Good day folks. It's Chris Gonzo Gonde here again for another NetApp newsworthy minute. This time we're talking about VMware and more specifically VMware in the cloud. Um NetApp and VMware have had a strategic alliance for many years and we've recently made some exciting announcements. So to help us learn more about these exciting announcements, I'm delighted to introduce you to my guest today, Alex Degruta, who's staff cloud architect at VMware. Welcome, Alex. Welcome, Alex. Welcome, Alex. Thanks very much, Gonzo. It's a pleasure to be here. >> Fantastic. Alex, I'll start off by asking tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at VMware. >> Yeah, absolutely. Um, so I've been uh in technology for the best part of well kind of 30 years now, so it makes me feel a little bit old, but I did start building computers with my dad once upon a time. So uh I have worked for customers uh for partners for SIS uh and I guess in the last uh seven or eight years I found the golden land that is vendor land. Uh sothat's sort of where I've landed now. So I'm an SA. Um I've been in pre-sales for the best part of you know 10 to 15 years in various product roles andwhatnot. >> Fantastic. Yeah. So um can you tell us a little bit about VMware and public clouds? Um, I think we've seen this huge rush to leverage the services offered by hyperscalers, but more specifically, I'm hearing about VMware Cloud with Amazon Web Services, Azure VMware Service with Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud VMware Engine with Google Cloud Platform. This is pretty exciting stuff. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I guess like if you look at the history especially in sort of Australia, New Zealand um wewere pretty early adopters uh of virtualization ingeneral um and Con I know you are running GSX so you're sort of an old hat at this stuff um but like VMware has such high penetration um inmarket and people have invested in like people and processes and tools and management systems to manage their VMware um infrastructure. And what we saw kind of I guess it sort of happened certainly in the last I would say it's accelerated like the last seven or eight years is people are adopting as you sort of mentioned like a lot more public cloud services and looking to move to the hyperscalers to get all those buzzwords that they can mark their career on like things like IoT and AI machine learning and all that good stuff that's in the cloud. Um but all of their traditional workloads have been built on VMware infrastructure. And so rather than you know rather than sort of pick those virtual machines up and put those in AC2 EC2 rather or as your virtual machines ordumping those into um Google compute whatVMware did um initially with AWS and we worked with the other hyperscalers now like Azure and Google and Oracle and Alibaba actually. Wow. is work our way to actually host that VMware infrastructure as is uh on the cloud and that that's been really palatable um to a lot of customers because rather than having to stand up individual teams and build new processes uh andeven like use a new language um when you're in the public cloud you can use the traditional sort of VMware based infrastructure people teams and then supplement uh andyou know rather than replace what you have uh add toandenhance your you know yourVMware footprint with some of those cloud services. Yeah, look, you rais a really important point there around user experience, right? I think a lot of folks have really invested a lot of time, effort, skills over decades now leveraging this technology. You know, a as we were talking earlier, I am a um self-confessed VMware fanboy and I've been running VMware forover a decade myself. But um speaking of uh over a decade um NetApp and VMware we've had a strategic alliance for you know over a decade but most recently we've kind of significantly bolstered that relationship with the announcement of supporting these um VMware incloud offerings and more specifically by um providing the ability to use NetApp native storage capabilities with VMware in the clouds. I'm keen to understand um your thoughts on this andwhat you think the benefits are for our partners and customers. Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think it's um [sighs and gasps] I know Idecided that I wasn't going to use platitudes and kind of emotive language as part of like before the session, but it is a real game changer. And what I mean by that is anybody who's worked with hypercon converged infrastructure knows that in order to grow any part whether it's memory or your CPU or your storage um you need to add more nodes and when VMware cloud on AWS was kind of created um you know gosh almost 5 years ago now or sort of the announcement was made in order to add additional capacity especially for storage workloads you like our response was add more nodes >> um And like that's a tricky conversation when a customer is like well what you know I don't need more compute and we're like yeah no we know just add more nodes and you can have it for future use but like it doesn't really make sense like it's really hard to have that conversation um with customers and like especially like whatwe'll often do with customers is we'll do like an analysis of their environment and we typically use like things likeRV tools is one that we actually do the analysis on. I know we're getting a little bit in the weeds here, but we'll see. Often there'll be like this there'll be like a file server that's like reallybig or a backup server that's reallybig and we'll say, "Oh, well, you know, you can move all like that thing I said before about, hey, you can move your VMware footprint into the cloud." You can except for that server. And then customers like, "Oh, that's a bit hard." Like now I have to revisit my backup technology. Like oh, and we're like, "Oh, no. Don't use don't move the file server. Use an AWS native service." And they're like, "That's a bit hard." like or it all gets hard and it all gets more difficult and so I think >> unnecessary change sometimes right >> yeah exactly right it's like and it's like customers are looking at VMware cloud on AWS not because like they maybe they want to innovate maybe they want to change some things more often than not they just want to move quickly and yeah >> as soon as you add those oh you know yeah we can move most of your estate but that 10% why don't you transform it's hard annoying conversations um like we do a lot of work with like public sector organizations um where we're actually doing some joint work at the moment and having that conversation. Theywant to move those virtual machines without changing anything. They don't even want to tell their users. They don't want to tell their downstream business units they're actually moving. They just want to do it. >> And as soon as we say, oh yeah, no, you know, you can move to BMC, but then you have to transform those couple of workload, it's really hard. So I think being able to present especially being able to present those data stores and that's you know something that we've got coming on VMware cloud and AWS and Google in the future as well and also is already there onABS so the Azure based offering um is yeah is really exciting.