XenTegra - Nutanix Weekly

Nutanix Weekly: Elevate Your IT Infrastructure with Long-Term Support Release: Nutanix AOS 6.10

XenTegra / Andy Whiteside Season 1 Episode 93

Discover the new Nutanix AOS 6.10 release - the next cornerstone for the Nutanix Cloud Platform solution.  This Long-Term Support (LTS) release not only enhances performance, manageability, and security but also  marks a new era for hybrid multicloud capabilities. Combining features from versions 6.6 through 6.81 into a single update, AOS 6.10 represents a significant advancement amidst the rapid pace of technological change.

Blog: https://www.nutanix.com/blog/elevate-your-it-infrastructure-with-long-term-support-release-nutanix-aos-6-10

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Jirah Cox
Co-Host: Ben Rogers

WEBVTT

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Philip Sellers: Hey, and welcome to another episode of Nutanix Weekly one of the many podcasts that we like to call content with context here at Zentagra.

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Philip Sellers: I'm your host, Phil Sellers. I'm the practice manager for modern data center. We call it modern data center, because we know that not all of the things that run your business run in a colo or in that room down the hallway anymore. It's probably hybrid in some way. Some aws, some sas little bit of everything contributing to how you run your infrastructure. So

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Philip Sellers: I'm joined today again with 2 great guests 2 great co-hosts. From Nutanix. We've got Jira Cox, who is a principal technologist. Jaira, how you doing.

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Jirah Cox: Good man. Good doing well.

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Jirah Cox: appreciate the the invite back again.

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Philip Sellers: As always, it's standing invite right? We've also got Ben Rogers, a enterprise sales engineer. Ben, how you doing.

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Ben Rogers: Good glad to be here. It is, as Jairus said.

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Ben Rogers: glad to be invited back, so always a pleasure to hang out with you, too.

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Ben Rogers: and and just to let you just let the listeners know I learned just as much from this hanging out with you 2 as probably they do. Listen to all 3 of us. So I always appreciate the time and the invitation to sit in on the podcast.

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Philip Sellers: Well, it it's funny. I think there's a lot of learning going on, Ben, and it's good to point that out like I'm I'm sitting in Durham just across the railroad tracks from Nutanix, headquarter here on the East Coast. I've been here

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Philip Sellers: a lot over the last few months, just doing different activities with customers with, you know, training internal

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Philip Sellers: spending a a fair amount of time here and a lot of that is learning. So I don't care if it's bringing a customer here for an executive briefing which we did last week, or

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Philip Sellers: if it's it's hardcore training, you know, 8 HA day always leave with something new, because there's just that much going on inside of Nutanix inside of the product. And

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Philip Sellers: I'll be honest. Today is is a great, and we couldn't have asked for a better intro for for what we're gonna talk about today, which is the brand new release, a long term support, release of Nutanix Aos. Version 6.10.

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Philip Sellers: This came out. What last week is that? Right? Jaira?

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Jirah Cox: Sounds correct. Yep. Well, last week, as we as we were talking about it, you and I now.

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Philip Sellers: That's true. This probably isn't gonna release for a few weeks. So came out on October the 8th so early October. And

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Philip Sellers: yeah, we were talking a little bit about this. But you know, long term service releases short term service releases. It's a release cadence for nutmx. But basically lts, and 6.10 is a long term. Service release is gonna be supportable for a longer period of time.

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Philip Sellers: but what goes into one of these lts's Jaira. What what are we getting with? 6 dot 10.

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Jirah Cox: Sure, with 6 to 10 you're getting. It's kind of a you can think of it almost as like a roll up. Release a little bit like, you know. We've seen those for years, and like the windows server patching cadence right where you have patches that that catch up, you know, as giant releases things that are shipped beforehand as well. Now that's trickling out to lots of stuff like us. Patching one of my desktops here at the house the other day, and it was like.

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Jirah Cox: Do you want some early stuff first, st or do you want to catch it? You know, as it kind of goes mainstream. So I would think of these more like a mainstream release like they're they're intended for all customers to roll out all new clusters with

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Jirah Cox: to patch existing clusters up to right

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Jirah Cox: and and therefore really everyone for all purposes, for all workloads ready to go. And then, of course, we do, of course, put out some intermediate releases, right? That are what we call Sts that are for like, if you need a new feature faster, then, of course, those are there for you as well, and those sts eventually get merged into a future. Lts like this.

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Philip Sellers: So so the short version of that is new toys.

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Jirah Cox: Yeah.

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Jirah Cox: totally true. Yeah, very much true. So new for new for everybody. Right? So a couple of some some kids have been playing with these toys and testing them for us earlier on. And now toys for everyone.

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Philip Sellers: No, that that's funny, like you know. My son grew up as the Youtube generation. So

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Philip Sellers: much to my surprise, he enjoyed watching other kids unwrap and play with new toys. That was one of the video crazes for his generation. So this is kind of our version of I can't remember the Kid's name now. But kind of those Youtube videos of playing with new toys we we get to talk about here today.

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Jirah Cox: Trying to think about how those kids out earn all 3 of us combined doing that as like a 6 year old on Youtube, you know, playing with toys.

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Philip Sellers: Absolutely.

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Ben Rogers: Doubt. No doubt

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Ben Rogers: I would like to take a moment here to kind of, you know. Talk about my learning. Curve a little bit since I've been here at Nutanix.

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Ben Rogers: you know I'm going to age myself here to get enhancements out of an environment. You used to have to throw a lot of hardware at it. And there was really no software change that could be made. It was basically to throw hardware at it today. Specifically with this 1st area we're going to talk about now, kind of segwaying into the storage capabilities.

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Ben Rogers: This is where you see Nutanix. And I'm kind of fascinated by this, and being 54 years old to get fascinated by something that I've done for 30 years is quite of achievement. But I'm starting to see where our software engineers can play with the operate. Our our Aos

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Ben Rogers: and man bring goodness and performance out of just, you know, man changing some some gears within the software itself. And since I've been here over the 2 and a half year period, I've seen them make several enhancements to the software part of the

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Ben Rogers: equation that has really bought some enhancements, you know, discharging some of those things. Jare can speak a whole lot more of what we brought to the table, but it just amazes me when you look at some of the features and capabilities that we bring in these Lts releases

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Ben Rogers: that are software driven that bring performance to the platform where it used to be. You had to wait to refresh hardware to get some of those performance enhancements, and so I'm very fascinated by that, and what our company is able to do from a software level to get as much power and performance as they can out of the hardware stack.

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Philip Sellers: Well, I think you hit on one of the age, old sort of conflicts inside of it. Is, is it the software, or is it the hardware. And and as infrastructure guys, we've, we've probably always thrown

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Philip Sellers: more hardware at the problem to try and solve it. But really there's a lot of magic that can happen inside the software. And

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Philip Sellers: I I think that's 1 of the shifts that we see in where we're at today. And as an industry is that the software is the defining difference. And that's the story of hyper converge. That's the story.

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Philip Sellers: Cloud

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Philip Sellers: breaking down silos, making things scale and using industry standard Lego building blocks to to do that. And

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Philip Sellers: I think it's a great point. You know. It's

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Philip Sellers: it is something that we're seeing tremendous

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Philip Sellers: progress. I guess, as

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Philip Sellers: time comes on with with the capabilities around performance. So

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Philip Sellers: you know, as as we dig into this, it's it's not only higher performance, but there's some

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Philip Sellers: density changes that come along with this, too. Right?

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Philip Sellers: we're we're able to get

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Philip Sellers: some new limits

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Philip Sellers: in place, I mean, is there anything, maybe, beyond what's here in the blog post, Jaira, that that you could share in terms of those

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Philip Sellers: density, capabilities and things like that.

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Jirah Cox: yeah. So so, which is a neat point to to highlight there, right? How 6.10 really

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Jirah Cox: catches up

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Jirah Cox: what? What has already been brought by Aos 6.6 6.7 and 6.8. So yeah, of course, if you're anywhere in there in the middle, then yeah, there probably is new stuff here for you around larger nodes.

