 Welcome back everyone. LiveCube coverage here at VMware Explorer. It's the second year of Explore. Our 13th year doing theCUBE at VMware's conference, formerly VMworld. I'm John Furrier-Oz. Dave Alonso-Nissan. I'm here with Rob Stretchy. He's leading our research for theCUBE. We've got two great guest bill brothers and CUBE alumni. He's the VP of Solutions at NetApp. CUBE alumni have been in NetApp for many, many years. It's mere to do. Worldwide VMware Strategic Alliance Solutions Architect Leader with AWS. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate you guys. Got to love the cloud action. Phil, great to see you. What's new? You know, what is new? You know, I was thinking, it's, I've been coming to this event since it was in Los Angeles, probably with you in about 2005. And I was thinking like, coming over here, that we've gone from telling people what a VM is and why you would want one to, could you actually use that for a database and basic stuff like that? And now we're sitting here working with AWS on how to extend to the cloud and we've got these cost reduction, like there's, we've got customers here because we were here last year just extending the solutions with AWS. This year we've got customers improvements to the products and we've got AI to come in the future. It's like, it's a very interesting time. Sameer, I want to point out, I've interviewed, I've known NetApp for a long time, since 1997 as a company. You've been there forever, OG at NetApp. I remember, I remember when I first started covering AWS around 2012, 2013 timeframe. At that time, NetApp was already in the cloud. I mean, NetApp doesn't get the credit. They were doing stuff against the grain, by the way, in the storage industry. Not the brag, but that was one of my teams, Dave. We were porting ONTAP onto AWS in the marketplace. Fast forward, cloud volumes ONTAP. So, as Andy Jassy would say, there's no experience is the best compression algorithm of their experiences, can't just get there. Where are you guys now? Because right now the cost refactoring, we did a lot of Amazon savings in the cloud, I just did a segment on that. People are right sizing in the cloud, not repatriating, all the repatriates out there, trust me, there's net new on premise, don't get me wrong. But that refactoring and that right sizing is being reinvested, okay? This is the conversation that we're hearing in the marketplace. I'm going to right size the cloud play, I want to reinvest in more horizontal scalable IT workloads on-prem and cloud. Yeah, I think what it comes down to is you have customers who are utilizing NetApp technologies in their on-premises environment, right? Now they're also utilizing it in AWS, right? With NetApp ONTAP, FS6n, it comes into play, where you can leverage AWS services. Now customers want to take it, hey, there's VMware cloud on AWS. How can I leverage my investment knowledge of NetApp technologies with VMware cloud on AWS? So last year the announcement was made for our NetApp ONTAP FS6n, right? And then it comes down to where the advancements have been made, and you mentioned the customers already that are utilizing it, right? They're in different verticals and whatnot. So it shows where now you can decouple your storage from your compute and your memory, right? So now, rather than growing out your STDC by adding additional hosts, you no longer have to do that, right? So from a TCO construct, that comes into play. One thing that hasn't changed with cloud and on-prem is that infrastructure is a lot about price, performance, and ease of use, like when you get down to it, right? And when we first started working with Amazon, it was clear that there's just the ability to call EC2 just quickly, and so my team's developed as a SaaS, essentially ONTAP is a software layer that runs on EC2 and EBS and S3, right? And so, when we first built that out, we were trying to provide file services easily on the Amazon cloud, enterprise file services. That actually, the next step was obvious to us, it was now you got to get VMware on-tap. It's actually the same thing that happened to NetApp's business on-prem over the last 20 years. We're playing that out again with the apps moving to the Amazon cloud right now. One thing I always want to tell people is the economics are changing so fast on the cloud side that a lot of people say, hey, I looked at it a few years ago and it was expensive, and I'm like, yeah, well, look again, because like Samir was saying, for example, when we put ONTAP and VMware together, and now in your bigger data sets, you can break the connection between compute adding and storage adding, the economic value of that is like a 40% cost reduction to operations. Because you're optimizing EC2 versus the storage piece, and they work together. Separately, all big operations, anyone that does service provider work knows, a big operation is going to want to run a compute layer, a network layer, and a storage layer separately. So you could scale independently, and keep it connected easily. That's the holy grail. And I mean, Amazon is the king of that. Well, it's funny enough, I used to work at Amazon and I used to work at NetApp. And I was there when FSEC's NetApp ONTAP is, we had to call it because, you know, very long, all acronyms side from that. But I think what was interesting when I was there and what, to your point, I think, is how fast the uptake and the actual, using the services that are built into ONTAP that had the auto-tearing, that were able to do that and bring people through to help them see that cost savings. Now that you're able to be part of VMC as well, right? That was one of the more recent announcements, is that, are you seeing that as well as a big piece of it where people are saying, hey, I'm going to replicate my data store up there and bring it up in VMC? Like, if you just think a really simple example is in a jar in data center evacuation, you're done with a lease on a data center. What would you like to do? Have another lease or would you like to move to Amazon? And it's like, well, you're still going to operate typically in a hybrid mode when you're thinking like this. And so, bringing basically all the integrations we've done with VMware up into the management plane so you can drive the enterprise data management out of the management plane of VMware, having that run on the Amazon cloud, which then makes it extensible to all the Amazon services, it's a really powerful capability. Now you have to build it up. All our customers that are good at it, they understand virtual, like the cloud, I'm going to say it, you could say it for me better. But I mean, what it comes down to getting the network incorrect is always an important VPC, that's what I'm trying to say. The thing is, you know, people look at it. Hey, it might be complicated, right? But when you leverage a solution like this, you're simplifying all of it. Well, I was going to ask about the productivity piece and the data transfer fees. Those are two areas that come up a lot in these conversations. What's that? Does that, does it help the productivity and what's the cost side of it? How's that being just because I think VMware had some announced we want to do that one? Yeah, well, I mean, I think, so I think even with VPC pairing for a single AZ, right? So prior to this advancement, right, you had to utilize a transit gateway and VMware transit gateway, transit connect had to be utilized for that. So that would provide that connectivity. But you had fees that come into play, right? Because what comes on their transit gateway? Correct. One of the tricks, this is just one of the tricks of the cloud is that transit gateway was an interesting problem because it was somewhat hard to quantify what the real cost would be. And if, you know, there's nothing that's worse than an unidentified cost like that. So we worked hard over the last year with Amazon, with VMware. It took all three of us to eliminate that problem. So you eliminate that cost and that potential black hole of fees. We changed how we do it. We don't eliminate the cost. I don't want to go that far, but we make it determinant. You can understand what you're doing. We raise the performance by two X. We also improve the scale quite a bit. And we're just going to keep going down. Andy Jassy is one of my idols. And I've always heard him say, you know, you always know customers like it when things go faster and when they're cheaper. That's a pretty safe bet. And so we're pursuing those paths. Andy also says work backwards from the customer. So what's the customer's perspective here? They're going at it for either change from the data center or is it operational efficiency? What's the customer point of view here? I think it's both in a way. I would say it's mixed where they're familiar with the NetApp construct. They want to leverage that, but they're utilizing cloud services in this case. And this is treated as an AWS native service. So it comes down to the simplicity of the cloud, the breadth and depth that AWS provides with NetApp's technology as well. Just to add onto that, I'd say our customers mostly are on-prem and then looking at moving to the cloud. So unlike AI, which is usually starting on the cloud and then read, but this market, this group is looking at it that way. So it's always an economic consideration and an operational consideration, do I move? When our customers that I've seen move, I've seen a move for sustainability. So a big one was data centers are not green enough. You can get greener by going to the Amazon cloud. I've seen you can extend DR for almost nothing when you do it right. So I've seen guys who are trying to go all in on the cloud too. They're like, they're trying to get out of data centers completely. All of those advantages are use cases, the ones we're trying to set up. So the main motion of your use case is migrating VMware to AWS. Extending is the word I always use. And they get lower costs, more functionality, higher level services. I think in the biggest thing, holding back adoption, a little bit is complexity of the networkings. One of the big ones we keep working on. And another one is just getting the costs so that we keep having to drive down the cost. That's why separating the compute from the storage was such an important step to VMware. VMware worked, when they're not getting enough credit for all the work they did to make this happen. But that's all about making it more cost efficient to make the move. Correct. So I mean, how about the relationship with NetApp? And we've covered, by the way, we've covered a lot about the VMware Amazon relationship when Pat Gelsen was the CEO, then Andy came down for that press conference, I remember that. But talk about the relationship now with NetApp. How's that going? What's the status? How do you feel about it? What's your point of view? Yeah, I mean, I think it's always evolving, right? And I think it comes down to AWS has new services that come into play, over 200 services today, right? What it comes down to is, we have these partners that we're jointly engineering these solutions with. NetApp has been wonderful to leverage those type of solutions and then even work with VMware. So we're doing like a tri-party effectual engineering effort at the end of the day. Where we're working with our customers, we're driving advancements for our customers. NetApp technologies, do-do compression, that also comes into play with this as well, right? So the customers can leverage that. So at the end of the day, you know what, I think the biggest disconnect comes down to, hey, this is not a native service or we don't treat it as a native service, but in fact it is, right? So. It's huge, just because you were talking about back in 2014, it's probably, it's almost nine years or eight years since we started working on all this, that when we're in the marketplace, there's some real advantages to being what's called a first-party service. Makes billing easier, makes calling, other services easier, and. You mean the Amazon marketplace with that procuring? The Amazon marketplace, what I'm talking about. Cellar side. I don't mean to diss the marketplace, right? There's a lot of value in the marketplace, but there is some friction in being it. And we were working with Amazon Engineering. FSX, the entire platform of FSX, not just FSX NetApp, is a really beautiful platform because it gives you all the advantages of first-party services with a selection of file services is basically what FSX is, like RDS for databases. And getting to that meant that we could put OnTap into that platform purely as software. So now it has instant scale across the entire Amazon data center world, which is really amazing. And I always think, I don't ever think people appreciate how valuable it is for what FSX does just as its capabilities. And then obviously putting OnTap in it, which we consider the world's best file service, it's a pretty good thing. So how is it that you go about protecting customers that have regulatory needs or are looking at that? And how do you play in that when they're looking for almost data sovereignty, I guess you could say? And how does that play with all of this as well? That's a huge question. You guys have some announcements. Yeah, you guys have news. VMware, you have the Blue X feed disaster recovery. Ransomware, disaster recovery, all those elements. There's the traditional elements of protecting data that every good data, I mean, you can't get to be a 25 year old storage company without protecting customers' data extremely well and being very containerized, multi-tenant operations, all those things. The thing I think people, when you think about NetApp and where we operate, we do this with GovCloud. It's where I was thinking, if you want to go the extreme of this, all the stuff that we're talking about is also in Amazon GovCloud. And these are the most secure people on Earth using our platform for data security. And we're very experienced with that class of security. I think as you get into, what I think is going to happen now is you look forward into things like what GNAI is going to do. It's going to put a lot of emphasis on tagging and things that we've worked with Amazon on over the years to go, how do I have sovereignty over my data in a more sort of what's in the data kind of way than we've done it traditionally? That's going to be a big area of work together, looking forward. And it's also like, what's in the data? What can you do with that data? And I think that's bridging the gap as well. Yeah, yeah. Guys, the next two minutes we have left in the session, I want to get at kind of what's the core message you want to send to the audience out there right now. NetApp, obviously, world-class storage, cloud investment. What's the state-of-the-art product solutions you have right now that you'd put out front relative to NetApp and the relationship with AWS? What should people know about? What's the top story in your mind here at VMware Explorer? Yeah, I think for two different groups of customers, if you're a cloud native customer, I'd go, you just want, you may not even heard of NetApp before. Just know that you have this world-class file system available to you through FSX. If that's for files like high-performance files for your AI work, you could use it there. VMware is an awesome use case if that's what you're interested in. Usually, the VMware people are more enterprise people looking to come to the cloud. And for those people, I just want you to hear, like, we're working our ass off the lower, can I say that on this? Yeah, of course. Okay, we're not regulated. Okay, sorry about that. I got a FOM the other day in my podcast. Oh, oh, never mind. Yeah, okay, I won't go there. Also, I'll try to stay away from that. But that we keep making it more cost-effective and powerful to make this cloud extension, which then opens up a whole new world of capability. And by the way, LLMs, this whole big LLM and generate AI models, they're files. Vector databases, embeddings, you put them in files. So, again, storage is not, AI makes it. The gift that keeps giving, AI makes unstructured data a lot more useful. We love AI. It's a core function at the end of the day, right? So you have to leverage storage no matter what. I think the AI is a gift in this market right now for many reasons. It's still early. I don't even think it's the three steps to the marathon as Adam Schlesi was saying. I think it's even earlier. I think it's just an awakening now. I think as people start going, oh, wow, there's impact here. You're just going to see things being put in building. And I think we haven't seen anything in production yet that's going to even resemble the opportunity. Yeah, there's stuff out there now, but you got to store the data. You got to have the architecture. I think cloud and operating models of cloud for the data is going to be the most important aspect. It's not just a storage. It's the platform for the customer. We're working with some. There's some advanced users in AI, like in the wide sciences. These guys do it all the time too. Wide sciences, healthcare, some automotive and things like that. We're definitely working already, but I agree with you that, I think Gen AI is like a supercharger on this. And the agility required, if you look at the AI teams now, they're class, they're smaller teams. They're not as big, and you don't need the volume of engineers or the number of engineers, and the volume of data is higher, but the speed of the time to value is incredible. And I think that's something that's not talked about. Well, in all this, actually, Jensen and Raghu did a great job. I thought yesterday talking about the challenges, there's both huge opportunity, but then you have like this, and Silebsky's talked about it too, is how do you do this responsibly is a complicated task. And what we are seeing is there's a lot of these data scientists that are then using shared infrastructure basically, and shared data models and things, that whole trend we've still got to go through. Absolutely, have to use that. Guys, that's a great interview. I'll give you guys the final word. Each of you share your perspective on what's next for you guys, the relationship products. What's, we'll start with you, Phil. What's next? What do you have to do for the next wave of the journey? I think I just to repeat myself, we're going to see a whole bunch of growth of positive apps moving to the cloud, moving AWS. VMware is going to be a huge bridge to that happening. That's going to be big. And what you were just talking about, I think the next big boom of that will be what can you do with unstructured data with all the tools of AI? Sameer, what's your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I think what it comes down to is just the partnership in general, right? We are evolving the partnership, we're leveraging it even further with VMware cloud on AWS. And we look at it from the standpoint where a lot of customers are looking at costs, how can they lower their costs, right? How can they leverage their data? This is that way to do all of that together. So we're looking at advance that even further and looking forward to that. The future of enterprise computing and storage is happening right here on theCUBE. Jensen stole my line yesterday on, so he actually said that. Jensen said that on stage. It is, he should be a Kube host. Yeah, yeah. Hello, Jack, I'm on theCUBE. Be cool, you should get it. Hi, Phil, thanks for seeing me. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. Sameer, thanks for coming on theCUBE. For Rob's Stretchy, I'm John Furrier. Stay tuned. More live coverage, day two of VMware Explorer. We've got more wall-to-wall action coming. Stay with us, we'll be right back after this short break.