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Nutanix Weekly: Nutanix Expands Support for vSAN Ready Nodes · Nutanix Weekly

WEBVTT 1 00:00:03.660 --> 00:00:14.210 Philip Sellers: Hey? And welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly. I'm your host, Phil Sellers, practice director here at Zintegra for Modern Data Center. 2 00:00:14.520 --> 00:00:21.210 Philip Sellers: and you know, Nutanix Weekly is one of many Podcasts we produce here at Zintegra. 3 00:00:21.230 --> 00:00:38.180 Philip Sellers: We like to call it content with context. We review different blog posts and things all around the Internet with our partners and try to bring the real world flavor to it and bringing that flavor. Today we've got a couple of guests 4 00:00:38.587 --> 00:00:44.619 Philip Sellers: co-hosts with me. We've got Gyra Cox from Nutanix. Jaira, how are you doing today? 5 00:00:44.620 --> 00:00:45.859 Jirah Cox: Doing, good. Man, how are you. 6 00:00:46.210 --> 00:00:59.210 Philip Sellers: Doing. Well, you know, it's funny. I introduce you every time on this podcast. And I don't ever quite know the title. So I don't ever say your what is your title at Nutanix? What? What is your official title? 7 00:00:59.210 --> 00:01:00.740 Jirah Cox: I'm a principal architect. 8 00:01:00.740 --> 00:01:04.266 Philip Sellers: Okay, principal architect. See? That's easy enough. I can probably say that. 9 00:01:04.569 --> 00:01:06.589 Jirah Cox: Oh, I'm all about easy. 10 00:01:07.309 --> 00:01:18.179 Philip Sellers: But a lot of what you do is is getting out on the road working with customers. You you talk in front of groups. Somewhat like a field CTO, is that appropriate. 11 00:01:18.300 --> 00:01:23.550 Jirah Cox: Totally. I mean, if you want more words, I often say I'm a principal architect on our field CTO team, covering the Americas. 12 00:01:24.490 --> 00:01:26.006 Philip Sellers: That's a mouthful. So yes. 13 00:01:27.720 --> 00:01:31.709 Jirah Cox: Simplest possible solution first, st and then, you know, justify more complexity. 14 00:01:31.710 --> 00:01:42.210 Philip Sellers: There we go. We're also joined with a brand new team member here at Zintegra, but not new to the Nutanix space at all. Chris Calhoun. Chris, how are you today? 15 00:01:42.490 --> 00:01:50.243 Chris Calhoun: Fantastic, definitely feeling good about joining this crew today. Obviously have connections to both and 16 00:01:50.790 --> 00:01:52.480 Chris Calhoun: appreciate the opportunity. 17 00:01:52.690 --> 00:02:05.310 Philip Sellers: Yeah, Chris, we're we're happy to have you. Chris just joined saying, the team here at Zintegra as a solutions architect spent some time with Nutanix. Spent time on the customer side as well. 18 00:02:05.877 --> 00:02:11.570 Philip Sellers: So super happy to have you here and helping our customers so 19 00:02:11.590 --> 00:02:14.930 Philip Sellers: like my 1st week at Zintegra. 20 00:02:15.020 --> 00:02:21.498 Philip Sellers: This is Chris's 1st week, and we've got him on a podcast so hopefully, that's a good track record for you, Buddy. 21 00:02:22.290 --> 00:02:24.379 Chris Calhoun: Absolutely feet to the fire. Let's do it. 22 00:02:25.790 --> 00:02:43.949 Philip Sellers: Well, as I said, we like to bring content with context. And so today's content is a blog post on the Nutanix blogs. It says Nutanix expands support for Vcn. Ready nodes, and I was out@nutanix.next. I think, Jaira, you were there as well. 23 00:02:44.396 --> 00:02:52.500 Philip Sellers: There were some announcements around this back in May, June timeframe. I can't remember when that next was now. 24 00:02:52.630 --> 00:02:57.740 Jirah Cox: It was May right I should know this. We were there. It wasn't March right. It was one of the M's. 25 00:02:57.930 --> 00:03:12.329 Philip Sellers: But this was one of the big announcements, right reuse hardware. There were multiple different announcements around being able to reuse existing hardware. This has been something that's a consistent request from customers to Nutanix, and 26 00:03:12.330 --> 00:03:35.129 Philip Sellers: it's somewhere where there wasn't a ton of flexibility in the past. But we're definitely becoming much more flexible. So I'm really interested to dig in here today and talk about Vsan ready nodes for anybody listening. That doesn't know what a Vsan ready node is Jaira. Can you kind of give us a quick synopsis of what is a Vsan ready? Node. 27 00:03:35.530 --> 00:03:37.870 Jirah Cox: Sure great question, so 28 00:03:38.050 --> 00:03:51.559 Jirah Cox: I'm not reading from a dictionary here, but off the top, off the top of my head. A Vsan ready node right is a node purchased for the purpose of getting a factory pre-installed. Experience of hypervisor plus software find storage fabric 29 00:03:51.630 --> 00:03:55.070 Jirah Cox: that you can then use to usually commonly run. Of course, the Vsphere stack. 