Gabriel Chapman

in many respects.

It really depends, I think, on the architecture and design of the HCI solution, depending on how it's packaged, on whether you can scale those resources, you know, independent of each other and kind of get a little more granular level of the scaling of the different disparate resources.

Or if I have to scale all of them all at once, it really is just going to depend on

You know what the design point was like and really kind of what point you're going to go to in your journey into what we're traditionally calling next generation data center.

Sure.

So, you know, the way we tend to present it is such, right?

So I kind of, if I go back to, so I was like an end user for 15 years.

I did storage and virtualization stuff for a long time.

And, you know, if I go, let's start the year 2000, you know, back then, what was I doing?

I was doing server consolidation.

I was starting to put things onto storage arrays.

I was creating SAN.

I was starting to implement, you know, processes that made my life simpler from a lifecycle management standpoint.

Around 2004, 2005, we start playing around with virtualization.

And virtualization simplifies our lives from the standpoint of that common server resource utilization, which is sitting at, what, 5% or 6%.

Now I could scale those resources up, virtualize a lot of things, put a lot more workloads in a denser package, and simplify my life there, right?

And the common building block point to really enable a lot of that was storage area networks or SAN, right?

So I had a storage place to put all my data.

I had a lot of different compute nodes that would connect to it, and it made for a very simpler, easier provisioning process.

As those spaces started to expand, those customers started to get bigger, as we started to get towards 20%, 50%, 90% virtualized, we started to realize that there were a lot of challenge around how I automate and orchestrate that from a policy-driven data center standpoint.