Gone are the days when it was thought that customers would flock to the cloud and throw away on-premises data centers forever. But even as hyperconverged infrastructure continues to move enterprises forward with cloud, companies are still keeping their on-prem stack alive and well. And technology companies like VMware Inc. are continuing to face these demands.

“We’re seeing customers deploy on-prem at speed in scale,” said Lee Caswell (pictured), vice president of products, storage and availability at VMware. “We have new data showing that 54 percent of our customers today are running clusters that are greater than 11 nodes. This is getting in the mainstream data center, and that means that … HCI is not a point product play. It’s a stack play. I’m going to go buy into the stack.”

Caswell spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed HCI, security, and VMware’s offerings in these areas. (* Disclosure below.)

A bi-directional world with HCI, hybrid cloud

What is now emerging with HCI and hybrid cloud is a bi-directional world with a distributed environment that provides a customer with needed flexibility, according to Caswell. VMware is meeting these demands with vSAN, HCI with cloud ubiquity and flexibility for the stack.

“We’re giving all sorts of tools,” Caswell described. “The latest four releases of vSAN have been around making sure that customers have all sorts of guard rails, best practices. We’re making sure that when you do that it says you better release at the same time.”

VMware is also making sure that security is front and center through NSX Data Center. “We’re redefining how security is supplied in a hybrid cloud world,” Caswell said. “Those [virtual machines] are not going just across a cluster — they’re going across geographies and into the public cloud. So instead of having a security model … that’s a fortress around each one of those locations, instead what I do is I give you security policies that you can take with you to another location.”

As VMware makes these changes, there are challenges — but the company is committed to the evolution, according to Caswell. “Hyperconvergence is not about us. It’s about our customers,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: VMware Inc. sponsored coverage of VMworld, and some segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE are sponsored. Sponsors have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE