 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. theCUBE's been here 12 years, Dave, we've been watching the evolution of the user conference, been quite a journey to see, and virtualization just explode. We've got two great guests here, we're going to break it all down. Ash Bacardi, director of multi-cloud product management, Dell Technologies, no stranger to the VMworld, now VMware Explore, and Josh Pruitt, Chief Product Officer at Rackspace Technology. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. Absolutely. Yeah, thanks so much, thanks for having us. So, you know, the theme this year is multi-cloud, but it's really all about vSphere 8's out, you got VxRail, you got containers, you got the magic going on around cloud native, which really points to the future state of where this is going, which is agile enterprises, infrastructure is code, high performance under the hood, I mean, all the things that you guys have been doing for many, many years and decades in business, but now with VMware, putting it all together, it feels like this year, it's like, you got visibility into the value proposition, people have clear line of sight into where the performances are from the hardware, software, and now cloud, it's kind of coming together, feels like it's coming together. Let's talk about that and the relationship between you guys, Rackspace and Dell and VMware. Perfect, that sounds great. Well, thanks so much for having us. You know, I'll sort of kick that off. We've got a huge lifelong partnership and relationship with Dell and VMware, and the technologies that these guys create that we're able to put in front of our customers are really what allows us to go drive those business outcomes, so yeah, happy to dive into it. Yeah, and I think to add that, we understand that customers have a tremendously complex challenge ahead of them on managing their infrastructure. That's why with VxRail, we have intelligent infrastructure. We want it to simplify the outcomes for customers when they're, no matter if they're managing VMware or if they're managing the actual hardware infrastructure underneath it. You know, one of the things they always talk about, you know, you read about on the blogs and the news and the startup world is, oh, product market fit. And with the kind of applies here, if you think about what's going on in the product side with the edge emerging hybrid cloud on principle, private cloud, and obviously cloud native is great too, if you have native applications in there. But now putting it all together, you're hearing things like the telco cloud. I hear words like that. I hear super cloud, which we're promoting, which you're seeing companies becoming cloud themselves with the CapEx being handled by either public cloud or optimized on-premise or hosted hardware. I mean, this is now, this is not all about everything's going to the cloud. This is now cloud operations on-premise and in hosting. So I'd love to get your perspective on that because you guys are huge hosting, get huge experience there, modernizing all the time. What is the modern era look like for the customer? Yeah, so I mean, I think it's very clear to everybody that it's a multi-cloud world, right? I think the main question is, are you multi-cloud as a strategy or are you multi-cloud as a situation? Because everybody's multi-cloud. That ship is sailing, right? And so when I look at the capabilities that we have with the partnership with Dell and the VxRail technologies, lifecycle management that you have to go and perform across your fleet can be extremely difficult. And whenever you take something like the VxRail and you add the hardware and you have the software all fully integrated there, it makes it much easier to do lifecycle management. So for a company like Rackspace, where we have tens of thousands of nodes that we're managing for customers across 29 global data centers and we're all over the place, the ability to have that strength with Dell's hardware, the VMware platform, improve lifecycle management makes it so much easier for us to manage our fleet and be able to deliver those outcomes even faster for customers. So assuming that VxRail isn't a virtual railroad that delivers data to Rackspace data centers, if it's not that, what is it, Ash? Give us a little primer on what VxRail is. Well, VxRail is the first and only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware. So everything we do with VMware is better. So hyper-converged infrastructure. Hyper-converged infrastructure. But we used to call a server because all the bits are in the box, right? All the storage, everything's in there. Everything's in there. Simplifies management. And we built in with the VxRail HCI system software which is really our secret sauce. We built in to actually add those automation capabilities with VMware so it allows you to scale out very quickly, scale up very quickly. And one of our big capabilities is our lifecycle management which is full stack meaning it life cycles the entire vSphere stack as well as the hardware infrastructure underneath as one continuously validated state. Meaning that customers can focus more on their business outcomes and driving their business forward. We're spending time managing their infrastructure. And when you talk about customers, it's also the value proposition that's flowing through Rackspace because Rackspace when you install these systems, how