>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE,
covering VMworld 2018.
Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage
of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas, Nevada.
We'll go back to San Francisco next year,
but here in Vegas, third year in a row,
and I'm Stu Miniman.
My cohost is John Troyer.
Welcome back to the program Gil Shneorson,
who's the SVP and VxRail general manager with Dell EMC.
Gil, great to see you.
>> Great to see you, it's still great to see you, John.
>> All right, so I caught up with you at Dell World
just a few months ago, down the strip.
At that point, we couldn't take an autonomous vehicle.
But since then, that Lyft now has like autonomous vehicles,
so we know things can change pretty fast in the area.
Why don't you give us, what's the update on your end?
What's changed since last we talked?
>> Thanks for asking.
As you know, we're moving very fast.
We're moving very fast,
picking up many, many new customers every quarter,
but the reason for that is because we keep innovating.
So for example, in the show we announced a new G Series,
a new 560 which is a new two-by-four Dell-based model,
with more memory, more CPU, more capacity.
Very popular form factor by our customers.
We announced that we are now doing a simship with VMware,
we're calling it synchronous releases.
Our customers told us that they don't want to wait
between a vSAN release and a VxRail release.
We announced VxRail participation
in Dell's customer loyalty program,
which is a lot of features for future proof.
We just included VxRail in the network fabric design center,
which is kind of a sign for things to come,
as where do we need the whole solution to be
with networking inclusion.
More configurability for VxRack SDDC,
in other words, we keep moving forward very quickly.
>> Gil, we've had the chance to document this since day one.
So vSAN, I said when it was first announced,
this was the rising tide
that will really raise all the ships
in what we launched as the hyperconverged environment.
VxRail was,
at the time, EMC and VMware creating a team together,
took the product people, took some various components
and made a product that really accelerated the marketplace
and was very successful, thousands of customers.
vSAN's got 15,000 customers,
you've got to be one of the top deployments out.
You're all under the Dell family,
but is it still made up of those people
and how does that teamwork and innovation
between various groups work today?
>> Look, when we did this there was no runbook.
How do you take two teams from two companies?
But we discovered all the time
that what we've created is extremely powerful.
We were growing three times the market.
And usually that's not a simple thing
and so on both of our sides we're doubling down.
On the roadmap, the integration between the companies.
And as I said, synchronous shipping is an investment,
because what you really have to do is move more things
towards the VMware side so testing are done quickly
because you don't want to forego quality.
So we're very happy with this model,
and I think customers are happy with this model.
You take the software, you put it
with a specific configuration, you automate it to match,
and you get something that's very resilient,
and I think both of us know that
and both of us keep investing it because it's working.
>> That's great.
Gil, I wanted to kind of follow on
with what you said about the VMware
and the Dell teams coming together.
So my tribe is on the VMware side, right?
And the VMware admins have always
been very involved with storage.
And for the last couple years they had been
very involved cross-training on vSAN.
So I'm kind of curious about the demand
for VxRail and where it's coming from.
Is it the VMware folks that are saying,
"Hey, let's look at this"?
Is it the C-level, is it the old storage team,
is it the business unit?
What's driving this transformation?
>> Yeah, I'll tell you.
Two years ago you needed to talk to people about why HCI.
More and more, the conversation is why you're HCI.
And we have a very unique position
because we are part of the VMware stack.
And in fact, maybe we'll touch on it later but
HCI
has its place,
but we're already looking at what multiclouds means
from infrastructure standpoint, right?
And so, if it's a transformative conversation
it would be some sort of an architect
in that environment that's transforming.
And they'd have a cloud project
and they'll have a name for me,
Cloud One, My Cloud, one of those.
But most of the cases it's still a tech refresh,
they're moving from a three-tier architecture,
to a consolidated hyperconverge.
And vAdmins have a lot to say.
The server admins have a lot to say.
And the reason they buy an appliance
or basically buy our automation,
because they realize that it saves them time,
and it takes away risk.
And many of them, by the way,
choose to deploy vSAN on their own
with servers which we call ReadyNodes,
and they're also very successful.
In other words, it's how much value you want
on top of vSAN that you're willing to pay for
and they're voting with their wallets.
>> Yeah, Gil, I'm really glad you brought up multicloud
because it's one of the big themes of the show.
And it's funny, because we know
that vSAN is a critical component
of the VMware Cloud Foundation, the VCF stuff.
But I hadn't really thought about,
VxRail is just built with vSAN.
