 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program here at VMworld 2016. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to have joined as my guest host Keith Townsend, and happy to welcome him to the program. For the first time, someone that actually knows theCUBE, been around many events that we've done over the years, but first time on the program, Gil Schneersen, who is the vice president and general manager of the VxRail product line inside the EMC Converged Platform Division. Gil, thanks for joining us. Thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so Gil, we've been at many events that you've been part of. Remember when EMC launched the V-Specs program, that was something your team ran. You've kind of watched this emergence of, reference architecture, converged infrastructure, now hyper-converged infrastructure for our audience. Give them kind of a little bit of your background and the longitudinal view as to what you've been saying in this space. Sure, we've been dealing with this for five, six years now, where customers basically want to shift the responsibility of building the complete infrastructure stack from themselves to somebody that can give them the service level that they require. And VC has been the forefront of all of that, leading the way and creating market leadership for Converged Systems based on what is otherwise discrete components that could be put together. I'm adding a lot of value and then a few years back we recognized that there was another way whereby if we just recommended a recipe and then our channel partners built it for them, we would get to a similar end result, maybe not as rigorous as a V-Block and we called it V-Specs as you noted. And we ran that for a few years and then we realized that more and more customers are shifting towards a integrated system versus a recipe methodology. And at the same time hyper-converged starting to emerge and so I've shifted my own personal responsibility into what is now the VxRail appliance motion, so our hyper-converged appliance for VM or customer. All right, so you had, this isn't your first generation of the hyper-converged product, there was the EMC version of EVO-Rail, seems to be a big difference in kind of the customer adoption, congrats, talk a little bit about the momentum and what you've learned so far since you've lost this product and what's kind of the big delta between last year when we were talking about this and today? The big difference is that we discovered that in order to deliver a system that can be serviced and supported, hardware and software needs to be designed and built in context. And so before there was a program that came out from VM or we were one of many players, but there was some disconnect where the software was on one roadmap and the hardware was on a different roadmap in the system, they did not come together well. And so last year we have changed up the motion and we've become exclusive with VM or and we've actually formed a joint engineering team, VM or badge employees, EMC badge employees, we changed the business model, we've become much more transactional. And what we also added is tons of configurability, which was a big inhibitor in the previous and we relaunched the product in February. And from what is truly a, let's say a challenging year, has become a phenomenal, phenomenal adoption. We've picked up hundreds of customers since February. And the reason that's happening is because what we've done is we've created the ultimate consumption model for a VM or customer. Assuming that they already have VM or that they already like VM or that they have the skillset in place, we are providing them the economical benefits of hyperconverged without taking away from the already known and trusted VM or environment. And I think customers really like that. So Gil talking about that value of the support system between EMC and VMware, VCE. One of the great advantages of ACI is time to value. I can get my ACI deployed within minutes or hours. What about day two? What's the power of ACI for managing beyond that time to value? People want hyperconverged for three main reasons in my opinion. They want to start really small. They want to grow at very small increments and they never want to migrate again. So everything boils down to those reasons. Now for a VM or customer, there are other choices obviously to get to the same economical benefits, but those take away that environment and add a new vendor and a new storage management framework and new replication, a new support model. And so there is a trade-off and we are offering that same economical advantage without that trade-off because it's a VM or product. Now day one is, I think it's very astute what you said because day one happens only once. But day one happens only once many times for many appliances, point number one. Point number two, life cycle management for the VM or stack all the way to the hardware done in concert happens on an ongoing basis. And the ability to never migrate again when you keep adding nodes to those clusters is massive because that is a true saving and it allows us to never plan. It allows you to start small, only get what you need and not worry about the migration cost and the CAPEX investments. And so people really look at this and there are many other benefits. For example, you can manage your entire environment from that VM or team, right? So hyperconverges takes away components and everything else that needed to manage them and simplifies everything. So