>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas.
It's the Cube.
Covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare
and it's ecosystem partners.
>> Okay welcome back everyone live here at VMWorld 2017
behind us we got the stage here set on the VMVillage,
a lot of people hanging out, I'm John Furrier with
Dave Alante our next guest is Vish Muichand who's
the Senior Director of Product Manager HPE, Cube alumni
Eric Burgener, Research Director at IDC.
Guys welcome to the Cube.
>> Thanks very much John.
>> Vish, lot of storage action going on VMWare, you see
Vsan, the cloud's here, true private cloud report
from Wikibonds off the charts, showing a huge growth
on prem, cloud operations, storage is impacted.
What's the dots that we're connecting here this week?
What's the storage story this week?
>> So clearly there's a lot of different things happening
in the marketplace right, different modes of operation
and that in itself is demanding different approaches
to infrastructure.
So I think what you are seeing in the industry a
variety of different approaches in storage, right?
Whether it's external storage, whether it's
software-defined storage, whether it's hyperconversions,
or that's all flash storage.
All of these things are coming together and trying
to respond to the needs of data and how you want
to process that data.
>> We've been talking with, we talk to you guys a lot
on the Cube, HP Discover, and we always say software's
eating the world, we just heard Sanjay Punin from VMWare
talking about it, he likes to drop that soundbyte.
We take it one step further.
He's a Harvard MBA, we got the bapsen mojo here.
We say if software's eating the world, then data's
eating software.
So you guys have had a software core competence and
you mentioned data.
What is the impact and compromise, more and more data
comes in from the edge, this primary, this secondary
storage, this backup this data protection, it seems
to be like this melting pot of changing architectures.
How are you guys handling that at HP?
>> Filling software is a very key element because it provides
you with those capabilities, right?
To really deal with the logical instantiation of assets
and in this very virtualized world, this very dynamic
world right now, gone are the days where you can do
hardware type desegregation.
Software gives you that speed, that agility, it gives
you that flexibility.
Gives you the changeability to move quickly.
>> Eric you're at IDC you guys, this is your job.
You guys track the market share, you guys have the pulse
it's like keeping track of the baseball game.
What inning, how are the Red Sox doing?
Are they in first place are the Yankees catching up?
What is the current state of the server virtualization
because you know certainly the game's changing a little bit
the world's going to cloud.
What are you guys seeing in your research?
>> Well so obviously most mainstream computing is
running on virtualization, whether that's in the cloud
or that's on prem.
There's very little physical infrastructure left.
There is still some of that but clearly that is not
the future, virtualization is the future.
>> So I wonder if I may, so you're saying virtualization
is the future, so I wonder if we can unpack that a little
bit because the theme here is cloud and everything is
cloud related.
Is your feeling, Eric, that that's sort of over your
skis marketing, getting ahead of where the customer
really is, I wonder if you could sort of elaborate.
>> I think what the customers are really looking for is
an easier way to do their jobs for less cost.
And cloud provides that flexibility that you don't
necessarily get if you're managing your own on-premise
infrastructure, that's not 100% true based on some
scale issues, but by and large, I think that's really
what cloud brings to the table is a different payment
model, and a flexibility that you wouldn't necessarily
have with on prem infrastructure.
>> So what are you guys seeing, do you feel as though
the on-prem infrastructure leaders like HP, there are others
obviously, are going to be able to bring that cloud-like
simplicity to what do you call private cloud or whatever
on-prem, is that happening, how fast is it happening,
is it viable?
>> Yeah so I absolutely think that's happening, in fact
that's one of the reasons why software-defined storage
is growing so fast is those type of products give you
the kind of agility that you would normally get from
a cloud environment and if you're running that on prem
and you've implemented the right infrastructure around it
then you're getting many of those same kind of benefits.
Now you're paying for that hardware and software in a
different manner than you do for the cloud, but you're
getting many of those IT agility benefits that you might
otherwise get from the cloud.
>> And Dave, you know HP's tagline is Making Hybrid IT Simple
right and so our point of view is that there is both
on premise and off premise, just depending on what
the usage models are and what the problems you're
trying to solve, right.
And bringing that simplicity where you may be going
from a 100% on premise to maybe 20% off, but we've
also seen some people at 50% off premise trying to
come back a little bit on premise, right?
So both directions I think are very very key.
>> Is your point of view and I want Eric if you could
chime in as well, from HPE's perspective, is hybrid IT
sort of horses for courses in other words, workloads
on prem versus workloads off prem,
or is it beyond that some kind of federation model?
>> So we see three key use cases.
