(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, along with the way that Dell has integrated this technology into its PowerEdge server lines. We're in for an interesting conversation today. Today, I'm joined by Dilip Ramachandran, Senior Director of Marketing at AMD, and Juergen Zimmermann. Juergen is Principal SAP Solutions Performance Benchmarking Engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Welcome. >> Thank you David, nice to be here. >> Nice to meet you too, welcome to theCUBE. You will officially be CUBE alumni after this. Dilip, let's start with you. What's this all about? Tell us about AMD's recent launch and the importance of it. >> Thanks, David. I'm excited to actually talk to you today, AMD, at our fourth generation EPYC launch last month in November. And as part of that fourth generation EPYC launch, we announced industry-leading performance based on 96 cores, based on Zen 4 architecture. And new interfaces, PCIe Gen 5, as well as DDR5. Incredible amount of memory bandwidth, memory capacity supported, and a whole lot of other features as well. So we announced this product, we launched it in November last month. And we've been closely working with Dell on a number of benchmarks that we'd love to talk to you more about today. >> So just for some context, when was the last release of this scale? So when was the third generation released? How long ago? >> The third generation EPYC was launched in Q1 of 2021. So it was almost 18 to 24 months ago. And since then we've made a tremendous jump, the fourth generation EPYC, in terms of number of cores. So third generation EPYC supported 64 cores, fourth generation EPYC supports 96 cores. And these are new cores, the Zen 4 cores, the fourth generation of Zen cores. So very high performance, new interfaces, and really world-class performance. >> Excellent. Well, we'll go into greater detail in a moment, but let's go to Juergen. Tell us about the testing that you've been involved with to kind of prove out the benefits of this new AMD architecture. >> Yeah, well, the testing is SAP Standard Performance benchmark, the SAP SD two tier. And this is more or less a industry standard benchmark that is used to size your service for the needs of SAP. Actually, SAP customers always ask the vendors about the SAP benchmark and the SAPS values of their service. >> And I should have asked you before, but give us a little bit of your background working with SAP. Have you been doing this for longer than a week? >> Yeah, yeah, definitely, I do this for about 20 years now. Started with Sun Microsystems, and interestingly in the year 2003, 2004, I started working with AMD service on SAP with Linux, and afterwards parted the SAP application to Solaris AMD, also with AMD. So I have a lot of tradition with SAP and AMD benchmarks, and doing this ever since then. >> So give us some more detail on the results of the recent testing, and if you can, tell us why we should care? >> (laughs) Okay, the recent results actually also surprised myself, they were so good. So I initially installed the benchmark kit, and couldn't believe that the server is just getting, or hitting idle by the numbers I saw. So I cranked up the numbers and reached results that are most likely double the last generation, so Zen 3 generation, and that even passed almost all 8-socket systems out there. So if you want to have the same SAP performance, you can just use 2-socket AMD server instead of any four or 8-socket servers out there. And this is a tremendous saving in energy. >> So you just mentioned savings in terms of power consumption, which is a huge consideration. What are the sort of end user results that this delivers in terms of real world performance? How is a human being at the end of a computer going to notice something like this? >> So actually the results are like that you get almost 150,000 users concurrently accessing the system, and get their results back from SAP within one second response time. >> 150,000 users, you said? >> 150,000 users in parallel. >> (laughs) Okay, that's amazing. And I think it's interesting to note that, and I'll probably say this a a couple of times. You just referenced third generation EPYC architecture, and there are a lot of folks out there who are two generations back. Not everyone is religiously updating every 18 months, and so for a fair number of SAP environments, this is an even more dramatic increase. Is that a fair thing to say? >> Yeah, I just looked up yesterday the numbers from generation one of EPYC, and this was at about 28,000 users. So we are five times the performance now, within four years. Yeah, great. >> So Dilip, let's dig a little more into the EPYC architecture, and I'm specifically also curious about... You mentioned PCIe Gen five, or 5.0 and all of the components that plug into that. You mentioned I think faster DDR. Talk about that. Talk about how all of the components work together to make when Dell comes out with a PowerEdge server, to make it so much more powerful. >> Absolutely. So just to spend a little bit more time on this particular benchmark, the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. It's a widely used benchmark in the industry to basically look at how do I get the most performance out of my system for a variety of SAP business suite applications. And we touched upon it earlier, right, we are able to beat a performance of 4-socket and 8-socket servers out there. And you know, it saves energy, it saves cost, better TCO for the data center. So we're really excited to be able to support more users in a single server and meeting all the other dual socket and 4-socket combinations out there. Now, how did we get there, right, is more the important question. So as part of our fourth generation EPYC, we obviously upgraded our CPU core to provide much better single third performance per core. And at the socket level, you know, when you're packing 96 cores, you need to be able to feed these cores, you know, from a memory standpoint. So what we did was we went to 12 channels of memory, and these are DDR5 memory channels. So obviously you get much better bandwidth, higher speed of the memory with DDR5, you know, starting at 4,800 megahertz. And you're also now able to have more channels to be able to send the data from the memory into the CPU subsystem, which is very critical to keep the CPUs busy and active, and get the performance out. So that's on the memory side. On the data side, you know, we do have PCIe Gen five, and any data oriented applications that take data either from the PCIe drives or the network cards that utilize Gen five that are available in the industry today, you can actually really get data into the system through the PCIe I/O, either again, through the disk, or through the net card as well. So those are other ways to actually also feed the CPU subsystem with data to be processed by the CPU complex. So we are, again, very excited to see all of this coming together, and as they say, proof's in the pudding. You know, Juergen talked about it. How over generation after generation we've increased the performance, and now with our fourth generation EPYC, we are absolutely leading world-class performance