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Jirah Cox: I know one of the key things that we're highlighting, of course, is even larger larger nodes that can support things like nightly snapshot rates. Right? So if you only need once a night snapshots and less than like, say, continuous data protection, then yeah, the nodes can get get truly truly large these days, the blog. But this blog post doesn't call out specifics on that one.

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Jirah Cox: But that, of course, is an area. You can imagine that we're always looking to make continual improvement on right to give our customers better rpos larger density, larger density translates into better financials, right? Better economics around, you know, denser hardware refreshes, fewer notes to manage

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Jirah Cox: and helps keep pace from a storage platform level. Really, I would say of what CPU vendors are looking to do as well right like they're they're much more investing into. How many cores can we fit into this node?

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Jirah Cox: Not. Let's get you more nodes to hit a certain kind of core account right? So as our core counts per node, really push limits of what some of us even enjoy as like an ha boundary. You know. How many baskets do I want for my for my eggs? Here, then, you know, like 1, 28 cores is kind of like, oh, wow! That's a really interesting design. Non limit. Right? So then, we want storage to not also be the the constraining part below that either.

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Philip Sellers: Absolutely.

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Philip Sellers: And I think you know that that takes us into the idea of you know what is truly enterprise. Ready? Right? We're

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Philip Sellers: we're talking about eggs in a basket. We're talking about you know, risk at the end of the day. And so you know, one of those risk factors is, you know, does the software running on this platform.

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Philip Sellers: you know. Is it supported? Is the Isv I'm working with going to support it. So Lts is really important when it comes to that ecosystem of things that run on Nutanix.

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Philip Sellers: A lot of vendors don't certify for Sts releases. And so.

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Philip Sellers: as we talk about that and enterprise readiness, you know. That's a huge factor for 6.10. This will be something that we can expect. Many Isv softwares to be certified against.

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Philip Sellers: And so this is another

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Philip Sellers: huge step forward where we're getting tons of new capabilities, speed, density, all of these things, but also that enterprise, level support, and that that kind of takes us to

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Philip Sellers: point number 2. Enterprise readiness with Ahv

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Philip Sellers: You know, age fees been around 10 years now, and.

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Jirah Cox: We're there for the birthday party.

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Philip Sellers: Birthday. Yeah. So we saw that at Dot next earlier this year.

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Philip Sellers: it's come a long way, and

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Philip Sellers: there's tons of of goodness in here. Let's kind of cover off some of the things from an enterprise. Readiness, standpoint.

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Jirah Cox: Yeah. So the post calls out, you know a new one. It's again, it's new. It's new now to really all customers, whether you were on, or at least they already have this feature or not. So on demand. Cross, cluster migration. That's a mouthful. But a great thing right? The ability to move running vms, of course, from one cluster to another, which in our standard nutanix designs are sort of always shared nothing right. Those those clusters might not share anything other than maybe the network that your your guest Vm. Is attached to.

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Jirah Cox: so that ability to move a running vm from one cluster to another, whether that's across.

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Jirah Cox: and a wreck across the aisle or across town, all now possible for all customers, whether you are on a release that had it before or not.

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Jirah Cox: Storage optimizations, of course, helping to place vms more intelligently onto even clusters where they want to run.

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Jirah Cox: and then and then vm placement as well.

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Jirah Cox: and then security. And then I mean you. You really touched on it, Phil, but that ecosystem right, that

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Jirah Cox: nothing exists in a vacuum right? So so much of what our customers experience when they want to move on to Nutanix and move on to Ahv involves looking at that vendor matrix of like, what else do I use to help manage and monitor my environment? Help make my job easier as an administrator, as a platform owner.

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Jirah Cox: and and it's really a delight, and thanks to our alliances team for all the work they put into this. When I sit with customers and look through the matrix of like what supports Nutanix? And what can they keep that they already own

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Jirah Cox: as they migrate over? And that list gets longer and longer by the day. It's really quite really delightful to see, and it's wonderful for our customers.

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Philip Sellers: And Ben, you come from that customer background. This is a huge deal.

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Philip Sellers: Because

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Philip Sellers: what you don't want as a customer is to call into support and be like, sorry I can't help you.

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Philip Sellers: because X, this, this is a huge deal.

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Philip Sellers: what?

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Philip Sellers: I I guess. What's your perspective, as you kind of look at this enterprise. Support

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Philip Sellers: and how it's changed over time.

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Ben Rogers: So, you know, there's a there's a paradigm shift kind of going on in the industry to this micro service mentality. And I think that's really where we're. We're shining right now, as far as like it is a platform where Hv. Is just a service within that platform. So you know, you were talking about our ecosystem, you know. Right now we have the ability to look at customers and go. You know the platform is the foundation for the micro services that you want to run.

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Ben Rogers: So if you want to run Ahv, and you want to run containers. With that we can do that if you want to run? Hv, and you want to run our nus, our unified storage services on that. I mean, this is what we're bringing to the table. And I think that's what's making it. Enterprise ready is, we're not just a hypervisor. We're not just a storage component anymore. We're really bubbling up goodness that allows you to manage files, manage unstructured data.

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Ben Rogers: manage ransomware and looking at the content of your unstructured data, kubernetes, container management deployment application. You know, I mean database management and deployment now. So there's a there's a lot of things when you say enterprise readiness.

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Ben Rogers: and what I go back to is that you know nutanix at the heart is a cloud platform that's based on micro services that live in that platform. Hv. Is one of those services amongst the other ones that we just talked about, and that to me is what defines the enterprise. Readiness.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I I think that's a a valid point. It is a platform.

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Philip Sellers: you know. I'm a huge performance proponent of calling it a platform. You know, it's it's not just hyper converse. This is so much more because the services that run on top of it are really valuable to your business. One of those hugely valuable

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Philip Sellers: services is really around disaster, recovery, and resiliency.

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Philip Sellers: we're raising the bar again with 6 dot 10

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Philip Sellers: new replication resiliency features near sync for volume groups and consistency groups, multi-site metro, multi-site. Dr. Which is really interesting. And and that's 1 i would want to talk a little bit about. And then also multi cloud snapshot technology which I think is really interesting.

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Philip Sellers: When you start talking about and thinking about cost, effective ways to handle Dr.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, spot on Megan.

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Jirah Cox: Yeah. So I mean, it's great to see near sync. Come now to volume groups and and consistency groups. That's our way of saying our 1 min replication threshold. So we can now get that data offsite within 1 min which gives a ton of protection to the business. And really I usually describe this as sort of like for the most complicated apps. Our customers ask us to host right? So like into the, you know, either multi vm groups or multiple Vdisc groups right where I need, like the right order, fidelity of like

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Jirah Cox: this. These snaps occur in the right way, preserving that data right as it was flowing down to disk, or even flushed down to disk. If I needed app consistency as well.

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Jirah Cox: helping those those most complicated applications right? Get off site and get protected.

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Jirah Cox: And then the the metro multi-site is such a neat way to phrase this ability now to have a workload that runs with sort of 2 sites, keeping it in full lockstep right full synchronous replication.

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Jirah Cox: and then also still have a 3rd site that catches an asynchronous replica as well. So I can now have, you know, 0 data loss recovery among 2 sites, and still have a whole 3rd site participating in that. That's asynchronous as well, for even like a sort of a near, near, far recovery and availability model for my my critical data.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And and you know, Ben, as as we talk about multi cloud snapshot technology, this, to me, is really interesting, because for the 1st time you're leveraging, not Nutanix necessarily as the destination for that replication. You're actually directing it to S. 3. I mean that that seems like it's gonna be a a significant cost savings and you know, for certain use cases, but not all.

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Philip Sellers: Maybe worth.

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Philip Sellers: you know, stepping back from really aggressive sort of Rpos or rtos.

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Ben Rogers: Well when when he, when he was describing this man healthcare, came to my mind with active active in a tertiary backup, I mean, that's that's screaming healthcare infrastructure right there. So absolutely right again, I just think this goes to our commitment to to our customers to have

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Ben Rogers: world class replication and Dr. Services again. You know I don't want to minimize the Hypervisor with this conversation, but when customers go into cloud they're not looking at the Hypervisor, the hypervisor is just part of the service that's delivered. They're looking at more of things like, how do I replicate my data? How do I protect my data. How do I give my data governance so that it stays in the realms? And these are all the things that we're delivering. Now.

