 Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm joined by two CUBE alumni. Please welcome Ehab Terasi, Senior Vice President and CTO Networking at Dell Technologies. Ehab, welcome back and welcome to the virtual CUBE. Yeah, thank you. I'm excited about this. Thank you. We're going to have a good conversation because Vijay Ramachandran is also here, VP of Product Management at VMware. Vijay, welcome back. Thank you, Lisa and happy to be here again. So with a lot to unpack, we're on the cusp of VMworld 2021. You guys are making an announcement. We want to talk about NVMe, why it's important or break down the announcement. Go ahead and start, Ehab, we'll start with you. NVMe, why is it important? What is it? All that good stuff. Yeah, this is excellent topic. And this is really an important component of infrastructure these days. Modern applications are changing how they consume infrastructure. That's because the workloads are evolving. Some of them are AI type machine learning workload that need very high performance. There's also a continued trend by our customers to put workloads in public cloud and on-prem and create a hybrid multicloud model. And also the new exciting stuff is all have to do with edge applications and distributing applications everywhere with automation and connectivity to where they need to be operating at on-premise. So long story short, these trends, these new applications, how the deployment models work is really diving the need for NVMe becoming the key technology for getting your data and storage. And with it, NVMe over fabric and connectivity is starting to become a very important topic. How do you have this discussions with customers in terms of their next steps, especially in the last year and a half, Ehab will stay with you, that we've seen such acceleration of digital transformation. What have those customer conversations, how have they changed? The conversations have changed in two big ways. One, they really want to discuss outcomes. They know that we can bring industry leading infrastructure and tools and automation and software, but they really want to discuss outcomes. How do I automate my operations? How do I get to unpack the value of my data no matter where the data is eyes and where it's coming? So that's the first big change is people have shifted completely to outcomes. And the second change is that now there's a really good discussion about performance and sustainability. How do I make sure that I'm meeting my sustainability goals? I'm meeting my performance goals instead of just discussing one piece of the solution. Got it, BJ, I want to bring you into the conversation now. Talk to me about NVMe and its evolution from VMware's perspective and some of the changes that you've seen in the last dynamic 18 months in the market. Yeah, thanks for being here, Lisa. These are actually, I think that we are living in interesting times now. What we are seeing from the VMS standpoint is that applications are evolving rapidly and demanding more performance, lower latencies, higher throughput, and these are modern applications. And NVMe, what we're seeing is that NVMe as a protocol is becoming the de facto sort of connected protocol for these applications. At the same time, what we're also seeing is that the infrastructure team at scale, when they deploy these applications at scale, they are moving towards a disaggregated architecture in the data center. And all the enterprises are moving towards this because they want to emulate the public club. And so, what's exciting about this announcement and sort of what we're delivering together at Dell is that the combination of NVMe plus TCPIP provides, sort of brings both these worlds together. It provides performance and latencies that these new applications, these new modern applications need. At the same time, it provides a different way that is disaggregated. And so the combination of these two is indices changing in my opinion and we'll see that this will become sort of the de facto way to deploy infrastructure in our data centers. And that's what we're seeing at VMware. Got it, thank you. Let's go ahead and now unpack that announcement that Vijay alluded to. Dell and VMware have announced an end-to-end NVMe TCP ecosystem solution. Back over to you, Ehab. Talk to me about this. What is it? What are some of the core components? And then we'll get into benefits. Yeah, perfect. So we both see NVMe over TCPIP as this new future storage connectivity. And it is a pivotal moment for the industry. There's always been debate about what protocols you use for connecting storage, for performance speed, but the time has come for NVMe over TCPIP to become the de facto future protocol. What we're announcing is, first of all, we're announcing a new software product called SFSS from Dell. And that software product will automate the discovery, provisioning, and automate the setup of all the storage networking, how you connect all the hosts to the storage targets in a fully automated way. This is something that has been very complex, very hard to do manually, and a one by one. So that's a whole new software product. Number two, we're announcing the availability of NVMe over TCPIP on our key Dell products, which is PowerStore, PowerEdge, which is our server product, and also PowerSwitch, which is our networking product. So the combination of the new software tool, SFSS, and all the availability of NVMe over TCPIP on our compute storage and networking, that gives customers the end-to-end ecosystem to be able to use it, along with the VMware capabilities that are essential for it. Yeah, and Vijay, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to add to what you have just said. Of course, VMware is fully committed to bringing this, that option of NVMe, along with our partnership with Dell, to the market, and Dell has been, our partnership with Dell has been instrumental in bringing this to the market. Now, the cool thing about this particular announcement and what to bring to the market is that the smart fabric services manager is actually built into vCenter. So from a VMware standpoint, a vSphere administrator or VMware administrator can, so stay within their vCenter console and be able to manage provision, manage and monitor NVMe over fabric, NVMe over TCPIP connections. And so it sort of bridges the gap between storage and a VMware world that you will. And also the vSphere, the launch of NVMe over TCPIP and vSphere 7U3 is the last component of this announcement between putting SFSS inside vCenter, vSphere enhancements and the Dell products. The end result is the customers get this bump and new capability. However, they can continue to use all the management tools that they have today. So this is an easy automated lift and they get this new capability. An easy automated lift though, that sounds like magic to I'm sure a lot of folks ears. Ehab sticking with you, talk to me about, this is a new direction for Dell and VMware. Talk to me a little bit about that and the impact. I think the new direction is that we have supported multiple protocols for connectivity, fiber channel, RDMA. But I think now as we go to this next evolution and the fact that the world is going to multi-cloud and edge and distribution, the new direction here is we're putting a lot of investment and energy, both of us into making NVMe over TCPIP, automated and high performance. As Vijay said, we've been collaborating for over two years on this project jointly. That included