So I still, even though I know it's a software thing,
I think of it as an appliance
and something coming from Dell.
Talk to us about how VxRail fits
into the multicloud world for customers.
>> So VxRail, today we have VxRail and we have VxRack.
They differ only in parts
of the management stack on top of them.
There's VxRail manager, there is an SDDC manager
that comes from VCF.
And by the way, those over time will find their way
into somewhere of a consolidated stack.
And the reason I'm talking about multicloud today is
because we have not, we keep innovating with the vSAN team.
We keep benefiting from their innovation,
we keep adding on top of it.
But more and more you'll see us integrate
with other parts of the VMware stack.
So for example, I think Pat touched
on our future or upcoming integration
with our Cloud Assembly services.
So you can take a software-based management vRealize
and manage VxRails that you own as a service.
So our current roadmap in investments
are not only to invest in being the most resilient,
robust, vSAN-based infrastructure,
but tying to every part of the VMware stack
so we can really be that infrastructure for multicloud.
So between VxRail and VxRack
and the different touchpoints across the stack,
we're really weaving it into the entire stack.
That's our strength, we are a VMware product essentially.
And so we realize that we need to take the whole breadth
of the VMware stack and integrate as appropriate
at every level, so this choice becomes
a no-brainer for customers.
>> Gil, since VxRail is an appliance,
how often does it get updated
and are people capable of taking those updates
since it's an engineered system like that?
>> Yeah, look, in the past,
when people wanted a lot of things to work together,
they'd qualify them, they'd test them
and then they'd go upgrade them manually.
Piece by piece through a recipe, if you will.
What we've done in the appliance model,
we've added our own IP
which basically takes all of that and automates it.
So what our customers get is a downloadable package
from Dell EMC that includes the entire VMware stack update,
all of the drivers, all of the firmware involved,
and does a one-boot update for each node in the cluster
and cycles through it automatically.
So, because we now are synchronously shipping with VMware,
and by the way, customers are concerned
with express patches.
Those we do within seven days, or even faster.
So every time VMware moves forward,
every time we move forward, we package it all up
and we make it downloadable and upgradeable automatically.
So it happens as fast as they need it to be,
you know what I mean?
There's no limitation because it's an appliance,
it's the same thing as having a stack.
>> Gil, I'm wondering if we can talk
a little bit up the stack.
The early customers that I've talked to,
we know that modernizing your applications
can be really challenging.
A pattern that I've seen from a number of customers is
step one, modernize the platform,
step two, start modernizing the applications.
What are you seeing from your rack and rail customers
as they go through that kind of transition?
>> That's a good question. (chuckles)
I think most of the customers we're talking to today
are still modernizing the infrastructure.
That's the reality.
They need a more agile environment
because they need to take care of things up the stack
and go into development models of all sorts.
You can also see that there's a lot of success
with our joint work with Pivotal
on Pivotal Ready Architecture.
And so Pivotal and us have created
the Ready Architecture, based on VxRail.
The value in that is really Cloud Foundry
and what it brings to the table, and the design.
And we see a lot of adoption for that,
so people are adopting Cloud Foundry
as a development model and a deployment model.
They're using VxRail as an infrastructure,
and obviously because of its ability to migrate
across environments, that infrastructure transcends,
it makes sense.
So there are two angles, but I think a lot of people
are still modernizing their base infrastructure
to be ready for greater things.
>> Absolutely.
All right, Gil, want to give you the final word.
What should we be looking for from your group
as we go through the rest of 2018?
>> We're going to keep moving, we're going to keep innovating.
We're going to make sure that the solutions fit
into the existing VMware environments
in a more seamless way
every time we work on it.
And I got to say, if there are customers
watching this Cube interview,
I keep reaching out to customers saying,
look, we have many, many thousands of customers now.
We do not want to lose the intimate relationship with them.
So if anybody's watching
and they're interested in a conversation
telling us what they wish to see on the roadmap,
voicing their opinions directly to the product group,
I know my title and Twitter handle
are going to be here at the bottom,
I invite people to reach out and talk to us.
>> All right, great closing point.
Gil, we're always loving
fostering conversations and feedback.
So, Gil Shneorson, his Twitter handle's
on a screen in case Shneorson doesn't
come off your keyboard nice and easy.
John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman,
we're also, always love the feedback
when you send it on Twitter.
And we'll be back with lots more coverage
here from VMworld 2018, thank you for watching theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
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