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Ben Rogers: yeah.

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Jirah Cox: And I agree with you, Phil, that like that, you know, I think it speaks to how many customers

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Jirah Cox: want

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Jirah Cox: nowadays to have their 1st 4 I'd be like, how do I use cloud for Dr. For my workloads? It's such a juicy target in their minds of. I get to close this entire whole other data center that has always kind of been like sort of a boat anchor for procurement of like, I get to buy 2 and only use one of them.

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Jirah Cox: Well, now, I get to spend less on that second copy right, because I can rent it in the cloud. Keep the the running cluster. Very tiny. Right? The pilot light nutanix cluster and then let that offload data into other cloud native storage. Right? So it's sort of the more direct and most effective way to use cloud as a Dr. Target cost. Effective technology, effective accomplishes the mission as well. So I think it's really exciting.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And honestly, I mean doing some architecture training that I mentioned earlier.

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Philip Sellers: You know, it's great to say, multi site. You know, Metro. Dr. Here, there's still a lot of planning that goes in on that. But it's really cool technology. You know. I I worked in a a place where we did, Metro clustering. And you know, stretch vlans between our 2 data centers. And

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Philip Sellers: you know it. It is the Nirvana state of disaster avoidance. Right? This.

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Jirah Cox: I'm sure it's super easy to get there, and very easy to maintain.

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Ben Rogers: No.

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Philip Sellers: Hey? I will say the software helps a lot when it comes to that. Easy to maintain thing right.

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Jirah Cox: It's not a part of a solution that we all work together to provide. Right. It's not a 1 click. Turn it on, you know instantly now, your metro, all the things.

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Ben Rogers: We do we do

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Ben Rogers: in Phil. I totally agree with you. It's not the easiest thing in the world, but we do make this process easier for our customers, where they have less gears, they have to turn

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Ben Rogers: before it was networking, you know, storage, compute blah blah blah with with this solution that we're bringing. There's always going to be networking, you know. That's the 1st thing customers have to deal with when they go in the cloud is, how do I get my networking to catch up with what I'm doing on? Prem, but the back end of how you set the volume groups up to be replicated and ensuring and monitoring of that replication reporting, we do make those things easier because we bring that into the platform.

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Philip Sellers: And it's a great point, guys like I that wasn't a knock on software at all. You guys make it easier for sure. But that networking piece.

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Philip Sellers: The plumbing is still pretty hard, and and especially as an infrastructure. Guy, I you know I even sleep in a holiday inn express last night like, I got no claim to networking whatsoever. So

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Philip Sellers: it's it's 1 of those things where, yeah, we we definitely have to have our partners help. And there's a lot of planning that goes into making this magical.

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Philip Sellers: yeah. But as we talk about networking, that's a great segue into Number 4 here network security offering enhanced security connectivity and cyber resilience. Jaira, I'll throw it over to you.

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Jirah Cox: If you hadn't made the segue. I was going to. Yeah, for sure. It was an amazing team. And I was also just making the point of like, you know, as it's a solution that we all drive towards consultatively right, that it's not just not just, you know, one product, right? But the partner. And it matters the integration matters, the operational practices matter. And to both of your point, yeah, we definitely can help make the networking part a little simpler as well by offering our own Sdn stack as well

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Jirah Cox: to be that network stretched layer when your workloads require that right? There's also obviously lots of ways. You can do it from private data center to private data center. Do it in the fabric, do it in your top rack, do it lots of different ways.

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Jirah Cox: You can do it purely in software, and you almost need to when one of those clusters is going to be in the cloud right where there is no top rack that you can go touch.

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Jirah Cox: So now, with some of the maturity brought to flow network the flow networking stack right on both the security and the networking side of things. Some really great stuff to call out is, of course, there's a new dashboard again. It did come out in 6.6. But now everyone gets that by just doing their regular standard. I would almost say boring Tnx updates, you just get new functionality, get new features

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Jirah Cox: on the cluster. You're already running really good stuff that you know the calls out here, protecting your data, safeguarding your network. And of course, helping you as the Admin host, to kind of own and wrangle all of this ensure more operational security more easily.