30 00:03:55.460 --> 00:04:05.149 Philip Sellers: Yeah, yeah. And I think it's it's important, like, it's qualified hardware for that specific stack. So certain components, certain 31 00:04:05.490 --> 00:04:14.376 Philip Sellers: processors and RAM and configurations that make it really well suited for running the vsphere with V Sanstack 32 00:04:15.120 --> 00:04:26.449 Philip Sellers: It sounds eerily familiar or similar to Vx rail, but it's not the same thing as Vxrail. That's a much more holistic lifecycle managed 33 00:04:26.806 --> 00:04:33.530 Philip Sellers: appliance type form factor. So these are just more of validated hardware designs, I guess, is that safe to say. 34 00:04:33.840 --> 00:04:35.948 Jirah Cox: Yeah, is it more like 35 00:04:36.580 --> 00:04:39.259 Jirah Cox: it's it's the, is it? Like a kit car 36 00:04:39.420 --> 00:04:44.200 Jirah Cox: where all the pieces are meant to work together? But they might just not come fully, completely assembled. 37 00:04:44.430 --> 00:04:47.369 Philip Sellers: I like that analogy. I like that analogy a lot. 38 00:04:47.370 --> 00:04:48.400 Jirah Cox: This is why I joined. 39 00:04:49.900 --> 00:04:53.709 Philip Sellers: You trademark it right, you know. Get paid every time. 40 00:04:53.710 --> 00:04:56.040 Jirah Cox: For the analogies. That's that's that's why I'm here. I know my role. 41 00:04:58.102 --> 00:04:59.580 Philip Sellers: You know. So 42 00:04:59.600 --> 00:05:12.610 Philip Sellers: again reuse one of the hallmarks of Hci nutanix as a stack and as a solution is the ability to life cycle. The ability to do upgrades easily. 43 00:05:12.690 --> 00:05:17.290 Philip Sellers: and part of that has been, you know, a pretty defined Hcl, so 44 00:05:18.130 --> 00:05:26.779 Philip Sellers: are are we just basically expanding upon that. Hcl, is that essentially what we're doing here, or is, is there a little more play. 45 00:05:27.150 --> 00:05:36.100 Jirah Cox: I think I think there's a bit more to it. We have, of course, had to your point, a very opinionated design for how to run our software stack, because we 46 00:05:36.110 --> 00:05:38.979 Jirah Cox: really, we're sort of only interested in giving customers 47 00:05:39.050 --> 00:05:55.760 Jirah Cox: a plus plus experiences. Right? If you look at other other times in the industry, other flavors of of stories in the industry. We've seen places and times where certain kinds of like, yeah, bring these parts together. They should all just work as the promise. And then customers go to deploy it. 48 00:05:56.190 --> 00:06:01.710 Jirah Cox: find that certain things don't quite match up with their expectations, or maybe failure handling modes get more. 49 00:06:02.020 --> 00:06:20.479 Jirah Cox: let's say, interesting than they really should be. We want boring, predictable failure, handling really all the time for all customers. And so then even certain parts would come off of certain vendors. Hcls. Right? So we don't want our customers ever that have the experience of should work works on paper. You buy it. Try it out. Let us know how it goes. We only want customers 50 00:06:20.770 --> 00:06:23.000 Jirah Cox: for the most part, if it's our our 51 00:06:23.140 --> 00:06:30.840 Jirah Cox: our most opinionated designs running on hardware that we also run in our labs, that we're doing like full regression testing on 52 00:06:31.332 --> 00:06:38.609 Jirah Cox: to your point, that we offer that full lifecycle experience on, of of really driving down that cost of 53 00:06:38.770 --> 00:06:56.170 Jirah Cox: cost, of time and care and feeding of a certain platform down as as low as possible. Right like 0 is probably never going to be realistic. But how much time can we give back to our Admins as they run our platform to do stuff like firmware updates, bios, patching, Nic firmware disk firmware things like that nature right things where there's really. 54 00:06:56.730 --> 00:07:02.889 Jirah Cox: Usually I describe it to practitioners as it's kind of a 0 sum game like you never will get a pat on the back 55 00:07:03.230 --> 00:07:18.159 Jirah Cox: if you do it perfectly. No one even knows you did it, and if someone does find out you were doing firmware maintenance because they noticed it. It's because they noticed it in a bad way, right? So there's never like a great outcome for being like the excellent like disk firmware applier at your day job. 56 00:07:18.230 --> 00:07:27.300 Jirah Cox: you know. So the more we make that invisible, the more time you get back and just works. And we want kind of boring outcomes. That being said, you know, we've talked about on this podcast 57 00:07:27.350 --> 00:07:32.519 Jirah Cox: as customers are in this broad. I want to adopt more nutanix motion. 58 00:07:32.600 --> 00:07:51.020 Jirah Cox: But let's say I've already owned and purchased hardware for other purposes in the past. How much of that can we reuse. Right? Are we willing to get? Are they willing to accept other outcomes that maybe not include might not include the exact same Lcm experience? But they can, you know? Run that hardware more sooner? That's not good grammar 59 00:07:51.347 --> 00:08:05.419 Jirah Cox: to get the outcome deployed there, you know, is is the migration itself more important than I want the full stack. Best possible mechanics experience. I'm willing to like, maybe compromise on Lcm. Experiences or or former patching, because I have other priorities. 60 00:08:05.790 --> 00:08:07.765 Philip Sellers: Yeah, that makes sense. 61 00:08:08.560 --> 00:08:15.019 Philip Sellers: you know, Chris, I'm I'm curious, like I have to think there's a lot of customers asking for 62 00:08:15.160 --> 00:08:21.039 Philip Sellers: this expansion, this reuse of hardware because it opens up the nutanix. Goodness 63 00:08:21.529 --> 00:08:34.300 Philip Sellers: even if maybe you're not aligned with a hardware refresh cycle. What what's it kind of been like as you've talked to customers and looked at these sorts of things. What have what have they been asking you for? 64 00:08:35.590 --> 00:08:48.639 Chris Calhoun: Great question, and and this kind of parallels with what Nutanix has done in the past, as far as like listening to customer ask, customer needs customer wants. And and this announcement 65 00:08:48.770 --> 00:09:10.449 Chris Calhoun: goes hand in hand with that, because to me this is something that as the need for technology changes or moving away from a Vsan ready node to get prepared for a migration of some sort to hey? How can we best use the existing investment in our hardware. Nutanix has done a good job listening and 66 00:09:11.110 --> 00:09:17.909 Chris Calhoun: staying with that hardware compatibility list that they extend it to 67 00:09:18.382 --> 00:09:34.469 Chris Calhoun: situation like this, where it's similar type technology. But really, the focus from the customer perspective is, yes, we want it. Yes, we need it. How can we get the nutanix goodness in a faster way without actually having to 68 00:09:34.490 --> 00:09:36.100 Chris Calhoun: budget for 69 00:09:36.410 --> 00:10:01.160 Chris Calhoun: a full total tech, refresh from hardware. So from a customer perspective, I think it makes sense to consider this route of Hey, look if there's a small project where we can pull some of these ready nodes away from that to look at Nutanix as a a suitable offering. I think that that's a fantastic opportunity to take some of that nutanix. Goodness! 70 00:10:01.800 --> 00:10:07.719 Philip Sellers: Yeah. And and the blog goes on to say, you know, understanding Vcn ready nodes and nutanix integration. 71 00:10:07.760 --> 00:10:11.129 Philip Sellers: You know, this isn't a 72 00:10:11.300 --> 00:10:17.449 Philip Sellers: shocking sort of repurposing. You know, these and ready notes have a lot of similar 73 00:10:17.490 --> 00:10:25.359 Philip Sellers: components. They have similar underpinnings, I guess, of what a mutanix hci node needs. 74 00:10:25.370 --> 00:10:33.030 Philip Sellers: and so, being able to certify these, you know, Blog says, was pretty easy. Relative ease is the way it said here. 75 00:10:33.543 --> 00:10:40.569 Philip Sellers: That probably has a lot to do with the fact that we're not talking about every possible 76 00:10:40.680 --> 00:11:02.320 Philip Sellers: SSD in the world, every possible Pci card and variety of Pci card being plugged into these. This was already a somewhat scoped Hcl. In the Vsan sort of realm, so I'm sure that had a lot to do with how quickly this was able to happen and come to market for for customers. 77 00:11:02.760 --> 00:11:09.279 Jirah Cox: Totally, if you'll pardon one more strained analogy, like on a spectrum of like hammer to play-doh. 78 00:11:09.410 --> 00:11:14.490 Jirah Cox: you have like the useful appliance that has no configurability whatsoever. 79 00:11:14.700 --> 00:11:15.470 Philip Sellers: Right. 80 00:11:15.470 --> 00:11:21.340 Jirah Cox: But therefore yields the most reliability and the most predictability. And that's historically been what we prioritized. 81 00:11:21.390 --> 00:11:29.870 Jirah Cox: Right? We're not going all the way full play-doh on the spectrum of like. It's so configurable it can be anything, including terrible things and not always useful. 82 00:11:30.180 --> 00:11:35.040 Jirah Cox: But it's maybe one step in that direction of let's be a little bit more flexible 83 00:11:35.050 --> 00:11:41.799 Jirah Cox: than our traditional approach of like. Let's have a pretty narrow offering that we guarantee is going to always work amazing. 84 00:11:42.270 --> 00:11:49.810 Philip Sellers: Well, I I know what I'm buying Jaira for Christmas now. It is a hammer to play-doh spectrum art piece, so. 85 00:11:51.650 --> 00:11:56.280 Jirah Cox: If you see the shirts those are gonna be very limited. Limited time offerings. 86 00:11:58.076 --> 00:12:08.800 Philip Sellers: But it's a great analogy, though. Right? I mean Hamburgers built for a specific purpose. If you tried to smack a nail with Play-doh. I don't know that it's going to be so effective. So 87 00:12:08.830 --> 00:12:13.689 Philip Sellers: it was built for a specific purpose. These are very similarly built 88 00:12:13.750 --> 00:12:18.920 Philip Sellers: hammers, and so it makes it an easy thing to adopt. 89 00:12:20.540 --> 00:12:21.490 Philip Sellers: you know. 90 00:12:21.620 --> 00:12:23.380 Philip Sellers: in terms of reusing 91 00:12:23.810 --> 00:12:29.850 Philip Sellers: hardware what you know, what are some of the advantages here that the blog post kind of goes through. 92 00:12:30.416 --> 00:12:32.650 Philip Sellers: You know. 1st of all. 93 00:12:32.970 --> 00:12:37.452 Philip Sellers: you know one. The adaptability, I guess, is, is an advantage. 94 00:12:38.320 --> 00:12:44.259 Philip Sellers: but there's also another one called out here in terms of total cost of ownership. 95 00:12:44.700 --> 00:12:50.699 Jirah Cox: I think it's huge. It's it's really, primarily, primarily, I would call it the driving factor, right of of 96 00:12:51.040 --> 00:12:57.990 Jirah Cox: please help me find a way to not need to fully discount early retire. Recent investments. 97 00:12:59.620 --> 00:13:00.450 Philip Sellers: Yeah, absolutely. 98 00:13:00.450 --> 00:13:05.610 Chris Calhoun: From a customer perspective, you know. Of course. You want to try to time 99 00:13:05.630 --> 00:13:23.000 Chris Calhoun: your new technology around refresh where something's Eol? Well, that's not really a concern. Now, in this case you can continue down the path of the hardware that you're using, and continue the use of that with the nutanix advantage. 100 00:13:23.990 --> 00:13:30.219 Philip Sellers: One. And you know this is a core tenant. We talk about simplicity and automationist tenants. 101 00:13:30.250 --> 00:13:32.820 Philip Sellers: but choice is another huge 102 00:13:32.990 --> 00:13:44.131 Philip Sellers: tenant of the nutanix system. And so this is another one of those places where you're providing, flexible. And, as the blog says, future proof solutions 103 00:13:44.810 --> 00:13:49.729 Philip Sellers: where you're allowing choice, this is just another way, allowing customers choice 104 00:13:49.750 --> 00:13:58.060 Philip Sellers: in the way that they deploy the Nutani software because the goodness of all this comes back down to that software layer. That is the same. 105 00:13:58.190 --> 00:14:00.770 Philip Sellers: and no matter what substrate, it's placed onto. 106 00:14:03.850 --> 00:14:20.110 Philip Sellers: the the blog is on to talk about a little bit of your history, and if we talk about this, I know you. You did a good job of kind of summing this up earlier. I think, Jaira, but you you did very tightly integrated hardware development cycles, pretty narrow. Hcl. 107 00:14:22.820 --> 00:14:30.790 Philip Sellers: Beyond customer requests. Was there other things that kind of brought this about? Or. 108 00:14:31.150 --> 00:14:36.000 Philip Sellers: you know, helped you to kind of change your strategy around this. 109 00:14:39.600 --> 00:14:44.229 Jirah Cox: I think I think in my opinion, I'd say the strategy is fundamentally 110 00:14:44.510 --> 00:14:51.820 Jirah Cox: unchanged. We always want to be as responsive to customer needs and requests as is reasonably possible and 111 00:14:51.850 --> 00:14:54.820 Jirah Cox: good for Nutanix, good for the customer, good for the platform and the brand. 112 00:14:56.630 --> 00:15:24.479 Jirah Cox: there there could be times and and certain compelling events right when we have certain amounts of customer demand that make us revisit certain things, or maybe change up the the roadmap or the the prioritization there, not a fundamentally different strategy in some ways, and also in the in the historical. Look back here, right? Fundamentally, we were a bit more of an appliance company closer to that launch in 2011 compared to where we are now as really pure software. 113 00:15:24.640 --> 00:15:41.189 Jirah Cox: right? So once we complete that transition to being pure software company, where we, of course, need to run on great hardware. But we don't. Fundamentally, you know, you can look at our either our quarterly publishings, or even how we build the company. It's not really, fundamentally around 114 00:15:41.220 --> 00:15:47.290 Jirah Cox: incentivizing that hardware sale. We just need hardware somewhere that you get in some fashion, right, whether from us or from another great partner. 115 00:15:47.320 --> 00:15:56.030 Jirah Cox: or from in this case. Now being able to reuse it. So we're now free really to think about and get a bit more flexible in this kind of area. 116 00:15:57.080 --> 00:15:59.229 Philip Sellers: Now you mentioned, you know 117 00:16:00.560 --> 00:16:11.150 Philip Sellers: somewhat, maybe compromising that lifecycle management is. Is that the case with the solution? Are there some things that maybe, aren't there from a lifecycle management? Or 118 00:16:11.260 --> 00:16:16.409 Philip Sellers: with these particular announcements, are we we still able to fully benefit from Lcn. 119 00:16:17.240 --> 00:16:18.450 Jirah Cox: So it's it's my understanding that. 120 00:16:18.600 --> 00:16:19.110 Chris Calhoun: You will. 121 00:16:19.110 --> 00:16:36.349 Jirah Cox: Continue to patch these as traditional in this case, mostly dell or even HP. Servers, right, which we actually have made easier along the way as well. Right? You can now put a nutanix node even running Ahv and running our software defined storage in maintenance mode right? With one click in the browser in prism there. 122 00:16:36.350 --> 00:16:49.460 Jirah Cox: So then, that makes it even more easy to, even though I have a resilient distributed cluster to, to still say, I want to do maintenance on node 5 today. Right, patch it, bring it up to speed, and then bring it back into the cluster. There. 123 00:16:49.740 --> 00:16:58.710 Philip Sellers: Yeah. So still automated. So still that workflow. Simplified sort of process, maybe just not quite as automated. 124 00:16:59.040 --> 00:16:59.710 Philip Sellers: Yeah. 125 00:16:59.710 --> 00:17:06.730 Jirah Cox: Yes, yeah. Still simple. With maybe a bit more interaction with the admin for the actual hardware hardware firmware patching itself. 126 00:17:06.960 --> 00:17:07.560 Philip Sellers: Yeah. 127 00:17:07.760 --> 00:17:25.910 Philip Sellers: So the the next section of the blog talks about streamlining the migration process. Chris, I'm I'm gonna kind of push this one over to you. What? What are some of the benefits and stuff of of the migration process? Because we're talking about the life cycle of it. But we have to get there first.st So migration is pretty important. Also. 128 00:17:25.910 --> 00:17:48.253 Chris Calhoun: Absolutely. And that's again something that Nutanix prides itself on is simplicity as far as designing a path and creating a path for customers to recognize and see that solution come to fruition and experience the goodness in a in a faster way. And that's really where 129 00:17:48.880 --> 00:17:50.140 Chris Calhoun: new tennix 130 00:17:50.310 --> 00:17:56.540 Chris Calhoun: uptime and resiliency is really key to the this product itself is being able to 131 00:17:56.680 --> 00:18:07.450 Chris Calhoun: rely on that software defined solution where hardware is really a a non issue. So that's part of the 1st key bullet point there listed in the 132 00:18:07.947 --> 00:18:22.480 Chris Calhoun: blog post, and that's something that to me is an advantage to as a former customer I can speak to is knowing that the benefits come from the solution and the hardware is 133 00:18:22.590 --> 00:18:31.560 Chris Calhoun: definitely a quality piece of that. But it's really the simplified management, which is the next bullet point that's highlighted there of 134 00:18:32.046 --> 00:18:42.869 Chris Calhoun: a unified platform. Including the software stack for compute storage and networking all in one. That's the bread and butter of the nutanix goodness! 135 00:18:43.190 --> 00:18:52.329 Chris Calhoun: And then of course, last of all, is being able to run the demanding workloads, and I know that this is something that 136 00:18:52.970 --> 00:18:55.832 Chris Calhoun: that Jaira has emphasized in past. 137 00:18:56.990 --> 00:19:22.310 Chris Calhoun: statements of nutanix is ready to run today's workloads and future workloads. And that's really the the benefit to the Nutanix platform. It's seeing into the future. It's investing in quality products. Now with customer choice of the gear, but in this case, being able to be flexible enough to adapt and 138 00:19:22.310 --> 00:19:39.230 Chris Calhoun: move from a Vsan to a nutanix node. That's really where the flexibility comes in and the benefit for the customer is really key. And it's a great announcement as far as the forward thinking approach that Nutanix has for this. 139 00:19:40.700 --> 00:19:55.937 Jirah Cox: And the cool thing is, I mean for most customers, right? This hardware that we're talking about here. It wasn't sitting in a warehouse right waiting for deployment. It was actually already running workloads running the business. So what's really cool here is these customers are, gonna get a front row seat to really 140 00:19:56.220 --> 00:20:12.910 Jirah Cox: you know, drinking the champagne along with us around saying, Yeah, we want, we want to run great hardware. You're going to have a like for, like hardware experience here, they're actually going to have the some of the most clearest proof points around. Yeah, I used to run it on that stack. And now run on Nutanix, and here's how much faster it is. Here's how much easier it is to administer 141 00:20:12.970 --> 00:20:40.239 Jirah Cox: to Chris's point how easy the migration to get it from A to B was. It's really pretty neat, actually, compared to where we meet the vast majority of customers right where we're talking about migrating from other cloud platforms, or from 3 tier. Or what have you? And of course those things are not fundamentally like, for, like so of course, you'd expect that we can really shine there. But here it's like, just change out the part of the software stack that we write and see what the results look like for you, and you'll be impressed. 142 00:20:40.830 --> 00:20:42.220 Philip Sellers: Yeah. And and I mean. 143 00:20:42.340 --> 00:20:59.940 Philip Sellers: I I know it's kind of redundant with with you 2 guys on here. But I still run into a lot of customers that think, you know, replacing vmware is just a hypervisor question, and it's not there. There's so much more here, at least with this comparison. We're talking about 144 00:21:00.000 --> 00:21:21.789 Philip Sellers: folks that are already invested in a hyper converge stack. There's already that, you know, software defined storage component. So you're right. It really gives you an excellent way of highlighting before and after and comparing outcomes. So it'll be interesting to talk to more customers as they adopt this as they make that migration, and we start to hear some of the 145 00:21:22.761 --> 00:21:28.556 Philip Sellers: before and after stories. So hopefully, we get a blog post about that hint hint nudge nudge so 146 00:21:29.890 --> 00:21:50.050 Jirah Cox: But a cool segue into what the article calls out here, which is that apparently we're only about half done with our planned Vsan ready certifications. So this already is a very extensive list. The article does link out to our support portal with some kind of details around what generations of dell and HP. We support, but apparently lots more goodness to come here as well. 147 00:21:50.420 --> 00:21:56.789 Philip Sellers: Yeah, I see some other oems that come to mind that that are on the list today. Today we're talking power edge and 148 00:21:56.820 --> 00:21:59.410 Philip Sellers: pro alliance. But 149 00:21:59.560 --> 00:22:12.390 Philip Sellers: you know there, there are certainly other vendors where I know there's work in progress. There were other announcements, particularly around Cisco and support for existing hardware. Not necessarily Vsan. Ready notes, but 150 00:22:12.650 --> 00:22:19.249 Philip Sellers: lots of reuse stories kind of in the mix right now. So it's it's a fantastic 151 00:22:19.550 --> 00:22:21.460 Philip Sellers: customer benefiting 152 00:22:23.600 --> 00:22:36.720 Philip Sellers: development, I guess strategy from from the folks at Nutanix. So I I kind of love this. I'm like you, Chris. I I definitely see the benefits as a former customer, knowing how 153 00:22:36.810 --> 00:22:41.960 Philip Sellers: difficult sometimes it can be to justify those those hardware changes. And 154 00:22:42.330 --> 00:22:52.990 Philip Sellers: you know, even my last company, we were pretty progressive, like we were refreshing every year and a half, and passing down hardware as new generations of things came out. 155 00:22:53.070 --> 00:22:55.129 Philip Sellers: So we were pretty aggressive. But 156 00:22:55.180 --> 00:22:57.030 Philip Sellers: you know, when you 157 00:22:57.080 --> 00:23:07.000 Philip Sellers: definitely sweat your assets longer. This is a huge benefit for you to to be able to have this adaptive reuse of existing hardware. 158 00:23:07.650 --> 00:23:10.310 Jirah Cox: So for other customers listening to that, Philip was that roughly. 159 00:23:10.360 --> 00:23:12.849 Jirah Cox: a 1 3rd of the environment. 160 00:23:13.228 --> 00:23:16.950 Jirah Cox: Every year and a half so close to a 5 year 161 00:23:17.100 --> 00:23:18.550 Jirah Cox: full lifecycle. There. 162 00:23:19.222 --> 00:23:25.560 Philip Sellers: So it it's somewhat strategy evolved over the years that I was with the the firm. 163 00:23:25.800 --> 00:23:36.119 Philip Sellers: The main thing was getting the benefit of the hardware, the new generation of cpus every time they came out, and putting those under our tier 0 databases. And 164 00:23:36.220 --> 00:23:51.710 Philip Sellers: you know our critical applications. And then that that then in turn took that year and a half old hardware still well within its support life and moved into, you know, tier, one type applications, primary sort of use cases and hosting. And 165 00:23:51.730 --> 00:23:54.967 Philip Sellers: maybe our Vdi stack, or maybe our 166 00:23:55.660 --> 00:24:00.319 Philip Sellers: Dmz, or you know, some other use case. And so 167 00:24:00.550 --> 00:24:10.569 Philip Sellers: by doing that every year and a half we somewhat stair stepped our migration process over the course of, you know, a 5 year cut, and 168 00:24:11.172 --> 00:24:19.020 Philip Sellers: it it definitely gave gave us some advantages, but we were. We were chasing raw speed, sometimes on the processors. 169 00:24:19.020 --> 00:24:22.360 Jirah Cox: Sure makes sense, I mean, I can see some advantages for some customers. 170 00:24:22.780 --> 00:24:30.219 Jirah Cox: as it's a neat, at least at the very least, a thought model, if not a practice around hardware governance right around. 171 00:24:30.370 --> 00:24:32.480 Jirah Cox: You know, a the team gets 172 00:24:32.860 --> 00:24:42.210 Jirah Cox: more practiced at migration because you're sort of in some ways, always doing a migration right, whether it's a to BB to C or C back to A as you sort of rotate. Around 173 00:24:42.270 --> 00:24:55.929 Jirah Cox: which 3rd of the environment. You're thinking about a given in a given 18 month period. So that's pretty neat, financially, I can think of that smoothing out a lot of lumps in terms of like giant purchases into more of just sort of a continual buying stream. 174 00:24:56.776 --> 00:24:59.969 Jirah Cox: And somewhat, maybe even de-risking stuff like 175 00:25:00.080 --> 00:25:07.510 Jirah Cox: we can think back to, you know, some previous generations of like, say, CPU memory combos, where industry wide oem wide. 176 00:25:07.720 --> 00:25:21.040 Jirah Cox: planet wide. They're just for like sort of like dims popping off left and right, with either, you know, true or more more commonly, false. Positive health alerts for some customers that was their entire 5 year purchase had that 177 00:25:21.320 --> 00:25:26.699 Jirah Cox: condition top to bottom, right? Whereas you kind of had a limited blast radius there of, you know, a 3rd of the environment. 178 00:25:27.540 --> 00:25:32.517 Philip Sellers: And you know the the other benefit that I also found over the years with this was 179 00:25:33.040 --> 00:25:34.819 Philip Sellers: you know we 180 00:25:35.630 --> 00:25:42.620 Philip Sellers: to your point. We were constantly sort of a stream of this, but the software component to it helped us 181 00:25:42.680 --> 00:25:50.660 Philip Sellers: with that ability to continually do migrations. You know, we may take things out of tier one send them to Dr. 182 00:25:50.930 --> 00:26:01.540 Philip Sellers: You know, we were shipping stuff around and and so that was a healthy practice. So yes, we were. We were pretty well tuned to migrations just because of the nature of the company we worked for. 183 00:26:01.650 --> 00:26:06.380 Philip Sellers: But this was another way where migrations were were definitely enabled by software. 184 00:26:06.520 --> 00:26:24.720 Philip Sellers: Yeah, I think if we had a lot of physical machines and we were having to do OS rebuilds. And all these other more difficult migration paths. It would be one thing, but with virtualization as that abstraction layer, it certainly bought us the benefits of being able to migrate to new platforms much more easily. 185 00:26:25.301 --> 00:26:31.169 Philip Sellers: And with the Hci model you now have that benefit even wider, where 186 00:26:31.450 --> 00:26:42.909 Philip Sellers: you may just be able to add notes and eject nodes. And so you're not even reforming the cluster and doing, you know, storage of emotion, type activities. You're just growing and shrinking the cluster. And so 187 00:26:45.170 --> 00:26:50.939 Philip Sellers: all of those things kind of come together as the culmination of that simplified operations. 188 00:26:51.070 --> 00:27:13.040 Philip Sellers: And that's an enabler for you to then maybe take and take that, you know. Flatten the curve of the spend on an annual basis versus, you know, having these big 3, 4, 5 year spikes where you have a massive amount of capital going out, and I know every company is different. This is that, you know. 189 00:27:13.090 --> 00:27:19.479 Philip Sellers: Do companies still make capital investments? Do they prefer opex, and 190 00:27:20.140 --> 00:27:25.502 Philip Sellers: I'm a little bit different and a little tainted. I guess not tainted. Slanted 191 00:27:26.220 --> 00:27:32.610 Philip Sellers: I worked for private companies, you know. One was a member owned cooperative, the other was privately held. 192 00:27:32.750 --> 00:27:40.950 Philip Sellers: And so yeah, we we definitely valued capital investment. And so that's that's another sort of 193 00:27:41.490 --> 00:27:57.540 Philip Sellers: affecting point, I guess of the strategy here is that we were definitely investing from a capital perspective versus, you know, handling this in opex. So anyway, I know we we just kind of bird walked off. But hopefully, that's a good discussion, too. 194 00:27:59.240 --> 00:27:59.599 Jirah Cox: Those are me! 195 00:27:59.600 --> 00:28:17.110 Chris Calhoun: Part of the part of the Bird Walk. Think about this from a a customer, perspective from mergers and acquisitions, being able to reuse hardware from from acquired companies. That's obviously a big incentive for companies to 196 00:28:17.545 --> 00:28:35.194 Chris Calhoun: look at, reusing or repurposing the existing gear that they have, too. So I think that's a huge factor as far as flexibility, knowing that if there's something that can be reused instead of buying that new it's definitely a a bottom line factor on the 197 00:28:35.980 --> 00:28:37.670 Chris Calhoun: on the financial side. 198 00:28:38.400 --> 00:28:43.399 Philip Sellers: But and I think that's that's a great culmination of what we're talking about. Right? It is 199 00:28:43.900 --> 00:28:44.990 Philip Sellers: that 200 00:28:45.010 --> 00:28:46.770 Philip Sellers: stewardship 201 00:28:47.260 --> 00:28:53.579 Philip Sellers: that we all have as somewhat of a agent of our companies. 202 00:28:53.710 --> 00:28:59.830 Philip Sellers: We have limited resources, we have limited time, limited money, capital resources. 203 00:29:00.610 --> 00:29:08.579 Philip Sellers: you know, we're we're being good stewards with this, and this is just another choice, another avenue for us to be able to carry that out. 204 00:29:11.050 --> 00:29:12.020 Chris Calhoun: Absolutely. 205 00:29:12.340 --> 00:29:16.910 Philip Sellers: Guys, this, this is a fun topic. I I think we definitely 206 00:29:16.970 --> 00:29:20.064 Philip Sellers: love the announcement, love the direction, 207 00:29:20.920 --> 00:29:27.739 Philip Sellers: but there's certainly more to come. You know, we were talking just before we kicked off this episode. There's so much great 208 00:29:27.790 --> 00:29:35.850 Philip Sellers: stuff happening, so many great blog posts and stuff going up. So looking forward to digging into the next topic with you guys 209 00:29:35.860 --> 00:29:48.150 Philip Sellers: and for everybody listening. Want to say, thanks for spending a little bit of time with us exploring Vsan. Ready nodes being certified for Nutanix. Jaira, Chris. 210 00:29:48.280 --> 00:29:51.459 Philip Sellers: thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it. 211 00:29:51.460 --> 00:29:52.290 Jirah Cox: Thank y'all. 212 00:29:52.290 --> 00:29:53.430 Chris Calhoun: Pleasure yep. 213 00:29:53.980 --> 00:30:00.039 Philip Sellers: And for everybody listening. We'll see you on the next episode. I hope that you have a great 214 00:30:00.050 --> 00:30:01.390 Philip Sellers: rest of your day. 215 00:30:02.340 --> 00:30:03.080 Chris Calhoun: Take care!