This week’s VMworld 2016 unleashed its innovative technology on conference attendees, including its new Cloud Foundation, which helps organizations manage and secure off-prem workloads more effectively. And also dominating the conversation was the updates to VMware, Inc.’s Viritual SAN (VSAN), the company’s enterprise-class shared storage solution for hyper-converged infrastructure.

Yanbing Li, SVP and GM of Storage and Availability at VMware, along with Rawlingon Rivera, principal architect, Office of the CTO, at VMware, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during VMworld 2016 about bringing affordable, cross-cloud management to the enterprise and how VMware has taken VSAN to a new level.

Li is theCUBE’s Women in Tech spotlight guest this week.

Building a modern infrastructure

Miniman noted that VSAN was the core fundamental piece of what’s going on at the show. He asked Li to talk about its strategic importance. She responded by saying that VSAN and vSphere (VMware’s software manager) work together to build and fuel the innovations of tomorrow.

“If you think about how vSphere transformed compute, VSAN is doing the same thing for storage. And if you think about the relationship of VSAN and vSphere, if you have a have a virtualized environment, VSAN is really becoming that foundational layer of your modern virtualized infrastructure,” Li explained.

Li continued: “So the tight coupling of vSphere and VSAN [is] providing the most basic building blocks and converging your storage and compute together. It’s becoming the foundational element in fueling all these other innovations that we are going to. Whether extending it to a much fuller cloud foundation, the whole SVC [SAN Volume Controller] stack was smart lifecycle management with cross-cloud architecture. What I’ve been saying is, everything — whether it’s private [or] public cloud, today’s application, tomorrow’s application — [is] powered by VSAN.”

The big moment for VSAN

Furrier tried to get to the heart of the excitement surrounding VSAN. He noticed that people are excited about it and questioned why is it doing so well. Li pointed to savings and simplicity as the keys to success.

“I think a lot of our customers buy VSAN because of the incredible cost savings they see. This tends to be the strong driver for procurement, and everybody is looking to do more with less. But what customers truly fall in love with VSAN is how simplified [it is] and how it really brings vSphere and storage together,” Li said. “You are essentially seeing your compute and storage at the same time … and there is a lot more unified management on top of it because it’s not just vSphere with vCenter [Server]; there is vRealize Automation. There is vRealize Automation [which automates the delivery of personalized infrastructure, applications and custom IT services].”

Li added: “You know all these management capabilities are integrated, bringing everything into one integrated stack. Simplicity is what customers [love about VSAN].”

All products working together

Furrier wanted to know if the object was to have all of the product work together. Li confirmed that the company wants to manage the whole data center.

“We definitely want to build individually differentiated products, but more importantly bring them together,” Li explained. “If you think about this morning’s demo — I was doing a VSAN segment — but what I demoed is Cloud Foundation, working in a private data center; working in your public data center and connected together.”

Ruling the stack

Rivera talked about how the individual products stand on their own but how together they become more powerful. Furrier asked if this was the company’s key value proposition. Li responded by talking about differentiating VMware from the competition.

“We all want to win the hyper-converged marketplace. I do think from a competition standpoint it is really hard to compete with a basic set of [one] product’s functionality. You win one round. Your competitor wins another round,” she said. “I think for VMware, I really see the power is how we bring the entire stack together and how we put it in the context of cross-cloud. And I do think that what we demonstrated today on stage, only VMware can do that.”

Positioned for growth

Furrier talked about the substantial growth the company has seen over the past few months. He mentioned that VMware is adding 100 customers per week in just install base. Li said there is more to come.

“I’m very excited about the growth potential, and I think even though we started to see this acceleration a couple of months ago, I do think it continues,” Li stated. “You recognize that this is the fastest growth — storage market — and we feel VSAN is positioned really well given how we’re integrated with vSphere … how VMware’s broad ecosystem and customer base supports us. So a lot to look forward to.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE