Gabriel Chapman

Hey, yep, Gabriel Chapman here.

I am the guy, for lack of a better term, the HCI whisperer.

I whisper to the HCIs.

Now, in reality, I, too, like Derek, came over with the SolidFire acquisition and have been focused on bringing HCI to the field for NetApp customers, partners, and internal teams.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

So, all right.

So hyper-converged infrastructure.

Okay.

let's see this.

We can go back and kind of do a precursor to kind of lay out how the market came about.

If you go back to 2009, essentially you have two companies that kind of came about roughly within a couple month period, Nutanix and SimpliV that decided to take the traditional stack of infrastructure components and abstract away the complexity behind them and put it in kind of an all-in-one consumable package, right?

So you had

servers and switches and storage arrays and appliances that all did things.

Under the covers, those are naturally just commodity x86 components running some form of Linux.

There's no reason why we could not virtualize those constructs, package them together and essentially sell you a consumable building block for the data center that provisioned storage

memory, compute, and laid a hypervisor on top of that to simplify the provisioning of virtual assets.

Does that make sense?

I mean, there's a couple of ways to look at it, right?

If we started to look at, you know, the traditional silent base IT shop, you know, I have my storage team, my network team, my server team, my virtualization team, the application team.