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Jirah Cox: But then, also, yeah, flow networking security goes next. Gen now

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Jirah Cox: brings the controller for all that into prism central along with basically the entire stack, whole platform, right? More and more management done through prism central. So fewer places to go to do things as part of your day job.

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Jirah Cox: but also really now cool is that flow networking can also now help you do more security, oriented operational activities, right? Like traffic, monitoring traffic, mirroring policy management, scaling to clouds, stretching your networks out there when you need to, and really just helping you stay in a posture to stay on the alert against threats in real time, in your environment.

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Philip Sellers: You know it's interesting here, and

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Philip Sellers: I'm not one to brag but I have to brag on my managed services team. So we. We implemented both flow network security and flow virtual networking in our data centers. And

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Philip Sellers: I guess it's been maybe a month and a half ago.

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Philip Sellers: Our colo provider, had an outage at the facility where we we host in Atlanta. So during that outage we had customers affected, obviously, that we're hosting for?

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Philip Sellers: Well, because of what we've done in the networking stack with flow we were able to fail over and get our customers back online in 7 min. So shout out to my manage services team, also to the development team at Nutanix around that it's a perfect example. And and that's 1 of the things that we always say is a differentiator for us here at integra. We're running the same things. You're running as a customer, and so we can talk about our experiences.

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Philip Sellers: If that's not proof, I don't know what it is. But shout out to my managed services team, because, you know, those calls come at

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Philip Sellers: really bad times in the middle of the night, when you're not, you know.

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Philip Sellers: probably the most awake and.

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Jirah Cox: Yeah.

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Philip Sellers: You're getting out of bed to respond to these things. And these guys did an amazing job and had the customer back online in 7 min. Just an amazing kind of illustration of how good this technology is today.

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Jirah Cox: No, that really is fantastic. Kudos.

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Ben Rogers: You're not even.

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Jirah Cox: Everyone involved.

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Ben Rogers: The money that you saved them for only being down for 7 min.

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Philip Sellers: No, not at all. I I mean, there's implications, financially, operationally. You know, everywhere in the stack there, there's implications here, but you know there was an investment of time to configure this, to set it up, make it interoperable with our physical, networking infrastructure. But you know it also saved us.

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Philip Sellers: you know, to a great degree, during a Dr. Situation, a real world, Dr. Situation. So it's proven technology.

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Philip Sellers: we probably didn't set out to prove it on Saturday morning, a a month and a half ago. But you know I'm glad that it it worked out well for us. And it's a success story today.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Ben Rogers: I think one of the biggest sections with this is is, you know, our existing customers that have come from prison element into

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Ben Rogers: prism central, and have, you know, I don't want to say, gone through some growing pains, but have gone through some growing pains. This really is starting to show the commitment of Nutanix to our, you know, prism Central, and getting more services in there. And you know, trying to get to that. I don't want to say, one pane of glass, but

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Ben Rogers: a centralized environment where you can look at all the micro services in one, in 1 1 application. And so, you know. I'm glad to see that we're we're committed this to Prism Central and getting more services into there, and I'm glad to see all these Sts. Lts are bringing us a little closer to that.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, 100%.

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Philip Sellers: Well, and and you gave us another great segue, Ben, I, I have to say, last up here is streamline management and automation, just one of the other services delivered. And

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Philip Sellers: yeah, we've we've got a number of new things here.

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Philip Sellers: you know. But again, building on what's been released in the incremental things, you know. Fine grain. Our back is a big one that came with 6.8 but let's talk a little bit about, you know. Streamlined management and automation. Jaira, I'll throw it to you.

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Jirah Cox: Sure. That that's definitely part of it. Right? more detailed, more configurable. Our back controls, of course, helps the entire organization. Right operations, team security teams, networking teams.

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Jirah Cox: as as we, you know, help. Our customers have a path to streamline and sort of democratize all operations. We know that not everyone's there yet. Right? So when I need to have just a certain team that can only do certain operations, that kind of a management model and and policy engine helps with all of that.