on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. >> Dilip, I have another question for you, and this may be, it may be a bit of a PowerEdge and beyond question. What are you seeing, or what are you anticipating in terms of end user perception when they go to buy a new server? Obviously server is a very loose term, and they can be configured in a bunch of different ways. But is there a discussion about ROI and TCO that's particularly critical? Because people are going to ask, "Well, wait a minute. If it's more expensive than the last one that I bought, am I getting enough bang for my buck?" Is that going to be part of the conversation, especially around power and cooling and things like that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, every data center decision maker has to ask the question, "Why should I upgrade? Should I stay with legacy hardware, or should I go into the latest and greatest that AMD offers?" And the advantages that the new generation products bring is much better performance at much better energy consumption levels, as well as much better performance per dollar levels. So when you do the upgrade, you are actually getting, you know, savings in terms of performance per dollar, as well as saving in space because you can consolidate your work into fewer servers 'cause you have more cores. As we talked about, you have eight, you know. Typically you might do it on a four or 8-socket server which is really expensive. You can consolidate down to a 2-socket server which is much cheaper. As also for maintenance costs, it's much lower maintenance costs as well. All of this, performance, power, maintenance costs, all of that translate into better TCO, right. So lower all of these, high performance, lower power, and then lower maintenance costs, translate to much better TCO for the end user. And that's an important equation that all customers pay attention to. and you know, we love to work with them and demonstrate those TCO benefits to them. >> Juergen, talk to us more in general about what Dell does from a PowerEdge perspective to make sure that Dell is delivering the best infrastructure possible for SAP. In general, I mean, I assume that this is a big responsibility of yours, is making sure that the stuff runs properly and if not, fixing it. So tell us about that relationship between Dell and a SAP. >> Yeah, for Dell and SAP actually, we're more or less partners with SAP. We have people sitting in SAP's Linux lab, and working in cooperative with SAP, also with Linux partners like SUSE and Red Hat. And we are in constant exchange about what's new in Linux, what's new on our side. And we're all a big family here. >> So when the new architecture comes out and they send it to Juergen, the boys back at the plant as they say, or the factory to use Formula One terms, are are waiting with baited breath to hear what Juergen says about the results. So just kind of kind of recap again, you know, the specific benchmarks that you were running. Tell us about that again. >> Yeah, the specific benchmark is the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark. And for SAP, this is the benchmark that needs to be tested, and it shows the performance of the whole system. So in contrast to benchmarks that only check if the CPU is running, very good, this test the whole system up from the network stack, from the storage stack, the memory, subsystem, and the OS running on the CPUs. >> Okay, which makes perfect sense, since Dell is delivering an integrated system and not just CPU technology. You know, on that subject, Dilip, do you have any insights into performance numbers that you're hearing about with Gen four EPYC for other database environments? >> Yeah, we have actually worked together with Dell on a variety of benchmarks, both on the latest fourth generation EPYC processors as well as the preceding one, the third generation EPYC processors. And published a bunch of world records on database, particularly I would say TPC-H, TPCx-V, as well as TPCx-HS and TPCx-IoT. So a number of TPC related benchmarks that really showcase performance for database and related applications. And we've collaborated very closely with Dell on these benchmarks and published a number of them already, and you know, a number of them are world records as well. So again, we're very excited to collaborate with Dell on the SAP Sales and Distribution benchmark, as well as other benchmarks that are related to database. >> Well, speaking of other benchmarks, here at theCUBE we're going to be talking to actually quite a few people, looking at this fourth generation EPYC launch from a whole bunch of different angles. You two gentlemen have shed light on some really good pieces of that puzzle. I want to thank you for being on theCUBE today. With that, I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here on theCUBE. Stay tuned for continuing CUBE coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, and Dell PowerEdge strategy to leverage it.

(upbeat music) (logo swooshing) >> Good morning and welcome back to Dallas, ladies and gentlemen, we are here with theCUBE Live from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how are you doing? Exciting, day two, feeling good? >> Very exciting. Ready to start off the day. >> Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about Ethernet as the fabric for HPC, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. You all seem all in on Ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >> Yeah, I mean, when you look at Ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC, InfiniBand's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial in their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500, what they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at Ethernet, you kind of look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes, that's a perfect fit for Ethernet in that space and those types of jobs. >> I love that. Pete, you want to elaborate? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the biggest things you find with Ethernet for HPC is that, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you've had old technologies like, ATM, Sonic, Fifty, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward Ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as InfiniBand, Omni-Path, that are out there. But basically, they're single source at this point. So what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind Ethernet. And you see that also the fact that Ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise, is used in the cloud data centers, that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia into enterprise, into cloud service providers, it's much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >> So what's the state of the art for Ethernet right now? What's the leading edge? what's shipping now and what's in the near future? You're with Broadcom, you guys designed this stuff. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Savannah: Right. >> Yeah, so leading edge right now, got a couple things-- >> Savannah: We love good stage prop here on the theCUBE. >> Yeah, so this is Tomahawk 4. So this is what is in production, it's shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 terabytes per second. >> David: Okay. >> Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, InfinBand, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25.6 T. So state of the art right now is what we introduced, We announced this in August, This is Tomahawk 5, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth, out of any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, actually, winds up being a factor of six efficiency. >> Savannah: Wow. >> 'Cause if you want, I can go into that, but... >> Why not? >> Well, what I want to know, please tell me that in your labs, you have a poster on the wall that says T five, with some like Terminator kind of character. (all laughs) 'Cause that would be cool. If it's not true, just don't say anything. I'll just... >> Pete: This can actually shift into a terminator. >> Well, so this is from a switching perspective. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what's the latest in terms of, well, the nicks that are going in there, what speed are we talking about today? >> So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. >> David: Okay. >> Moving to a hundred gig PAM-4. >> David: Okay. >> And we do see a lot of nicks in the 200 gig Ethernet port speed. So that would be four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon, 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end node tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig PAM-4. >> Wow. >> Yeah, that's crazy. >> Yeah, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I want to circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen, where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armando, do you want to go? >> Yeah, well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling you it's 50/50 now. So Ethernet is at the level of 50%, InfinBand's at 50%, right? >> Savannah: Interesting. >> Yeah, and so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, hey, we want to see flexibility and choice and, hey, let's look at Ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we their have switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially MPI. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, hey, I've been InfiniBand but now I want to go Ethernet, there's going to be some learning curves there. And so what we want to do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running and they can actually get some value out the cluster. >> Yeah, Pete, talk about that partnership. what does that look like? I mean, are you working with Dell before the T six comes out? Or you just say what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >> No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. Dell's been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group, within Broadcom, we've then gotten very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, Dell can take it and deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again, in both the hardware and the software. >> So I'm fascinated by... I always like to know like what, yeah, exactly. Look, you start talking about the largest supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be two million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores. Exoflap of performance. What are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the increments in terms of how many... And I know it's a depends answer, but how many nodes can you support in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? Or what does that increment of scale look like today? >> Yeah, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. Where we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig Ethernet ports. >> David: Okay. >> So that would be 128, 400 gig E ports connected to one chip. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the nicks, you can have double that. So in a single hop, you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >> Okay, so this T five, that thing right there, (all laughing) inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what's the form factor look like for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have.. What does that look like? >> It tends to be pizza boxes these days. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towardS pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plug into or interfaced to. These days what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the line card. >> David: Okay. >> So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a 2RU, with 64 OSFP ports. And often each of those OSFP, which is an 800 gig E or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig ports. >> So yeah, in 2RU, and this is all air cooled, in 2RU, you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics and they'll actually deploy 4RU, just so that way they have the phase-space density. So they can plug in 128, say QSFP 112. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you want to have DAK connectivity combined with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >> And Armando, Ethernet isn't necessarily Ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. >> Right. >> I think I have a projector at home that's actually using Ethernet physical connections. But, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center Ethernet, or is this RDMA over converged Ethernet? What Are we talking about? >> Yeah, so RDMA, right? So when you look at running, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on Ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on Ethernet. If you look at NPIs officially, built to, hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand but now what you see with Broadcom, with the great work they're doing, now we can make that work on Ethernet and get same performance, so that's huge for customers. >> Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of Ethernet in HPC in terms of AI and ML, where do you think we're going to be next year or 10 years from now? >> You want to go first or you want me to go first? >> I can start, yeah. >> Savannah: Pete feels ready. >> So I mean, what I see, I mean, Ethernet, what we've seen is that as far as on, starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. >> That's impressive. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Nicely done, casual, humble brag there. That was great, I love that. I'm here for you. >> I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of Ethernet, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any of the networking technology. >> David: More who? (all laughing) >> So I see that, that trajectory is going to continue as far as the switches doubling in bandwidth, I think that they're evolving protocols, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on RDMA, for the supercomputing, the AI/ML workloads. But we do see that as you have a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's going to be doubling a bandwidth over time, evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably going to evolve over time depending on the AI/ML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-packed optics. So right now, this chip is, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. >> How many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that-- >> 9,352. >> I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >> Yeah, so right now, all the SERDES, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we actually we have a version of Tomahawk 4 at 25.6 T that has co-packed optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk 5. >> Nice. >> Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. >> Wow. Cool. >> So I see there's the bandwidth, there's radix's increasing, protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >> Okay, You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only going to chase this one, okay? >> Peter: All right. >> So I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. >> Yeah. >> So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that many optical connections? What's the mapping there? What does that look like? >> So what we've announced for Tomahawk 5 is it would have FR4 optics coming out. So you'd actually have 512 fiber pairs coming out. So basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because-- >> It's miraculous, essentially. >> Savannah: I know. >> Yeah. So a lot of people are going to be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus Ethernet, I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running Ethernet moving forward as HPC which sort of just trails slightly behind super computing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI/ML. What are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running Ethernet in that environment? Is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What are the advantages? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that Ethernet has again, is that the data centers, the networks within enterprises, within clouds right now are run on Ethernet. So now, if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology. So I think one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to Ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use Ethernet, it's going to give you the same performance and actually, in some cases, we've seen better performance than we've seen with Omni-Path, better than in InfiniBand. >> That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I want to make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of Ethernet here in HPC? >> Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at, train a model, okay? So when you go and train a model in AI, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially, you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you want to utilize. But if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the CPU. And essentially, if you're going to do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well, guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal, the bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage, maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed, you want faster, faster, faster. >> It's all about making it faster and easier-- for the users. >> Armando: It is. >> I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas, stakes, there's a lot going on with that. >> Making me hungry. >> I know, exactly. I'm sitting out here thinking, man, I did not have big enough breakfast. How did you come up with the name Tomahawk? >> So Tomahawk, I think it just came from a list. So we have a tried end product line. >> Savannah: Ah, yes. >> Which is a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kind of like the bigger and batter missile, so. >> Savannah: Love this. Yeah, I mean-- >> So do you like your engineers? You get to name it. >> Had to ask. >> It's collaborative. >> Okay. >> We want to make sure everyone's in sync with it. >> So just it's not the Aquaman tried. >> Right. >> It's the steak Tomahawk. I think we're good now. >> Now that we've cleared that-- >> Now we've cleared that up. >> Armando, Pete, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of Ethernet and HCP. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to theCUBE live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us. (soft music)

>>You can put this in a conference. >>Good morning and welcome back to Dallas. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here with the cube Live from, from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how you doing? Exciting. Day two. Feeling good. >>Very exciting. Ready to start off the >>Day. Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >>Having us, >>For having us. I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about ethernet as the fabric for hpc, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. Y'all seem all in on ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >>Yeah. I mean, when you look at ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC and you know, infinite band's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial and their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500. What they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at ethernet, you kinda look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes. That's a perfect fit for ethernet and that space and, and those types of jobs. >>I love that. Pete, you wanna elaborate? Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, one of the biggest things you find with internet for HPC is that, you know, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you know, you've had old technologies like, you know, atm, Sonic, fitty, you know, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as, you know, InfiniBand, omnipath that are out there. Yeah. But basically there's single source at this point. So, you know, what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind ethernet. And you see that also, the fact that ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise is using the cloud data centers that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia, you know, into, you know, into enterprise, into cloud service providers is much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >>So, so what's this, what is, what's the state of the art for ethernet right now? What, you know, what's, what's the leading edge, what's shipping now and what and what's in the near future? You, you were with Broadcom, you guys design this stuff. >>Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. So leading edge right now, I got a couple, you know, Wes stage >>Trough here on the cube. Yeah. >>So this is Tomahawk four. So this is what is in production is shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 tets per second. Okay. Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, infin band, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25 point sixt. So state of the art right now is what we introduced. We announced this in August. This is Tomahawk five. So this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth have, you know, any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, it's actually winds up being a factor of six efficiency. Wow. Cause if you want, I can go into that, but why >>Not? Well, I, what I wanna know, please tell me that in your labs you have a poster on the wall that says T five with, with some like Terminator kind of character. Cause that would be cool if it's not true. Don't just don't say anything. I just want, I can actually shift visual >>It into a terminator. So. >>Well, but so what, what are the, what are the, so this is, this is from a switching perspective. Yeah. When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what, what's, what's the latest in terms of, well, the kns that are, that are going in there, what's, what speed are we talking about today? >>So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. Okay. Moving to a hundred gig pan four. Okay. And we do see a lot of Knicks in the 200 gig ethernet port speed. So that would be, you know, four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon. 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end nodes tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig pan four. Wow. >>Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, >>That is, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I wanna circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen. Where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armand, do you wanna go? >>Yeah, yeah. Well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling it's 50 50 now. So ethernet is at the level of 50%. InfiniBand is at 50%. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, Hey, we want to see, you know, flexibility and choice and hey, let's look at ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we have our switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially mpi. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, Hey, I've been in fbe, but now I want to go ethernet, you know, there's gonna be some learning curves there. And so what we wanna do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running, and they can actually get some value out of the cluster. >>Yeah. Peter, what, talk about that partnership. What, what, what does that look like? Is it, is it, I mean, are you, you working with Dell before the, you know, before the T six comes out? Or you just say, you know, what would be cool, what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >>No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. You know, Dell has been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, you know, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group within Broadcom, we've then gotten, you know, very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, you know, Dell can take it and, you know, deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again in both the hardware and the software. >>So, so I, I'm, I'm just, I'm fascinated by, I I, I always like to know kind like what Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Look, you, you start talking about the largest super supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be 2 million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores, yeah. Ex alop of, of, of, of performance. What are the, what are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the, what are the increments in terms of how many, and I know it, I know it's a depends answer, but, but, but how many nodes can you support in a, in a, in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? What does that increment of scale look like today? >>Yeah, so I think, so this is 51.2 terras per second. What we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig ethernet ports. Okay. So that would be 128, you know, 400 giggi ports connected to, to one chip. Okay. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the Nicks, you can have double that. Okay. So, you know, in a single hop you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >>So, okay, so this T five, that thing right there inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what is, what does that, what's the form factor look like for that, for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have, what does that look >>Like? It tends to be pizza boxes these days. Okay. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towards pizza, pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, you know, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plugged into or interface to these days, what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box, and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the, the line card. >>Okay. >>So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a two R U with 64 OSF P ports. And often each of those OSF p, which is an 800 gig e or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig quarts. Okay. So yeah, in two r u you've got, and this is all air cooled, you know, in two re you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics, and they'll actually deploy a four U just so that way they have the face place density, so they can plug in 128, say qsf P one 12. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you wanna have DAK connectivity combined with, with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >>And, and Armando ethernet isn't, ethernet isn't necessarily ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. Right. I think I have a projector at home that's actually using ethernet physical connections. But what, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center ethernet, or, or is this, you know, RDMA over converged ethernet? What, what are >>We talking about? Yeah, so our rdma, right? So when you look at, you know, running, you know, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on ethernet, if you look at NPI is officially, you know, built to, Hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand, but now what you see with Broadcom and the great work they're doing now, we can make that work on ethernet and get, you know, it's same performance. So that's huge for customers. >>Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a, a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of ethernet in hpc in terms of AI and ml. Where, where do you think we're gonna be next year or 10 years from now? >>You wanna go first or you want me to go first? I can start. >>Yeah. Pete feels ready. >>So I mean, what I see, I mean, ethernet, I mean, is what we've seen is that as far as on the starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. That's >>Impressive. >>Yeah. So nicely >>Done, casual, humble brag there. That was great. That was great. I love that. >>I'm here for you. I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of, of Ethan is like, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory, the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any other networking technology >>More who, >>So, you know, I see that, you know, that trajectory is gonna continue as far as the switches, you know, doubling in bandwidth. I think that, you know, they're evolving protocols. You know, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on rdma, you know, for the supercomputing, the a AIML workloads. But we do see that, you know, as you have, you know, a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the, the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's gonna be doubling a bandwidth over time evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably gonna evolve over time depending on the a AIML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-pack optics. So, you know, right now this chip is all, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. How >>Many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that >>352. >>I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >>Yeah. So we get, so right now, you know, all the thirties, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we have this, actually, we have a version of Hawk four at 25 point sixt that has co-pack optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk five Nice. Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. Wow. Cool. So I see, you know, there's, you know, the bandwidth, there's radis increasing protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's, you know, a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So, you know, a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >>Okay. You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only gonna chase this one. Okay. >>All right. >>So I think of, I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. Yeah. So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that in many optical connections? What's, what's, what's the mapping there? What does that, what does that look like? >>So what we've announced for TAMA five is it would have fr four optics coming out. So you'd actually have, you know, 512 fiber pairs coming out. So you'd have, you know, basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the, the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because >>It's, it's miraculous, essentially. It's, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, a lot of people are gonna be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus versus ethernet. I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running ethernet moving forward as, as hpc, you know, which is sort of just trails slightly behind supercomputing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI ml. What, what are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running ethernet in that environment? Is it, is it connecting, is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What, or what, what are the advantages? >>Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that ethernet has again, is that, you know, the data centers, you know, the networks within enterprises within, you know, clouds right now are run on ethernet. So now if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is, you know, the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology, you know, so I think what, you know, one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your, your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the, the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use ethernet, it's gonna give you the same performance. And actually in some cases we seen better performance than we've seen with omnipath than, you know, better than in InfiniBand. >>That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I wanna make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of ethernet here in hpc? >>Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at train a model, okay, so when you go and train a model in ai, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you wanna utilize, but if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the cpu. And essentially, if you're gonna do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal. The bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage. Maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed you want faster, faster, faster. >>It's all about making it faster and easier. It is for, for the users. I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas Stakes, there's a lot going on with with that making >>Me hungry. >>I know exactly. I'm sitting up here thinking, man, I did not have a big enough breakfast. How do you come up with the name Tomahawk? >>So Tomahawk, I think you just came, came from a list. So we had, we have a tri end product line. Ah, a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kinda like, you know, the bigger and batter missile, so, oh, okay. >>Love this. Yeah, I, well, I >>Mean, so you let your engineers, you get to name it >>Had to ask. It's >>Collaborative. Oh good. I wanna make sure everyone's in sync with it. >>So just so we, it's not the Aquaman tried. Right, >>Right. >>The steak Tomahawk. I >>Think we're, we're good now. Now that we've cleared that up. Now we've cleared >>That up. >>Armando P, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of ethernet N hpc. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to the Cube Live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and Supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. This is Dave Vellante. We're diving into the deep end with AMD and Oracle on the topic of mySQL HeatWave performance. And we want to explore the important issues around machine learning. As applications become more data intensive and machine intelligence continues to evolve, workloads increasingly are seeing a major shift where data and AI are being infused into applications. And having a database that simplifies the convergence of transaction and analytics data without the need to context, switch and move data out of and into different data stores. And eliminating the need to perform extensive ETL operations is becoming an industry trend that customers are demanding. At the same time, workloads are becoming more automated and intelligent. And to explore these issues further, we're happy to have back in theCUBE Nipun Agarwal, who's the Senior Vice President of mySQL HeatWave and Kumaran Siva, who's the Corporate Vice President Strategic Business Development at AMD. Gents, hello again. Welcome back. >> Hello. Hi Dave. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Okay. Nipun, obviously machine learning has become a must have for analytics offerings. It's integrated into mySQL HeatWave. Why did you take this approach and not the specialized database approach as many competitors do right tool for the right job? >> Right? So, there are a lot of customers of mySQL who have the need to run machine learning on the data which is store in mySQL database. So in the past, customers would need to extract the data out of mySQL and they would take it to a specialized service for running machine learning. Now, the reason we decided to incorporate machine learning inside the database, there are multiple reasons. One, customers don't need to move the data. And if they don't need to move the data, it is more secure because it's protected by the same access controlled mechanisms as rest of the data There is no need for customers to manage multiple services. But in addition to that, when we run the machine learning inside the database customers are able to leverage the same service the same hardware, which has been provisioned for OTP analytics and use machine learning capabilities at no additional charge. So from a customer's perspective, they get the benefits that it is a single database. They don't need to manage multiple services. And it is offered at no additional charge. And then as another