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>> Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back
to theCUBE's thrilling live coverage
of AWS re:Invent here in Las Vegas, Nevada.
I'm joined by my fantastic co-host, John Furrier.
John, things are really ramping up in here, day one.
>> Yep, it's packed already.
I heard 70,000 maybe attendees-
>> Really? >> this year.
I just saw that on Twitter.
Again, it continues to show that
over the past 10 years we've been here,
you're seeing some of the players
that were here from the beginning growing up
and getting bigger and stronger,
becoming more platforms, not just point solutions.
You're seeing new entrants coming in, new startups.
And the innovation you start to see happening
it's really compelling, it's fun to watch.
And our next segment
we have multi 10 time CUBE alumni coming on,
and a first timer, so it should be great.
We'll get into some of the innovation
>> Not only as this guest went on theCUBE 10 times
he also spoke at the first AWS re:Invent
just like you were covering it here with theCUBE.
Without further ado
please welcome Ronen and Kevin from NetApp.
Thank you gentlemen both for being here
and for matching in your dark navy blue.
(Ronen and Kevin laugh)
How's the show going for you?
Ronen, I'm going to ask you first,
you've been here since the beginning,
how does it feel in 2022?
>> First, it's amazing to see so many people, right?
So many humans in one place, flesh and blood.
And it's also amazing to see,
it's such a celebration for people in the cloud, right?
Like this is our event
the people in the cloud.
I'm really, really happy to be here
and be in theCUBE as well.
>> Fantastic, it is a party,
it's a cloud party.
How are you feeling being here, Kevin?
>> I'm feeling great.
I mean, going all the way back
to the early days of Spotinst,
which was the startup that eventually got acquired
as Spot by NetApp.
I mean this was our big event.
This is what we lived for.
I've gone from everything,
one of the smaller booths out here on the floor
to all the way up the huge booth that we have today.
So we've kind of grown along with the AWS ecosystem,
and it's just a lot of fun to get here,
see all the customers,
and talk to everybody.
It's a lot of fun.
>> That's the theme that we've been talking about
and we wrote a story about it on SiliconANGLE and more.
That growth from that getting in and getting bigger,
not just an ISV,
or a part of the startup showcase, or ecosystem,
the progression of the investment
on how cloud has changed deliverables,
you've been part of that wave.
What's the biggest walkaway,
and what's the most important thing going on now?
'Cause it's not stopping.
You got new entrants coming in
and the folks are rising with the tide
and getting platforms built around their products.
>> Yeah, I would say, years ago,
is cloud in my decision path?
And now it's cloud is in my decision path.
How much is it and how am I going to use it?
And I think especially coming up over the next year,
macroeconomic events and everything going on
is how do I make my next dollar in the cloud
go further than my last dollar?
Because I know I'm going to be there,
I know I'm going to be growing in the cloud,
so how do I effectively use it
to run my business going forward?
>> All right, take a minute to explain Spot,
now part of NetApp.
What's the story?
Take us through for the folks that aren't familiar
with the journey,
where it's come from, where it's today?
>> Sure, so Spot is all about cloud optimization.
We help all of our customers deploy scale
and optimize their applications in the cloud.
And what we do is everything from VMs to containers
to any type of custom application you want to deploy.
We analyze those applications
and we find the best price point to run them.
We rightsize them, we do the automation
so your DevOps team doesn't have to do it.
And we basically make the whole cloud serverless
for you at the end of the day.
So whatever you're doing in the cloud,
we'll manage that for you
from the lowest level of the stack
all the way up to the highest level of financials.
>> Is this what you call the Evolve Cloud state?
>> It is, and the Evolve Cloud's a little bit more,
and Ronen can touch on that a little bit too.
The Evolve Cloud's not only the public cloud
but also the cloud that you're building on-prem, right?
A lot of big companies
it's not necessarily 100% one way or the other,
the Evolve Cloud is, which cloud am I on?
Am I on an on-prem cloud and a public cloud,
or am I on multiple public clouds and an on-prem cloud?
And I think Ronen, you probably have an opinion on that too.
>> Yeah, and I think what we are hearing from our customers
is that many of them are in a situation where
a lot of their data has been built for years on premises.
