Jeff Baxter

So that's available in ONTAP Select 9.2.

Again, mostly targeted are those robo use cases where people want to have just distributed select out in the field, but they don't want to have any more than two nodes.

They want to have HA, but they definitely don't want to build out

more than two nodes there in the environment.

Other couple of things, the other really big thing we've added is something we call VNAS.

And that's the capability to use external storage as the basis for the select storage.

So this is actually, this opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

People are aware probably of what we used to do and still do with our, what's called V-Series going back in the day.

Now it's called FlexArray and being able to take

third-party storage and we present it out through an ONTAP control.

Think of this as the SDS equivalent.

Select today runs on top of vSphere.

vSphere obviously has a ludicrously large HCI of storage providers that are supported underneath it.

So any of that storage, if you can essentially present storage out to a vSphere environment, then we will turn around and we will take that storage from vSphere, load it into Select, and then we present it out as ONTAP-based storage.

So that's useful if, for example, you have a SAN environment underneath, but you have no way to run NAS.

Now you can run basically the number one NAS in the business as a software deployed option directly on top of vSphere and use your existing third-party SAN array.

The other really interesting one, and it's the same basic technology, but we talk about it a little bit differently, is running it on top of something like a VMware vSAN.

So for a lot of our VMware administrators, we would love to talk about

why and how you could use ONTAP Select or even AFF, frankly, as opposed to vSAN, but certainly understand that some customers have made the choice towards vSAN, and it's a great technology in certain ways.

So if people are going to be using vSAN for their VMware data storage, and that's great, and they've got a very strong SAN offering there, but they still need to offer NAS, right?