The first is of course wholesale, applications running
on the cloud.
Office 365, the perfect example of that, Sharepoint,
Dropbox right, that's one.
Then there is what I would call disaster recovery as
a service, where you may want to have your third site
in the cloud even though you got two sites on premise.
Then there's also the third use case or in archiving
that says how do I archive a portion of my data maybe
into the cloud so it is online, but I don't have to
manage it and I don't have to maybe deal with some of
the associated costs around it.
So these are the three sort of cases I see.
>> Dave: Okay, what are you seeing
in the customer base, Eric?
>> Well so I completely agree that hybrid cloud is the
way data centers are going to be built going forward.
There are reasons to keep certain workloads on prem,
generally there's performance, security or some kind
of regulatory requirements that might make you put
workloads on prem versus putting them in the cloud.
It also depends on how often you're using the data.
So Vish mentioned archive use cases.
So that's a case where you need a lot of storage
capacity that you keep for a long time but you may not
necessarily be accessing it that much.
If you're going to be accessing data a lot, that's another
reason why you might consider bringing it on prem,
as opposed to leaving it off prem.
And of course the access, the costing access models
that you get from people like Amazon and Azure are
going to impact where you draw the line on that.
>> So is there a difference between multi-cloud,
I got a bunch of different clouds in my organization,
I'm going to choose where to put stuff and cross-cloud
sometimes you call it inter-clouding was, I like that term.
>> Vish: You could dual source your cloud.
>> And either dual source or federate or actually split
application work.
>> So I have seen several different aspects of that.
So a customer has said to me that they need to move
20% of their data off premise, to do that they need
two cloud vendors, and to get to two cloud vendors
they need to see four or five of them so they can
narrow it down and they they says okay, HPE all of the
data that I have today is in your premise or with
your equipment, how are you helping us broker that
kind of arrangement.
What are you doing to help federate some of that data?
And work with some of these cloud vendors.
So I think that's an interesting customer ask.
>> Okay, well there's also cost consideration because
if you multi-source or you have the opportunity to
multi-source, you've got a competitive environment
that's going to drive lower costs for you.
As opposed to if you just got one choice.
The other issue there is data mobility.
If I'm locked into cloud vendor one, and it's very
difficult, there's major switching costs to move,
then that's another reason that might offset the
potential price advantage I get from being
able to go to any vendor.
So there's a lot of vendors out there now, infrastructure
vendors that are talking about making it easier to
move data on prem to off prem, into different clouds
from cloud to cloud and I think that's something that
creates a more level playing field that really is
going to ultimately result in lower costs.
>> That's a great point about the costs, we'll just
double down a quick question on that.
Where are customers tripping over themselves in terms
of total cost of ownership because what you're
getting at here is hidden costs, right in plain sight.
What are those trip fault wires if you will?
What's the pitfalls what should they be looking for?
>> Well, so I'll give you a general answer to that,
but I think that it's very specific to workload type
and the regulatory requirements that you're in
but I'll tell ya one of the cases where we see
repatriation, workloads moving from the cloud back
into on prem is when you get to a certain level of scale.
And the largest enterprises.
>> John: Scale in terms of when to bring it back?
>> Well just in terms of how >> or when to leave
>> So how much data do I need to basically maintain
in this environment and use on a regular basis.
And the larger scale environments are the one where
larger enterprises are able to actually bring back,
create their own cloud infrastructure on prem,
with their own environments and actually manage that
for less cost than what they could otherwise pay a
public cloud provider.
>> So just to take it one step further,
connect the next dot, the CXO, the CIO has to try
to get some stability and there's some uncontrollable
things certainly in retail it's predictable that
the holiday season needs bursting or whatever
so you do some things in the cloud but that's a known
pattern, so you're saying that they're starting to
recognize some of these scale issues for predictability
they bring them on prem.
Is that kind of what I'm getting?
>> Well so the scale from a cost point of view, so if
you're creating your own private cloud infrastructure
and you're using the same kind of highly agile software
to find storage designs to build that environment,
you somewhat have the same ability to burst.
Now yeah, you have to buy the hardware and there's
redeployment issues and hopefully when we move forward
towards much more composable infrastructure that becomes
a lot easier problem to solve but that's you know
some years in the future.
But what I'm really talking about it's the cost.
If I'm going to be maintaining a five petabyte data set
over a ten year period, and I know what my access
patterns are, is it cheaper to put that in Amazon
or is it cheaper for me to build an infrastructure in house
and maintain that myself.
>> That's a great point.
