>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark,
it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.Next 2019.
Brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage
of Nutanix.Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman, of course.
We're joined by Rajiv Mirani,
he is the CTO of cloud platforms at Nutanix.
Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Rajiv.
>> Glad to be here, as usual.
>> So you were up on the main stage talking
about your guiding force, your mission,
to make enterprise computing so reliable,
so ubiquitous, that it's invisible.
>> Rajiv: You don't think about it--
>> You don't even, yeah,
just riff on that a little. >> Yes, that's the point.
No, I mean look if you look at any successful technology,
the consumer of technology doesn't need to be aware
of the details around it, right?
I mean, take cars.
When cars were first introduced,
you probably had to understand what a carburetor was,
how it all works, remember to fill water in the radiator,
but most people don't know how to do that today.
I wouldn't know how to do that today,
even though in my youth,
I actually had to do some of those things.
It's getting to the point where the cars are self-driving.
Now, the same thing should happen to computing,
and we spend way too much time today
just doing things that keep the lights on, right?
Just managing infrastructure, patching things,
upgrading them.
That really should be something that's not what IT is doing.
IT should be focusing on the business,
delivering applications that their customers need,
and not so much on managing infrastructure.
>> Rajiv, that one-click simplicity
is so important. >> Yes.
>> Yet we know things are becoming even more complicated.
Bring us inside a little bit.
You know, you've got 14,000 customers.
>> And there's been a major, basically, rewrite of AOS
to be able to be ready for all of the new apps,
and cloud data, NVMe, Optane, you know,
you name it, all of these things.
How do you balance getting all of this new stuff up
with making sure that you keep that simplicity
and don't break things for all of your customers
while the jet engine's, you know, up in the air?
>> No, it takes constant effort.
It takes a conscious effort to make sure that
things aren't drifting away from our goal
of being simple, and, to be frank, at times it has.
We periodically do audits of all our workflows,
make sure they're as simple as we think they are
and haven't drifted over time, and occasionally,
we do find some real clunkers and they have to go back
and fix those things.
What makes it different is that we start with a fairly
opinionated view on how things should be done.
The idea is to make it simple for 99% of the people,
while still offering all the advanced options
the 1% power users would need them,
and making sure that we understand
what 90%, 99% of people need,
and focusing on that is very important.
So, a lot of customer focus studies,
a lot of design reviews,
but also this constant going back
and you take a workflow like VM creation,
like provisioning of VM.
When we started, it was pretty simple, right?
Then as you start adding more and more options,
is this thing going to use PCI pass-through?
Is it going to use this option, that option?
Suddenly you realize that now
there are 30 things that people are filling in
to provision a VM, most of which nobody cares about.
So you go back, rewrite,
and keep doing that again and again and again.
>> Yeah, so, Rajiv, it's one thing when you talk
about living on different servers,
whether it be Supermicro underneath
or Dell EMC, Lenovo, HPE.
It's got to be a little bit different if you're talking
about where you're going with HPE GreenLake,
with the X in AWS that you talk about.
When I talk to people, you know, it's like,
"Oh, I'm trying to use Terraform,"
and "boy, I have to write it one way to work with Amazon.
"I have to write it another way if it's Azure or GCP."
So, will Nutanix be able to keep that simplicity
and bring that homogeneity to these dispersed environments?
>> Absolutely.
So the point is what's your layer of abstraction, right?
The way we are going to public cloud,
the way we go to every server when we're out there,
the way we are doing things in Xi,
all of it starts with the hypervisor
and the storage stack and networking,
we have the three layers of abstraction.
And if you have the same three components everywhere,
everything we build on top of that remains exactly the same.
Prism looks the same, our APS looks the same,
everything looks the same.
So higher-level constructs like COM and so on
don't have to be aware of what the actual substrate is.
If they're creating a COM blueprint whether it
works on Xi on AWS
or whether it runs on ESX
or whether it runs on Nutanix AHV.
The blueprint remains exactly the same.
Now if you want to consume more services.
If you want to consume services
on Amazon which are not available on-premises.
You want to use things like Author Scaling Groups in EC2.
Sure you could then create blueprints that
are customized for a particular substrate.
>> So in terms of this, you said you start with
the very opinionated place of where the customer is.
Well first of all it's based on customer feedback,
and as you said customer surveys.
>> Rajiv: Absolutely.
And so where are you right now
in terms of where the customer is?
Are you meeting the customer now,
or is the customer ahead?
Where would you describe the customer mindset?
>> I think it depends on what you are looking at.
If you are looking at the core products,
absolutely the customers are with us.
They are ready to consume.
They actually drive a lot of the innovation
that we are doing with feeding back.
Changes that we could be doing
to make things even simpler.
On the private cloud side that's getting there.
I think we get a lot of feedback on files
on Prism Pro.
On COM.
On Flo.
Because those have started getting a lot
of an option in the market.
And we do get a lot of feedback on them.
On some of our newer projects which have
started evolving more recently.
It's a more collaborative process.
There we actually working with customers directly.
