G'day folks, it's Chris Gonzo Gondek for another Newsworthy Minute, which today we're talking about VMware cloud with Google Cloud platform. NetApp have had a strategic alliance for many years with both VMware and GCP, and we've recently made an exciting announcement together. So to help us to learn more about this announcement, I'm delighted to introduce you to my guests today. Corey Adolphus, Corey is specialist customer engineer at Google Cloud. Welcome Corey. Thanks Gonzo. Corey, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Google Cloud. Yes. So I'm a customer engineer for Google Cloud, which is a technical pre-sales role, sometimes called a systems engineer or sales engineer in other companies. I'm based in Melbourne, Australia, and I've been with Google since 2017. In my role, I specialize in our infrastructure solutions and in particular Google Cloud, VMware engine. Oh fantastic. So tell us some, what's been your experience so far with GCVE or Google Cloud VMware Engine and you know, the customer experience? Yeah. So the service launched in Australia in late 2020 and it took a bit of time to gather some awareness and momentum in the market, which is, you know, it's only natural, but for the past 12 months it's been growing exponentially and is now a very significant service for us and our customers. They've been loving the performance of our offering since we use enterprise grade servers and very high bandwidth, non oversubscribed networking. And not only that, though, also the ease and simplicity with which they can connect GCVE to the rest of Google Cloud to other services that they might be running in Google Cloud and also that all of their existing VMware tooling works without modifications. Somuch kind of like the best of VMware, the best of Google Cloud coming together. It's exactly right. It's right. Well, this brings me to us. You know what is NetApp fit into all of this? I mentioned in my introduction that, you know, NetApp, VMware, Google Cloud, we've individually had strategic alliances for many years. But in this most recent announcement around GCVE supporting the NetApp based cloud volume service fit for Google as an NFS data store. Can you tell me your thoughts on this? And, you know, what are the benefits for our partners and customers out there? Yeah, look, GCVE is built using VMware's Cloud Foundation stack, which uses hyper converged infrastructure as its foundation. As you know, this means that it scales linearly by adding more nodes, each having a fixed amount of compute memory and storage. Now, this can be fine for a lot of customers who have workloads that fit neatly into the node configuration that we have. But, you know, there have definitely been times when customers come to us with storage heavy workloads and previously this would require adding more hyper converged nodes to their configuration, even though they only needed the storage that these extra nodes delivered. So that's, you know, effectively they've been wasting CPU and memory in those situations. And now by having a cost impact as well, right? Absolutely. Yeah. So now having this option of provisioning NetApp cloud volume service, as you said, as an NFS DataStore to GCVE. Now these sorts of customers can size their hyperconverged nodes for the amount of compute and memory that they need and then size the storage independently. And that's,just one of the use cases. You know, another one is often customers also have a requirement for different tiers of storage and the built in offering of GCVE has just one tier, right? It's a, it's a very high performance tier but it's one tier. You know, all your storage is the same. And so by again, offering this ability to now connect NetApp cloud volume service, NetApp CVS has different tier offerings and so you can actually create multiple data stores from a NetApp CVS service to GCVE. You could have a high performance for, you know, if you've got high performance requirements that don't fit on the internal storage for GCVE. But also if you had the requirement for more, say, archival storage, secondary storage, then that is absolutely something that is delivered by this capability. So, you know, and as you said before, you know, from a cost perspective, I'd say in both these use cases it is about lowering the TCO customers. Fantastic. So yeah, increasing performance, lowering TCO, increasing the, I guess options and multiple features and you know, speaking about that, Corey, it turns out you're a bit of a NetApp alumni yourself. You know, you're at NetApp for many years yourself prior to Google Cloud. Is there any extra NetApp technologies that you're familiar with that would bring extra benefits to customers using not just Google Cloud and GCVE but the cloud volume service itself? It's based off of NetApp ONTAP technology? Absolutely. Yeah. Look, I've always got a soft spot for NetApp in general, having worked there for many years. Some of the best years of my life. I can definitely say that. And, you know, I still firmly believe that no other technology comes close to ONTAP, particularly for things like Windows File Serving, you know, SMB shares, storage efficiency, features like flex clones, dedupe compression. And of course, you know, thebedrock of NetApp technology, the unbeatable data protection tools like snapshots and some of the snapshots in the snap mirror absolutely saved me many times. So, look, some of these features are available with NetApp Cloud Volume Service and others are applicable only to the other formats. That cloud volumes comes in, which is cloud volumes ONTAP or CVO. You know, and whilst CVO isn't supported as a data store for GCPVE, it absolutely can be used as guest connected storage, which means use cases like VDI on GCVE, very popular use case. It needs shared storage at the guest layer for things like home directories and group drives, user profiles, and doing that via the Windows file sharing or SMB protocol to a NetApp CVO instance. Absolutely supported and works brilliantly, you know, and then you get all of the efficiencies as well as the entry level side. And I guess some of the other storage features allow us to run in a hybrid mode as those got a lot of NetApp customers out there use on premise ONTAP storage systems that will just natively connect to this native Google cloud service known as CVS. That's right. Yeah. So again, that ability to take an existing customer, a NetApp customer, usually certainly in my experience when I worked at NetApp, got a lot of loyal customers that really loved the technology and have built their I.T. Infrastructure, foundations on it. But you still want to be able to leverage cloud in a lot of ways. Maybe it's for just certain applications or migration because you're maybe closing a data center, whatever that might be. But the best way to transfer data if you've already got NetApp is to have the destination NetApp as well. And as you know, that's fully supported as we've been talking about in Google Cloud and then being able to use Snap mirror between the two. It's just a perfect match. Absolutely perfect match. I love your choice words. And look, just really in closing, we're talking about, you know, this recent announcement, which is great, the CVS supporting GCVE with NFS DataStore support. We've got all these other extra features that we're using under the hood. The story doesn't stop there, right? We've got Google Cloud platform with Google Communities Engine. We've got different types of workloads that running Google Cloud that can leverage the CVS service as well. Right? It's not just specific for GCVE. There are a whole bunch of other Google Cloud native use cases that can use the service. That's right. And, you know, theCVS service as well. My understanding, it's got a couple of different performance tiers that are available. So once again, that gives customers a lot of flexibility, things that they don't necessarily get from some of our Google native technology. So really, this is about bringing the best of NetApp experience in shared file systems and data protection and adding that to some of the Google Native services, like, as you said, Kubernetes engine, compute engine. And so you can actually really get that best of both worlds because, you know, we've got a lot of customers, majority of them are coming from an existing place of an on premise technology and they're migrating to cloud. So there's a lot of technologies that exist in on premise like NetApp, that you need to maintain when you move to cloud. And so it just creates a really good capability there of cloud native plus enterprise on premise datacentre technologies that are now finding a very good home in the cloud. Fantastic. Corey, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming out and talking to us on our NetApp Newsworthy Minute. I look forward to catching up with you in a few months time where we might be able to share some customer stories and some success that we've achieved from this three way partnership with VMware. And yeah, looking forward to having you on the show again. Thanks, Gonzo. Thanks for having me.