aspect, which is kind of hard to learn which is based on the IP, the work we have done it is also significantly faster than what customers would get by having a separate service. >> Just to follow up on that. How are you seeing customers use HeatWaves machine learning capabilities today? How is that evolving? >> Right. So one of the things which, you know customers very often want to do is to train their models based on the data. Now, one of the things is that data in a database or in a transaction database changes quite rapidly. So we have introduced support for auto machine learning as a part of HeatWave ML. And what it does is that it fully automates the process of training. And this is something which is very important to database users, very important to mySQL users that they don't really want to hire or data scientists or specialists for doing training. So that's the first part that training in HeatWave ML is fully automated. Doesn't require the user to provide any like specific parameters, just the source data and the task which they want to train. The second aspect is the training is really fast. So the training is really fast. The benefit is that customers can retrain quite often. They can make sure that the model is up to date with any changes which have been made to their transaction database. And as a result of the models being up to date, the accuracy of the prediction is high. Right? So that's the first aspect, which is training. The second aspect is inference, which customers run once they have the models trained. And the third thing, which is perhaps been the most sought after request from the mySQL customers is the ability to provide explanations. So, HeatWave ML provides explanations for any model which has been generated or trained by HeatWave ML. So these are the three capabilities- training, inference and explanations. And this whole process is completely automated, doesn't require a specialist or a data scientist. >> Yeah, that's nice. I mean, training obviously very popular today. I've said inference I think is going to explode in the coming decade. And then of course, AI explainable AI is a very important issue. Kumaran, what are the relevant capabilities of the AMD chips that are used in OCI to support HeatWave ML? Are they different from say the specs for HeatWave in general? >> So, actually they aren't. And this is one of the key features of this architecture or this implementation that is really exciting. Um, there with HeatWave ML, you're using the same CPU. And by the way, it's not a GPU, it's a CPU for both for all three of the functions that Nipun just talked about- inference, training and explanation all done on CPU. You know, bigger picture with the capabilities we bring here we're really providing a balance, you know between the CPU cores, memory and the networking. And what that allows you to do here is be able to feed the CPU cores appropriately. And within the cores, we have these AVX instruc... extensions in with the Zen 2 and Zen 3 cores. We had AVX 2, and then with the Zen 4 core coming out we're going to have AVX 512. But we were able to with that balance of being able to bring in the data and utilize the high memory bandwidth and then use the computation to its maximum we're able to provide, you know, build pride enough AI processing that we are able to get the job done. And then we're built to build a fit into that larger pipeline that that we build out here with the HeatWave. >> Got it. Nipun you know, you and I every time we have a conversation we've got to talk benchmarks. So you've done machine learning benchmarks with HeatWave. You might even be the first in the industry to publish you know, transparent, open ML benchmarks on GitHub. I mean, I, I wouldn't know for sure but I've not seen that as common. Can you describe the benchmarks and the data sets that you used here? >> Sure. So what we did was we took a bunch of open data sets for two categories of tasks- classification and regression. So we took about a dozen data sets for classification and about six for regression. So to give an example, the kind of data sets we used for classifications like the airlines data set, hex sensors bank, right? So these are open data sets. And what we did was for on these data sets we did a comparison of what would it take to train using HeatWave ML? And then the other service we compared with is that RedShift ML. So, there were two observations. One is that with HeatWave ML, the user does not need to provide any tuning parameters, right? The HeatWave ML using RML fully generates a train model, figures out what are the right algorithms? What are the right features? What are the right hyper parameters and sets, right? So no need for any manual intervention not so the case with Redshift ML. The second thing is the performance, right? So the performance of HeatWave ML aggregate on these 12 data sets for classification and the six data sets on regression. On an average, it is 25 times faster than Redshift ML. And note that Redshift ML in turn involves SageMaker, right? So on an average, HeatWave ML provides 25 times better performance for training. And the other point to note is that there is no need for any human intervention. That's fully automated. But in the case of Redshift ML, many of these data sets did not even complete in the set duration. If you look at price performance, one of the things again I want to highlight is because of the fact that AMD does pretty well in all kinds of workloads. We are able to use the same cluster users and use the same cluster for analytics, for OTP or for machine learning. So there is no additional cost for customers to run HeatWave ML if they have provision HeatWave. But assuming a user is provisioning a HeatWave cluster only to run HeatWave ML, right? That's the case, even in that case the price performance advantage of HeatWave ML over Redshift ML is 97 times, right? So 25 times faster at 1% of the cost compared to Redshift ML And all these scripts and all this information is available on GitHub for customers to try to modify and like, see, like what are the advantages they would get on their workloads? >> Every time I hear these numbers, I shake my head. I mean, they're just so overwhelming. Um, and so we'll see how the competition responds when, and if they respond. So, but thank you for sharing those results. Kumaran, can you elaborate on how the specs that you talked about earlier contribute to HeatWave ML's you know, benchmark results. I'm particularly interested in scalability, you know Typically things degrade as you push the system harder. What are you seeing? >> No, I think, I think it's good. Look, yeah. That's by those numbers, just blow me, blow my head too. That's crazy good performance. So look from, from an AMD perspective, we have really built an architecture. Like if you think about the chiplet architecture to begin with, it is fundamentally, you know, it's kind of scaling by design, right? And, and one of the things that we've done here is been able to work with, with the HeatWave team and heat well ML team, and then been able to, to within within the CPU package itself, be able to scale up to take very efficient use of all of the