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>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark.
It's theCUBE! Covering Nutatnix.Next 2019.
Brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of
Nutanix.Next.
We are here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight,
alongside of Stu Miniman, the analyst for theCUBE.
We have two guests for this segment.
We have Manoj Agarwal.
He is the SVP of Engineering at Nutanix.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
>> Thank you Rebecca. That's good.
>> And Gil Haberman. He is the Senior Director
of Product Marketing at Nutanix.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
>> Thanks for having me.
So, our topic today is Xi Clusters.
These were announced at Anaheim,
at .Next back in Anaheim.
Gil, why don't we start with you.
Describe the business problems you were hearing
from customers and how these Xi Clusters
are designed to help solve them.
>> Gil: Sure, first thanks for inviting me.
I'm a big fan of theCUBE.
It's so great to be here.
To your question, at Nutanix, we've been working
with customers on the vision of Hybrid Cloud for
a number of years now.
And the different challenges have evolved over time.
Initially, there were pockets of public cloud adoption
where customers wanted to simply find a way to operate
across multiple clouds.
But today, the challenges are different.
Now, as customers are looking to adopt business
critical applications that span private and public,
bursting and migrating applications,
there's a strong need for consistency across environments.
And we gear around consistency around 3 aspects.
The first is infrastructure.
The second is operations.
And the third is the consumption model itself.
From an individual perspective, what we keep hearing
is that the same VMs and applications must
be able to work across environments,
without significant replatforming or retooling.
From an operation's perspective,
cloud engineers truly need a way to utilize
the same practices, integrations,
in work that they have done on their applications
for many years, across multiple clouds.
So there's a need to sustain the same practices
across these multiple clouds.
And finally from a consumption model perspective,
there's a need to have a platform that drives the
same level of consistency in terms of licensing
and software across different environments.
And for that, we at Nutanix have to evolve
to empower operators to be able to address
all of these needs of consistency across private and public.
>> Now, I would like to add something to it.
You just think about three years ago.
The entire world was talking about
"Everything is going to be public cloud."
And very soon, all these CIOs also realized that
it's not going to be just public cloud
or just private cloud.
It's going to be Hybrid.
And we ran a survey with 2,700 IT professionals
who participated in the survey, and what we learned
mainly 91% of them, they said hybrid is ideal.
And the second thing that was not also a surprising thing
was 94% of them, they said the app migration
or app mobility is going to be the key.
And then we look at that option like
"How are you going to adopt?"
And that was also strikingly similar,
like what we see currently maybe 18% or so,
that they are into the hybrid world and getting onto
close to 41% or so in the next 24 months.
>> Yeah, but Manoj, I'm glad you brought that up.
When I talk to users, the thing that they're concerned the
most about are their applications% and their data.
And in IT forever, migrations have been a challenging
thing to do and it was usually,
you set up a migration and it takes you
weeks or months to do it.
Today, migrations aren't even going to be
even a one time thing.
If I'm moving from one cloud to another,
if I'm moving from private to public,
or even public to private.
I need to have some flexibility to what I'm building.
How has that informed how you're building
your architectural designs?
>> That's a great point.
In fact, we always feel that architecture matters,
and why the fundamental technologies that we are building
should help.
Two things that I'll say.
One is the data replication technologies that we have built
and strengthened over time.
Plus the second thing is the network.
If you get the network right, then you are very
slowly there.
And we had been reflecting on the data side, you know.
10 years of journey and data replication technologies
like we have built.
Networking we have been very hard at work on that front also
in the last three years or so,
with the building of Xi Cloud.
We'll see and hear more and more,
especially in the context of Xi Cluster.
What you see is that we have done the ready integration
with AWS ETCs.
Thereby first of all all the services that exist in AWS.
It's available to the customers with their app,
running on XI Clusters without changing anything there.
>> This is a competitive market
so let's talk about differentiation.
How do you see the product as completely different
from your rivals and then how are you positioning it
to your customers?
>> Yeah. I'll go back to again the same thing.
Architecture matters.
We were not the first ones to go out with a hybrid
converse like in 2013.
There were a lot of competitive solutions
that existed at the time.
But we took our time.
We wanted to make sure that we do it right.
We do provide choice to our customers.
That's where we matter.
As we are building out solutions,
again going back to the four principles.
Applications sort of require change.
You don't require an IPO presence to change,
so when we are building the solution,
we are making sure if you want to pay for private cloud,
on-prem our service provider.
Or you want a public cloud. Any of the big cloud
players or this new cloud, that you have a common
architecture underneath.
You have the same management plain with the prism.
You can really orchestrate, and manage
the entire infrastructure.
You have the flexibility in terms of the networking.
Other services that you want to go and use,
you have the choice of wahtever platform also.
Like something that we don't want you to go and change
if you don't need a change.