Understanding their problems
and moving a road map forward based on that.
So while it's early in terms of an option in production
the whole process is very collaborative in those situations,
so we are really very close to customers there.
>> What are some of the biggest customer problems
right now that they're facing?
What's keeping them up at night,
therefore keeping you up at night?
>> Security is always a big one.
Complexity, people, skills, all those things
are big problems.
In fact one of the biggest things right now
is just training enough people to handle
all the complexity in a data sect.
The more you can remove from that
the more they don't have to focus on that,
the easier you make their lives.
The other thing is just a lot of
time spent on routine activities which are quite
a disruption to services, right?
This is something we have talked about before.
Why does it require a Legacy 3 disc system
to have maintenance windows and downtime
to do an upgrade?
Google never has downtime.
Google is never down for maintenance.
Doesn't mean they aren't upgrading,
they are upgrading all the time.
So how do we bring that same kind
of capabilities on-premises?
That's been a focus for a long time.
>> Alright so Rajiv when I'm talking to users out there
when they talk about right, all of the items that are out
there that they need to deal with and the routine tasks
automation is something that keeps coming up.
So tell us where automation fits into some
of the new things that you were talking about today
and this week with your customers.
>> Yeah automation for us you know,
we look at automation in three steps.
Anything that's automatic better be safe first of all.
Safety is paramount.
So it starts with security.
It has to be simple when we're talking about
how COM provides for that.
And then you can start adding in this new wave
of technologies around Artificial Intelligence
and machine learning.
And really it's not so much about automation right now.
It's all about autonomy.
It's autonomous operations.
Not just scripts that do a task.
That's an area we invested in very heavily
early on with our Prism Pro product.
We built our own path algorithms for machine learning.
Applied them to operational metrics like
capacity planning and what if modeling and dynamic alerts.
And what we've been doing with that is
extending that more into the application layer.
So that not only can you apply these algorithms
to CPU and Memory, you can actually get insights into,
"Hey the latency on this particular
"application looks somewhat unusual".
Or "The amount of cash available on
"a Sequel server is unusually low."
And act on those.
And the other part is acting on alerts.
Something happened, does a human being need
to get involved to solve for that?
And if it does then well it's not really automatic right?
So that's the other part that we introduce.
Which is our cross flow product which lets you
define these action chains that are automatically
triggered when an event or an alert takes place.
You can go ahead and fix the problem
but also simple things like send you
a slack notification, or an email, log the event.
Maybe create a snapshot of your VM so that
you can go back and debug problems later.
All that sort of thing made really really simple
>> Yes it goes back to the simplicity
and the invisibility to that aspect.
>> Rajiv: Yes, yes, yes.
>> Yes.
>> Autonomous data centers by definition
have to be invisible right.
If you're were to get in to
Walden Managing and Autonomous Data Center then well,
>> What's the point?
>> What's the point, exactly.
So the whole idea is that, human involvement
in day to day operations become so low
that everybody's focused on applications
and line of business use cases.
>> Yeah.
Rajiv, when it comes to those applications
you know you talked about some of the new
enhancements like NVMe and Optane.
You know where are your customers today
you know are there any interesting applications
that you're seeing them deploying today?
A pattern I've talked about for the last couple
of years at the Nutanix show was modernize
the platform and then modernize the apps on top of it.
>> Rajiv: Yeah.
>> You know things like containerization.
>> Rajiv: Yeah.
>> You know I'm sure it's a bell curve
and a journey for all the customers.
You know what are some of the patterns
that are starting to emerge?
Where are they finding success?
>> Yeah this whole wave of new applications
around data pipelines with Kafka, Spark.
Things like that.
The Apache stock effectively.
Which are putting more of a load on storage
in particular so that's one area we see
customers looking for more performance.
But even you know some of the traditional
applications like SAP HANA
and Epic and MEDITECH Expanse
they also have patents which can
benefit greatly with some of the
advancements that we have been making.
It gets a little technical.
It's you know the size of the working set
whether it all fits on SSD
or if it's fitting on magnetic drives.
But the some of the work we have been
doing is removing the overheads.
If you do have a mess and you go to slower media
you still get good performance.
And that's really how we're getting the new (mumbles)
>> Well yeah maybe without getting you know
we don't need to drill down into the core
of the intel chip and everything.
>> Right, right, right.
>> But you know Nutanix doesn't just take
off the shelf stuff and you know
put a box together.
It's software and there's work that
happens with your partners in the ecosystem.
Give us a little flavor as to you know
where you're making the investments
and where some of those partnerships
and integrations are key.
>> Yeah, yeah.
So on the platform site
a lot of the investments happen in validation
of the platforms.
Making sure that we are ahead of the curve
in adopting technologies.
But also feeding back from our side
things we would like to see in the platform right?
So how do you adapt things like RDMA
to handle not just the traditional workload
but a hyper converged workload.
How do you essentially look for things
and this new class of memory's that
would benefit from data locality for us.
So that's one class of partnership that we have
with the hardware vendors with HPE with intel with IBM.
A whole bunch of people.