They're accelerating their move to the cloud,
some of them are accelerating,
they're moving into multiple cloud.
And that situation of an on-prem that is becoming cloudy
and cloudy all the time.
And then accelerated cloud adoption.
This is what the customers are calling the Evolve Cloud,
and that's what we're trying to support them
in that journey.
>> How many customers are you supporting
in this Evolve Cloud?
You made it seem like you can just
turnkey this for everyone, which I am here for it.
Just to be clear.
>> I mean, we have 1000s of customers, right?
Everything from your small startups,
people just getting going with a few VMs,
all the way to people scaling
to 10s and 1000s of VMs in the cloud,
or even beyond VM services
and 10s of millions of spend a month.
People are putting a lot of investment into the cloud
and we have all walks of life under our customer portfolio.
>> Multicloud has been a big topic.
I know in the industry we call it super cloud
'cause we think super cloud kind of
more represents the destination to multicloud.
I mean, everyone has multiple clouds
but they're best of breed defaults.
They're not by design in most cases,
but we're starting to see traction towards
that potential common level services,
fix the latency.
But I still think we're on the performance game now.
So I have to ask you guys,
performance is becoming back in vogue,
speeds and feeds back during the data center days,
well, we do want to talk speeds and feeds and solutions,
and then cloud comes in.
Now we're at the era of cloud where
people are moving their workloads there.
There's a lot more automation going on,
a lot more as you said, part of the decision.
It is the path.
So they say now, "I want to run my workloads
on the better, faster infrastructure."
No developer wants to run their apps on the slower hardware.
>> I think that's a toss up for you Ronen, go ahead.
(laughs)
>> I mean, I put out my story, no developer ever said,
"Give me the slower software performance and pay more."
>> Kevin: Fast, faster, fastest,
you choose faster. (laughs)
>> Speeds and feeds are back, right?
>> And performance comes in different parameters, right?
I think it is come through throughput,
it comes through latency.
And I think even a stronger word today
is price performance, right?
How much am I paying for the performance that I need?
NetApp is actually offering a very, very big advantage
for customers on both the high end performance
as well as in the dollar per performance that is needed.
This is actually one of the key differentiator
that FSx for NetApp ONTAP is an AWS storage
based on the NetApp ONTAP storage operating system.
This is one of the biggest advantages it is offering.
It is SAP certified,
for example where latency is the key item.
It is offering new and fastest throughput available
but also leveraging some advanced features
like tiering and so on,
is offering unique competitive advantage
in the dollar for performance specifically.
>> And why is performance important now, in your opinion?
Obviously, besides the obvious of
no one wants to run their stuff
on the slower infrastructure.
But why is some people so into it now?
>> I think performance as a single parameter is definitely
a key influencer of the user experience.
None of us will compromise our experience.
The second part is performance is critical
when scale is happening, right?
And especially with the scale of data,
performance to handle massive amounts of data
is becoming more and more critical.
The last thing that I'll emphasize is,
again, is the dollar for performance.
The more data you have,
the more you need to handle,
the more critical for you
is to handle it in a cost effective way.
That's in the secret sauce of the success of every workload.
>> There isn't a company or person here
who's not thinking about doing more faster for cheaper.
So you're certainly got your finger on the post with that.
I want to talk about a customer case study.
A little birdie told me that a major US airline
recently just had a massive win
where according to my notes,
response time and customer experience was improved by 17x.
Now that's the type of thing that cuts cost big time.
Can one of you tell me a little bit more about that?
>> Yeah, so I think we all flew here somehow right?
>> Exactly and airlines matter to
probably most folks listening.
>> They're doing very well right now.
>> Yes. >> The airlines.
>> Yes, and I think we all also needed
to deal with changes in the flights
with really enormous amount of complexity
in managing a business like that.
We actually rank and choose what to airline to use
among other things based on the level of service
that they give us.
And especially at the time of crunch,
a lot of users are looking through a lot of data
to try to optimize.
>> Plus all of them who just worked
this holiday weekend, sidebar.
>> Exactly, right.
And Thanksgiving is one of these crunch times
that are in the middle of this.
So 17x improvement in performance means a lot.
>> John: Seven, zero, or 17?
>> One, seven x, right?
>> Well, and especially when we're talking about
it looks like 50,000 messages per minute
that this customer was processing.
That's a lot.
That's almost 1,000 messages a second.
Wow, I think my mouth tees up there, yeah.
>> It does allow them to operate in the next level of scale
and really increase their support for the customer.
It also allows them to be more efficient
when it comes to cost.
Now they need less infrastructure
to give better service across the board.
The nice thing is that it didn't require them
for a lot of work.
Sometimes when the customers are doing
their journey to the cloud,
one of the things that hold them back
is like, is either the fear,
or maybe is the concern of
how much effort will it take me
to achieve the same performance
or even a better performance in the cloud?
They are a live example that not only can you achieve,
you can actually exceed the performance
that I have on premises
and really give customer a better service.
>> Customer better service,
and reliability is extremely important there.
99.99% >> 99, yes.
>> That second nine obviously being very important
especially when we're talking about
the order of magnitude of data
and actions being taking place.
How much of a priority is reliability
and security for you all as a team?
>> So reliability is a key item for everybody
especially in crunch times.
But reliability goes beyond the nines specifically.
Reliability goes into how simple it is
for you to enable backup and DR,
how protected are you against ransomware.
This is where NetApp,
and including the FSx for NetApp ONTAP,
richness of data management makes a huge difference.
If you are able to make your copy undeletable,
that is actually a game changer
when it comes to data protection.
And this is something that in the past
requires a lot of work,
opening vaults and other things.
Now it becomes a very simple configuration
that is attached to every NetApp ONTAP storage
no matter where it is.
>> We heard some news that VMware Explore
this past early fall, you guys were there.
We saw the Broadcom acquisition,
looks like it's going to get finalized maybe sooner than later.
>> Savannah: Lots of acquisitions.
>> So there're a lot of speculation around VMware.
Someone called the Vmwhere,
like where is VMware?
As in where (indistinct).
>> Savannah: Funny, nice pun.
>> It was actually Nutanix people.
They go at each other all the time.
But Broadcom's going to keep vSphere,
and actually the bread and butter,
that's the goose that lays the golden eggs,
customers are there.
How do you guys see your piece there
with VMware cloud on AWS that integrate solution?
Also you guys have a big part of that ecosystem.
We've covered it for years.
I mean, we've been to every VMworld,
now called VMware Explore.
You guys have a huge customer base with VMware customers.
What's the outlook?
>> Yeah, and I think the important part
is that a big part of the enterprise workloads
are running on VMware,
and they will continue to run on VMware in the future.
And most of them will try to run in a hybrid mode
if not moving completely to the cloud.
The cloud gives them unparalleled scale,
it give them DR and backup opportunities.
It does a lot of goodness to that.
The partnership that NetApp brings
with both VMware as well as AWS,
as well as other cloud vendors,
is actually a game changer.
Because the minute that you go to the cloud,
things like DR and backup have a different economics
connected to them.
Suddenly you can do computeless DR.
Definitely on backup you can actually achieve
massive savings.
NetApp is the only data store that is certified
to run with VMware cloud.
And that actually opens to the customer's huge opportunity
for unparalleled data protection
as well as real real savings, hard savings.
And customers that look today and they say,
"I'm going to shrink my data center,
I'm going to focus on moving certain things to the cloud,"
DR and backup,
and especially DR and backup
for VMware might be one of the easiest, fastest things
to take into the cloud.
And the partnership between AWS, VMware,
and NetApp might actually give you everything you need.
>> And the ONTAP's great solution, FSx there.
>> Yes.
>> I think you guys got a real advantage here.
And I want to get into something
that's kind of a gloom and doom.
I don't have to go negative on this one, Savannah, but ...
>> Savannah: Making me nervous, John.
>> But if you look at the economic realities
you got a lot of companies
that are in the back of,
Druva, Cohesity, Rubrik, others,
they're generational cloud.
Who breaks through?
What's the unique thing?
Because there's going to be challenges in the economy
and customers are going to vote with their wallets,
and they'll start to see
as they make these architectural decisions,
you guys are in the middle of it.
There may not be enough to go around,
and the musical cheers might stop, or not, I'm not sure.
But I feel like if there's going to be a consolidation,
what does that look like?
What are customers thinking?
Backup recovery, cloud, that's a unique thing.
You mentioned economics,
you can't take the old strategy
and put it there from five, 10 years ago.
What's different now?
>> Yeah, I think when it comes to data protection,
there is a real change in the technology landscape
that opened the door for a lot of new vendors
to come and offer.
Should we expect consolidation?
I think microeconomic outside
and other things will probably drive some of that to happen.
I think there is one more parameter, John,
and I want to mention in this context, which is simplicity.
Many of the storage vendors, including us, including AWS,
you want to make as much of the backup and DR,
basically a simple checkbox
that you choose together with your main workload.
This is another key capabilities
that is being bringing and changing the market.
>> But it also needs to move up.
So it's not only simplicity,
it's also about moving to the applications that you use,
and just having it baked in.
It's not about you going out and finding a replication.
It's like what Ronen said, we got to make it simple
and then we got to bake it into what they use.
So one of our most recent acquisitions of Instaclustr,
allows us to provide our customers
with open source databases and data streaming services.
When those sit on top of ONTAP,
and they sit on top of Spot's infrastructure optimization,
you get all that for free through the database that you use.
So you don't worry about it.
Your database is replicated,
it's highly available,
and it's running at the best cost.
That's where it's going.
>> Awesome.
>> You also recently purchased CloudCheckr as well.
>> Yes.
>> Do you just purchase wonderful things all the time?
>> We do.
(speaking simultaneously)
>> We walk around and then we find the best thing
and then we break out the checkbook.
No, but more seriously,
it rounds out what customers need for the cloud.
So a lot of our customers come from storage,
but they need to operate the entire cloud
around the storage that they have.
CloudCheckr gives us that financial visibility
across every single dollar that you spend in the cloud,
and also gives us a better go-to-market motion with our MSPs
and our distributors than we had in the past.
So we're really excited
about what CloudCheckr can unlock for us in the future.
>> Makes a lot of sense,
and congratulations on all the
extremely exciting things going on.
Our final and closing question for our guests
on this year's show
is we would love your your Instagram hot take,
your 30 second hot take
on the most important stories, messages,
themes of AWS re:Invent 2022.
Ronen, I'm going to start with you
'cause you have a smirk.
>> And you do it one day ahead of the keynotes.
(laughing)
One day ahead of the keynote.
>> You can give us a little tease, a little preview.
>> I think that pandemic or no pandemic,
face-to-face or no face-to-face,
the innovation in the cloud
is actually breaking all records.
And I think this year specifically
you will see a lot of focus on data and scale.
I think these are two amazing things that you'll see
I think doubling down.
But I'm also anxious to see tomorrow,
so I'll learn more about it.
>> All right.
We might have to chat with you a little bit
after tomorrow's keynotes and whatnot coming up.
>> What about you?
>> I think you're going to hear a lot about cost.
How much are you spending?
How far are your dollars going?
How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities?
How efficient are you being with your dollars in the cloud?
I think that's going to be a huge topic.
It's on everybody's mind.
It's the macro economics situation right now.
I think it's going to be in every session
of the keynote tomorrow.
>> John: All right.
>> Every session. >> Every session.
>> A bold claim.
John, we're going to have to pay attention to that.
(speaking simultaneously)
I'm not going to argue with him,
but all ultimatums in general are bold.
>> You guys have all the data.
You can go look up what I said.
>> Yeah. >> We'll go back
and look at it.
>> We are going to check on you on that.
>> The record now states. >> There you go.
>> Ronen, Kevin, thank you both-
>> Put it down >> so much.
We hope that it's a stellar show for Spot by NetApp.
And that we have you 10 more times
and more than just this once.
And yeah, I can't wait to see if,
well, I can't wait to hear when your predictions
are accurate tomorrow
and we get to learn a lot more.
>> No, you've got to go to all the sessions (indistinct),
check his math on that.
>> Yeah, no, exactly.
Now we have to do our homework just to call him out.
Not that we're competitive
or those types of people at all, John.
>> No. (Savannah chuckles)
>> On that note, thank you both for being here with us.
John, thank you so much.
Thank you all for tuning in from home.
We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada,
here at AWS re:Invent with John Furrier.
My name is Savannah Peterson.
You're watching theCUBE,
the leader in high tech coverage.
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