long does it take to spin up to have a VM available for use when you install one of these systems? Oh so you can have the system up and running very quickly. So we automate all the day one deployment. So you can have the system up and running in your labs and in your data centers in 45 minutes and you can have VMs up in provision very shortly after that. So what do you do with that kind of agility? Oh my gosh, so we've actually taken that and we've taken the VxRail platform and we've created what we call Rackspace services for VMware cloud. And this is our platform that is based on VxRail. It's based on vCloud director from VMware and by having the VxRail's already rack stacked ready to go for our customers, we're able to sign a customer up today and then within a matter of minutes give them access to a vCloud director portal where they can go in and spin up a new VM anytime they want. But then it also integrates into all of those cloud management platforms and tools, right? It integrates into your Terraform. So you've got your full CI CD pipeline and so you have that full into in capability. If you want to go click around on a portal, you can using vCloud director and using vSphere and all that great stuff. If you want to automate it, you can do that too. And we do it all in the backs of that VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure. Tell me about the DPU dynamic. We're hearing a lot about DPUs, VxRail. You guys have some HCI like vibe there with DPUs. How is that impacting performance can you guys see? Cause we're hearing a lot of buzz around the VxRail and the VMware, DPUs really making things much faster. I mean, it's the thing we talk about most with customers now is their challenges with scaling their infrastructure and VxRail is going to be the first and only jointly engineered system that will have vSphere 8 with DPUs functionality and we'll have the full lifecycle management and what this really empowers customers to do is as they're growing their environments, as they're scaling out their workloads in the data center, they need a way to scale to that next generation of networking and network security and that's what DPUs allow you to do. They give you that offload and that high performance capability. Talk about the, love to get your guys perspective while we're just riffing on this real quick sidebar for a second. If VxRail has these capabilities which you guys are promoting it does and some of the things go on in the modern era, the next gen apps are going to look a lot different. We're calling it super cloud if you will for lack of a better description. Yeah, multi-cloud is a state, I agree it's a situation and a state but super cloud is really the functionality of what cloud does. So what do you guys see as, maybe it's he leads reading now or dots connecting, what are some of those next gen apps? I mean the edges, all the edge is going to explode and I can see the edge having new kinds of apps we've never seen before, whether it's on-premise building lights and how they work or IoT changing. What do you guys see as the next gen apps coming out that's not looking the same as now or how our apps today changing for next gen because you get more performance at the edge, you get more action, you get more co-locations in geos. So it's clear multi-cloud, multi-presence is happening too, right? So what do you guys see? What's this? Yeah, I would say two areas that resonate most of customers is customers transitioning to their cloud native journey. So beginning it and using things like Tanzu for Kubernetes operations, which we fully support and have a white paper out there listed for customers. Another area is really in the AI-IML space. So we've been partnering with both VMware and Vidya to simplify how customers deploy new AI-IML infrastructure. I mean it's challenging, complex, a lot of customers are wanting to dive in because it really enables them to better operate and operate on insights and analytics they get from running their business. Josh. And I think it really comes down to whether you want to call it Edge or IoT or smart things or whatever, right? It all comes down to how we are expected now to capture all of the data to create a better user experience. And that's what we're seeing the modern applications being built around, right? Is how do you leverage all of the data that's now at your fingertips, whether it's from wearables, machine vision, whatever it may be, and drive that improved user experience. And so that's the apps that we're seeing now, right? You know, of course you still have all your business apps, all your ERP capabilities that need to exist and all that great stuff. But at the same time I also expect that whenever, you know, now whenever I'm walking into a store and their machine vision picks me up and they're paying with my phone and pushing me, push notifications, I expect to have a better user experience. And you need a big search on YouTube by the way. Yeah, exactly, right? No search warrants out for them, you know, you're good. That's exactly it. So, you know, you kind of expect that better user experience and that's where I'm seeing a lot of the new app development. Yeah, it's fun in these cases, one talks can think about all the weird coolness around it. The thing that I want to get your thoughts on is when we were just talking on the analyst session earlier on theCUBE, if DevOps is here in one, which we believe it has and infrastructure code is happening, the cloud native discussion, shifting left CICD pipeline, that's DevOps in my mind. That's like cloud native developers. That's like traditional IT in my mind. So that's all part of the coding. Data ops and security ops seem to be the most robust areas of conversations where that's the new ops, right? So, I mean, I made the term up, but new ops in terms of the focus, what are you making more efficient? What are you optimizing for? What's your guys reaction to that? Because all the conversations that we talk about is data, security, and then the rest seems to be cool, all good, developer side. Yeah, shift left, that's happening up there, Kubernetes containers. But all the action on the ops side seems to be data and security. Yeah. What's your reaction to that? Is that right? So personally, I do think that it's right. I think that with great power comes great responsibility. And so the clouds have brought that to us. All of your infrastructure as code has brought that to us. We have that great power now, right? But then you start to see kind of the pipeline attacks that are starting to become more and more popular. And so how you secure something that is as complex as a cloud native development pipeline is really hard. It's really challenging. So I do think that it warrants the attention. Then on the data side, I think that that matters because when I talked about those examples of a better user experience, I don't want my better user experience tomorrow. I don't want it 20 minutes from now. I want that real time capability. And so with that comes massive requirements from a compute and hardware perspective, massive requirements from a software perspective and from what folks are now calling data ops perspective. Yeah, data addressability, having the data available to be delivered. There's been a lot of talk here at the conference about the disaggregation of the brainularism who are going to make up words. The horsepower that's involved, CPU, DPU, GPU. I'll make up another word. We're familiar with the thermometers used during COVID to measure temperature. Pretend that I've invented a device called a carometer. And I'm pointing at it various people's foreheads. Who needs to care about DPUs and GPUs and CPUs? You know, John was referencing the idea of like security at the edge, data. Well, wow, we've got GPUs that can do things. Who needs to care about that? Obviously we care about it. You care about it. You care about it. You're building this stuff. You're deploying this stuff. But at what level in the customer stack do they need to care about it? Are you going in, is Rackspace engaging customers and saying, look, here's the value proposition. We understand your mission to be this. We believe we can achieve your mission. How far down in the organization do you go before you get to someone where you have to have the DPU conversation? Because we didn't even define DPU yet here, which is always offensive to me, right? I think I defined it actually. Did you define DPU? Good, thank you, John. But who should really care about that? Oh, that's such a complex question, right? Because everybody, Rackspace included. But a good question. Oh, it's a great question. Thank you. Great question. Everybody, Rackspace included, is talking about selling business outcomes, right? And ultimately that is what matters. It is what matters is selling those business outcomes to the customer. And so of course we're dealing with our business buyers who are just looking for, hey, improve my KPIs, make this run faster, better, stronger, all of that great stuff. But ultimately you get down to an IT staff and to the IT staff, these things matter. Because the IT staff, they all have budgets they have to hit. The realities start to hit them and they can't just go and spend whatever they want, trying to hit the KPIs of the marketing department or the finance department, right? And so you have your business buyers that do care significantly about buying their outcomes. And so we're having the business outcomes conversations with them. And then oftentimes they will come back to us and say, okay, but now we need you to talk to this person over in our IT organization. We need you to talk with our CIO, with our VP of infrastructure, whatever that may be, where we really get down to the nuts and bolts. And we talk about how we can stretch the hardware coming from Dell, we can stretch the software coming from VMware, and we can deliver a higher caliber experience, a lower TCO by taking advantage of some of the new technologies coming out. So there's a reason why I ask that awesome question. And it's because I can imagine a scenario where, this speaks to rack spaces positioned in the market today and moving forward and what your history has been. People want to know, well, why should I work with rack space instead of some mega hyper monster cloud? If part of the answer is, well, it's because for very specific application environments, like healthcare we talked about earlier, that might be a conversation where you're actually bringing in Dell to have a conversation about how you are specifically optimizing hardware and software to achieve things that otherwise can't be achieved with t-shirt sizes of servers in a hyperscale cloud. I mean, is that part of the rack space value per opposition moving forward? That you can do things like that with