsoft. Obviously, it was introduced last year, it was incredibly unpopular. I think it was, frankly, quite a mistake based on earlier guidance that customers have gotten from VMware. And it was also a marketing tool that Microsoft could bludgeon VMware to death with. They've effectively eliminated a marketing tool for Microsoft, and that's good for VMware. But if you look at it from a direct cost perspective, Hyper-V is still a free hypervisor, and it has all of the enterprise features that you're going to find, and even an enterprise plus skew these days from VMware, including a virtual distributed switch, all of the live migration features, the high availability features. Now, they're not quite as smooth as they are in vSphere, but they are there, and I think that you're going to see a lot of Seattle start to say, what am I paying for when I can just have something maybe not quite as smooth, but this still does what I need to be able to do to get business done. Great, so fascinating stuff. Look forward to more writing from you on kind of the Microsoft piece. I'd like to transition a little over to the end user computing or BDI space. So while in the hypervisor, all the discussion is usually about VMware versus Microsoft and VDI, it's Citrix has been the lead dog there, certain advanced functionality Citrix has had, in many ways VMware has closed the gap, and Microsoft has partnered with Citrix for a lot of these solutions. So what's your take on VDI? Did you happen to catch the keynote this morning? How's VMware doing, and what do you see in the VDI marketplace? Well, and VDI has been one of these, it's almost a unicorn in some respects to get the perfect VDI solution as a former CIO when I first started looking at VDI, I was looking at it very much from a cost perspective. I wanted to figure out a way to get out of the endless desktop replacement lifecycle that we were always in every five years replacing PCs just to replace them. But with VDI, we were able to start thinking about leaving those endpoints out there and redirecting our funds into really making the core a great place to be, and then basically just having endpoints, kind of return to the mainframe days. But as time's gone on, the economics have not necessarily worked out for all, if you're not trying to do VDI to save money, you're doing it wrong basically, up until recently at least. Yeah, one of the things in the keynote that got a good chuckle, especially across the Twitterverse is, one of the ways that you can lower the cost of VDI is through BYOD, bring your own desktop, or as VMware put out, it's S-Y-O-M, spend your own money. Exactly. So we joked to all of us that kind of love using Macintoshes and tablets or everything, you know, I bought my own iPad, you know, it's supported by, you know, Wikibon, but you know, that was my own dollars that we were able to get that client, so. I see BYOD and VDI as interlinked. I think that's what will actually drive VDI more than anything. It won't be the necessary, the cost savings that come with it from the enterprise as the primary driver, but it'll be to satisfy those BYOD wishes that we're seeing rise these days, because IT can still deploy and provision standard desktop, so no matter what the device. And that's what really we want to see in IT, is as much standardization as we can to make things easy to support, make it easy to train users, keep our costs down, so that things are a bit repeatable. Yeah, is there anything from the Microsoft side about VDI that's coming out in that new release that we should know about? We're gonna see a lot of remote effects enhancements, that's Microsoft's answer to Teradici's PCOIP. Beyond that, I haven't researched enough yet to be able to tell you exactly what other VDI enhancements are coming, but they are coming. I know that they've done a lot with remote effects, they're putting their money where their mouth is, and making remote effects a first rate protocol. All right, so the last topic I think we want to cover is Flash. So, it kind of joked, in the storage industry, Flash is the savior of the universe, the old classic Queen song. So, you've looked a lot at Flash, it's one of these discussion points that when you talk about refresh cycles, our CIO's saying, is this something that I just kind of add to my existing environment, or do I go a brand new architecture, do I have a specific application for Fusion IO, or violin, or am I looking at some of these new hybrid or all Flash arrays? You did what we believe it's called the CIO primer on solid state storage, up on the Wikibon site, free research that you can go find, if you just Google Wikibon CIO primer solid state storage, you'll find it easier, go to wikibon.org. So, what did you find in this study, and what's your advice for CIOs looking at Flash? You know, one of the things that, I want to mention something I saw here at the show, regardless of Flash, the storage market is represented well here at VMworld. I mean, I believe that every other booth is potentially a storage player at this show, which tells you that basically virtualization and storage are inextricably linked to one another. But what we're seeing in the Flash market is a lot of players taking advantage of the revolution that's coming in storage. From a CIO perspective, when you look at what's next, again, it's going to depend on workload. If you're a big data place, you're going to look at a pier, or you're going to look at a whip tail, where you're going to be doing something all SSD, where you really got to have those massive IOPS in order to be able to support your research efforts. But if you're looking at a general