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Jirah Cox: But also even things like like data centric policies where I can tag a Vm or apply a category to it in the PC parlance. But with that category have that.

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Jirah Cox: Do things like affect my Vm replication status for offsite affect? Who can see it affect my data reduction on it. Do I want to apply compression to it? Do I want to have it be rf, 2 or Rf, 3. From a data, resilience, perspective, all these things that I can now do via policies that in before I had to do sort of as the admin and making and making careful and

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Jirah Cox: purposeful placement decisions right? But now I can really change virtually anything about the environment from one state to another, just by changing my changing my policies that apply to that object. So that allows for a lot of simpler planning.

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Jirah Cox: faster, faster execution, and sort of simplifies the stack right before. Where, if I would have needed multiple, say, like data stores for things like data reduction versus richer coding versus Rf, 2 versus Rf, 3. Now, I can have just one and have policies that apply to the workloads where they need to

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Jirah Cox: for access control. We, of course, are still rolling out v. 4 Apis across the board. This calls out how the ones in this release are released candidate. So they're able to be inspected. And you can start planning on moving operations. Automations. There we go to using those V 4 Api endpoints. That'll be great. And then a long time

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Jirah Cox: asset. It's so great to to have fully solved. Now is that ability for Ngt installs or guest tools? You can now install them really, any which way you want to write ansible terraform.

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Jirah Cox: Sccm. Powershell, any which way you wanted to. You can now spray out the Ngt. Installation itself as opposed to needing us to do it for you. So you had to script us versus. Now we can give you the payload. You install it on your own vms

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Jirah Cox: that allows more customers to use that more places more easily right. So making the guest tools kind of a lighter touch more broadly applicable. Installation

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Jirah Cox: is is fantastic. Right lets our customers solve problems the way that they want to.

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Jirah Cox: And then we also did bring out this new extra small prism central. It's it's travel size for your convenience, right? So when you need one at the edge. It's tinier and smaller. So that when you want this sort of prism, central based management construct, which is kind of, you know, really the direction we're headed across the board. I can now put one of those really anywhere, and it can be a right sized workload for the environment that it wants to run in.

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Philip Sellers: You know that that's an interesting one to talk about, too, because, as we pack more goodness into prism central, you know, it

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Philip Sellers: really hasn't significantly grown in a while. We've

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Philip Sellers: yeah. It's another thing to point out, like the high end, large or extra large.

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Philip Sellers: is still kind of consistently

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Philip Sellers: the same. So

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Philip Sellers: kudos to the team, developing in that same footprint, but adding and incrementally pushing things forward.

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Philip Sellers: You know

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Philip Sellers: we we must be

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Philip Sellers: busting at the seams, I guess, would be the right way to say it in our current sizing for prism central. So but there's so much goodness that is is being built in

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Philip Sellers: you know, Ben, as as you talk to customers and stuff in the field. Let's talk about that robo use case that Jira mentioned, like the extra small prism central, the robo, you know. That's that's

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Philip Sellers: somewhat of a newer

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Philip Sellers: I guess. Subscription style for Nutanix. Are you seeing a lot of interest in it, because I know I am with with customers. I talk to.

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Ben Rogers: On the robo side, not so much on the prism central, I think, where a lot of people are gravitating towards Robo is just the multi micro services that we can run there as far as like, it doesn't have to be just vms or containers or unified storage. You know, it can literally be all 3 or 4 of those services running at the edge. And then AI is becoming a big thing. You know. We're talking to customers that are in kind of a retail market in.

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Ben Rogers: They're looking for having Gpus on the edge to do some AI for

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Ben Rogers: buyer buyer trends, you know. If they see things in the store being able to interact with the buyer. So we see a lot of interest on our robo just being multi serviced and being able to do it in one cluster instead of multiple clusters per service.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And and that echoes some of what I'm hearing with customers, too. They want to do more analysis at the edge

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Philip Sellers: rather than transmitting everything back to a data center or to the cloud provider. And Robo is a compelling offering for a lot of customers with branch locations and retail locations. And so it's really a a good way of repackaging all the great things we've talked about into a very cost effective

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Philip Sellers: package for the edge. So if if you're listening and you're not sure what we're talking about, you can find information online for Nci Edge.