Lastly, I would say, on the business side,
we do want to give the smarty cloud world the flexibility
for the customers to bring a cloud of their choice and
if they want to switch, they should be able to switch with
one click also.
>> Yeah. Gil, I'm wondering if you can actually explain
to our audience one of the challenges here is
deploying unbared metal is not something that
anybody can just do on the public clouds.
For AWS, the first solution was actually VM ware on AWS.
They had to develop that but they're now opening that
to be able to use.
Can you walk us through where we are with the
cloud providers and that's I think part of the reason
why this isn't yet generally available.
Indeed, AWS has been the first to open bare metal
and this is really the path for us at Nutanix to
make clouds invisible as well.
We worked with a number of platforms on Prem and
now we want to extend that to public cloud and
having an ability to actually access bare metal
is the first step in doing so.
Beyond that, what we've done is what we believe
is the hard work of making things very simple to
drive customer delight.
And so what we've done is integrate into AWS
rather than just running on top of AWS,
inside existing accounts and VPCs of customers
and the outcome has benefits on both technology
and business perspective.
From the technology perspective, cloud operators
can see all bare metal as well as cloud native
services in one place, one inventory.
And we believe that this type of topology will
provide better performance.
And then on the business side,
this allows us to do a couple of things.
The first, if you are an AWS user like most of
our customers, they can use AWS credits for that
bare metal infrastructure.
At Nutanix, we are now able to evolve
our services to provide hybrid licenses,
so our licenses would eventually be portable.
And so you see how we are gradually building
towards this portability across multiple clouds,
AWS being the first cloud.
>> Yeah, it's great to see Nutanix-
We've seen a few other companies moving towards
that model because if I'm software and truly agnostic,
you should be able to have it across those environments.
I believe Solidfire a couple of years ago started
doing some of the things; A couple other companies.
So the X in AWS sounds like it will be first.
We know Google has been the partner of Nutanix for a while.
Could you just give us where are we with Google and Azure?
Kind of to round out the big three.
>> Sure, so we have started to work with AWS
and we have announced early access now inviting
customers to sign up with us to get access.
We are also actively working with Azure to figure out
how to together bring better bare metal services
and the type of software on top of that.
And of course, we believe that other cloud vendors
are going to open this up as well and
Google Cloud being a close partner of ours is
an important part of that strategy as well.
>> And we are doing something
with Google already as you know.
We have integrated the entire stack using
their nested vertilization technologies,
like running on their vertilization the HB which is nested.
Today, we run a lot of our customers prospect they run.
The test, our experience the entire
solution on Google test prime.
We have brought out more than a thousand users
every month, that they access it.
So it's a journey, like when they
have the full bare metal, you can see
a lot more but we are very engaged with them.
>> I want to talk about the future now and have you looked
into your crystal ball a bit, 6, 10, years from now.
What do you see-
This is such a fast changing environment but
how do you see the cloud evolving
and then how do you see Nutanix?
What role does Nutanix play?
>> Last 10 years, it was all about how we bring
public cloud into the private cloud, right?
Next 5, 10 years when you think about it
is all how do we really make it hybrid.
The experience that what customers have
come to expect in the last 10 years.
You can go and pick any kind of platform
on which you want to run the same stack.
You won't need to worry about it.
Something similar that needs to happen
and the underlying architecture of technology
which will go and drive that is going to be data
mobility, same control plane that
can go and extend this smarty cloud.
This story by the way resonates very very well
with the customers because it's not easy to
get your IT for support, to get trained on different
cloud technologies also because
the talent things cost there.
And if you can go and teach them one interface and
have them run with the choice of infrastructure
or the back form or the cloud, that's what we think
we can make a huge difference for the customers.
>> Yeah, so I want to make sure I understand when
talking about your hybrid or multicloud strategy,
we've got Xi Clusters help you get in
and matches what you have on sight.
Have you had a conversation about Kubernetes yet?
Where does Carbon which is the Nutanix Kubernetes
fit into this overall discussion?
Is that just part of the platform that gets baked in
and therefore we don't need to talk about it
or am I missing a piece?
>> That's a great question because the beauty
of what we're talking about is that we bring
the entire software and the entire platform
with us wherever we go.
Part of that stack is carbon and calm.
We need the ability to have both traditional applications
alongside modern applications with Kubernetes.
Even hybrid applications that include some front end
that might be containerized, maybe back end that is
not yet containerized.
And all that, everything that we've been doing on-prem,
can now be moved into any other public cloud we provide.
>> It's part of the compute, right?
You got the VMs, now you got the containers.
It's part of the backbone.
>> So yeah, we've heard from some people say that
Kubernetes is just the new containerized compute.
We don't need to talk about it and I'm okay with that,
because it's just in there.
>> Yes. Absolutely.
>> Excellent. Well Gil and Manoj,
thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> Manoj: Thanks so much for hosting us.
>> Gil: Thanks for having us.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman.
Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .Next.
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