 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE TVs. Live coverage from VMworld 2015. Here in Moscone North, double set going. This is the director set. I'm excited to have two guys I've known for a lot of years. Scott Lowe and David M. Davis with actual tech media. Scott, welcome back to theCUBE. And David, it's your first time, isn't it? It is my first time, yes. Well, we're really excited to have you on. Finally, as I said, both of you guys, VXperts, regular participants, people I've known on Twitter, long before I was doing this gig or anything like that. So thank you so much. It's an honor. Thank you, Stu. Yeah, thanks for having us. All right, so first thing. Scott, you got a prop here. You got to show us something. Thank you. I've worked with you when you've been writing a couple of books, congratulations guys, the latest book. Tell us about the GrillaGuides and what's in this one. So the GrillaGuide is a new series that actual tech media has launched with the inaugural book being the Hyperconferenced Infrastructure Implementation Strategies GrillaGuide. This is a completely actual tech media-based publication from design to publication to writing to everything. And this is the, we hope to be the first in lots of books in the series. All right, so great. So first time we've had you on is Potter Actual Tech. Maybe tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing. What are you creating? How are you helping the community? Sure. The actual tech media is basically a content generation, content marketing, and the demand generation firm. We work with a lot of companies in this space. We have managed to work with a lot of hyperconverged infrastructure companies, including the sponsor of our book. We're doing work in the community as far as long form webinars and helping educate people about some of the trials and tribulations and some of what they're seeing in the market today. Yeah, so I mean, David, you're no stranger to education of the community. I've watched some of your training videos, I think probably everybody in this environment has probably watched you, hey, don't I know you? Aren't you that guy that I watched that thing with? Or at least your voice, right? So there, can you give us just kind of your update is what have you been seeing in the last few years? What stayed the same and what's changed when it comes to educating, especially in the virtualization community? Yeah, I mean, I really don't see us doing too much different than what I've always done, which is educate people. We're just doing it in a different way. We're doing books and online webinars and stuff. So I mean, as far as how things have changed, I think the community's changed. The number of the experts has grown. People have, that we've known for years, who were admins are now, they moved up to engineers at big companies and now evangelists. So people have changed roles in the technology at the same time has changed. The keynote this morning, we're talking cloud, hybrid and Docker. So there's just a lot more education, especially around hyperconvergence and storage and everything that's going on there. All right, so let's dig into the hyperconvergence stuff. So that's what the new books add. I'm pretty familiar with it. Heck, Scott, I got a really nice compliment from the community saying, hey, there's this article that you and I co-wrote talking about vSAM, SimpliVity, Nutanix and how those lined up and they're like, where do I get more content like this? So where is the conversation that you're seeing kind of top things that people don't understand or top things that they get kind of the wow or oh, when they really dig into it? Yeah, and I have a number of thoughts on that. Number one is that people just don't know where to start. They think of hyperconvergence, they look at it and some of them think it's a return to the past because we're back to direct-to-patch storage but some of them see if it forwarded is which is basically a leap forward in the data center market. But that's where our role is, is to help people figure out what all this stuff means. And I remember that piece because I think it had 25 or 30,000 views on wikibon.org when I last checked and it was basically a piece that said, here's how all the companies line up and that's the kind of stuff that's really missing from the conversation today is how this stuff really works. Yeah, you bring us from great points because the thing about hyperconvergence, it's a nuanced conversation because is it a return to the past? Well, it's a pendulum swing. We're going back, but we're pulling storage back into kind of the compute layer but it's very different because it's very much software led. It's not just taking a bunch of disks and sticking it in a box and running some cable links and things like that. So it's a lot of software, there's a lot of management. It's a multifaceted environment and boy, there's a lot of options now. I interviewed yet another startup in this space this morning here and I feel like every week there's a new company coming up in this space. Well, even a lot of companies that have been traditionally doing other things are jumping in in the hyperconverged space now because they see the potential business, the potential technical benefits from it and it has a lot of potentially really good outcomes for organizations. I think some of the interesting things are that there are so many conversations about it. People, there's arguments over what hyperconverged really means and things like that. If you're really bored on a Friday night you can go on Twitter and watch people fight about the word hyperconvergence. You know, things like that. Hyperconverged, yeah, absolutely. We've been in way too many of those. I mean, boy, yeah. But it's interesting though. I mean, you mentioned David, the keynote this morning. There's a lot of cloud discussion. I was talking actually to a customer that's using hyperconverged and I said to them, when you just discuss your environment, talk about how it simplifies your environment, really creates a platform for the way you can handle it and organizationally, I mean, it sounds almost cloudy and the customer said, absolutely. That's the way I think of it. It's really got to have that management layer and take care of it. So I don't think of it as another box in my environment. It is now, you know, it's part of my whole cloud strategy. That's right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I kind of see hyperconvergence as almost like virtualization 2.0. You know, I mean, we virtualized the compute. Now we need to virtualize the storage and, you know, be much more efficient with it just like we did with server virtualization. But yeah, I did some speaking about hyperconvergence and yeah, one of the questions from the audience was, you know, my CIO says we should just move everything to the cloud. Why don't we just do that instead of, you know, hyperconvergence? And I think that's a very valid question. You know, it depends a lot on the application and the company and a lot of things to think about. Yeah. Go ahead. I think what we're seeing, the meta trend in all of this is simplicity. I think we're seeing data centers become far too complex, far too expensive, far too difficult to maintain. There's no longer a desire to maintain a one-to-one staffing-to-infrastructure ratio. And people are looking for ways to do things better, faster, cheaper. And I think things like hyperconvergence and what we've talked about this morning in the keynote are all means to that end, is to help us get to a point where the infrastructure really is a service rather than this mess that we have to constantly manage and try to get upkeep. Yeah, that's a critical component. And I think, you know, if we talk about, you said virtualization 2.0, well, when private cloud first got talked as a term, it's like, well, what's the difference between that and virtualization? Are we just adding some kind of management layer? And we're still working at that management stack. We are. It was kind of my critique this morning, if you talk about the unified hybrid cloud strategy out there, well, I've got lots of stuff. I mean, we all know, you put something new in the environment, we usually don't sweep the floor and get rid of everything else. And oh, by the way, all your customers, are they using Amazon? Yeah, they're using Amazon. Are they using Office 365 and some of the Azure stuff? Yeah, you better believe they are. So it's, I mean, it's a heterogeneous, multi-cloud, multi-dimensional world. And that puts a lot of strain on the IT staff, if they don't have the right tools. So, I mean, Scott, you've been in that role as a CIO. You do consulting with plenty of companies. We said the goal is simplicity, but if we keep adding all this stuff, are we adding more silos, are we adding complexity, or is it really, at the end of the day, is it simpler? I think it's going to get simpler. I think that we're in a phase right now where we're going to have to necessarily take some steps that might give us some short-term complexity, but the end result is going to be a simpler architecture at the end of the day. I mean, smaller organizations, I think actually have it easier in some ways in this, because they can replace if they really need to. And they can go out and they can burn their data center to the ground this afternoon and put a new infrastructure in tomorrow. But large organizations can't do that. And I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing so much use case focus from a lot of companies now too, helping them figure out a way to get the foot in the door to ultimately start migrating over to something that's simpler in the long run to deal with. All right, so I'm sure you guys like me here, plenty of just kind of, there's kind of misconceptions out there about hyperconverts. Oftentimes it's almost FUD as to what's going on there. So I wonder if we can talk a few about those, what you've really seen. I know some of them are covered in the book there, but isn't hyperconverged? It's just kind of that mid-range thing for VDI and it's just going to be yet another silo. There's no way it can replace all my workloads or handle real applications or anything like that. What's your findings? I think that's FUD. I mean, we do hear a lot about that from companies, especially legacy vendors that are scared of hyperconvergence because it does bring a lot of different nuances to the equation. But I think that when we start really looking at it more deeply, then you're going to see that it's really can run your mainstream workloads. Now I still think that it's not a silver bullet. It's not going to run everything. But for mainstream organizations, which is the vast majority of what's out there, I see hyperconvergence as a reasonable opportunity for reducing cost, reducing labor, and possibly even help redirect the IT staff to more business-facing efforts. And that's why it's the key to all this stuff. Yeah, I mean, what's been fascinating to me to watch is all these different hyperconvergence companies and how they're different. They don't just virtualize the storage and distribute it, but what do they do that's special? And I think it's been a great competitive thing to market to watch to see how one company's doing data protection. The company offers replication. The other one will throw an open-stack private cloud on top of it and run Docker. And it's like, how many things can they throw into this hyperconvergence solution to make it different and make it unique? And in the end, it really all benefits, I think the customer, to have so many options to add on to this new solution. Yeah, absolutely. It's definitely today. It's not a homogeneous offering from those, like 20 companies that are out there. So I guess, what doesn't hyperconverge fit for? I mean, are there kind of pieces of the market or areas that you should say, hey, maybe this isn't the best fit today? Yeah, I think there are some things out there, but I think those things are going to eventually get encompassed by growing and more maturing hyperconverged offerings. But today, things like major hyperscale or Hadoop type things, anything that massive IO needs, like huge analytics or genome sequencing, you know, that kind of stuff. I think that we're going to have troubles with some of those monster, monster VM sort of applications, just because of the way that the architectures are built today. But over time, I think that's going to happen, just like we had with virtualization. Early on, we couldn't virtualize exchange. Today, everybody does. The same thing's going to happen with hyperconverge. So it's interesting. So David Fleuer, Wikibon CTO has actually written what we consider, it's different from today's hyperconverge, but fits under the umbrella of what we call server stand. So it's called Flash's memory extension. Because today, absolutely, if this is an HPC, super high environment, that's probably not going to go on the traditional hyperconverge that we have today. But, does that mean I put an all flash array in there, or are there new architectures that are really closer to the compute, that really require a low latency, really leveraging some of the newer technologies, maybe it's PCI extension, PCI extension like. So, the whole pulling it in and having that kind of architecture like a hyperconverge, shows some promise down the road is to be able to take that to the environment. Absolutely, and this is really a stepping stone to what's coming. As all flash, and as all the flash successors continue to jump into the market, we're going to see them get sort of integrated or assimilated into the hyperconverged offerings, and we're going to start seeing the ability to take some of those larger workloads, high performance computing, some of the PCI extensions, dim socket memory, or flash storage and things like that, and really leverage it for new workloads. Yeah, I mean, one of the concerns I always have is when people see something that's released, and maybe they even try it out or look at it, and they say, yeah, maybe that's not a fit. 12 months from now, when it's gone through a big rev, they don't look at it, so I mean, look, we know. From my background as a hardware guy, it was like, if you're building a chipset, you probably want to throw out the 1.0 because you don't want to put that in their environment. From a software standpoint, you put it out there, you put it in a test environment, and you matured out there. We've seen all of these environments really mature. I'm curious your take on that, especially VMware's come out big announcement last year with VSAN, and all the evil rail pieces there, which I think was the rising tide to get everybody talking about this space. I mean, every single company that sells a hyperconverged says, thank goodness VMware did this because it's not the, what is that, and why am I going to consider it? They're like, oh, I think I get it because we've got this wave of marketing. Thanks to people like you guys also helping educate with websites and webinars and everything you're doing, but the market changes pretty rapidly, and people often are like, they're thinking about what they heard a year ago, or 18 months ago, or tried it a couple of years ago versus what's available today. Right. I think that if you tried it before and it didn't work, you should try it again. I mean, there's Cycle and all this stuff, and would you agree with that? Oh yeah, I mean, it's like VDI. It's like, well, we tried VDI four years ago. And it was a flop. And it was because storage couldn't keep up. Right, right. David, you're not trying to say that this is the year of VDI, are you? Maybe it is. Maybe it's the year of hyperconvergence. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, great point is you look at the drumbeat of Moore's Law, and it makes so many things that five years ago, you'd be like, I'd never considered doing that to like, wow, I mean, you mentioned Hadoop as a workload. I mean, it's the kind of stuff that before, if I wasn't Google, there's no way I could do it. I just couldn't afford it. Right. So Scott, I want to bring you, you've got a lot of background kind of in the SMB marketplace. Cyperconvergence really playing there. How does that fit? A lot of the solutions seem to be the sweet spot. Add that kind of mid-sized to mid-enterprise market. What about the SMB? I think the SMB, there are solutions out there for them. And I mean, I won't name names, but there are specific vendors that are focused on the space on the SMB and they're killing it. And they should be because they've got great solutions. Now, it's going to require rethinking a little bit. And it's going to mean that some of the, you never got fired for buying X, you're going to have to have those conversations because some of the tier one players, they're the safety net, but they're not the ones that are doing all the really cool, innovative stuff these days. And the SMB is starting to more and more be the beneficiary of a lot of what's happening in some of these startups. And we are seeing more companies. One of my biggest pet peeves is emerging companies that focus on the Fortune One. I mean, they're looking for that massive customer when there's only 10 of them. And there's hundreds and thousands of SMB and mid-market companies that are screaming for solutions that are affordable, sustainable, and that they can actually implement in a way that's reasonable. Yeah, I mean, I remember when I was an IT manager, I came to VMworld for the first time. And yeah, it felt like 80% of the solutions here just weren't for me. So I think it's a great feeling to see hyper-convergence solutions that are for smaller businesses, remote offices, things like that. Companies who have a lot of remote locations, they don't have a high availability for their storage. They don't have data protection that they need. Maybe hyper-convergence can be the thing that they put in that with all these add-on things provides what they really need at an affordable price. Well, it becomes the data center of a box. They get rid of their storage. They get rid of their servers. They potentially get rid of having to deal with a separate hypervisor in some cases. And they get a box that does their data center stuff. And they can have a guy that manages it, especially in smaller companies where they have to wear lots of hats. All right, so your new book, it's got over 100 pages in there, a lot of good pieces, but can you maybe, I know it's tough to choose, but give us a couple of examples of key takeaways that people should, things that they'll take away from that book. We brought the book into three sections. One is about hyper-convergence. Second is use cases. The third is the organizational impact. And I think that's a relatively unique take to the topic. And I think two of the chapters that are of most use are the ones about the organizational impact, because we talk about what it's gonna mean for your staff, because that's a question a lot of people have, is if I get rid of the sand, what has happened to my job? And we talk about that in the book. We also talk about how to think about this from an economic perspective, because it's more than just buying the equipment. If you're able to replace a whole rack of stuff with a few units of infrastructure, there's all kinds of electrical and cooling and other opportunities you can start to think about when it comes to economics. You can start to rethink how you scale the environment. So it starts to let you think of a different conversation around capital expenditures versus operational expenditures. We talk about those kinds of things in the book. So it goes from technical to sea level to help everybody sort of get a handle on what this really means for the organization. All right, so I think we covered hyper-convergence real well. Last question I have for both of you guys is other than hyper-converge, what cool stuff are you looking at? What are you digging into? Where's kind of the biggest opportunity for people to learn more? Besides the book, I mean, I'm interested in all the new vSphere features, network virtualization. Is it plausible for companies? We're talking a lot here about storage. That's a good question. We're talking a lot here about storage, software-defined storage. But what about the other form of hyper-convergence, software-defined networking? Cloud, is it really possible for a lot of companies? So what about you, Scott? Some of the areas that actual tech media is going to be focused on in the next few months are software-defined data center, obviously more in hyper-converged infrastructure because it's changing so fast, data protection and security. I think security is one of those things that is getting a lot more attention these days with some of the things that's happening in the market. And I think it's interesting we're starting to see companies bake security into their products. And that's some of the things we're going to tackle at actual tech media. Yeah, and even I've talked to a couple of companies that have adopted hyper-converged and you said, what do I do now that I don't have to touch my box and do as much? Oh, wait, you know the security project that's been sitting on my desk for two years? And I have time and I can actually work on that. You got it. Isn't that awesome? All right, guys, unfortunately we are out of time. Really appreciate you coming over, sharing your story. People know to hit you up on Twitter and the website for actual tech is... ActualTechMedia.com. All right, excellent. Thank you so much, Scott and David. Always a pleasure to chat with you guys and thank you for sharing with our community. We appreciate it all. Are you doing to help educate out there? Thank you for watching. Everybody will be back right in a second here with our next guest, to wall to wall coverage from VMworld 2015. This is theCUBE.