Thomas Cornely, Nutanix & Travis Vigil, Dell Technologies | Hybrid Cloud Made Easy
hello and welcome to hybrid Cloud Made Easy with Dell Technologies and new tanic on the cube as we all know too well there's never a dull moment in the world of it just look at how things have erupted with generative AI hitting the scene we have seen that it leaders are increasingly interested in having choices and flexibility when building up the stack that works best for their infrastructure modernization projects modern app development efforts AI integration initiatives and so on things are dynamic as ever particularly in the virtualization space AI infrastructures need an easy button people are really looking to understand how do they turn up these new infrastructures in a very concise and easy way cloud is really not a place but an operating model and it's spreading across all from Edge on Prem collocation and into the hyperscale cloud inference at the edge definitely needs a cloud operating model and people are looking for that easy button for bringing inference all across their entire infrastructure HCI offers a streamlined management experience by integrating compute storage and network into a single system this reduces complexity of managing separate components and allows it team team to focus on more strategic tasks at hand companies can rapidly deploy new applications and services without the need to integrate disparate systems allowing for quicker response to changing business needs as we've seen with generative AI storage and data workflows are evolving and where data will be processed will continue to move around as new AI applications built in Cloud native and virtualized ways move closer to the consumer in many ways organizations will be bringing AI to the data where it lives in real time joining us today are two gentlemen from very well-known Enterprise it providers Dell Technologies and nanic they are both Veterans of the cube and I want to welcome back on because it's always a good experience to talk with them and get into the details and they're going to share their perspectives and get into those details on some new collaborative developments that they both been working on they're both senior vice presidents of product management I have Travis vill who's at Dell and Thomas cornelly who's at new tanic welcome on board guys thanks Rob so Thomas can you talk a bit about what you're seeing and hearing from customer that are really interested in these types of solutions today and what are the challenges that are bubbling up for them right now well I mean rob you started with saying that look there's a lot of change right in it and that's kind of the you know the constant right um at the top level what we're seeing is customers just knowing having an avalanche of new applications you know we're talking of three quarters of a billion applications new applications coming on board over the next couple years so that's just a massive amount uh we seen customers deal with the fact that they have to be ready for these applications dealing with M modernizations things running at the edge in the private Cloud you know in public clouds you know having to think about kubernetes having think about Ai and how to make the get value out of Enterprise AI right so there's just a lot of different things going on and those are all forward-looking at the same time we're seeing changes in the ecosystem you know we're seeing Acquisitions disrupt existing environments and customers having to go and make adjustments to what that means for their install base right so all of that put together just massive amount of pressure on customers to think in terms of being flexible having options and you know having agility built in to the co infrastructure so there's a lot in there to unpack because I I think again you said things are changing to to put it mildly how do you how do you break that down where are you looking for uh potential solution perspective to help those customers well I mean if you think about all of these different patterns right what's going on with on pram Legacy what's going on with you know new applications modern applications ctive applications nii you know all of that means potentially a lot of complexity that customers you have to go deal with and complexity is cost it's risk and so really when you look at this at methanic when we talk talk to customers the focus for us is to think along four key axes four key pillars in terms of how you should think about your next steps the first one is think in terms of platform and you know a multicloud hybrid multic Cloud platform that's the whole Foundation here is to have one environment get a consistent way of doing things wherever you're running at the edge in your core or in public clouds you know we've been working on this for years on our side you know nutanix as you said is you know rooted in hyp converge but we's been building the platform adding compute you know more than 70% of our customers today in our install base are running our home buil hypervisor ah right so a lot of customers have gone with a full stack approach already thinking of look if I get this full stack I can benefit from the integration I get from the stack in terms of having portability and consistent operations so that's Point number one think in terms of a cloud platform the second one is make sure your think terms of having options for the future it's not about optimizing for now only of course you want to go and decisions today but what happens and what we see consistently now is what was the best location for an application today likely won't be three years down the road because somebody will get acquired because your contract with a you know hyper skill will change and we've seen this you know covid was all cloud cloud cloud and now customers are all about repatriation and thinking hybrid the third one is you know how do you get to manage all these environments in a consistent fashion right and this is about going ahead at the potential complexity of dealing with all this and getting one control plane to actually get consistent ways to go and monitor applications protect them make them resilient and last but not least in all this right is about being ready for the future it's not about today it's about this new crop of applications those AI enabled applications those ctive applications having a platform that supports your Innovation for the future and that's again something that is so core to what we've been doing here at nanic this is also what brought us to working more CL we down yeah I I I think again we're big fans of common platforms and open ecosystems put it mildly and that certainly seems to be in a winning approach for the long term like you said investment protection we're also seeing that in our data from ETR our partner that 50% of cloud native applications are actually being built on premise uh so now you know turning to Travis let's bring you in here and get your take on this yeah my perspective here is is really uh well aligned with what Thomas just laid out but uh let me offer up a statistic that I think highlights some of his points 90% of it organizations say they're facing increasing complexity in their hybrid Cloud environments that means that nearly every organization out there has a hybrid strategy and they could also use some help to simplify things so from our perspective customers need a modern data center that's smart it has to be flexible and it has to be resilient and those last two flexibility and resiliency are top of mind for us at Del Technologies because we're continuing to build out a virtualization portfolio that offers customers choice and that includes the choice between a streamlined HCI Appliance running your preferred software stack and as you know HCI offers Simplicity efficiency performance and solutions that are built on a two-tier architecture that allow for compute and store to scale independently and can offer even greater flexibility over the long term yeah I I hear some really interesting things in there so you know given all of that how are things evolving through your recent work with Thomas and the team at nanic well we're adding even more options to our portfolio with two new joint Solutions those Solutions are going to be sold and delivered one 100% through D let me talk uh in a little detail about each of them the first solution is Dell XC plus it is available now and adds to our existing XC family of HCI based Appliance for a simplified approach to hybrid Cloud for our joint customers uh Del XE plus is a suite of integrated TurnKey hyperon converged appliances that combines nanic Cloud platform software with Dell's portfolio of industry-leading powerage servers we are also pre-announcing support for Dell powerflex with nanic Cloud platform this is I think is going to be a very powerful combination that will provide customers with a flexible approach that includes bare metal hypervisors kubernetes kubernetes distributions and more it's going to be initially available through a tech preview at the end of this year with General availability plan for the first half of next year now I want to talk just in a little bit more detail about them the first one D XE plus this is really hybrid Cloud Made Easy here we're leading with simplicity for streamlining operations and optimizing performance poweredge servers are designed with customer outcomes in mind we start with the workload and then design the servers from the ground up to meet the unique requirements of that workload and deliver the right combination of Technologies to deliver that outcome the poweredge hardware that XC plus is built on is available in a number of configurations that best meet the requirements of a range of applications some of which Thomas mentioned AIML dat databases modern apps Cloud native you name it now Dell power Flex with nanic Cloud platform on the other hand enables customers really to unlock their storage and solves for virtualization flexibility it provides uh High scale across anywhere that your applications will run and with it you'll get a single single interface for Hardware management the ability to run your choice of hypervisor the openness and flexibility to run a variety of ecosystems on a Consolidated infrastructure solution and support for private and public cloud deployments and of course the security and resiliency built in to protect your data and your applications at every level yeah I I think that's actually a really good segue Travis to uh back you know to Thomas here in the nanic cloud platform has really a dedicated and growing user base for you know it has been for some time now and I think that Thomas could you run down some of what nutanix's stack offers absolutely I mean when you look at the cloud platform at tanic you know for us it's about delivering one platform to run all your apps and data anywhere has been kind of a driving motion for us in terms of innovation and goto market now what we deliver effectively is software defined infrastructure that gives you virtual storage virtual compute as I mentioned you know 70% of our customers are running our own hypervisor ah and that's a big drop here you know virtual networking and then complement that infrastructure stack with the buildin automation from cloud management things around buildin operations you know capacity planning automated remediation selfservice PS coming built in with the whole solution you know cost governance security governance so that put together is what is the new Cloud platform okay so you get an environment here that is consistent that you can basically deploy and run all your applications at the edge in small environments in data center at very large scale or natively in public clouds that in a natural is the key thing you get three key benefits out of this so the first one as Travis was mentioning earlier is about operational Simplicity right you have one software infrastructure that allows us to automate a lot of the TD's work normally involved just running infrastructure right and once you get this software doing the work for you what you get a second benefit which is better security and better resilience because very often what affects security and availability is you know human errors and you take those out by having the software self-monitor self-correct and keep things up to date and the last benefit here in terms of the work we've done historically is make sure that you know customers can actually run the most high performance applications on the cloud platform that's been driving a lot of our investments but doing this in a way that gives you choice and simplicity so customers can go and take this software and run it on their choice of server hardware and this is really here what we've been extending here working with their is not only simplify how you get to procure those Solutions but also extend the reach of the cloud platform by allowing customers to go and complement their power Flex environments with the new CL platform yeah and I think again this is really exciting because when you start to look at how customers are really trying to understand and do that across their entire Cloud operating model it it's huge but one of the things that I and I don't want to bury a really good point here which is that you know power Flex right and that power Flex point and nanic offering native integration for Dell storage is is a pretty big deal and correct me if I'm wrong here but this is New Territory for you isn't it Thomas it's absolutely is um and you know and the best way for me to think about this is if you look back at the history of the company nutanix and the long history we've had with d as a partner going you know more than 10 years now back in the day new was an appliance vendor the first time we actually went into doing software with Partners what with d you know with d doing the X Appliance at the time using n software on D servers so in my mind it's only logical that as we Contin to extend the reach of our products and OB Bally add support for what we refer to generally