VMware Explore 2024 | Keith Norbie | NetApp & Jonsi Stefansson | Netapp

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Keith Norbie

CTO WW Partner Solutions

NetApp

Jonsi Stefansson

General Manager of Cloud

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play_circle_outline NetApp and VMware Partnership Expands for Cost Savings, VCF's vSAN Requirement Removed, Partners Drive Optimization

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Keith Norbie | NetApp & Jonsi Stefansson | Netapp

Keith Norbie

CTO WW Partner Solutions NetApp

Jonsi Stefansson

General Manager of Cloud VAST Data

The team at VMware Explorer discusses the shift towards modernization in infrastructure and the role of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). NetApp offers cost-saving measures of up to 50% through optimizations in VCF, removing the vSAN requirement and enhancing integration with Cloud and Azure/AWS. Cloud Insights optimizes VMware environments with a focus on storage efficiency and policy-driven solutions. NetApp collaborates with VMware as a design partner for vVol version 2.0, aiming to help customers modernize and optimize their VMware environments by distributi... Read more

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What is NetApp announcing at the show in relation to VMware Cloud Foundation and cost savings for customers, including removing the vSAN requirement and optimizing SnapMirror, as well as new reserve instance capabilities for Cloud, Azure, and AWS? add

What are the implications of vSAN no longer being a requirement in terms of storage providers competing against vSAN? add

What impact does engineering and leading as an engineering design partner of VMware for creating vVol's version two have on scalability and automatic tiering for on-premises customers? add

What is the ultimate validation for this company and how do they achieve up to 50% cost savings for their partners? add

What are some of the reasons why the focus is on the ASA platform for block storage, specifically in relation to VMware environments and vVol 2.0? add

What benefits does NetApp offer to VMware customers in terms of scalability and non-disruptive optimization of their storage estate? add

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Keith Norbie | NetApp & Jonsi Stefansson | Netapp

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>> Welcome back, everyone, to VMware Explorer. I'm John Furrier. Your host of theCUBE, Dave Vellante's here. A whole team is here. We're getting the wall to wall coverage, day two. Keith Norbie, worldwide partner growth and CTO at NetApp, and Jonsi Stefansson, CTO and SVP as well with the technical depth. Then we got the partner angle. Guys, great to see you, Keith. Notice the purple coats, Vikings colors. Well done.

Keith Norbie

>> Thank you.

>> We got a real Viking here.

Keith Norbie

>> Yep. Go Vikings. We'll get into that later.

>> Welcome back guys. Two CUBE alumni. Look, you guys at NetApp have been doing a lot of work we've been covering you guys for since theCUBE, it's been around 15 years, and the storied history of NetApp, everyone knows that story. Now is the hottest time ever to be in infrastructure. I mean, you're seeing a systems revolution, new ways to architect data centers. Gen.AI has brought down the gauntlet and laid down the mission. Every single enterprise is looking at refactoring, how they foundationalize IT for the next generation. Obviously, the three major building blocks, storage, compute, and networking back in the center of the ring again for all the action. It's not just incremental improvements, some significant stuff. So the big conversation is, okay, what do I do? I got object store, I got got file, I got multi-modal file types. It's a whole other revolution coming on. And so all the smart system architects and platform engineering, cloud DevOps have done that work on Gen1 cloud. Now you got Gen2 cloud and you got distributed computing. So we're back to kind of the drawing board, in a way.

Keith Norbie

>> Yeah.

>> How do you guys see the market?

Keith Norbie

>> Well, the headline for us at this show, and it's no secret that VMware has really pushed a lot of folks to modernize beyond just the DOT upgrades of the past, and VCF is at the center of all that. At this show, our headline is really, save up to 50% of your costs with NetApp. No one else at the show is saying that. No one else can touch that. How we deliver that is through a variety of ways that we can optimize environments. Jonsi will get into some of those details. And we're really announcing three things with the backdrop of our ASA platform as well. So what we're announcing at the show are really three big things. The first is that in VCF, VMware Cloud Foundation, they're removing the vSAN requirement and we're optimizing our SnapMirror to be able to help folks take VCF forward further. So that's really what NetApp has been about, is really getting a platform that can help you reduce costs and redeploy that investment into VCF and the places that VMware wants you to go. The second thing is then, as you look at how we work with Cloud and Azure and AWS, we have new reserve instance capabilities, I'll have Jonsi get into as well. And the third thing is Cloud Insights, is a tool that we have that helps to scan and optimize VMware environments, not just for the VM optimization, but also for the storage side. And it's a tool we use in our partners, the services like go to market. All this is backed with, really a lead for us at the show is this new ASA platform that we revealed last year that helps folks focus on vVol and policy-driven storage. So that's the headlines.

>> So you just ran down the news, but bottom line is that everyone's looking for modernizing VMware. The current situation is obviously, Broadcom's taken over VMware. So you're seeing a lot of people saying, okay, licenses, all that's sorted out. It's still costly.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Yeah.

>> And so, cost is huge. So dig into this. To me, I mean, I love the Reserve instance for Azure, love that, and Cloud Insights. That's come, to me, nice upgrades. But the VCF news is huge. This is a big deal, because now with vSAN no longer a requirement, what does that mean?

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Well, it means that any basically storage provider can actually come with their own value proposition against vSAN. And it's not only that. For example, on NetApp we can offer you, like you talked about, all these different storage protocols. We can offer you object storage, we can offer you file and high-performance block. So we are actually unifying the storage underneath VMware so it actually can scale. One of the issues of vSAN and VMFS, which is their file system, is the scalability. It sort of flattens out after 120 nodes, where we can scale to thousands. And that's why we are, we've been collaborating with VMware for 20 years. We have over 24,000 joint customers that are relying on our joint engineering efforts. So we are actually engineering and leading as an engineering design partner of VMware, creating vVol's version two that actually allows for that scalability, and that also allows for the automatic tiering that we have brought to the hyperscalers. We can now bring that to our on-premises customers.

>> And the impact of that, Jonsi, is what? They're opening up the storage, the external storage?

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Not only external storage, but we also optimize the compute because, in many cases you are required more powerful compute in order to get the IOPS that you need. When you have the IOPS, you can optimize for performance or you can optimize for cost. When you optimize for performance, you'll actually lower the cost of your compute as well. So it's a huge correlation between compute and storage.

>> All right, so let's take this through to the customer. So the customer has VMware, they probably have multiple cloud instances. Well, I know the Azure VMware service, Azure owns and operates that thing. AWS is doing something similar. So you see this, all the hyperscalers are kind of doing the same thing. What is the VCF vSAN thing mean for the customer? What use cases, what problems does it solve, and what does it enable?

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Well, vSAN has always been, their big pitch has been mobility, lessening the data gravity. But in all honesty, we are the only ones that actually deliver on that promise. For example, we are the only storage provider in the world that is a first party storage offering in all three of the public clouds. So we can seamlessly move any data set you want to be moved into AWS, or GCV, Google Cloud VMware engine. So we can seamlessly migrate those data sets, the same manner that vSAN did, but we can do it at a much bigger and greater scale. And we actually have the optimization built in, or the intelligence in our data infrastructure, that vSAN doesn't have. So we are very bullish on our value proposition when it comes to optimization. And not only optimization, but the flexibility. There are so many companies today that are creating different infrastructure for different workloads, therefore creating these silos all over the place. And this is the biggest blocker in AI today.

>> Yeah, silos kill.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Silos kill, 100%. What we do is, because we can unify the storage needs for all protocols, for all of your workloads, allows you to have that skip first ability into the cloud, allows you to have cross-region replication, multiple data centers for scalability, and we pride ourselves on security and compliance as well.

>> So you got the scale covered, a lot of nodes you support. This is the big thing everyone wants. I want this to scale out, scale up, whatever my needs are for the data, because it's got to be horizontally scalable to feed the gen AI layers. And then security, obviously you guys got that. But the cost is huge. So when I heard 50%, I'm like, okay, I got to call you out on that. Okay, prove it. Okay, what is the 50% number? That's a huge number.

Keith Norbie

>> Yeah.

>> Unpack that. I mean, I'm like, if I'm a customer, I'm all over that, because not only cost optimization's hot right now because they're retrofitting their environments, but the VMware licenses are going up. So what's the 50% mean?

Keith Norbie

>> Well for us, the ultimate validation is our partners. Our partners tell us, and they use the tools that we provide to calculate what the cost savings are and actually prove the realization. That's the whole point of this, is that if we can take out some cost inefficiencies, either as Jonsi said, on the compute layer or on the storage layer, and liberate your reinvestment into trying to get VCF to do what VMware wants it to be done, then you can really take the whole platform forward. So the way we achieve that up to 50% savings is through all the optimization. And our partners are ones that have led that charge, because to make that happen, it is not just the NetApp platform, but it's all the other ecosystems with networking, security, and all of the programming needing for VCF.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> On top, John, you know this, we've spoken so many times. So you know that we bring deduplication compression and efficiency storage efficiency that is, nobody is rivaling the efficiencies that we are getting. But that's not enough. We would have then been able to tell that story years ago that we would be able to optimize your VMware environment by 50%. We couldn't do it then. But what we are doing now, with replacing vSAN, you no longer need different storage architecture and you don't need to be paying the vSAN licenses as well. So that's part of the optimization that we are bringing. And this is only due because Broadcom actually was the one that actually opened up the VCF platform for others to be able to bring in their own unique value proposition that didn't exist until...

>> And that's partner-friendly.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> That's partner-friendly.

>> I mean, okay, first of all, everyone's kind of criticizing VMware, obviously, in the transition, but they're simplifying things. VCF's not going to work for everyone, but take it or leave it, basically is what they're saying. And simplification, they get benefits. But the partner network is big part of that. You guys have been great partners with VMware. We've covered you guys on theCUBE every year. This year, what's it like being a partner for VMware? Because you guys have the news. They hooked you up with the vSAN, kind of decoupling that, allow you to extend the storage to take advantage of NetApp.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> And be a design partner of vVol's generation 2.0. That's huge for us as well, because we can actually bring our unique value prepositions, our APIs, our SnapMirror capabilities, our FlexCash, everything that we bring to the table can now be a part of VCF.

>> Got it. And you got the big booth here. Keith, talk about the partner relationship with VMware. Give us an update.

Keith Norbie

>> It's great. I mean, our alliance has never been stronger. With these next moves, I think it takes us further into penetrating all these customers that have now put their chips in and said, all right, VCF comes with this. We're going to have to figure out how to do something with this. And we've seen big companies make this change now, and the partners are right at the epicenter. So that's one of the reasons why the Cloud Insight tool becomes so critical, because rather than just having an improved tool, what we did is we said a partners-led, have a services-led go to market with that tool, to be able to not just look at the compute environment, the VM environment, but also the storage environment, and come back with how is the right way to deploy this new VCF environment that everyone's kind of moving to, and how do you make that work for their operating environments?

>> And that was the news you guys just dropped on the tool. Those are the big details right there?

Keith Norbie

>> Yep. Well, yeah. There's several optimizations for taking that whole platform further, and we'll unpack that. I don't know if you want to expand on client side.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> One of the great thing here is, we are offering these 30-day trials for Cloud Insight, and we've had 85 sign-ups just yesterday in the booth, signing up to actually start evaluating their VMware environments. And I mean, to be really, really frank, in some cases, they actually have the wrong on-top configurations that is too big, or they have waste storage laying around that they shouldn't, and that actually calls out us as well. Which is really beneficial for the customer. It actually calls out how you've actually done it and allows our partner network or professional services to come in and right-size the environment, and that's right-sizing us as well.

>> Yeah, and it's great feedback too. One, people have to take inventory what they got in their estate, because right now you got to look at everything. And one of the positives about VMware right now is that people have to look at their estate and realize what's going on. I think that's why this whole flexibility angle, in my word, you didn't say it, but you basically said it, with a vSAN situation, you guys can bring more flexibility to the customers. Because they got to start retrofitting, repurposing, retrofitting, and redesigning, all at the same time.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> And there is this overall myth that a lot of people are looking, a lot of customers, a lot of partners are looking at alternatives. Well, people have to realize that they have built their entire CICD pipeline on top of VMware, all of their business-critical apps. It doesn't happen like that.

>> Yeah, I mean switching costs are off the charts. I mean, I'm looking at some TCO numbers and I hear people doing five-year migrations. Five years from now, are you kidding me? We're going to be in a different world. I mean, okay, so we're done, now the world's changed. The goalpost is moving, so it's almost better to stay where you are in most cases, because you're running critical infrastructure, critical apps, and the data coming through the operations now is changing as well. You mentioned silos. I mean, just in the gen AI landscape, in the data layer, you have now a horizontally scalable data model emerging, semantic layer, some call it, some others call control plane. But this has to how... Data's going to change. So if you're going to be playing down here, you might miss the boat up on the data side.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Yeah, and the value of unstructured data. Imagine what's happened to that in the era that we live in right now. And if you read all the reports that are coming in, what's the biggest blocker in companies taking full advantage of AI? It is those silos, those data silos. They can't access the data because they have a different storage architecture for their SAP, then another one for their VMware, then they're creating yet another one for their fine-tuning, training, inferencing, rack. That doesn't make any sense because the data needs all to be be collected. And if you wanted the true value, you have to unify the way you're actually building your infrastructure. You have to have a unified storage and you have to have the capability of bursting into the clouds, because like you talked and GPUs or circuits. They're going to have to burst into service providers like Lambda, like Corvi, like Vulture. There are so many different NVIDIA-certified partners that they have to burst into, because they don't even have the power budget to build up the super...

>> You could stack all the GPUs you want in rack, but if you don't have power, you can't utilize them all. So they're going to send the workloads wherever there's horsepower to process those. And then the other thing that's interesting, and we talked about a little bit before we came on is that, beyond the GPU and training, you have inference. I just saw Cerebus announce a competitor option against NVIDIA, and then I know Intel's working on it, and many others. Inference is the killer app, but you don't necessarily need a GPU for that. You can do that on CPUs. So the whole pairings with chips, it's kind of like wine. You have some red meat, you got some red wine. You got a little GPU, you got little chips here. These apps can be purpose-built around the chips, which will allow the hardware to be purpose-built in some cases. So we see a world going towards making sure that the stable foundation of storage computing networking is built, but storage is changing. For training, I might need better reads and writes based on the use case.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> 100%.

>> I mean that's new. That's not new to storage, but now you have a new use case driving different categories of storage capability.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Yeah, and that has honestly driven a lot of innovation coming from NetApp. I say the last two years of NetApp on top engineering is the biggest advancements that we've done in years, because there are so many different angles to think about, different challenges that you have to meet today. It's the NVIDIA Super Bowl. It's the OVX platform. It's the RAG. How do you do ingest in place? But you have to account for everything, because if you're just focused on one, like let's say you're just focusing on training the model and that to be the best there, oh, you kind of screwed because that's the only, then you're missing the boat on inferencing, then you're missing the boat on a lot of other things. So that's the reason why we are coming up with all these announcements that, well, I'll see you at Insight, NetApp Insight.

>> Yeah, NetApp Insight. TheCUBE will be there. Looking forward to it.

Keith Norbie

>> That's Insight. I'll be there.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> So that's going to be a lot of announcements that are super exciting in regards to not only AI, but what we're doing for virtualization. And I'm talking about virtualization, the breadth of virtualization, not just VMware, I'm talking about the Red Hat OpenShift, I'm talking about all these different...

>> You guys really highlight the VCF value proposition, simplicity, with the vSAN being now not a requirement. One, opens up architecture optionality for sure. But also you're not only modernizing VMware with their moves too, you're optimizing. You're modernizing and optimizing at the same time, while giving the customer the options that they need. And we've seen this move. We've been around the block a few industry cycles, and remember the old server, you put some storage attached to it and you got storage inside, then you got storage pools. NetApp built their business on that. Now you're seeing the supercomputing paradigm come in to replace the server, where you have a clustered system and where you need storage as a platform. This is now the new normal. It's not storage anymore, it's a data platform.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> 100%.

Keith Norbie

>> 100%.

>> Explain this phenomenon, because this is a huge paradigm shift. It's a secular trend. It's the same game, but different kind of architecture, because it's categorically new, generative AI.

Keith Norbie

>> And I think you guys touched on it in a few different blogs and mentions about the future of where the data foundations go. It's not just the ship from Hadoop to Spark, but it's more complex up the stack. And when you think about what VMware's trying to do with optimizing the environments with cloud foundation and cloud being tied in, you have to figure out how you redeploy in ways that you can prepare for the adoption of AI in whatever situation you're looking for, like you mentioned inferencing being the big next wave of the AI models. Cloud and how cloud has to serve a purpose for starting experimentation. Going heavier on-prem. And as you said, the repatriation or the rebirth or the revitalization of the data center. When we look across partners and how they look at this, that's why we make tools available like Cloud Insights, look at competencies to be able to align to who has the skills, so that not just our field, but also customers can know, who's the right partner for the right situation? Because that work is a ton of really high-value stuff to work through, and the outcome, as everyone talks about then, is that 50% savings.

>> Yeah. Also, you also mentioned the version to the cloud as kind of an example illustrating the trend. I mean you guys have been on multi-cloud. This is why we call it super-cloud, not multi-cloud, because we saw this new wave coming with semis, new abstraction layers around developers coming down to the hardware level. A lot of developers moving kind of the old-school kind of systems programming. Not your chip developers. We're talking about software guys, just writing now, getting performance levels close to the hardware. And so, being in multiple environments is a distributed computing paradigm, one. Two, to your point about partners and about flexibility, we live in a heterogeneous world. I mean, this is a fact. So the monolithic concept, you could have a super-computing or a mainframe-like super power, or super-machine, supercluster, whatever you want to call it, but you're still going to distribute. This is the difference between, quote, calling it a "mainframe," to just calling it more horsepower. I mean, talk about the distributed computing impact to the customer and the distributed nature, because we're talking cloud operations, data everywhere, inference training, reinforced learning's coming as that next cycle of applications.

Keith Norbie

>> And one of the reasons why we think that's important is, and one of the reasons why we're focusing on our ASA platform, our all-SAN array platform for block, is that's highly optimized. It's a lower-cost platform than the multi-protocol for really targeted VMware environments, especially as you mentioned vVol 2.0, its policy-driven storage, and how that translates into the benefits, because the cool part about our platform ONTAP and the capabilities that it delivers through that FOSA provider up into VCF, that's the difference it's going to make. And like I said before, the partners are the one that kind of bring that to life.

>> Talk about the ONTAP and NetApp in general around the psychology of the VMware customer right now, because they have to scale. You can't have disruption. You have only, it's not a pivot. You're not stopping and turning. You're building on a trajectory. This is kind of what we're seeing right now at the show, is that people are looking at their estate. What is the mindset of the NetApp VMware customer?

Jonsi Stefansson

>> We have been doing these workshops with our largest customers jointly with VMware and how to actually do exactly that, with non-disruptive way of optimizing and even moving their storage estate to NetApp. Most of our, in many cases they might have just their data store on NetApp, but they're not the root volume groups, not their blocks or anything. That's usually on vSAN. But for us, it's actually really easy to actually do this without, there's zero downtime. And we've been doing this with more than a handful of customers up to date, and there are more and more coming. And this is what NetApp does. It is for business-critical applications. It is for high availability, it is for flexibility, and it is for being able to migrate and meet the customer wherever he needs to go. And we do that in a non-disruptive manner, and that has to be like that.

>> Jonsi, I got to ask you, since you've been on theCUBE so many times, you know how we riff sometimes. Let's riff a little bit. I got to ask you, what a CTO, obviously you're a senior vice president, you see a lot of things. You don't have to reveal any secrets of what's going on in NetApp, but personally, what are you really excited about right now? Because if you look at this next wave we're on right now, it's going to be a big one. It's going to be for, it's a generational shift. What are you most excited about? What gets you excited?

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Right now, I am actually amazed at how many people are sleeping on giants like Intel, AMD. They are coming in with a blast as well. And everybody's coming up with their own platform. Everybody's coming up with their own value proposition. Everybody has their own particular focus. And the beauty of being at NetApp is because we are agnostic. We play with everybody, and everybody knows it. Everybody wants to be our partner, and we want to partner with everybody. So from my perspective, I'm super excited about seeing where the AI trajectory is going to take us, because we are only scratching the surface. There are so many customers that are out there saying like, "Hey, we are doing, we full in on AI." Yeah, you have Copilot. You're not really doing AI. You're not doing anything specific.

>> It's a data challenge and risk management challenge. Security and data.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Yes, precisely. And there is also the struggle on how, on-premise, how are you going to bring all the innovation of the cloud down to on-premises? So it's from my perspective, this is going to be the only workload that's going to stay hybrid forever. It's going to be on-premise, you're going to have the base there. You're going to build up some of your base parts or super parts, and you're going to have your inferencing clusters, but you want to be able to be able to move it to Vertex AI in Google. You want to be able to move it to Bedrock and SageMaker.

>> Heterogeneous, baby.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Yes. And you want to be able to go to OpenAI services in Azure. And we have integrated with all of those services, so you can seamlessly do that, whether you are bursting from or to the cloud. It doesn't make any difference for us. But this is what, I think inferencing is going to take over, hands down, going to... We can't keep training models continuously.

>> It's like staying in school forever.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Yeah, that's what I said.

>> It's like, at some point you got to graduate, and then in front infer from the training.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> You're sort of going from training, then you go into fine-tuning, then you go to inferencing, then you're going to...

>> Reinforce learning is your master's degree, and then you get your PhD, and then you work for the training algorithms. You're in academia. Anyway, this is the kind of... I mean, I joke about it, but that's kind of the way it is. The applications will be the inferring and the reasoning and the constant iteration of data, and if the data's not available, you'll have data drift. So we're seeing a whole 'nother shift. What are you excited about, Keith? Obviously you got the news hit, you've got the three things, VCF vSAN, reserve instance for Azure VMware services, and obviously Cloud Insights tool. But you personally, you've been the industry a few cycles. What are you excited about?

Keith Norbie

>> It's a lot of things. I would obviously say AI, AI and AI, because we've been at this for five years with NVIDIA and now expanding that with other ecosystems. We've got a go to market with Lenovo on a joint platform. But this is the VMware show, and we've been at this for a long time.

>> Get a lot of customers.

Keith Norbie

>> So I'm kind of excited by the fact that they've simplified this down, and partners are starting to make the choice to say, how am I going to take this forward? So what I'm excited about is, now is the best time to really engage with NetApp on this opportunity. Because I think you hit it really well. You said this is the time and the opportunity to go do something. It's not just kick the can down the road. So I'm excited about seeing where partners can take all this. We've juiced up the incentives for you on this ASA platform that's optimized for VMware deployments with vVol 2.0, et cetera. We're focused now on VCF like never before, to be able to help organizations make that crossover. And then tying it back into cloud in the futures of what you said with the data platform is so important, because one of the things that Jensen said about us at GTC was about all the wealth of knowledge base that NetApp has around the world on our platforms, all the files and unstructured data. And if you want to make AI or your other systems really optimal for us to all benefit as end users from AI, you've got to have the knowledge base content to go get it. Between that and-

>> So it's data, at the end of the day.

Keith Norbie

>> What's happening with the modernization of VMware environments, that's a killer one-two punch.

>> Yeah, totally one-two punch. And I love that whole, Jonsi, your narrative there, because literally it's causing everyone to up their game.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Yes.

>> I mean, Intel, AMD is like, okay, whoa, game on. Put the pads on, let's go, let's hit the field. I mean, everyone's in the arena right now and you can't hide. The game is on and you got to bring scale. I mean, I had a big chat with Matt Garmin, the CEO of AWS about this, I just posted the exclusive yesterday, but in mic, I didn't get in the article, but one of the things I asked him was, cloud was great because you guys didn't have competition. You put your credit card down if you were an entrepreneur like me or startup, and rather than provisioning a server, you put the cloud in there and I took my web app and made it SaaS. Okay, so web app to SaaS was, I'm oversimplifying, but that's basically what happened. Now I asked him, what's after SaaS? So if web app was SaaS, what's SaaS going to go to? And we had an interesting riff, and I don't think he... We both knew we wanted to figure it out. You know what we came to? Scalable apps, because the problems that could be solved now weren't solvable years ago. So with all the horsepower, the entrepreneurs will solve harder problems. Companies can solve harder problems. And I think that's where the entrepreneurial energy is going to go. And if you look at all the top customers, the bar has been raised. We can now go after opportunities with the right data, exposing that data, putting it into the applications using GPUs, chips in combinations that no one's seen before, that's very super computer-like. And whether you're doing biology research or building a wing on Boeing, you can now do this. This was all, old school HPC, it used to take molasses progress. It was like glaciers moving. Now it's like, boom, instant agility. What do you guys think?

Jonsi Stefansson

>> I think it's going to be, there are always new technologies coming up when we talk about modernization, like everybody talks about Kubernetes, and we've been doing Kubernetes for 11 years, ever since it's... There are other technologies that are coming up that doesn't have that same layer cake, like virtual layer and container layer, because of isolation and all that. There's like server-side web assembly and functions are running on that. I think the world is just, you're going to be able to write to a function and it actually solves for you.

>> It's interesting, we've had many slogans and cliches over the years. The consumerization of IT. Digital transformation. Or IT is here to support the business. IT now is the business. I mean, IT is no longer our department, it's everything now. All the apps, the entire company's digitized.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Yes.

Keith Norbie

>> Yeah, and I think you guys really hit on it. The future's really about how you get all these apps and these data sets connected to be able to benefit off each other. You got CRM data with accounting and billing data, against HR information records, unstructured content, et cetera. It's all got to come together.

>> Keith, Jonsi, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great extended conversation. Love the content. Again, we're live... The bar has been raised. Stakes are high, and you can quantify the value now, and a lot of work getting done. Congratulations on your continued success with VMware and the ecosystem and just in general as you guys have more scale optionality.

Keith Norbie

>> Thanks a lot.

Jonsi Stefansson

>> Thank you, John.

>> Okay. I'm John Furrier here. We are at VMware Explorer. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching.

Keith Norbie

>> Thank you.