new standards, new innovation, new software capabilities, new divers on all our products. So although we make it sound simple, this is a company-wide on both side innovation effort to make this possible. Absolutely a big innovation effort. Vijay, go ahead. Now I was going to say, just to second what Ehab said, we work as one team, we're doing two companies, but we work as one team and really brought some innovative features and functionality out to the market and really excited to see this come to fruition. We've been working on it for two years now. So two years before the pandemic started, I'm curious to get both of your perspectives on how the tumults of the economy and the market of the last 18 months have influenced. We've seen so much acceleration in digital. How has this interesting time affected or accelerated what you're announcing or has it? I will start and Vijay, whatever you'd like to add, is that I think what we've seen during the pandemic is acceleration of adopting of a cloud operating model by using more of public cloud, but also using automation that we have built into our products, both VMware and Dell. And so this kind of automated type software tools falls completely in line with that. Customers more and more want the infrastructure automated and they want it cloud-like with, as a service usage-based type models and we're both invested into that area. Yeah, and Lisa, if anything at all in the last two years since the pandemic, what we are finding is that it's no longer a decision between is it on-prem or public cloud, but it's actually an and decision. It's on-prem and public cloud. There's truly becoming a multi-cloud world. And so to make this multi-cloud and then customers deploy the right applications and the right workload in the right place depending on the needs. And so in this multi-cloud world, having this automation and having a consistent way to manage infrastructure in an automated fashion across these multi-cloud deployments is becoming key. And so this is a key component of that. What we're announcing is a key component of that kind of a model that customers are moving towards. Let's talk about the customer benefits. You both mentioned performance, sustainability, low latency, high throughput. Give me examples of each of those, of how this technology will deliver that for customers across industries. This is where we've really enjoyed working together and where Vijay and his team did fantastic work to test the value of having this partnership is the end-to-end customer sees the performance and benefit from the eyes of using both the software stack from Dell and VMware, as well as the infrastructure below it. And we've been able to jointly test what the customer will see. And what we have seen, which I have to say was a surprise to us. We expected benefits, but it even, it was one of those aha moment. Oh my God, this is, we thought it was good, but it turned out to be even better. So on the performance side, it's about two and a half to three times the performance of iSCSI, which is the other technology we would compare this to. And on the latency side, it's 70% less latency and uses even less capacity in terms of CPU. We have not seen that kind of performance improvement from a protocol for a very long time. Changing networking protocols usually gives you some little benefit, but not this kind of a step function of performance. So I think the customers will be very excited about this. These are some submit numbers. Vijay, go ahead, extend on to that. No, I have nothing more to add because we have been extremely encouraged by the performance numbers that we saw. And here was right, we actually, it exceeded our expectations, right? And we knew that NVMe was the right way to sort of deliver performance. But to see this kind of results in real world is very encouraging. Mugres said there are several sessions at VMworld that are covering this topic. I'd like to get both of your perspectives on some of the sessions that you're presenting in and some of the key takeaways that the audience can learn. Ehab, we'll start with you. Yeah, I mean, we're starting with a session to explain the overall strategy and we're going to show demos exactly how would you use VMware software and Dell SFSS to configure, implement, how does that compare to the customer experience today? That's going to be an exciting session between myself and Paul Turner, who is the VP of product also at VMware. I think that kind of with these visual demos, people will see how fast automated that is, which is really the message here. Then we have multiple sessions from our key technical experts who are going to go through a deep technology review of the stack and how to do it and the functionality. Yeah, and Lisa, on the VMware side, obviously we have a number of sessions on various topics on storage. The one that I want to call out is there's a session that I'm doing with Mark Fleischer who's a CTO for storage and for cloud platform really. And we are discussing VMware's vision and strategy for storage and availability and NVMe is certainly a key part of that. But as we just talked earlier, the whole automation and the multi-cloud aspect of the parameters is critical. So we're sharing what, how we are approaching this whole multi-cloud world in this with storage and availability innovation. So I'm really excited about that. So a lot of news coming out on the NVMe over TCPIP front, talked about the collaboration, the acceleration of that, the directional shift. In terms of go to market and availability, when, where can existing customers go to learn more information? What's the joint GTM that Dell and VMware have? I think, Vijay, you want to start on vSphere and I'll add or? No, go for it, okay. Okay, so all the product we talked about today from vSphere 7.U3 power store, power edge, all of them will be available starting immediately after VMworld. And between October and November, everything we talked about will be available. And during VMworld, we will announce how customers can use it, download it, buy it. As we said before, because they are, SFSS is implemented into vCenter. This will be a familiar way for customers to use it, download it and implement it. And a new release of vSphere is something customers are used to. We have many customers on power store. So they will be getting a new software release and update with the new functionality. We do plan to create developer experience modules, sandboxes for people to play with will make more announcements on that in the future. Yeah, and this, as you have said, this functionality is built into vSphere and vCenter as well. And so the next release of vSphere will have this functionality. And you'll see a lot of noise about this at VMworld. That's sort of our coming out party. Excellent. Well, it sounds like it's gonna be a good coming out party with a lot of information to come around the VMworld time frame, some great education and deep technical dives that you guys and your teams will be providing to customers in all industries, which I'm sure they will be very much appreciative of. I appreciate both of you coming on, sharing with me the news. What's exciting about this, the impact it's going to make. And we look forward to hearing some of the news as it gets rolled out. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you. Great to have you guys. For eHob, Terazi and Vijay, Rahman Chandran, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a CUBE conversation.