Good day folks. It's Chris Gonzo Gonde here again for another newsworthy minute. Today we're talking about VMware cloud on AWS. Now NetApp have had a strategic alliance for many years with both VMware and AWS individually, but we've made some very exciting announcements recently together. So, here to help us learn more about this three-way partnership, I'm very delighted to introduce you to my special guests today. I have Alex Degruta, who is the staff cloud architect at VMware. And I have Simit Kalia, who is the data management and storage specialist, Australian, New Zealand at Amazon Web Services. Welcome, Alex. Welcome, Alex. Welcome, Alex. Welcome, Simmit.>> Thanks, Gonzo. >> Hey, Gonzo. >> Fantastic. So, um, folks, um, I'm going to be speaking to you both at the same time, so I'll try to, you know, keep it, um, manageable. Alex, I'll start with you. Tell us a bit about yourself and your role at VMware. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Monte. Thanks, Monte. Thanks, Monte. So, I am a cloud solution architect. Um, I've been with VMware for over three years now. Um, I realize that I have almost like 20 plus years experience in IT, which makes me feel pretty old when I say it out loud. Um, but I've been helping customers um and partners move their services into the cloud for the best part of that time. >> Fantastic. Yeah, I've got 20 plus years experience in myhair. You can see as well,over to you. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Amazon Web Services.>> Awesome. Hey, greetings toboth Chris and Alex. Um, and to everyone listening, uh, my name is Summit Kalia based in Sydney and I'm a storage specialist here at AWS. So my background similar to um others here worked at a variety of traditional on-prem storage vendors but over the last two years um I've been helping customers on their journey to AWS cloud assisting them to rethink their uh data storage management strategies for a variety of use cases and um equally excited to be here both with NetApp and VMware today. >> Fantastic. >> Fantastic. >> Fantastic. That's excellent. All right. So uh let's uh get right into it. Alex, tell me what's your experience so far with VMware cloud for AWS like uptake and activity? >> Yeah, absolutely. Um, so we're seeing a lot of uptake especially in regulated industries. Um like I think if you look at uh Australia, New Zealand in general and sort of you know how early we were to adopt in this country in this region uh virtualization like I think um something like 93% of workloads or something were virtualized and that was like maybe 10 years ago like we were very early adopters um and theline share of that was VMwarebased uh so like ESX type um hypervisor andwhat we saw was because we had so many customers who were kind of on VMware and were looking to the cloud and had such large footprints. Um it was kind of the like amarriage made in heaven I guess like in a way between VMware and AWS and being able to bring those workloads onto uh certainly like thelargest um and leading cloud uh asit was in Australia. So we've seen some really good adoption especially in the kind of like thebig end of town uh around like regulated industries and public sector and so forth. Fantastic. So I guess um submit um from your perspective or from an AWS perspective, what have you seen that's notable from a VMware cloud on AWS uptake and activity especially in our region? >> Absolutely. So let me set the scene here before Isort of dive into your question. You know, a reminder VMware cloud on AWS orVMC in AWS as we call it isa hybrid cloud service, right? And we launched this in 2017. So roughly five years ago and that was to primarily address thedeployment options for a lot of our customers that wanted to run VMware in AWS. And so with that, VMC on AWS brings a lot of the, you know, theVMware enterprise class uh softwaredefined data center stack um toAWS cloud and allows our customers to then optimize their um access anddeliverability ofAWS services ofnative AWS services. So it's also worthwhile pointing out that you know AWS is also VMware's preferred cloud vendor. um you know for vSphere based workloads. So to I guess to answer your question around what observations we're seeing um there's probably a couple that I'd like to call out. Firstly thedata center exit. We're finding that as customers are looking to exit their data center they're looking to minimize themigration downtime. Um so the ability to move to cloud faster with high speed you know reliable connectivity between on-prem and cloud that's a massive advantage. And then sticking with that DC theme, um, you know, that then feeds into customers wanting to simplify their disaster recovery offering or solution. And so ultimately customers are looking to reduce their costs, anything associated with that secondary physical site, but more importantly, the ability to then also recover and restore data rapidly from any sort of breach thatfeeds into thenotion of a, you know, a DR as a service. And then lastly, um, something that's really emerged over the, you know, the last sort of 18 months, um, I'd say is we're seeing a lot of our customers wanting to build their next generation of applications in the cloud. So once again building andhaving the uh you know some of those core building blocks around whether it be EC2 or S3 or RDS um some of those native AWS services and then you know customers can really modernize their applications on the back of that um and that's all while having consistent infrastructure that's compatible with their onrem vSphere environment for example. So Chris, it'sreally a theme here of removing some of that risk and complexity that's that we've got um and you know it feeds into the core cloud computing consumption