partners like Dell that the other folks aren't going to focus on? Absolutely it is, right? And that's a lot of the power of rack space is that we're the best in class pure play cloud solutions provider. And we can talk to you about your AWS, your Azure, your GCP, all of that great stuff. But we can also talk to you about private cloud solutions that are built on the backs of Dell technologies. And in this multi-cloud world, you don't have that one size fits all for every single application. There are some things that run great in a hyperscale provider and we can help you get there. But just exactly like you said, there are these verticals where you have applications that don't necessarily run all that well or they're not modernized. They haven't been refactored to be able to take advantage of cloud native services. And if all you're going to do is run that on bare metal in VMs, a hosted private cloud is by far the best way to do that. Right? And rack space provides that hosted private cloud on the backs of Dell technology, on the backs of VMware technology and we can go deliver those custom bespoke solutions to customers. So the infrastructure and the hardware still matters Ash, yes? Absolutely. And I think he just highlighted while what he does with his customers and what is important to his internal organization is being to deliver faster outcomes, better outcomes, give those customers to meet those KPIs of those customers consuming their infrastructure at rack space. So I think really what the DPU and the underlying infrastructure enables is all that full stack integration to allow them to quickly scale to the demands of those customers and what they need in their infrastructure. Guys, while we've got you here, what do you think about this year's VMware Explorer? A lot of anticipation around how many people going to show up and all kinds of things around the new name and Broadcom, big attendance here. I was very surprised about the size of the attendance and the show floor, the ecosystem. This train is not stopping. I mean, this is VMware's third act no matter what the contextual situation is. What's your observation on the show? Do you agree or is there anything that you could want to share about folks who didn't make it, what they missed? Yeah, I mean it really highlights, I mean you've seen the breadth of the show, I know people that aren't here that aren't able to see it are really to see the excitement. So there's a lot of great announcements around multi-cloud, around all the announcements around the vSphere 8 with the GPUs, the vSAN Express Storage architecture, ton of new exciting technology that are really empowering how customers, the future of how customers are consumed, their workloads and their data centers. Trust, they're not short on products and stuff. A lot of moving parts. vSphere 8, a bunch of new stuff and then Cloud Native does look pretty good too off the tee. It does feel like a focus on the core though, in a way. So I don't think there's been a lot of peripheral noise at the show. Sometimes it's, you know, and we got this and this and this and this. It's vSphere 8, vSAN 8, Cloud software, you know, really hammering it home and refining it. I mean, you don't think there's a little bit of a circus there. I mean, the general keynote was theatrical, I thought. I mean, I thought you did a good job on that. I think vSphere 8 was buried a little bit, I thought. They could have, they checked the box at the beginning. That's true, that's true. I mean, they mentioned it, but we didn't see the demos, you know? The demos are usually great, but that's my only concern. Well, that's why we supplemented it with the VxRail announcements, right? With our big announcements around vSphere 8 and with the DPUs as well as the vSAN Express Store to architecture being integrated with VxRail. So I think, you know, it's always that ongoing partnership and doing what's best for our customers, showing them the next generation how they consume that technology. Yeah, you guys got good props on vSphere. We had a great chat about yesterday. Rackspace, you guys doing a good quick update on what's happening with you guys. Give a quick plug. What's going on at Rackspace? What's hot? What's going on? What's the, give a quick plug for what the services are and the products about going on there. Yeah, absolutely. So we are that into in-cloud provider, right? And so we've got really exciting offers in market, helping customers take advantage of all the hyperscale providers, and then giving them, you know, that private cloud experience. We've got everything from, you know, single tenant running in our data centers on the backs of, you know, vSphere, vCloud director, and vXRails, all the way through to, like, multi-tenant burstable capability that runs within our own data centers as well. It's a really exciting time for technology, really exciting time for Rackspace. Congratulations. It's been following your journey for a long time. Dale, you guys continue to do a great job and end-to-end phenomenal work. The telco thing is a huge opportunity we didn't even go there. But Ash, thanks, Josh. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Okay, thanks for watching theCUBE. We're live, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets here in Moscone West on the ground level in the lobby, checking out all the action. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.