As the potential for VMware, Inc.’s cross-cloud platforming has developers eager to begin exploring the possibilities for applications, the company is making sure to remind attendees of this year’s VMworld conference that other parts of its solutions portfolio, particularly Virtual SAN (VSAN) have not yet reached the limits of their usability.

Jim Ganthier, VP and GM of Engineered Solutions, HPC and Cloud, at Dell, Inc., and Yanbing Li, SVP and GM of Storage and Availability at VMware, met with Stu Miniman (@stu) and John Troyer (@jtroyer), cohost and guest host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to talk about Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI), growing customer interest and the role HCI will play in the cross-cloud architecture.

Momentum and management

“What we are experiencing is absolutely the momentum around VSAN,” Li said, assessing what she sees as “greater momentum in customer interest in HCI in general, but specifically a VSAN-powered HCI solution.”

To Li, a big question for VMware right now is: “What is going to be the role storage plays in our cross-cloud architecture? That’s also going to be part of the scene for this conference,” she added.

For Ganthier, breaking down the HCI equation into its components reveals a striking change in the current situation. “When we think about a true converged infrastructure or converged platform, it’s gotta have server, storage and networking. The fascinating thing, though, is that storage is no longer traditional storage,” he said.

He continued: “It’s storage that’s actually sitting on the head-node of a server, and so what our teams have been doing, in partnership together, is figuring out ‘how can I treat that as not only a unified whole, but do it in a way that’s not only defined … how can I do that with a management orchestration layer that lets me quickly stand it up, and then if I need to reconfigure or send it to the cloud … the net is I can do that quickly, seamlessly, and I don’t require an army of admins to do it.”

Future convergence

“Think of hyper-convergence as almost like replacing previous storage, like software-defined storage,” Li said. “I do think that’s an important step toward storageless, but what’s more important is to really make it zero-touch as much as possible from a management, ease-of-use, intelligence point of view.”

The next step of the evolution is how VMware takes the view from storage being the data-persistence layer to the data-management layer, according to Li. “I think that’s especially going to be more important for the cross-cloud era, because cross-cloud, you don’t want to think about your storage … you want to think about how your data application workload is moving and being managed, being connected, being secured.”

VMware started small with VSAN, but “we are definitely prime in the data-center today,” Li noted, citing a survey in which 64 percent of respondents identified their companies as running mission-critical processes with VSAN. And to Li, that means that there’s still room to grow.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld US.

Photo by SiliconANGLE