51: GreyBeards talk hyper convergence with Lee Caswell, VP Product, Storage & Availability BU, VMware

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VMware

In this episode we talk with Lee Caswell (@LeeCaswell), Vice President of Product, Storage and Availability Business Unit, VMware.  This is the second time Lee’s been on our show, the previous one back in April of last year when he was with his prior employer. Lee’s been at VMware for a little over a year now and has helped lead some significant changes in their HCI offering, vSAN.

VMware vSAN/HCI business

Many customers struggle to modernize their data centers with funding being the primary issue. This is very similar to what happened in the early 2000s as customers started virtualizing servers and consolidating storage. But today, there’s a new option, server based/software defined storage like VMware’s vSAN, which can be deployed for little expense and grown incrementally as needed. VMware’s vSAN customer base is currently growing by 150% CAGR, and VMware is adding over 100 new vSAN customers a week.

Many companies say they offer HCI, but few have adopted the software-only business model this entails. The transition from a hardware-software, appliance-based business model to a software-only business model is difficult and means a move from a high revenue-lower margin business to a lower revenue-higher margin business. VMware, from its very beginnings, has built a sustainable software-only business model that extends to vSAN today.

The software business model means that VMware can partner easily with a wide variety of server OEM partners to supply vSAN ReadyNodes that are pre-certified and jointly supported in the field. There are currently 14 server partners for vSAN ReadyNodes. In addition, VMware has co-designed the VxRail HCI Appliance with Dell EMC, which adds integrated life-cycle management as well as Dell EMC data protection software licenses.

As a result, customers can adopt vSAN as a build or a buy option for on-prem use and can also leverage vSAN in the cloud from a variety of cloud providers, including AWS very soon. It’s the software-only business model that sets the stage for this common data management across the hybrid cloud.

VMware vSAN software defined storage (SDS)

The advent of Intel Xeon processors and plentiful, relatively cheap SSD storage has made vSAN an easy storage solution for most virtualized data centers today. SSDs removed any performance concerns that customers had with hybrid HCI configurations. And with Intel’s latest Xeon Scalable processors, there’s more than enough power to handle both application compute and storage compute workloads.

From Lee’s perspective, there’s still a place for traditional SAN storage, but he sees it more for cold storage that is scaled independently from servers or for bare metal/non-virtualized storage environments. But for everyone else using virtualized data centers, they really need to give vSAN a look.

Storage vendors shifting sales

It used to be that major storage vendor sales teams would lead with hardware appliance storage solutions and then move to HCI when pushed. The problem was that a typical SAN storage sale takes 9 months to complete and then 3 years of limited additional sales.

To address this, some vendors have taken the approach where they lead with HCI and only move to legacy storage when it’s a better fit. With VMware vSAN, it’s a quicker sales cycle than legacy storage because HCI costs less up front and there’s no need to buy the final storage configuration with the first purchase. VMware vSAN HCI can grow as the customer applications needs dictate, generating additional incremental sales over time.

VMware vSAN in AWS

Recently, VMware has announced VMware Cloud in AWS.What this means is that you can have vSAN storage operating in an AWS cloud just like you would on-prem. In this case, workloads could migrate from cloud to on-prem and back again with almost no changes. How the data gets from on-prem to cloud is another question.

Also the pricing model for VMware Cloud in AWS moves to a consumption based model, where you pay for just what you use on a monthly basis. This way VMware Cloud in AWS and vSAN is billed monthly, consistent with other AWS offerings.

VMware vs. Microsoft on cloud

There’s a subtle difference in how Microsoft and VMware are adopting cloud. VMware came from an infrastructure platform and is now implementing their infrastructure on cloud. Microsoft started as a development platform and is taking their cloud development platform/stack and bringing it to on-prem.

It’s really two different philosophies in action. We now see VMware doing more for the development community with vSphere Integrated Containers (VIC), Docker Containers, Kubernetes, and Pivotal Cloud foundry. Meanwhile Microsoft is looking to implement the Azure stack for on-prem environments, and they are focusing more on infrastructure. In the end, enterprises will have terrific choices as the software defined data center frees up customers dollars and management time.

The podcast runs ~25 minutes. Lee is a very knowledgeable individual and although he doesn’t qualify as a Greybeard (just yet), he has been in and around the data center and flash storage environments throughout most of his career. From his diverse history, Lee has developed a very business like perspective on data center and storage technologies and it’s always a pleasure talking with him.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Lee Caswell, V.P. of Product, Storage & Availability Business Unit, VMware

Lee Caswell leads the VMware storage marketing team driving vSAN products, partnerships, and integrations. Lee joined VMware in 2016 and has extensive experience in executive leadership within the storage, flash and virtualization markets.

Prior to VMware, Lee was vice president of Marketing at NetApp and vice president of Solution Marketing at Fusion-IO (now SanDisk). Lee was a founding member of Pivot3, a company widely considered to be the founder of hyper-converged systems, where he served as the CEO and CMO. Earlier in his career, Lee held marketing leadership positions at Adaptec, and SEEQ Technology, a pioneer in non-volatile memory. He started his career at General Electric in Corporate Consulting.

Lee holds a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Carleton College and a master of business administration degree from Dartmouth College. Lee is a New York native and has lived in northern California for many years. He and his wife live in Palo Alto and have two children. In his spare time Lee enjoys cycling, playing guitar, and hiking the local hills.

Greybeards talk about Storage Trends in our 2014 Yearend Podcast-part 3

In this our end of year video podcast Howard and I discuss some of the trends impacting the storage industry today.  Which include Cloud, SSD/Flash, software defined storage and converged server-storage systems and object storage.

The video comes in at a little more than 43 minutes and is available to be streamed, from Vimeo

or as a downloadable podcast in as a 3 videos.

Part 3 (~8 minutes) discusses the state of object storage and some of the trends impacting it’s adoption.

GreyBeards discuss server side flash with Satyam Vaghani, Co-Founder & CTO PernixData

Episode 2: Server Side Flash Software

Welcome to our second GreyBeards on Storage (GBoS) podcast. The podcast was recorded on October 29, 2013, when Howard and Ray talked with Satyam Vaghani, Co-Founder & CTO PernixData, a scale-out, server side flash caching solution provider

Well this month’s podcast runs about 40 minutes. Howard and I had an interesting and humorous discussion with Satyam Vaghani, who was a leading architect of VMware’s storage and file system stack and now is currently Co-Founder/CTO of PernixData, which offers a server side caching solution. Unlike other solutions in this space, Pernixdata offers advanced write-back caching and scale-out clustering solution for server side flash for data used by VMs running under vSphere. We discuss how they provide these features and why in our second podcast episode. Although why people are running analytics in a VM using server side flash is still a mystery …

 

Satyam Vaghani Bio’s

Satyam Vaghani, Co-founder and CTO Pernixdata
Satyam Vaghani is Co-Founder and CTO at PernixData, a company that leverages server flash to enable scale-out storage performance that is independent of capacity. Earlier, he was VMware’s Principal Engineer and Storage CTO where he spent 10 years delivering fundamental storage innovations in vSphere. He is most known for creating the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) that set a storage standard for server virtualization. He has authored 50+ patents, led industry-wide changes in storage systems and standards via VAAI, and has been a regular speaker at VMworld and other industry and academic forums. Satyam received his Masters in CS from Stanford and Bachelors in CS from BITS Pilani.

GreyBeards talk converged infrastructure with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO Nutanix

Episode 1: Converged Infrastructure

Welcome to our inaugural GreyBeards on Storage (GBoS) podcast. The podcast was recorded on September 27th, 2013, when Howard and Ray talked with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO Nutanix.

Our first podcast ran to ~48 minutes and was a broad, wide-ranging conversation that discussed everything from the specifics of Nutanix solutions to broader industry trends impacting IT today. In between, we talked about vBlock/FlexPod,  the gift of Moore’s law,  VMware’s Software Defined Data Center, VMware’s VSAN, and using Big Data open source to support enterprise class storage services in a clustered hypervisor environment among other things.  This last bit was pretty unexpected, if you ask me.

Next podcast

Next months GBoS podcast  will be on server side flash.  So if you have any questions on this “IO accelerator” please let us know.

Thanks for listening,

Ray & Howard

 

Dheeraj Panday, CEO Nutanix
About Dheeraj Pandey
Dheeraj is a co-founder and CEO of Nutanix. He brings over 13 years of experience working at high growth enterprise software companies. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was the VP of Engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering team [from the] ground up. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases. Dheeraj is a Ph.D. dropout from University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of CS. He has a BS in CS from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT, Kanpur), where he was adjudged the “Best All-Rounder Student Among All Graduating Students in All Disciplines.”