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>> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here with John Troyer.
We have three days wall-to-wall coverage
here at VMworld 2019.
We're in the lobby of Moscone North
and happy to welcome to program,
to my right is Tom Burns
who is the senior vice president and general manager
of networking and solutions at Dell EMC.
And sitting to his right, another Tom.
We have Tom Gillis who's the SVP and general manager
of networking and security inside VMware.
So I'm super excited to go back to my roots of networking.
Tom and Tom, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Thanks for having us.
>> Yeah, thanks for having us.
>> All right, so Tom, you and I have talked for years now
about it was not just SDN but the changes
in the environment, of course,
networking and computer, smashing together,
and the role of software in this whole
environment has changed.
So let's start, there's some news.
Let's cover the hard news first.
VMware has some networking pieces.
Dell has some software networking pieces also,
and there's so more comingling of those,
so maybe walk us through that.
>> Absolutely, I think the story this week
is about the collaboration that's happening
between Tom's team and my team in kind of innovating
and disrupting the traditional networking world.
Tom's had NSX around microsegmentation,
network virtualization, a lot going on with analytics,
the capability to really see what's
going on in the network from cord out, edge to cloud.
The acquisition of Avi, which is outstanding,
other things that are going on in VMware.
Dell EMC disrupting around desegregation
of hardware and software,
giving customers that capability to run
the NAS they need for the connectivity they need,
depending upon where the network is sitting.
So this week we got two announcements.
One is we've got worldwide shipment
of the Dell EMC SD-WAN solutions powered by VMware.
Great, better-than-none software
combined with better-than-none hardware
coming from Dell EMC on a global basis worldwide,
secure supply chain plus professional services
and support capability. >> Yeah, worldwide is the key.
A key parameter there, right?
>> Yeah, and Tom, maybe bring us in.
We'd watch VeloCloud before the acquisition.
SD-WAN, there's a lot of solutions that fit
in a couple of different markets.
It's not a homogenous market there.
Maybe give us just kind of the key points
from a VeloCloud standpoint.
>> SD-WAN is a white-hot market
'cause it has the classic combination
of better, faster, cheaper.
It delivers a better end-user experience,
it is so easy to deploy this, and it saves money.
MPLS circuits and backhauling traffic,
that was a 1990's idea and it was a good idea back then,
but it's time for a different approach.
>> Yeah, and just when I've talked to some customers
and talked to them about their multicloud environment,
SD-WAN's one of those enabling technologies
that they will bring up to allow them to actually do that.
>> Yeah, it was the movement really to Office 365
and SaaS applications that drove the SD-WAN revolution.
And backhauling all this traffic to headquarters
and then going out to Office 365
when a user might be in Des Moines,
that doesn't make any sense.
And so with SD-WAN, we intelligently route the traffic
where it need to go, delivers a better end-user experience,
and it saves a bunch of money.
I mean, it's not hard to imagine that
cheap broadband links are an order of magnitude
lower than these dedicated MPLS circuits.
And the interesting math is that you can take
two or three low-cost links and deliver
a better experience than with a single dedicated circuit.
>> I'm kind of interested in the balance
between hardware and software, right?
The family trees of networking and compute
kind of were different because of they
had specialized needs in silicon.
So where are we now?
It's 2019, where are we now with line speeds
and x86 and the hardware story?
>> I think, and I'll let Tom join,
the discussion around speeds and feeds is not dead,
but it should be dying very, very quickly, right?
>> It's irrelevant, yeah, yeah.
>> It's around virtual network functions
and everything really moving to the software layer,
sitting on top of commoditized x86 base hardware.
And the combination of these two factors
help our customers a lot more with flexibility,
agility, time to deploy, return on investment,
all these types of things.
But, I mean, that's my view.
>> Well, there's a recurring theme you're going to hear
is that in networking,
and I think you were alluding to this,
you needed these dedicated kind of magical black boxes
that had custom hardware in order to do
some pretty basic processing,
whether it be switching routing, advanced security.
You had to run things like hardware regular
expression matching, etc.
It was about three years ago that Intel
introduced a technology called DPDK
which is an acceleration that allowed VMware
to deliver in software on a single CPU,
we could push traffic at line rates
or faster than line rates.
It wasn't the champagne didn't go off
and the ball didn't drop in Times Square,
but it's a really important milestone
because all of a sudden, it doesn't make any sense
to build these dedicated black boxes
with custom hardware.
