 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Paul Gillan. We are joined by Young Bin Lee. She is the Senior Vice President and General Manager Storage and Availability here at VMware. Thanks so much for joining us. Well, thanks for having me, Rebecca and Paul. You're a CUBE veteran, so you're back again. We always love having you on the program. So let's talk about, let's start by talking about 14G, a new server, better, faster. What's different about it? Well, you know, we are very excited to work with Dell very closely on the 14G development and launch. You know, really looking for better together opportunity. Certainly coming from my business unit, Storage and Availability, you know, we're building hyper-converged infrastructure solutions on top of the 14G servers. There are many things that's, you know, coming with the 14G that really enhance what we can achieve through HCI. So, you know, one of my most excited feature is the 19X more NVMEs that's available on 14G. Think about, you know, how much that's been translating to storage performance and capacity. So, you know, so we have been working very closely behind the scene. The engineering teams work closely and we're aiming to make our solution available, the VCEN software ready for 14G on day zero of 14G shipping. This is another benefit for our product, the VCEN hyper-converged software. We're really taking advantage of the hardware innovation at the very beginning when they're available to our customers. And what, when you were doing the research to come out with this, what was it from customers that you were hearing? In terms of, I guess I'm trying to ask, how are customers helping you innovate? We heard a lot about this since this morning's keynote. It's being inspired to innovate based on much of the feedback you're getting from customers. Yeah, so certainly staying very, you know, centric to our customers is important in leading our innovation. So, as a very example for the flagship product that my group developed at VMR VCEN, you know, we just launched the sixth generation of the product, the sixth generation in three years. And a lot of the capabilities that we have in there is really driven by what our customer have asked for us. You know, better performance, better TCEO, better security, better operation simplicity. You know, all these things we're responding, I think both to the advancement of technology was happening in technology itself, but also responding to how our customers are asking us to better improve their experience. How rapidly are customers moving to virtualize their storage or to move the software to find storage? Is this happening at the pace that you anticipated? It's actually happening in a very major way. You know, if you think about our product has been on the market for three years and we really keep up the innovation engine so that, you know, we started of building a robust enough of a storage solution and then you add, you know, a loss of operation, day two and management simplicity and then you leverage all the advances in hardware advance and also we're looking at cloud integration. So the customer have been adopting it in a pretty major way. Last year I was at a cube around this time and I call last year the year of HCI and we definitely see that momentum continue. And when I call it a year of HCI this is where, you know, all the vendors start to build HCI solutions, you know, in a mainstream fashion and customers are adopting it in a mainstream fashion. We have a lot of customers running multiple petabytes of data in the vSAN for their business critical applications. So this movement is definitely happening. Now that you are so closely aligned with Dell, does this change the game as far as the power that you can get out of the Dell servers? Essentially, does Dell have most favorite nation status now for VMware? Very good question, Paul. You know, when we were part of EMC, in the early days of software defined storage it's kind of tricky to navigate, you know, being owned by a storage company and then we're building a new way of delivering storage and, you know, fast forward to now, together with Dell and Dell EMC, we're seeing a lot of the dynamic change. So there is a strong belief at Michael Dell's level of software defined storage is ready for a lot of the mainstream X86 workloads. So there is support and, you know, all the way from the senior management of the company. And we're also increasingly seeing how the two companies take a very complimentary view of our portfolio and how we serve our customer better rather than, you know, competing, rather than taking a look at customer-centric view, how do we bring more value to our customer? And certainly, looking at VMware, continue to maintain a very open ecosystem, certainly working very closely with Dell. A lot of the capabilities we're working with Dell, you know, become available on Dell platform very quickly. But in the meantime, we do maintain this open system. I have to say, this and the solution we built at VMware is the only truly hardware agnostic HCI platform that's on the marketplace. We work with 15 leading server members and nobody else is able to do that. We also work with a lot of cloud providers. It's also cloud agnostic. Yeah. I was just going to ask about the goal of VMware is to manage the whole data center. So how do you bring out these differentiated products but also bring them together in the customer-centric way? Right. So I just came out of Pat Gelsinger's keynote and, you know, he's making a bold prediction that today's infrastructure is going to be a hyper-converged infrastructure base. But when we look at hyper-convert, it's not just computer storage, but it's also you put on a software defined networking and you manage the whole thing by a fully automated management suite. And more importantly, this is not only a end-to-end software defined data center solution, but also is seamlessly extending into a cloud with VMware's cloud architecture. So we absolutely are seeing the need of creating this fully integrated