VMworld is known for being a technical conference. Last year Project Pacific made a match between vSphere and Kubernetes. This year Project Monterey is aimed at reimagining the data center for next-generation applications.

During an interview today with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, VMware Inc. Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger described the project as “ripping apart the I/O stack from the intrinsic operation of a vSphere.”

To delve deeper into the technology behind Project Monterey and other technological innovations in the VMware pipeline, Greg Lavender (pictured), senior vice president and chief technology officer of VMware, spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, during VMworld. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: Where did the innovation behind Project Monterey come from?

Lavender: Four years ago, in the office of the CTO, we actually had a future-looking project to get our core hypervisor technology running on Arm processors. That incubated for three years, and then last December, I moved the engineering team that had done that research and advanced development work over to our cloud platforms business unit, and SmartNIC kind of converged with that. So we were already well along the innovation path there, and it’s really now about building the partnerships we have with SmartNIC vendors and driving this technology out to the benefit of our customers who want to leverage it.

Vellante: Could you clarify something on that? When we interviewed Pat Gelsinger he talked about Monterey as a complete re-architecting of the I/O stack. What specifically was he talking about there? 

Lavender: With any computing server in the data center, in a colo facility or even in the cloud, a large portion of the CPU resources, and even some memory resources, can get consumed by just processing the high volumes of I/O that’s going out to storage devices, communicating between the different parts of multitiered applications. So there’s an overhead that gets consumed in the core server CPU, even if it’s multicore, multisocket.

By offloading a lot of that I/O work onto the Arm core and taking advantage of hardware offloads there in those SmartNICs, you can offload that processing and free up even as much as 30% of the CPU of a multi-socket, multi-core server and give that back to the application so that the application gets the benefit of those extra compute and memory resources.

Vellante: VMware published data that shows hybrid is 30 to 40% cheaper than the cloud. Can you add some color to the economics of hybrid? 

Lavender: Somebody asked me one time: ‘What’s really a cloud. Greg?’ And I said: ‘Automation. Automation. Automation.’ You can take your current environments and highly automate the release, lifecycle management, develop more agile software delivery methods, and so therefore you could get sort of cloud benefits from your existing applications by just highly optimizing them on the cost of goods and services.

Then again, the hybrid cloud model just gives customers more choice. For example, I want to reduce the number of data centers I have but I need to maintain reliability, scalability, et cetera. So, take advantage of the hybrid cloud that we offer, but you’ll still run things cloud native. You’re seeing this true multicloud technology and paradigm grow out as people have these choices.

Then the question is: If you have those choices, how do you maintain security? How do you maintain reliability? How do you maintain up-time yet be able to move quickly? So I think there’s different speeds in which those platforms will evolve, and our goal is to give you the ability to basically make those choices and optimize for economics as well as technical capability.

Furrier: VMware announced last month that the United States Space Force has committed to the Tanzu platform. When theCUBE interviewed Lieutenant General John Thompson recently, he talked about how Space Force is looking at software-defined as a key operating reality. What’s your take on this?

Lavender: There are a lot of interesting things happening just in fundamental networking. The Starlink satellites that Elon Musk has launched bringing higher bandwidth, lower latency to near space just opens up all new opportunities for what we can do. So I think of three things: You gotta have speed; you gotta have scale; and you gotta have security.

What’s exciting to me about being at VMware as the CTO is that we partner with all the hardware vendors; we partner with all the system providers, like Nvidia and others, the SmartNIC vendors. And then we get to come up with software architectures that bring that together holistically and give people a platform where we can run your workloads to get work done wherever you need to land those workloads.

Furrier: This really brings the whole Project Monterey full circle, because when we think about space and networks and all these things you’re talking about, you need to have smart everything.

Lavender: Exactly. It’s not just connecting everything and pushing data around; it’s then having the intelligence to do it efficiently, economically and securely. With the machine learning technologies, properly trained with the proper data sets and the proper algorithms that you can then employ at the edge — the small edge, thick edge — in the data center, at the cloud, then you give the visibility so that we get to that proactive world.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld. (* Disclosure: VMware sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither VMware nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE