 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 are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. We're here at the Mandalay Bay in the hang space at VMworld. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLES flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-student Miniman. Our next guest is Yen Bang Lee, who's the GM and SVP of the Storage and Availability Division. Did I get that right? Is that right? Welcome back. Thank you, John. Thank you, Stu. Great to be back here again. You know, I was here just yesterday, so to make this a little bit more fun, I actually have a surprise guest. You know, sitting next to me, our principal architect, Raleza Rivera. You know, he is one of our technologists that's most loved by our customers. So I think he's going to make this segment great. I try to crash all the parties I can, you know. Well, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. First of all, let's just get it out of the way. What's going on with the big party tonight? Well, we do this little shing dig, which has become the best party of VMworld every year, ever since we launched Vsand, the greatest thing ever created, period. And it's pretty good. So you guys are more than welcome and invited to make it to the party. Please join us. So what's new? I mean, you guys had a crushing keynote out there today. A lot of great positive vibes and comments on Twitter. Obviously, Stu knows very much about Vsand, wrote the seminal work on the paper. He writes in the research, but it really is becoming the real, you know, kernel of the innovation engine around a lot of different parts. Can you break that down? Let's spend a minute to talk about what's so important about Vsand in particular and how it brings everything together. Well, sure. So one of the things that Vsand does today is that it's just a key component of the software-defined data center. And it ties everything together now because everything has to be stored somewhere, right? So when you have a suitable, reliable, and performing that everything delivers everything that you want from every aspect that is part of that stack in software, it doesn't get any better than that. So now we enable that true vision completely in that aspect. And that's why Vsand is so big and the way it's architecting where it lives is something that's pretty important. So Yan Bing, maybe you could explain Vsand almost every announcement I've heard this week when you dig down into the components, it was like, oh, what's in Cloud Foundation? Up, yeah, Vsand's in there. How's it working with NXX? Vsand seems to be just a core fundamental piece of what's going on here. Can you talk about the strategic importance of it? Absolutely. I think if you think about what Vsphere, how that transformed compute, Vsand is doing the same to storage. And if you think about the relationship of Vsand and Vsphere, so if you have a virtualized environment, Vsand is really becoming that very foundational layer of your modern virtualized infrastructure. So the tight coupling of Vsphere, Vsand providing the most basic building block and converging your storage and compute together. So I think it's becoming the foundational element and filling all these other innovations that we're going into, whether it's extending it to a much fuller Cloud Foundation, the whole STDC stack with smart life cycle management or the cross-Cloud architecture. What I've been saying is everything, whether it's private, public, Cloud, today's application, tomorrow's application, powered by Vsand. Rawlinson, I've seen you throw down some epic demos in the past. I was a little disappointed, I didn't get to see you up on stage for a keynote this morning. So show us what you've been working on to tell us, is it face melting? Is it awesome sauce? Absolutely. So the keynote that Yan Bing delivered this morning was pretty awesome. And then the demo there, so we tied into the whole story that we're trying to position, obviously as of today, and with a couple of items that were tech preview, what we showcase in this demo is achievable today, for the most part, right? Some of the items that are not there are some of the things that we tech preview, but being able to go across Clouds from a private Cloud to a public Cloud, by changing a policy, if you remember, Vsand was the solution, the technology that introduces policy-based management framework that allows us to have the better life cycle of the infrastructure in that case. And those are some of the things that we showcase in that demo, which are amazing. I mean, if you think about the amount of work, the effort that it takes to do that, right? In terms of just trying to achieve that, it's several clicks, there's a lot of risk in some of these things that have to be done. And then on top of that, very quickly, we transfer, I mean, truly transfer, this was not a replicate this or that, this was a storage, a next promotion, as we call it, across a private Cloud and a public Cloud. And what makes that possible is the Cloud Foundation, the stack of products and features and technology that are there. It's what makes it possible. We are the only company that can do this today, and that's all because of the way all of our components, including with Vsand tied together, specifically in the network side with Vsand and NSX. Yeah, so, one more, yeah, yeah, please. So, Stu, can I inject one comment here? Sure. The real reason why Rolison was not on stage is actually the following. He just made it ridiculously simple for me to do. I only needed to do two things. You know, set the performance analytics on, and then change the policy, you know, yeah. He just made it too simple. As Chad Stack would say, it's the easy button. Basically, to be honest. So, what's the big deal? What's the big aha moment in Vsand? I'm trying to get to the heart of it, and why people are so excited about it. Is it workload mobility? Is it performance with Flash? Is it the data opening up the data? What is the big key issue around why it's so popular? Why is Vsand doing so well? If you can narrow it. So, I think a lot of our customers bought Vsand because of the incredible cost savings they see. This tend to be a strong driver for procurement, and everybody is looking to do more with less. But what customers truly fall in love with Vsand is how simplified, and how it really brings V-Sphere and storage together. Again, that just speaks to the heart of V-Sphere, it means. So, I see that's- So, simplifying the complexity, is abstraction? Yeah, simplifying, you're essentially seeing your compute and storage at the same time. Simplifying a lot of the complexity away. And there is also much more unified management on top of it, because it's not just V-Sphere with V-Center, but there is, we realize automation, there is we realize operation. All these management capability integrated, bringing everything into one integrated stack. So, simplicity is what customers fall in love with V-Sand for. So, a tweet I'll read here, it's interesting, it says that VMware is creating great gravity around V-Sphere, NSX, V-Sand, V-Realize, Workspace One, great individual products, but all great together. Is that kind of the sentiment that people are feeling around it, all of them working together? But yet, individually good, I mean, great. Well, we definitely want to build individually differentiated product, but more importantly, bring them together. If you think about this morning's demo, I was doing a V-Sand segment, but what I demoed is Cloud Foundation working in your private data center, working in your public data center, and connected together. So, Rollins is going to his session at three o'clock. So, I have a session basically going around that, and the deal is this, V-Sand is an essential, key pillar component of that stack, but it's about how well we integrate with the rest of the stack, but integration doesn't necessarily mean the dependencies are one another, right? Because the way we can cooperate and deal with NSX and V-Sand, the values that are there, those products within themselves stand on their own, but together they become much more powerful. And the whole stack is, you know, a bridge between them. That seems to be the key. Correct. The key value proposition. And I think even as we all want to win the hyper-converged marketplace, I do think from a competition point of view, it's really hard to compete on just basic set of product functionality. You know, you win one round, you know, your competitor win the next round. I think for VMR, I really see the power is how we bring the entire stack together, and how we put it in the context of CrossCloud. And I do think what we've demonstrated today on stage, only VMR can do that. It's a fact, only we can do it. All right. So, CrossCloud is coming with, Pat's going to come out on three, we're going to drill them on that one, but this seems to be enabling that. But, yep, some people were saying, five years as Pat laid out for CrossCloud, it's kind of a way out there. We've only been doing the queue for seven years. It seems like everything's changing. Steve Herrods of VC, Chad's the president of a division. You know, things are really moving fast. So, timing is critical. So, can you share your thoughts on what's shipping and where it's, what's going to be in market, kind of where the headroom is, and set the expectation for customers that are really excited by this? Okay, maybe let me start with VCAN. So, like Ronlinson said, most of the capabilities we demonstrated today are already available. There are a couple of pieces of tech preview, the VCAN performance analytics, that's a tech preview, and it's coming soon. Unfortunately, we are not yet at a place to be able to give a specific timeline. In Cription, we are already announcing the beta of that feature. Again, indicating it's really around the corner. You know, but the other capabilities are available today. And if you look at the broader umbrella services of, you know, cross-cloud services that Guido showcased yesterday, they're all in tech preview, and we will definitely be sharing the availability time with our customers. Sure. So, Ronlinson, you talked about how VMware, you think you've got the best stack out there. I know you also spent a lot of time with your storage partners out there. I mean, many of us spent, you know, more than the last decade, there's all the plug-ins and, you know, many years working on V-Vols, which is one of the underpinnings of VCAN. Can you talk about that relationship about, you know, there's V-SAN and then there's all the other storage pieces and some of the great things you're doing with the ecosystem? Yeah, absolutely. So we've done a lot of work in terms of obviously enabling, you know, probably the best storage platform for our own technologies within. But we also, within our ecosystem, enable the same sort of capabilities. So it's not just something we all, we hold on our own. So the behavior that we've developed and delivered with V-SAN, we've also exposed that to our external partners because now the same sort of logic technology, APIs and all that stuff is available in the form of virtual volumes. Right, so they're able to kind of leverage some of the things that we're doing as we evolve the ecosystems to kind of get to that point. If there's one thing that we have, out of all the things that I've done in storage, you know very well, for the past 20 plus years, storage is storage. The features are the features, there's different implementation, things change in performance improvement, but that's it. What have we done here, what we're trying to introduce in our software defined storage stack is, if there's one thing that you'd ask me, what is the one differentiator between what we're doing and applies to our core storage stack and all V-SAN and virtual volumes is our policy management framework. No one has that. And that fix is not just a feature we're trying to address an operational inefficiency problem. This, what you saw today in the demo was triggered by a policy, not by human carrying, you know, complete action. The system can now tell you based on requirements, storage requirements, takes an action, right? Those are the things that help us and kind of makes us kind of stand out on some of the things we do in terms of technology with storage specific. Okay, so just a quick follow up on that. If I'm a customer and, you know, I love VMware and I'm running V-Sphere, but let's say today I don't buy V-SAN, can I still participate in all of this? Can things like inter-clouding, you know, how can I, you know, do I have to buy all VMware? Or, you know, what flexibility and choice is there? So, if you think about V-SAN, as excited as we are about the momentum and we continue to see, you know, this big tidal wave coming at us, you know, 5,000 customers, that's really just 1% of VMR's customer base. So clearly we still have vast workload and customer basis that is on the traditional form of storage where we're trying to help them modernize with V-Vol. And so, like Ronin said, a lot of our value add is really in the management layer and that does not have to depend on the storage underneath. So a lot of those capabilities will be able to be leverageable to those customers. Is the growth rate surprising you that it's not growing faster? I mean, you're doing what, 100 customers a week? I mean, that's pretty phenomenal. I mean, that's, I mean, it's not like you have a lot of growth. I mean, only 1% of the ingest install base. Yeah. So, you're looking to put the pedal to the metal coming up or are you expecting to see some growth? I think we got, we have a, you know, pedal all the way down to the floor. I think the challenge is that we have something that is very unique and it changes not just the technology, it's the operational impact in a data center and for a customer. When you have to adopt this new model of operating functions, it's very different to just shift immediately to that and then kind of leave the other one, right? Yeah. I'm very excited about, you know, the growth potential. And I think even though we're starting to see this acceleration several months ago, I do think it continues, you know, certainly HCI even through you guys' research, you recognize this is by far the fastest growth storage market. And we feel V-SAN is positioned really well given how we're integrated with V-Sphere, you know, how, you know, VMware's broad ecosystem and customer-based support us. So, a lot to look forward to. Yeah, and just to give our audience a little bit of quantification on that, that's over 100% year over year growth for the industry and of course V-SAN, we added at 155% just for your product line. Congratulations on that. Thank you, Stu. Great research, by the way. Thank you. So, what's next? So, you guys are pedaling to the metal right now, pedaling as fast as you can, if you want to use that analogy. I mean, there's a lot of action going on in the software-defined data center, as it's been called. This seems to be fruit that's coming off that tree, if you will, for that kind of policy automation. I mean, that's basically DevOps kind of mindset. That is what people are looking for, that kind of scale. We're going to see more automation and we're going to have, how's this policy thing going to evolve? Where's this going to end up going? Actually, the growth is there in this demand. Where's the functionality going to take, where's the V-SAN going to go? I think there are multi-layers of technology that we're working on, Stu, at the core of the storage data pass, things like encryption, or how we keep up the innovation with all the greatest hardware innovation, that curve of IOPS and performance improvement, the next generation NVM hardware is going to bring. So there's continued vibrant innovation at the data layer. Now at the management layer, we talk about policy, intelligence, analytics. Then you go up to the service layer, think about data management and all the cross-cloud services. So, you know, our engineering is quite busy working across the stack. Yeah, I think we have a lot to do and a lot to look forward to. And Michael Dell feels comfortable with you guys growth and he's happy with the performance, now they've got a date September 7th, is the big close of the transaction? Yeah, I think Michael is following all the storage people on Twitter. He's coming to the party. He's coming to the party. He's come to our HCI Zoom, where he really interacted not just with the team also with the customers and especially I appreciate Michael's commitment to the open ecosystem. Because in the HCI Zoom, we have the HP, the Lenovo, the Cisco and he spent time with all of them. So, that commitment to maintaining this independent open system for VMware is extremely important for the success of VCEN because our ambition is to address all use cases that vSphere address today. Not limited to what Dell or EMC is about. Yeah, and that's the big positive message. Yeah, John, I mentioned this morning, I was talking to a customer who was, you know, sorting out what he was going to do for Hyperconverge and he got a call from, he didn't know who from Texas and there's Michael Dell saying, I want you to feel comfortable with Dell and what you're buying from the HCI marketplace there. So, you know, definitely top of mind for Michael, one of the key synergies for kind of Dell buying EMC and VMware, you know, control is part of that. Yeah, thank you for coming on theCUBE again. Great to see you back, Ronaldson. Thanks for sharing the news with the party and also the great knowledge and success you're having at the technical level and the stack. Congratulations and again, simplifying things is always a good business model, you know. So, congratulations. Well, thank you, John, thank you Stu. You guys make tech so sexy and interesting. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. We're theCUBE here live at Mandalay Bay in the hang space at VMworld 2016. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE.