 Welcome back, everyone. Cube's live coverage here at VMware Explorer. In Las Vegas, I'm John Furrier with Rob Strecce. We're bringing out all the action. This is day two of three days of coverage. Our 13th year covering VMware's conference consecutively. Normally, VMware will now VMware explore. Really, the big story here is the AI, cloud, multi-cloud migrations going on right now. It's an operating model, it's distributed computing, and it's really got a lot of action around it. I think under the covers, it's infrastructure and the new applications that are emerging, the modern applications are arriving here, and it's changing everything in the enterprise. It's refactoring. Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, said that with the CEO of VMware on stage yesterday. We've got two great guests here. We've got Phil Brethrenback from NetApp, VP of Solutions and Alliance. I'm going to stay the whole afternoon, yeah. John Gommar, Senior Vice President of Products, got the keys to the kingdom for the cloud infrastructure group at VMware. That's the core jewels of infrastructure. That's going to be the core foundation of all-cloud, multi-cloud, super-cloud action. John, great to see you again. Thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Great to be here. So excited to have you on. We think that the core VMware is going to be the center point of the innovation strategy going forward for you guys. As modern apps hit, bringing Aria with Tanzu is going to let apps fall on the infrastructure where they land, based on where they should land. Having abstraction layers emerge, horizontal scalability with data and AI is coming. Yes. The dream is finally in sight. You're telling us our story. That's great. Yes. And that's what I think we called CloudSmart, right? We did that last year with CloudSmart, but you got to make decisions about what is the application trying to do? What is the business trying to do? And then make smart decisions about where you deploy that application based on that. And then our job at VMware is to provide a consistent experience, management, operations, and to end across any one of those multi-cloud environments. And the exciting story here is, this year is the focus on ecosystems. There's always been big advantage of VMware, the community and the ecosystem, but it's changing. And as the world changes, you guys are expanding the ecosystem in the cloud. We've got NetApp here, Phil. You've been an ecosystem partner and with VMware for years. You have products integrated in. We started working with them in ESX2. Yeah. Yeah, 20 years at least. Easy 20 years. Easy 20 years working with VMware. Just as a side, I knew we were talking about it on camera. I want to get this out there. VMware and NetApp have been two of the iconic Silicon Valley companies from a culture standpoint, from an innovation standpoint, from a people standpoint, just a great culture of innovation and people. So, you know. Both companies, we always focus on innovation for customers and focus on being a great place to work. Those I think are the themes of great Silicon Valley companies. And VMware, I've had the good fortune of working and knowing people at VMware for years. I know they with that. It's definitely NetApp approach. We've had a great conversation on theCUBE earlier about the migration to AWS and the innovation with NetApp. VMware was the center of the conversation. VMware on the cloud, VMware by infrastructure from VMware. You guys do, you can buy infrastructure with VMware, partner clouds, hyperscale clouds. This is the core strategy of your group. Explain what this means and how you think this is going to play out. Yeah, like you said, it's the core strategy and the strategy is to offer this consistent software stack, whether it be compute storage, networking and make it a consistent stack regardless of the deployment model, meaning is it customer managed, is it VMware managed, is it partner managed, but also consistent across any endpoint. So if you go to a hyperscale or you go to AVS, you go to Amazon, you get the same experience and the same capabilities and then extending those capabilities with partnerships. And that's why the partnership with NetApp on multi cloud is so critical. So I always think of it sort of three legs of a multi cloud. You need a runtime, right? VMs and containers, you need networking, right? We have that. And then you need data and storage. And that third layer is one where customers are really looking for a lot of choice and looking for the innovation that companies like NetApp bring to that. Both have installed bases, vSphere, big product, vSphere 8, NetApp, storage, flash, a lot of intelligence. As you guys look at that core product integrating in, how's that relationship going? What's new? What's the innovation? What's the update for your customers as VMware and NetApp continue to take the next step? So, you know, John's program and our programmer, what we did, I first talked to John, I tell a little bit of story. I came back to NetApp after a brief cloud sojourn that we talked about a minute ago and started working with John three years ago. And the first thing we talk about always is joint strategy. And the strategy here was we've got, we've got to move forward on VMs. This is things like in our world is like VVOLs and VME, that kind of work. We got to move forward to containers, modern workloads. We got to get to the cloud. And so, I remember John and I, our first meeting three years ago, that's what we talked about. And if you look today at what we're doing, that's what we're doing. It hasn't changed at all. It starts with innovation. And then, when it was here last year, we launched the support for, the big thing was support of FSXN and AONF for the VMware cloud services. And then, now we've got customers this year, cost reductions, that type of thing. It's, that process keep going. vSphere 9, we're a design partner on both on-prem and on cloud side. A lot of integration. How important is NetApp to you guys? I mean, we have, I think it's over 20,000 joint customers. Big customers. Just to brag real quick is two of them were mentioned yesterday in the keynote. AON and SunCorp are very large VMware NetApp shops, multiple. So thinking customer in, right? Customer in innovation is really super important to us. And that design partner relationship is awesome for. We innovate faster when we have great partnerships where we're doing things together and solving problems for joint customers together. What