That's huge and Vish what's your reaction, is this
basically validates all the action going on on the
private cloud right now, on prem activity is setting
up the cloud models.
They can't do that unless you have the operating model.
>> I'll talk about two things right, one called Cloud Bank
and another one called Nimble Cloud Volumes and
soon to be called HPE Cloud Volumes.
So Cloud Bank allows you to take on premise data
running on a three part array, and actually take a
portion of that data onto either an on premise object
store or an off premise object store.
And we call that Cloud Bank working together with
something called Recovery Managed Central and store once
bringing that cloud picture together.
Now the HPE cloud volumes on Nimble Cloud Volumes,
it's another interesting concept where you have a cloud
service that's block storage service, but it gives you
the six nines SLA, it gives you the ability to do
snapshots and transform data without a lot of charges
that Eric talked about.
It gives you the ability to move the data to different
clouds because it's disagregated from the major
cloud providers, it's connected via a close proximity
connection so these are just two examples I think that
show you how putting these used cases into action.
>> Hey can we geek out a little bit here?
(laughter)
>> Aren't we geeking out now?
You want to go deeper?
>> So people want simplicity, we know that, we're
talking about bringing cloud on prem.
How do they get there?
Well one of the ways is VVOLs, we sort of been talking
about this, they haven't really taken off.
Eric you've written some content around this.
Like you said off camera, customers don't wake up in the
morning and say I got to get me some VVOLs.
But they do want simplicity.
>> Absolutely, yeah.
>> What are VVOLs, why do they matter, and how does
it relate to simplicity.
>> So yeah, let's talk a little bit about that.
So what everybody no matter whether they're putting
storage in the cloud, they're building on prem,
they're building a private cloud, everybody wants to be
able to manage their environments more easily,
more intuitively, and one of the things that we've seen
as a trend over the last five years is in general across
the industry, storage mangement tasks are migrating
away from dedicated storage admin teams, more towards
IT generalists.
In many cases, those are the virtual administrators.
To enable that kind of a move, you need to make storage
much easier to manage.
So the whole idea behind VVOLs is to basically allow
a non-storage person who maybe thinks about things
in terms of I'd like to do this operation to an application
for example, I've got Oracle running or I've got
this file system here and I want to create a snapshot of it
or I want to do some other task on it.
To be able to just select it at the application level
and perform that operation, that's very intuitive,
it's easy for a non-storage person to understand and
VVOLs effectively enables that kind of an ease of
use management in block based environments.
>> An application view of the storage?
>> That's right, and I mean it's effectively it ties
storage operations to a single virtual machine, and
basically you're running an app on a virtual machine
and so that's how you get that tie in in that way.
But one other thing I'll say about VVOLs is that
so it's not just what VMWare provides, there's some
work that needs to be done on the storage array side
to integrate with that management framework.
And then how that vendor has chosen to integrate with
that framework is going to determine the functionality
that you have access to when you're using that VVOLs API.
>> And how have you chosen to integrate with that framework?
>> Yeah so Dave if you look at VVOLs, both HPE and HPE
3Par nimble have bene very very strongly focused
on VVOLs in fact we've been working with VMWare gosh
over the last five years now, on the reference architecture
for VVOLs.
Most recently we've now introduced replication support
for both 3Parand nimble platforms with VVOLs and I think
that capability now within VVOLs is a very important
watershed capability because everybody needs resilience,
disaster recovery.
>> Automation's right around the corner, orchestration
all big topics here at VMWorld.
>> Correct and so that's a very key piece.
And I think if you look at to Eric's point around
simplicity, VVOLs is one key area.
Two layers maybe I'd like to highlight as well.
Number one is the visibility to what the application sees
and within the Nimble community, they've talked about
this app data gap, which is the applications not knowing
why they can't get access to data
and so this notion of bringing that level of understanding
visibility to that gap saying is it in your computer
infrastructure, is it in storage, is it in the network?
So this notion of VMVision, Infosight,
the Nimble (inaudible) because you're going to bring out
the rest of the HPE portfolio I think is very key
around simplicity.
The third thing let's not forget, VMWare's built a whole
ecosystem of management platforms around V-Center,
V-Realize operations, all the orchestration and operation
pieces and so continuing to integrate and offer customers
that view is very key, right, so three prong vector
I would say on making things simple.
>> Also it gives HPE discovers coming up in Madrid shortly.
Congratulations good to see you, Eric thanks so much
for stopping by and sharing the IDC perspective.
Great job, live coverage here at VMWorld 2017,
I'm John Furrier, Dave Alante we'll be right back
with more live coverage after this short break.
>> Thank you.