set of solutions to our customers because it's simply too hard for them to adopt them at the point product level. And with our new products, we call it VMware Cloud Foundation. This is an integrated software stack, a turkey stack with full lifecycle management work for on-premise environment as well as extending into the cloud. Well, what is VSAN support for cloud right now? Can I manage cloud storage transparently with my on-premise storage? So if you think about VSAN provides primary storage need for data center workloads. So certainly we have tons of on-premise customer usage of VSAN. VSAN today is also already cloud storage. If you look at VMware's cloud ecosystem set of partners, we have about 200 cloud provider partners already implemented VSAN as a way for them to deliver storage need to their customer. If you look at VMware's AWS relationship, VMware cloud on AWS, the only primary storage in that stack is going to be powered by VSAN. So Paul, VSAN is definitely already running in the cloud but we are also looking at better way of, hey, how we provide next layers of storage service on top of VSAN and leveraging the cloud economics of the different type of storage solution. For example, in AWS, and S3, and VSAN being Oflash high-performance tier of storage, how we can raise better fluidity among the different services available to the customer. Yonbin, you said that this was the year of hyper-convergent infrastructure, the era of hyper-convergent infrastructure. What's next? After hyper-convergence, where do we go from here? Yeah, so the way I see hyper-convergence is really a architectural shift to help our customer modernize their data center. From our customer's point of view, they're not our journey to modernize data center, they're on the journey to digital transformation. So the way we, from VMware, we constantly think from what do we see the infrastructure angle, but we definitely need to expand our value to better support application development, better support data management, really to link the value of the infrastructure more directly to our customer's needs. So for example, how we support DevOps type of application development, how we support new age of workload, whether it's analytics or machine learning, how we help our customer better manage and secure their data in this cross-cloud world. So these are newer areas we're getting into is go beyond infrastructure, but to application workload and data to help our customer with their business needs. So can you talk about how hyper-converged infrastructure and software-defined storage work together? Is HCI really a prerequisite for most effectively taking advantage of software-defined storage? I would say HCI is one way of delivering a software-defined storage. It's actually probably the most dominant plate based on customer requirements and customer adoption. So I don't say it's a prerequisite, it's one way of delivering a storage out of using a software-defined approach. Does VSAN pull in HCI business? I mean, are customers, is this an additional incentive for customers to move to hyper-converged? Yeah, so HCI being a relatively new category, the taxonomy is going through a lot of radical changes. Through our discussion with Wikiball and other leading analyst firms, we're constantly defining, hey, what is HCI? You know, if you think about the early days of HCI, it's largely defined as the appliance, the system level, kind of a hardware-centric view. We're seeing a very pronounced shift toward a software way of defining HCI. If you think about the secret sauce within HCI, it's not the box. The secret sauce is the software that's really converging your virtualized compute and virtualized storage together. So we're seeing that movement toward a software way of consuming HCI. So take a look at our business. We do support VSAN as a software, VSAN ready-nodes, where VX3O has fully integrated in appliance. We continue to see about three-quarters of our business come from a software consumption, and we're seeing other vendors also moving into that direction. So Paul, to answer your question, I feel the VMware approach is to address the HCI movement at a software and architecture level and enable our customers to adopt it at software with the most flexibility, or to buy it as the appliance with the simplicity and the integration or consume it in the cloud. So we're really trying to apply this architecture in all these different consumption models. I want to ask you about the gender gap. This is something that I know you are a passionate advocate of getting more women into this field. Business Insider calls you one of the most powerful engineers working in the technology industry today. What do you see as something that will really help that the VMware is doing to get more women into this business? Well, you know, certainly, I'm so excited to see you, Rebecca, as a female host of theCUBE. I'm here. The sisterhood. So it's good to see, you know, even you guys are consciously making this type of change. At VMware, we have been on the mission to create a more inclusive environment for the past few years. A program we have, we see a company called VMware, VMware Inclusion. The prior generation of that was VMware women. So it was lots of what I call a business-focused approach to creating a more inclusive workplace environment. You know, I'm just dying to see more diverse crowd at an event like this. Currently, we still have a lot of work to do. But I'm excited to see quite a few female speakers on the main stage with Karen Quinto's. Yesterday was Diane Bryant. This morning, we had a killer VMware female VP doing the demo for Pat, Pernima. She did a great job on stage. So just, you know, we need to start from having very visible women in events like this. And build on that momentum. Janbeck, always a pleasure to have you on the show. Well, so nice to see you again, Rebecca, and nice to talk to you, Paul. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for my co-host, Paul Gillard. We will have more from Dell EMC World after this.