Now general-purpose hardware,
when you have a global supply chain
and logistics partner like Dell,
coupled with distributed software
can not only replace these network functions,
but we can do things completely differently.
And we're just beginning this journey
'cause it's only recently that we've been able to do that,
but I think you're going to see
a lot more of that in the future.
>> All right, so we talked about SD-WAN.
There was a second announcement.
>> That goes back into the core.
The creation of a fabric inside of the data center
is still a bit difficult.
I mean, I've heard quotes as saying it's
something like 120 lines of CLI per switch,
so let's say four to six leaf switches
and two spine switches could take days
to set up a fabric.
What we've announced is the smart fabric director
which is a joint collaboration between
VMware and Dell EMC that creates this capability
to tightly integrate NSX, NV center
into the Dell EMC PowerSwitch family
of data center switches, really eliminating
several cases and, in fact, setting up
that same fabric in less that two minutes.
And we're really happy about not just the initial release,
but Tom and I have a lot of plans
for this particular product
and in the road map for quarters and years to come
about really simplifying, again,
the network, automating it,
and then really our version
of intent-based networking.
Is the networking operating the way
you configured it when you set it up?
And I think the two of us can combine.
>> Not just on day one, but in day N.
And I think you hit the nail on the head.
Networking has changed.
It's no longer about speeds and feeds.
It's about availability and simplicity.
And so Dell and VMware, I think,
are uniquely positioned to deliver
a level of automation where this stuff just works, right?
I don't need to go and configure
these magic boxes individually.
I want to just write a line of code
where my infrastructure is built into the CIDC pipeline.
And then when I deploy a workload, it just works.
I don't need an army of people to go figure that out, right?
And I think that's the power of what we're
working together to unleash.
>> When a technology comes up like SD-WAN,
sometimes there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace,
vendors going out, one size fits all,
this will do everything.
Where are we in the development of SD-WAN,
and what is this solution?
Who should be taking a look at this solution now?
>> Yeah, the SD-WAN market, as I said,
is growing, depending on whose estimate you look at,
between 50 and 100% a year.
And the reason is better, faster, cheaper, right?
So everyone has figured out maybe it's time
to think differently about network
and architecture and save some money.
So we just announced today
on the VMware side an important milestone.
We have more than 13,000 network virtualization customers.
That includes our data center as well as the SD-WAN.
We don't report them separately.
But 13,000, that's almost double where it was a year ago.
So significant customer growth.
We also announced we deployed together with our partner
from Dell in 150,000 branches around the world.
So by many metrics, I think,
VMware is the number one vendor in this space.
To your point, it is a crowded, noisy space.
Everybody's throwing their hat in the ring.
Oh, we do it too.
But I think the thing that is driving adoption
and the sales of our product is that
when you put this thing in,
it fundamentally changes the experience for the end user.
And there's not a lot of networking products that do that.
I meet customers that are like, "This thing is magic."
You plug it in and all of a sudden streaming just works.
Google Hangouts or WebExs, they just work,
and they work seamlessly all the time.
And there's something there that I think
is still unique to the VMware product.
And I think it's going to continue
to drive sales in the future.
>> I think the other strong differentiation
when it comes to Dell technologies,
VMware, and Dell EMC combined
is we have this vision around the cloud,
Edge, Core, cloud, and this hybrid multicloud approach.
And obviously SD-WAN plays a critical part
as one of the stepping stones as it relates
to creating the environment for this multicloud environment.
So fantastic market opportunity, huge growth.
As Tom said, market's probably doubling in size each year.
I don't know what the TAM numbers are.
I hate to quote.
But we really feel as though now having this product
and this capability inside of Dell EMC, again,
combining our two assets, it could be the next VxRail.
It really could.
>> Yeah, yeah, we believe the SD-WAN
is going to be a gigantic market,
and I think that what's interesting
about our partnership is that we can reach
different segments of the market.
In VMware, we tend to focus on the very
high-end, large enterprise customer
who's technically very sophisticated.
Dell can reach customers we don't even know,
we don't even talk to.
And the product is simple enough
that it works in all segments.
We win the very, very biggest,
and we win these smaller accounts where the simplicity
of a one-click deployment really, really matters.
>> Tom, one of the things that excited me a year ago
at this show was the networking vision
for a multicloud world.