But then we're also looking at partnerships
up the stack these days.
With companies like servicenow.
With veeam for backup for our mine product.
I think you saw a little bit of that today.
So a whole bunch of things happening
across all the areas.
>> One of the things that really comes across
at this conference is just how strong
Nutanix's culture is.
The company culture.
The humble, honest, hungry and another word
that's creeping in now is resilient.
I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about
your division of the company and describe
how the company's resilience
the employees and the company itself
>> Rajiv: Yeah.
>> Has really displayed itself.
>> So you know as with any company
you know anytime you go through
the kind of growth we have there's
the forward momentum that everybody sees.
There's also a lot of set backs that
people don't really see.
And there have been a whole bunch
of this in our history.
There been areas where literally
the product has had a flaw which was
so fundamental we called it internally
a "near death experience".
What's been really great again from
an engineering point of view is how
the teams come together at that point.
We set up these war rooms.
People are working weekends.
Everybody's there everybody's on it.
And nobody talks about,
"Hey look, where's my work life balance?"
or things like that at that point.
Especially when there's a customer involved.
If there's a problem that's causing customers outages
our engineers will give up everything.
They'll give up everything.
And not just at work but their lives
to make sure that gets fixed.
And that has helped us get past
the set backs.
Get back in stride.
Happens less now.
Used to happen a lot earlier.
But it's built this real culture of resilience
from the beginning in the early engineers.
>> All right Rejiv, what's exciting you going forward?
You don't have to touch on this one, but when I saw
at the end the XI clusters
>> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
>> and the hibernate feature was something that was like,
Oh yeah, I don't think I've seen that
as to how I can make sure I save my data
but be able to shut things down.
Maybe start there but give us
you know what a little bit look forward
>> Rajiv: Right.
>> As to where the teams playing.
>> Now that's kind of you know thinking that
the detailed thing that you have to do
when you want to launch a new product.
Right, okay.
Look the whole point of doing XI clusters
on Amazon one of the biggest
use cases is cloud bursting.
Well cloud bursting is not just about
increasing your workload size scaling it up.
At some point we want to scale it down.
How do you do that for stateful work?
Stateless it's easy.
All I'm really is putting webservers over there.
Throw them away they're gone whatever.
Database that I scaled down over there
well that data can't go away.
So we had to find ways to essentially
solve for those problems.
So that's how the hibernate feature came around.
In general the bigger question that you asked about,
you know what I'm most excited about.
I think this whole convergence of private
and public cloud with the same stack
on both sites is a new thing.
It really hasn't existed before.
The farther applications can now move back
and forth seamlessly between public cloud and private cloud.
Without rewriting, without refactoring,
without a big lift and shift.
It's very very interesting.
By itself it's not enough.
The flip that's missing is
what about data movement?
What about if you have your data in Amazon
and now want to move it On-premises.
That there really are no good solutions.
Amazon doesn't give you API's
and the tools to do that.
So I think data movement is going
to be a big thing.
And then building a common services stack
'cause it's not just networking storage
and computer anymore, right?
If you're on Amazon you're probably using
all kinds of networking services,
security groups, route 53.
How do you take those kind of services
and also make them available on-premises.
>> So Rajiv, is there anything you've
learned as a team when you look at
AWS Outposts, or Oracle Cloud at Customer
we've had a few years of people talking about
but not a lot of deployments yet.
So you know not saying you're late
to the market but what have you been able--
>> Rajiv: Right, yeah
>> To sit back and learn from what's
been done so far?
>> So the reason we are a little bit late
to the market is that we I think are
solving a problem which the other vendors are not.
Which is kind of what I eluded to before.
That is that how do you support both
the legacy applications and the cloud applications.
How do you provide for migration both ways?
Applications that were born in the cloud
and now you want to move them to on-premises.
Or applications that were born on-premises
and you want to move them to the cloud.
Outpost is great.
I think it's a good product.
The technologies that AWS thinks that
hybrid is the right strategy,
but it's also one problem.
It's also the problem of cloud applications
running on-premises.
It does not solve for the problem
of legacy applications running in cloud.
Right that is just as difficult as ever.
That's not becoming any easier with Outpost.
Similarly if you look at what (mumbles)
with AWS it's also legacy applications
going to AWS but in doing so they don't
have access to all the different networking
services that AWS offers because you're
now running an SX
and you're kind of running a different
networking stack than Amazon is.
So we talked long and hard about this problem.
And said, "Hey look, we're not going to
"take the easy answer over here".
You're going to take our stack which is known to run both
legacy and cloud native applications.
We've proven that.
And enter in natively into Amazon
so that you can use Amazon services
you can use our services you can run legacy
applications you can run more than applications.
Without giving up anything.
And that I think is why it's taken us longer.
But I think it's a more powerful solution for the long term.
>> Rajiv, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
It's always a pleasure having you on.
>> Great being on, thank you so much.
>> Come back and see us again.
>> Thanks.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight.
For Stu Miniman stay more of theCUBES
live coverage of .NEXT Nutanix here in Copenhagen.
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