company that just needs to do day-to-day work, I believe the hybrid players are really going to be a sweet spot for many CIOs. They have the advantage of having high IOPS for those workloads that require it, but also be able to have high capacity to be able to store the data that's necessary from a capacity perspective in organizations. Yeah, so Flash is a technology, but how do companies approach this? Is it the line of business that says, I have this research application that I can't meet what I need? How does it kind of come into the environment organizationally, where do you see it fitting and kind of playing out? If an organization is right appropriately, it's going to be a partnership between the business and IT to determine what is necessary. The business is going to tell IT, here's what we require, and somebody's going to research that project and figure out what's necessary. And I see basically the business demanding particular applications, and then IT saying, okay, we can meet that need, we're going to need to deploy either an all Flash or a hybrid Flash array in order to meet the performance requirements that you have for that particular application. Obviously, there's also the cloud that comes into that. There may be a cloud provider that can provide those services instead, but it really needs to be thought through well to ensure that the ultimate outcomes are met from a business perspective. Okay, so, you know, can't end without talking about, you know, the next big, you know, the data disruption that, you know, a lot of CIOs are going to need to think about, which is big data. So, obviously, Wikibon done a lot in the big data space. You know, you've come more, we're usually writing about the infrastructure side. You know, wikibon.org slash big data is where we've got kind of most of our research. So, you know, for infrastructure folks, kind of like you and me, with our background, you know, what does this big data mean to you and how should CIOs and companies be looking at it in your mind? You know, if I put on my infrastructure hat, I look at big data as a speed and feed sort of thing. I got to make sure that I'm provisioning the storage that can meet the massive IOPS that are going to be necessary in order to support these huge data sets that crunching these huge data sets, the compute load and the IOPS load. And I got to make sure that I'm building solutions that will also meet the capacity requirements. And obviously we're seeing some other players actually join this space to help in that effort. Companies like Cloud Physics are helping make sure that we're sizing our applications appropriately to meet the workload needs in our environment. So, as from a CIO perspective, those are the kind of places I'd be turning to these days to help me size my environment appropriately for the coming wave of big data applications. Yeah, I mean, Scott, you mentioned Cloud Physics. You know, one of the things I love coming to VMworld is there's so many startups. So, Cloud Physics just came out of stealth. I managed to go to an event last night. They had, you know, Mendel, the guy who, you know, created VMware there. So, it was phenomenal to see some of the startups and brilliant people here. You've been walking around the show. Any kind of cool technologies are interesting. You know, what's on your follow-up research list that you say, I saw this and I really want to dig into it after either technology or, you know, any cool companies you've seen? One of my goals is to continue to expand and scale the flash primer. So, I've actually been visiting with a lot of the flash companies to learn more about them so I can make that resource as valuable as possible for the Wikibon community. So, that's actually where I put a lot of my focus is on the storage vendors. Okay, great. Yeah, yesterday we actually had, you know, quite a lot of them on from, we had a new startup called Proximal Data. It was on early in the morning. Software based solution, Fusion IO was on and had two panels, one of hybrids and one of all flash. So, we'll probably make sure you got those videos linked in the article that you posted. So, Scott, I'll just, any other final comments that you want to add? It's kind of your VMworld experience, you know, here. It's been a great show. I'll tell you, I was thrilled to hear the end of VRAM yesterday. I think the applause was all that was necessary. I think VMware's taking the right steps to counter the coming Microsoft threat and it's obvious that we're moving beyond the data center in a lot of different ways. And this show is proof of that, it's just by walking around the trade show floor. Yeah, absolutely. All right, so Scott, thank you for sharing your CIO viewpoint to the user community out here. Absolutely some, you know, critical things that CIOs and all companies need to look at. You know, VMware's got an impressive ecosystem, but, you know, Microsoft's right on their heels. You want to make sure that, you know, the advancements and the vision isn't, you know, kind of overrun by things like licensing and pricing and all these other things which are just going to drive customers away. So, you can find Scott at Other Scott Low on Twitter. You can also find a lot of his writing on wikibon.org. Any other, whatever else should we go? I believe you've got your own website that we should. I do, I have an aggregate website of all my writing at CIOscape.com and my business website is at 1610group.com. All right, so Scott, thank you so much for joining us. This is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org and we'll be right back with our next guest here at VMworld 2012.