I think customers are seeing those advantages very clearly and in fact, some of the conversations we need to have is when hyperconversion is not a fit. So along those lines, you talked about customers not wanting to ever migrate again. Scale, what's the ceiling of a hyperconverged solution? So again, remember I'm focused on that VM or customer. So I will be giving them the scale that VM allows them to get from a vSphere cluster. And after that, they could have multiple clusters and they could all be managed through a vCenter. So this whole conversation about infinite scale really boils down to what do you actually need? If you're running vSphere, we will give you the scale to match that vSphere cluster. And if you're running many clusters, you will get many. So I could either argue infinite scale or I could say 64 nodes. The point is within that context of that VM or environment we deliver the consumption model that allows as much scale as that environment can take. So Gil, you've got a long history working with the channel. I know hearing from Chad, he said, he wants every VBlock customer to also get a VxRail so that they understand the HCI to get a footprint in there. But can you talk to kind of the channel engagement, getting new logos and any specific training or key use cases that they're looking at for the VxRail to kind of drive that adoption? Over 90% of our sales are channel, which is impressive. Only 40% of them are DRIs, which in our language means not known to EMC prior, so deal registration incremental. Channels have embraced VxRail and channels are also important because every hyperconverged solution requires meddling and leveraging the customer's network. So networking skills are paramount and VMware skills are paramount because you're going to deploy it in a VMware environment. And many of our larger channel partners deliver just that. And so that also produces a revenue opportunity for them for services around and planning. So there is great adoption and there's many new logos through the channel as well. Training, we are not heavy on training because we assume that those VMware partners know VMware. So we're leveraging a lot of the existing. I can tell you that going forward will be a little more rigid as to what prerequisites channels need in order to deliver deployments properly. So Gil, it's been officially announced now that the Dell acquisition of EMC going to close September 7th, so close the hurdles. I know everybody's excited, a lot of work's gone into that. It's also been reported that very soon we will see the Dell compute in the VxRail. I've talked to some VxRail customers that are using the quanta-based solutions. They kind of like it. They don't seem to have much preference. Will there be choice? Will it be Dell only? How do you handle the migrations? Can you speak to that? First of all, who is reported that that's going to happen? I think it was a quote from Michael Dell saying that was there. And I've interviewed Chad Sackich, who has said, you know, it's no secret we're working on this. We're working on this, and we're going to do this. We're going to keep our quanta platform as it is. First of all, it doesn't really matter that it's quanta because we are selling VxRail and EMC appliance and we stand behind it. So the hardware matters less. But this is a two by four configuration. We're going to add the alternative configurations such as storage optimized nodes, GPU nodes, and otherwise based on Dell. And we're going to benefit from the greatest supply chain on the planet, which is going to be very good for our customers. Still hardware doesn't matter though because software is what pulls everything together. And so those nodes are going to be interoperable with the existing quanta-based nodes either way. And customers are seeing that. So they're buying today because they know that they have a long-term road map in front of them that they can leverage. All right, so Gil, I want to give you the final word. You know, VSAN is one of the highlights of the show here. It seems strong momentum across a broad ecosystem. As you look at it, you know, why should customers choose VxRail instead of some of the other VSAN choices out there? That brings us back a few years where you could have a storage array and a network and a server and you could put them all together. And customers over time decided that converge infrastructure was a way to go. Taking VSAN, which is an excellent solution, obviously this is core to our product and implementing it over a VSAN ready node, for example, means that you still have stuff to do. For example, maintain compatibility between firmware and VSAN versions. And it also means that you have to deploy VSphere on top of it. So we are giving you the choice through this joint product, which is, as I remind people, this is a product developed by us and VMware together. Fully automate the day one implementation of an ESX cluster and then take the lifecycle management out of the equation because we do all of it for that customer. So we simply provide more value on top of just VSAN, but we have become a major part of VSAN sales. And I think customers were given the choice in seeing what level of automation and supportability that come into play, they make that choice. So we're happy to see the momentum for sure. Kilschen Erson, really appreciate you coming on the program. Happy to have you in the ranks of the CUBE alumni now. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2016. You're watching the CUBE.