Last week there was a big announcement around the FA

Hi Anders, the general availability of Files means that anyone can get access to it where previously it required an approvals process. But to leave it there would have understated the importance. We have taken a different approach to exposing file services on FlashArray (and this has been true since we began development of file services). File Services access the underlying blocks in the global storage pool the same way that our block storage does (we sometimes call this native or first class citizen). When you compare that to legacy approaches that started their architectural life as blocks systems and added file services on top or file systems and added block systems on top, a unified approach that delivers block and file storage services natively results in less complexity and greater efficiency. So from a technical stand point, we start from a global storage pool where all storage is pooled together. From that pool we can directly provision block or file or both to support consolidated/unified block and file workloads. Everything is managed from the same policy management system requiring fewer management views and driving greater automation and repeatability of management activities. Storage services such as deduplication happens at that pool level giving greater data reduction rates as deduplication is conducted from a larger pool size than competitive systems that dedupe at the share or lun level. The other element of this launch is that we are expanding where file services can help customers consolidate workloads. Support for NFS datastores means that customers who want to consolidate VMs along with block or other file workloads can do so on their FlashArray. Workload consolidation has several benefits including higher utilization rate and potentially lower complexity (if the systems you are consolidating on are less complex) so customers can gain these benefits when consolidating their VM workloads along with other workloads. And finally, our approach of providing VM granular management through a combination of global policies and VMs aligned on a one to one basis with managed directories introduces new levels of precision in VM management that are similar to VVOLs in the block VM datastore world. This is fundamentally different than competitors that do most of the VM management at the datastore level. Hope this helps. Let me know if you'd like to discuss further.