Reminded of Nicira pre-acquisition.
When we look at networking today, most network admins,
a lot of the network they need to manage,
they don't touch the gear.
They don't know where it lives,
but they are still responsible
to keep it up and running.
And if something goes wrong, it's there.
Give us the update as to where we stand with that,
where your customers are, and how that all goes together.
>> Yeah, you're asking the right question, right?
So our mantra is infrastructure is code,
and so no one should ever have to log into a switch.
No one should have to look into a queue.
No one should have to be trying
to move packets from here to there.
It's very, very difficult and not really feasible.
And so as networking becomes software
and those general purpose processors that I talk about
are giving us the ability to think about
not just the configuration of the network
but the operation of the network
in ways that were never before possible.
So, for example, we announced at the show today
with our monitoring product vRealize Network Insight.
We call it VRNI, right?
Not always such clever with the names,
but we're really good with writing code.
VRNI gives us the ability to measure
application response time from the data center
all the way out to the edge.
So a single pane of glass,
we can show you oh, here's where it's broken,
whether it's in the network, whether it's in the server,
whether it's the database that's not responding.
And we do this all without agents, right?
So it's like when the infrastructure get smart
enough to be able to provide that insight,
it changes the way the customer operates.
And that translates into real savings and real adoption.
And that's what's driving all of this momentum, right,
that 7,500 to more than 13,000 customers.
Something has to be behind that,
and I think it's the simplicity of automation.
>> CLI's come up a couple times here.
And so that's kind of a dirty word maybe even these days.
It kind of depends on who you're talking with.
I think VMware and Dell both have spent
a lot of time and effort educating
the networking engineering market,
and also educating the kind of data center,
the rest of the data center crew
about each other's worlds.
Again, where are we at now?
It sounds like with Director and the NSX whole stack,
the role is changing of the network engineer,
but again, where are we in that evolution?
>> I think we're early on, but it's moving quite rapidly.
I think the traditional networking engineer
or networking admin is going to need to evolve
more to this DevOps,
how do I bring applications,
how do I manage the infrastructure more like a platform?
I mean, Tom and I truly believe that the difference
between a compute and a network infrastructure
is really going to start to dissolve over time,
and why shouldn't it?
I mean, based upon what's happening
with the commoditization and the speeds
of the CPU versus the NPUs coming from Merced Silicon,
it's really beginning to blur.
So I think we're in the early stages.
I mean, certainly from a Dell EMC perspective
we still, at times, have those discussions
and challenges with traditional networking people.
But let's face it, they have a tough job.
When something's not working,
the network administrator usually gets blamed,
and so I think it's a journey and things
such as the Dell technology cloud,
open networking, NSX, and now SD-WAN,
it will continue to drive that,
and I think we're going to see a rapid change
in networking over the next 12, 18 to 24 months.
>> Yeah, I've talked to a number of customers
that have said this journey that Tom was talking about
is a challenge because the skill set is different.
My developers need to learn software.
And so what we've been working at VMware
is trying to make that software easier and easier to use
and actually approach like English language.
So the latest versions of NSX have these very simple
declarative APIs that you can say,
"Oh, server A can talk to server B but not server C."
Click, done, deploy.
And now in our partnership with Dell,
we can take that policy and push it right
down into the metal, right down into the silicon.
And so simplification and automation
are the name of the game.
But it is definitely a fundamental change
in the skill set necessary to do networking.
Networking is becoming more like software
as opposed to speeds and feeds and packet sniffers
and more the old, traditional approaches.
>> All right, Tom, want to give you the final word
as to what people should be taking away from Dell
and VMware in the networking space.
>> Well, I think across Dell EMC and in VMware
there's a great amount of collaboration,
whether it's the Dell technology cloud
with VMware really taking the leadership
from that perspective with this multihover cloud.
But in the area of networking,
two to five years ago when we announced
the desegregation of hardware and software,
I am in this to disrupt the networking business
and to make networking very different
tomorrow and in the future than it has been in the past
for our customers around ease of deployment,
automation, and management.
And I think that's a shared vision
with Tom and his team and the rest of VMware.
>> Tom Gillis, Tom Burns, thank you so much
for all the updates. >> Thanks for having us.
>> We'll be back with more coverage here from VMworld 2019.
For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman.
As always, thanks for watching theCUBE.
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