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Philip Sellers: It's kind of a robo based per vm. Packaging for all this in Nutanix. Goodness, we're talking about and

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Philip Sellers: certainly reach out to your Nutanix or Zintegra rep, and and we'll help you get connected with information. If that sounds like something that could help you in your business.

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Ben Rogers: Now, listeners, I'm gonna ask this question from a customer standpoint, because I've

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Ben Rogers: just going through a deal with this and learning about it myself.

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Ben Rogers: If I understand the robo licensing you pretty much buy it per vm.

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Ben Rogers: So you buy it, I think, like, in 25 vm. Packages. But it doesn't have to be per site, so you could buy like a pool of vms and then spread those across. How many ever sites that you would have so like, example, if I've got 3 sites

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Ben Rogers: and they've got 25 vms before those between those 3 sites, I can buy a 25 impact licensing and use it across those 3 sites. It don't have to be a license per site, if I understand the way we've done that correctly, Jaira and Philip, please keep me honest there as I'm I'm regurgitating that back.

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Jirah Cox: There are some parts that I

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Jirah Cox: don't devote a lot of brain cells to memorizing and look up when I need to. You've got more detail at your fingertips there than than I do at mine. So I'm going to defer to you, Ben.

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Ben Rogers: Yeah.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, I I think that there's a lot of flexibility based on what we've worked and and again, with.

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Philip Sellers: the competitor with a V name. Do we want to call it Voldemort? Maybe.

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Philip Sellers: that was a terrible terrible joke. They've eliminated their per vm licensing. So you know it's it's 1 of those things where it's definitely a compelling offering that that we

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Philip Sellers: we're talking about more and more. So.

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Ben Rogers: Yeah, for sure.

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Philip Sellers: roll ups. I think it's time to roll up this.

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Philip Sellers: podcast based on roll ups and 6.10. So I am not hitting on much with my jokes at this point. I'm just getting blank stares back. So I think that's a sign that we probably just need to cut this one off today. Guys, 6 dot 10 is a huge milestone, though, and we're gonna have this version out for a while.

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Philip Sellers: so there, there's a lot of great things to

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Philip Sellers: to make use of.

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Philip Sellers: Is there anything that sticks out for either of you that's been in the last sts releases that 6 dot 10 delivers for the mainstream customer that they should absolutely check out.

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Jirah Cox: Almost hard to avoid it. Live migration improvements, I mean, migration is part of what we do all day, every day. For sure. And then

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Jirah Cox: better, easier, faster, more accessible sort of software to find networking as well. Just so can be such a problem. Solver kind of like your your excellent example. There, Phil.

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Jirah Cox: when you need it, you really really need it.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, absolutely.

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Ben Rogers: I think some of the granularity with our our back is important for security organizations and being able to get people in the system. So now I'm seeing more junior engineers having access to Nutanix where before, because the limit of the Rbac. We couldn't do that. So just now, being able to bring more junior people in because you have more of a stricter. Our back policy that's huge

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Ben Rogers: for security organizations is huge for us, because it brings more people into our ecosystem to learn how to use it. And these junior engineers now become senior engineers one day, and so very grateful to see that coming to it, and I've had some customers thank me for bringing that in.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Philip Sellers: Well, guys, I I definitely appreciate your time talking about Aos 6.1 0. I don't think I actually said the name of the blog post. So blog post is, elevate your it. Infrastructure with long term support. Release. Nutanix aos 6.1 0. This was written by Alan waters. I think he's on the Nutanix tech marketing team. So shout out to Alan and the entire tech marketing team.

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Philip Sellers: We appreciate what you do because it lets us do what we do. So shout out to to you and the team.

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Philip Sellers: On behalf of Jaira and Ben. I want to say thanks for spending a little time with us this afternoon, guys. Thank you for your time

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Philip Sellers: and

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Philip Sellers: for everyone listening. We'll catch you on the next episode.

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Philip Sellers: Hope you have

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Philip Sellers: a great evening.

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Ben Rogers: Have a good one.