has that meant with vSphere 8 coming out and then launched that? And obviously everybody's looking for go fast storage at this point. I mean, it has some capabilities around Flash in there and is that the big story around that? Yeah, so there's a big story in there around Flash and support around NVMe and the big story around, for us it's been around vBalls, right? And can you integrate integration there? And really think about how do we get customers simpler ways to manage their storage that takes advantage of the native capabilities of the array, right? So VM level of replication and things like that, right? That helps customers better operate, make their environments more resilient, lower the cost, all the things they're looking for from us jointly. A consistent theme in like big banks and stuff I'm hearing is fiber, we've predicted the end of fiber channel for probably, I know probably I've done it, wait 20 years. But anyway, that fiber channel is migrating towards NVMe on prem, no question. And NVMe and vBalls will be a very vital piece of that upgrade cycle. And then that extension to cloud is connected to that. So the total modernization I think will be a cloud connected VMware platform with an NVMe, from a storage point of view, it'd be an NVMe foundation. Rob and I were in the analyst briefing getting the NDA pre-event stuff. And we're like dog whistle, we hear words and go, like, like, light up. We heard things like runtime, we heard the keynote, runtime is multi-cloud, we're great at scheduling. That's like, hmm, scheduler. What's a scheduler? Operating system. So it's a very operating system vibe here, but one comment jumped out of me, I want to get your reaction. And then vBalls and NVMe. The man of Leavens or Kit Colbert said it, or Chris Wolf again, which one CTO said it? We're really good at IO. This is VMware. If you think about the LLMs AI story, IO and some of these things that you've mastered, VMware's mastered in the data center and now in the cloud, nice foundation for some of the requirements for AI. I mean some core physics, core silicon, core networking, storage. And so storage becomes a huge opportunity with LLMs. So more storage, more, but connecting it. IO's big. What's your reaction to that? I think it's a great insight, right? Because thinking about how do you deal with massive amounts of data when you're talking about these large language models and thinking about how to extend them and parsing through a lot of information. We talk a lot about the GPUs and that's important for the compute side of that and the calculations, but having fast access to the data and ability to bring that into the compute environment is super critical, right? And so yes, the IO path is, and the connection between the different paths is going to be very important to be able to enable the scale and the computational work that we need to go do. This is where the dev ops. And they mentioned, just to add on just a little bit, Jensen kind of in passing. There were two things about Jensen and Raghu that on the keynote that hit me really hard. One was Jensen in this path, this is very geeky. Jensen mentioned that GPU direct is an important path through the VMware solution that VMware and NVIDIA are working on. GPU direct, we are qualified as a GPU direct partner with NVIDIA, we've done that for, we announced a huge benchmark about three months ago. So that stack exists today. The other thing Raghu said, and I know Raghu's an engineer, so he's not lying. When he said they're getting bare metal and sometimes bare metal. Hold on, are you saying all marketing people lie? Sorry, yeah, yeah, sorry, it's back, it's back, it's back. We've known Raghu too for a long time. I'm like, Raghu said it, it's true. The bare metal performance with the manageability of VMs was a big statement, I thought. And I was like, man, you get that going. Well, that's right, the scheduler's conversation. Well, that does mainstream. Now we're riffing now. This is cool, you're with me on this. So operating system, distributed computing is an operating environment. We're calling that the super cloud, just that's our version. If you're going to operate that operating system, you're going to need to have integration. So to me, I think this relationship with NetApp points to this new kind of ecosystem emerging where it's not just partnering. Hey, we're partnering and reselling. You know, there's integration points that are finally developed and enabling that's not going to be easy. Again, I know this is on your mind that VMware, Chris was on, your boss was on earlier, he's the GM. This is a business opportunity. If VMware gets this right, you guys are kind of like the reference implementation. My mind is that's the new ecosystem, not just selling and doing some integration. This is real engineering work. Real engineering work going on, Dave. And it's deep integration. And that partnership we talked about with NVIDIA is about deep integration and deep things around providing virtualization of GPUs and the integrations we do with NetApp are about deep integrations on the data path. And a lot of that is about providing this foundation, right? And then on top of that foundation, the ecosystem is going to continue to evolve rapidly in this space. I mean, it's such an early day from so many things around AI right now. And so we're all figuring out a lot of things. But we know that underneath that, that the compute stack and the storage stack and the networking stack need to be a high performance to go support. One thing I want to add onto this, when you, that's all true, a thousand percent true. Then go, the next thing, when we start talking about responsible AI, you have to, when you look at a data pipeline, the data scientists have to keep track of models. These are things where snapshots and things we've done down in data management land in other use cases, like actually developing chips and things, becomes really relevant in modern AI. That's going to go under the umbrella, I think, of responsible AI. And it's going to be vital. Every, everybody who's doing enterprise class AI is going to have to have both the safety, I think, you guys talked about this yesterday. You're going to have to have the safety controls in place as well as the performance pieces required. Yeah, I mean, we talked about protecting your IP, protecting your data, protecting you as access to those. That's right, it was your chief counsel who talked about this. Yes, that's right, we hear that constantly. So I