tenants that we have and it's no different for vSphere based workloads. >> Yeah, fantastic. So I guess then the audience is probably wondering at this point okay VMware cloud on AWS how does NetApp fit into the picture? And I mentioned in my intro that, you know, VMware and NetApp had a relationship an alliance forabout 20 years. VMware and Amazon Webservices, we've had a alliance relationship for over 10 years. And so very recently at VM explore we made a very exciting announcement about uh the VMware and cloud offerings by providing the ability to use our native service uh um that is NetApp and uh AWS which is Amazon FSX for NetApp on as a native storage capability ormorespecifically data store support for VMware and cloud workloads. Um, Jens, I'm interested in both of your collective thoughts on this, what the benefits are for our partners andcustomers. Alex, I'll start with you. >> Yeah, absolutely. And firstly, thank you for reminding me that it's called VM Explore. Um, the last couple of days of the event, I uh I kept on calling it VM World. Like, it's just habit for me. So,thanks for that. First up, >> I know. Look, it's a I don't want to be too dramatic and use, you know, vernacular that's too excessive, but it really is a game changer. Like, and what I mean by that is hypercon converge infrastructure is really good as long as you happen to find the exact right customer with the exact right workloads that hit that form factor. And that's not always the case. And often what we had is we had like these outliers like a GIS server or a backup server or a file server that didn't quite fit in the hypercon conversion infrastructure. And so like abig part of thestory with VMware cloud on AWS is you'veinvested in the skills, you've invested in the hypervisor, you can simply move that to the cloud. But then we had to say well actually except for that one workload, you have to modernize and change that and it kind of dilutes the whole value proposition. Being able to have those NetApp data stores and to be able to leverage that as a first-party offering aspart of VMware cloud on AWS means that we don't have to have these awkward side conversations about individual workloads that perhaps don't fit in the hypercon converged infrastructure. So like it's really exciting for us to be able to bring that to market with a partner and a trusted solution uh you know such as NetApp. >> That's fantastic. So submit what what's uh what are your thoughts on this announcement and the opportunities for our you know VMware customers out there um maybe already in VMware cloud on AWS or considering VMware cloud on AWS with this announcement around NetApp and FSXN look equally excited it'sdefinitely exciting times ahead right um let me rewind a little right so last year at reinvent as we all know um we announced our newest file services offering as part of the FSX family which was as you rightly called out FSX NetApp on tap andyou know for the audience in summary that is it'sa fully managed shared storage built on NetApp's ONAB file system and so with this you know for our joint customers they inherited all the nicities of ONAB but with ONAP now moved to the cloud and that included storage efficiencies such as DDUP compression taring and so on and so if we fast forward now to and to echo Alex's sentiments Um, with this capability, our customers can now attach a fully managed lowcost, high performance NFS data store built on NetApp on tap um, with VMC on AWS. And so with this, it allows them to scale their storage environment as needed without the need to purchase any additional hosts. And that's really the key here, right? So we've essentially decoupled the storage and compute dependency that was traditionally there andwhat that means is in return it provides not only technical but also commercial advantages that ourcustomers can uh can take advantage of. Um the other point I I'd also um worth mentioning here is you know let's not forget ourfriends in the data protection space you know the likes of the and K city rubric convolult etc you know they previously had challenges around or the fact they couldn't mount NFS data store to trigger some of the instant recovery and restore capabilities with VMC and FSXN um and so that challenge is also removed now with this announcement Um the ability to promote a VM and recover instantly, you know, ultimately means abetter RTO for our customers. Um so Chris, look, no doubt this will open more doors in terms of deeper conversations um not only for our partners butdefinitely for our customers andonce again it's in line with the Amazon mantra that you know, innovation is really driving the conversation here and that innovation comes from our customers. That'sled us to this announcement. That's fantastic gentlemen. Thank you both so much for coming out and joining me on this uh newsworthy minute. Um looking forward to uh reconnecting with you at some point to hear about what exciting uh you know customer stories we have about uh leveraging our kind of three-way technology. And uh so if you're out there considering VMware cloud on AWS, come speak to any of us. you know, come and reach out to your uh folks at VMware, reach out to folks at AWS, uh reach out to us at NetApp uh to learn more about how we can accelerate or even simplify uh your journey and your ongoing activities uh for VMware and cloud. I am going to leave you all with uh the dad joke I made at the partner academy yesterday. Ijust have to do it because I keep getting um you know uh hassled by my family for how bad the joke is. Um you know, we're here with NetApp, AWS, and VMware. So F2's company, three is a cloud. Thanks very much, folks. I'll see you on the next newsworthy minute. Thanks again, Alex and Smith.