>> Fantastic. Hey, youknow you're talking about movingVMs and uh Iyou know I'm very conscious of the fact that we both of us NetApp and VMware we haven't forgotten about our uh customers and partners that are still using quite heavily VMware on premises. In fact, I'd say this is the first opportunity that I've seen for a real hybrid cloud experience where um you know, we used to enjoy some of the features um of just VMware between data centers like I was my mind exploded the first time I saw votion and then when storage votion came out and you could jump data stores while you know the system just remains online as you migrate. um we can now do this between the data center and the cloud especially what we were talking about earlier from a user experience perspective you know is there any other exciting stuff or features we can unlock now that we have native VMware in cloud uh are there any other so on the migration front I've got a customer at the moment they're moving um 200 so there's different ways you can move a virtual machine so you can move it with like we call it bulk migration but it's a bit of a misnomer it's one plus so it's any number of virtual machines And that's like a vSphere replication where you do a fail over into the cloud. There's another one you can do cross center cross v center votion which is why cross center v motion but then there's also um there's replication assisted votion which is the best of both worlds. It does >> the bulk but then it and then it does the deltas. The um [laughter] the there there's some challenges because you need a lot of bandwidth to be able to do that and so forth. Um, I'm trying to convince this customer at the moment that that's a bad idea to do that for 2,000 VMs, that they should use bulk migration. My problem is it keeps working and so like it's they're like >> argue with it's working. Right. >> Exactly. Right. So they're like, "Oh, you know, we hear you. We're definitely not going to do it." And then I find out the like the week later they moved all these VMs with graph again. Um so like that'sthe one um I say migration we call it like wewe've called it unafectionately um like the hotel California like if you migrate into one of the native clouds like >> you can check in but you can never check in.>> Yeah. Exactly right. It's not that easy. Like it's really easy to get in like you can use um things like uh as your site recovery to get into um is your virtual machines really easily. Like it's not impossible to get back but it's not as easy. So being able to extend those networks and then migrate them in. Um the other thing I will say that I like about you know the fact that it's NetApp data stores in the cloud is lots of customers we work with have a large NetApp footprint and they've built their backup and recovery and restoration procedures around that like things like using like snap mirror and so forth. >> Fantastic. >> Fantastic. So look um uh finally is there any advice that you have for our partners and customers out there that are planning their VMware cloud journeys um and adoption and migration? You you've got some couple of great points that you just mentioned there. Um any kind of final words of advice >> um forlook um I think there's probably um anywords of advice like what I would say is that um like your decision isn't final. Um, andwhat I mean by that is that because you can have a VMware footprint on any number of different clouds, whichever cloud you pick today doesn't need to be like it's not a permanent decision. It's not like a marriage like you can, you know, you can break up and in the future you can use a different cloud. Um, there'salso like we talk a lot about the promise of multicloud. Um, and >> like and thatsounds reallygood. There's some challenges associated with that around oper operationalization operationalizingthose different clouds like because all of those additional services. So as you start to use the native services you need to consider you know what >> different ecosystems at the end of the day, right? Yeah. day, right? day, right? Yeah. >> Yeah.Differentpart you're right different ecosystems different partners um different fault restoration procedures. So like multicloud isreally good and there's also there's minimum viable footprints for a VCF hypercon converge infrastructure. So like most customers in our market will actually use one particular cloud but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be with that cloud for forever. Um >> would it be the other thing I would cons I'd say is um like they really consider what your um security profile is. um local lots of our customers will extend all their networks and then um they'll hair pin all their traffic on prem and we have ways that can make that a little bit better. Um but yeah, thenetwork needs to be really well planned out. >> No, that's >> it's always the network's fault. As a previous network guy, it's always the network's fault. >> It's always DNS as well, right? >> Network, DNS, and storage. So, I empathize with you guys. >> That's it. Alex, mate, I really appreciate you taking the time to come out and talk to us today and uh talk about the um you know the exciting uh you know benefits of uh NetApp now having a presence of being able to provide not just um guest access to NetApp storage in cloud but those that data store um capability is going to unlock uh a bunch of new features for NetUP customers and partners andpotential prospects out there. And uhcan't wait to talk to you again. Um hopefully we might get one of the hyperscalers in andget them to tell us about you know what they're seeing with um VMware cloud adoption as well. So Alex, thanks again and all the best. >> Absolutely. Thanks.