think just to bridge off that a little bit, I think it also becomes the manageability of it and how you can have the visibility into it. And you guys have talked about some stuff around ARIA and Blue XP and how does that all hang together? I mean, what's the takeaway from that for customers that are sitting here watching? I'll start by saying ARIA and both operations and automation are fundamental parts of our cloud infrastructure stack. I mean, they're almost required in terms of providing the visibility, the governance, you were talking about those about governance. These things are super critical. And whether you're doing traditional enterprise apps, you're doing modern application software development, or now if you're doing things around AI, across all these things, you need deep visibility, you need insight, you need to be able to manage things all the way up from the application down to the systems underneath. Together we've done things, for example, like we have ARIA operations packs for NetApp that help provide that sort of end-to-end visibility across the entire system. Yeah, I think the ARIA hub with the new Tanzu application platform is interesting because now you can have that visibility crossover and containers, and containers and VMs and all the way to the cloud. I'll just describe it sort of philosophically from our point of view is people want to take the capabilities we have of really fast snapshot, you mean you came from that, if you know all this stuff, that really high performance data management we can do at scale with IO is only interesting if it can be run by the administrators who want to trigger it. And often that's a, say a DBA or a VMware admin. So we take our plug-ins, so our Blue XP plug-ins into ARIA, and the whole idea is to auto manage very advanced on tap features through the console that you're used to. There's another side of Blue XP. That's huge by the way. It's very important. It makes operational simplicity and then in turn reliability and so much better. Then we also have to give controls to storage admins to have to look at the storage pool and Blue XP is doing that too, right? So it's that combination of integrations with ARIA plus looking at the storage admin persona, that's what we're really trying to accomplish with Blue XP. I have to say one more observation from my standpoint, I'll get your reaction. I think AI is going to facilitate more ease of use there. AI is going to get used in that a lot, guaranteed. You can connect more observability data, more connection data, and then the abstraction into the control plane. Well, you talk about the use of AI in the products, right? That's where there's real opportunity. We talked about intelligent assist a little bit this week. That's just a starting point. I mean, there's so much opportunity collectively and across the ecosystem to use AI to make it easier to interact with the products and more natural too. And I think that becomes, and to your point, I think this and everybody's point, I think that becomes the real opportunity because to simplify it and to, you know, so people become the architect and they're not the admin. And I think that's where it becomes that. So that they don't have to be, you get scale ability, you get your learnings are faster, you get to be able to work on those second level issues as well. Exactly, instead of being sort of down in the weeds, you actually be able to interact with the system in a natural way and get it to do what you want it to do. Exactly. Guys, thanks so much, John. Great to see you. Final word, I'll give you the final word, ecosystem. How's NetApp doing as a partner? What's next? And then- Say nice things. Subditions. Okay, let me walk that back. Let's talk about your vision now. No, NetApp's a great part, I know 20 years, but what's the importance about the partnership with NetApp? And then what's the vision for the ecosystem for you guys? We heard Hock Tan from Broadcom say yesterday, a million dollar and billion dollar investment into the ecosystem. And last night, people going, crap, what's with that dollars? There's a real thirst for the ecosystem. So let's end on you. Let me start with, NetApp's a really great and important partner because of the great alignment we have in terms of our vision of what customers are trying to accomplish from a multi-cloud standpoint. And we're very aligned in that vision. And we have so many joint customers that are moving in that direction around building multi-cloud. And NetApp helps make that easier along with us, right? And we sort of have a very parallel path around that. And that's going to continue going forward. And as we move forward with Broadcom and with that investment, I don't know, I can. I'm not in a position to say, but what I can say. It shows me that it's important, important. But what I can say is, I love the statements and I love the sort of the focus that Hock is bringing and the statements around partners are going to be critical for how VMware helps drive adoption of both our technologies but also of multi-cloud technologies. And we can do more and more to go help make that happen. And I'm excited to continue more and more deeply with NetApp to go do these things. Phil, I'll give you the final word since you want to get your word in and that NetApp's piece. What's next for NetApp in the relationship? What are you focused on? I actually think, I think almost exactly what Jensen and Hock and Ragu were talking about yesterday. I think we're going to now take our work with VMware to AI. And the thing about that is we're not anywhere close to done with the app modernization and the multi-cloud parts of this work. There's a huge amount to do there too. But the next brave area of innovation will have a lot to do with AI, I believe. Guys, this is fun conversation, a little riffing there. Congratulations on your success. And looking forward to the crown jewels of VMware, you know, getting in the center of the action, expanding, great, great horizon. I think, you know, there's always the hockey stick moment where in the inflection point does it kick up? And I feel like the whole multi-cloud, super cloud things very close where it feels That's how it feels to me too. It feels very close where this is going to kick up and game change big time. I agree. And so thanks so much for the conversation. Congratulations. Okay, the queue, we'll be back right after lunch. Stay with us. We're two sets, wall-to-wall coverage. I'm Sean for the Rob Stretchy. We'll be right back.