as you know IP based external storage we would do it with d and with their power Flex okay so this is a big deal it's a statement of direction for us it also shows the partnership we've had in terms of innovation working closely with Travis and and his teams right and it's again a continuation of our involvement in terms of getting increasing the reach of what you can do for customers you know particularly as they're looking now at hey what do they do next given what's going on with Legacy environments and what they need to do for those new applications container based applications and AI based applications so it's a it's a brand new thing again powerflex is the first that will be supporting as a IP basic storage to be clear it won't be the last there's going to be more yeah right Travis we're working on other yeah look we're like you and I talked Thomas we're we're open to expanding the partnership with all of Dell's IP based storage power Flex power store what have you so there there's G be more right we're not stopping there but the whole idea here it's an evolution of the architecture right we evolved from Appliance to software we made this software portable across all servers across all clouds and we're now extending the reach of the software to existing environments that are combining computer on one side and storage on the other IP based storage on the other and and Thomas I think there's a couple of really interesting benefits at play with power Flex in this offering that's coming out in the near future you know uh when I think about it uh customers that are are moving to a nanic software solution with natively integrated power Flex storage really solves um uh an issue that that I've heard customers uh ask us a lot uh in our conversations which is the ability to independently scale compute and storage resource and that really unlocks flexibility for performance and scale you can add more nodes to your storage deployment that means you can add both capacity and performance and that's predictable linear scaling for your storage and then second uh I I think it's important to to mention that this is natively integrated into the nanic environment so this isn't just a collaboration this isn't just about you know providing support for power Flex we're talking about Native integration with nutanix Cloud platform software that comes with the high performance that Del power Flex has to offer but it also means that all of the storage feature that features that nanx is bringing to the table are going to be there for customers to use with power Flex I think that's really powerful I think that's a great Point by the way Travis and thank you for pointing it out you know end of the day it's about integration of the entire stack the entire ecosystem with power Flex so you get all the benefits in terms of Simplicity oportun efficiency that we've been delivering for customers historically now in a powerlace environment yeah I think it's great CU I I think again you have the Dell XC plus where you're offering up proven power Edge technology right there alongside the centralized control plane Automation and distributed architecture all the things that nutanix brings to the table and you have nanic software with power Flex as an option for even more scale and flexibility because I've heard the same things about you know people don't want to have to scale everything all at the same time necessarily so this is huge I I mean like really huge uh is the idea that the customers can start simple with the xc+ if what they're you know really after is streamlined HCI Solutions and then there's a path to Performance and flexibility with power Flex at scale yeah Rob that's definitely One path we see think customers could and probably will take you know if they're already using nanic ecosystem or if they're looking to go there they're going to have options across both xe+ and power Flex whether they need the Simplicity of xe+ today with the option in the future to leverage their software investment and expertise with nanic but also adopt the flexibility and scale of power Flex at a later time or they're ready now to shift their strategies towards uh the integrated architecture of the nanic platform with power Flex to provide an open and scalable solution that can handle the complexity and scale of major Enterprise use cases and we really believe that this flexibility uh in a time of major change that you mentioned at the beginning of this uh of this webcast is going to be really valuable for for our customers and for their data centers I I think so I I think when you look at it there's more data than ever uh coming into these applications and especially where it's being deployed out at the edge in Colo all over the place on Prem uh not just in clouds and I I think that but they need that cloud operating model that is that control plane and the scale I I think it's awesome uh so you know let's kind of bring this all back around and wrap it up here so some parting words Thomas uh let's start with you well I mean you know this is a big deal right it's a big announcement again going back in terms of a long running partnership with D um two key things new Appliance around XT plus around this extension of the reach of the newcloud platform now working with d power Flex is what we're working through but really kind of to bring it all together it's about giving customers options and making it very simple for them to go and activate those options right the key point of this partnership is also having Dell be able to go and deliver hardware and software directly to customers right and customers be able to go and procure the entire Solutions whether it's an XD plus Appliance or a combination of cloud platform with powerflex directly from there yeah I I I can see the customers you know clapping already and being very excited about this to to put it mildly so Travis what about you some final final thoughts we are so happy to be able to offer uh this broader portfolio virtualization and storage solutions to our customers and working with Thomas and team and everybody over at New tanx has just been an absolute pleasure so I'm uh very excited to see what our customers do with xc+ and power Flex with nanx Cloud platform and I look forward to working with the nanx team to bring even more D IP based storage that Thomas mentioned earlier things like power store to this collaboration I really can't wait to see what customers do and to come back here and tell you all about it yeah we can't either and we'll be tracking it from the cube research perspective we think this is huge uh definitely a game Cher and I want to thank you both for coming on board this has been great and really can't wait to have you back on again uh next time so thank you all right thank you thank you and thank you for watching this episode of hybrid Cloud Made Easy with Dell Technologies and nanic thank you for sticking in here and watching it on the cube the leader in high-tech analysis and news thanks stay tuned [Music]
2024-08-19 04:31