course. And then of course, work with them on how you go between nodes. So you can have these very large systems that can run ML very, very efficiently. So it's really, you know, building on the building blocks of the chiplet architecture and how scaling happens there. >> Yeah. So it's you're saying it's near linear scaling or essentially. >> So, let Nipun comment on that. >> Yeah. >> Is it... So, how about as cluster sizes grow, Nipun? >> Right. >> What happens there? >> So one of the design points for HeatWave is scale out architecture, right? So as you said, that as we add more data set or increase the size of the data, or we add the number of nodes to the cluster, we want the performance to scale. So we show that we have near linear scale factor, or nearly near scale scalability for SQL workloads in the case of HeatWave ML, as well. As users add more nodes to the cluster so the size of the cluster the performance of HeatWave ML improves. So I was giving you this example that HeatWave ML is 25 times faster compared to Redshift ML. Well, that was on a cluster size of two. If you increase the cluster size of HeatWave ML to a larger number. But I think the number is 16. The performance advantage over Redshift ML increases from 25 times faster to 45 times faster. So what that means is that on a cluster size of 16 nodes HeatWave ML is 45 times faster for training these again, dozen data sets. So this shows that HeatWave ML skills better than the computation. >> So you're saying adding nodes offsets any management complexity that you would think of as getting in the way. Is that right? >> Right. So one is the management complexity and which is why by features like last customers can scale up or scale down, you know, very easily. The second aspect is, okay What gives us this advantage, right, of scalability? Or how are we able to scale? Now, the techniques which we use for HeatWave ML scalability are a bit different from what we use for SQL processing. So in the case of HeatWave ML, they really like, you know, three, two trade offs which we have to be careful about. One is the accuracy. Because we want to provide better performance for machine learning without compromising on the accuracy. So accuracy would require like more synchronization if you have multiple threads. But if you have too much of synchronization that can slow down the degree of patterns that we get. Right? So we have to strike a fine balance. So what we do is that in HeatWave ML, there are different phases of training, like algorithm selection, feature selection, hyper probability training. Each of these phases is analyzed. And for instance, one of the ways techniques we use is that if you're trying to figure out what's the optimal hyper parameter to be used? We start up with the search space. And then each of the VMs gets a part of the search space. And then we synchronize only when needed, right? So these are some of the techniques which we have developed over the years. And there are actually paper's filed, research publications filed on this. And this is what we do to achieve good scalability. And what that results to the customer is that if they have some amount of training time and they want to make it better they can just provision a larger cluster and they will get better performance. >> Got it. Thank you. Kumaran, when I think of machine learning, machine intelligence, AI, I think GPU but you're not using GPU. So how are you able to get this type of performance or price performance without using GPU's? >> Yeah, definitely. So yeah, that's a good point. And you think about what is going on here and you consider the whole pipeline that Nipun has just described in terms of how you get you know, your training, your algorithms And using the mySQL pieces of it to get to the point where the AI can be effective. In that process what happens is you have to have a lot of memory to transactions. A lot of memory bandwidth comes into play. And then bringing all that data together, feeding the actual complex that does the AI calculations that in itself could be the bottleneck, right? And you can have multiple bottlenecks along the way. And I think what you see in the AMD architecture for epic for this use case is the balance. And the fact that you are able to do the pre-processing, the AI, and then the post-processing all kind of seamlessly together, that has a huge value. And that goes back to what Nipun was saying about using the same infrastructure, gets you the better TCO but it also gets you gets you better performance. And that's because of the fact that you're bringing the data to the computation. So the computation in this case is not strictly the bottleneck. It's really about how you pull together what you need and to do the AI computation. And that is, that's probably a more, you know, it's a common case. And so, you know, you're going to start I think the least start to see this especially for inference applications. But in this case we're doing both inference explanation and training. All using the the CPU in the same OCI infrastructure. >> Interesting. Now Nipun, is the secret sauce for HeatWave ML performance different than what we've discussed before you and I with with HeatWave generally? Is there some, you know, additive engine additive that you're putting in? >> Right? Yes. The secret sauce is indeed different, right? Just the way I was saying that for SQL processing. The reason we get very good performance and price performance is because we have come up with new algorithms which help the SQL process can scale out. Similarly for HeatWave ML, we have come up with new IP, new like algorithms. One example is that we use meta-learn proxy models, right? That's the technique we use for automating the training process, right? So think of this meta-learn proxy models to be like, you know using machine learning for machine learning training. And this is an IP which we developed. And again, we have published the results and the techniques. But having such kind of like techniques is what gives us a better performance. Similarly, another thing which we use is adaptive sampling that you can have a large data set. But we intelligently sample to figure out that how can we train on a small subset without compromising on the accuracy? So, yes, there are many techniques that you have developed specifically for machine learning which is what gives us the better performance, better price performance, and also better scalability. >> What about mySQL autopilot? Is there anything that differs from HeatWave ML that is relevant? >> Okay. Interesting you should ask. So mySQL Autopilot is think of it to be an application using machine learning. So mySQL Autopilot uses machine learning to automate various aspects of the database service. So for instance, if you want to figure out that what's the right partitioning scheme to partition the data in memory? We use machine learning techniques to figure out that what's the right, the best column based on the user's workload to partition the data in memory Or given a workload, if you want to figure out what is the right cluster size to provision? That's something we use mySQL autopilot for. And I want to highlight that we don't aware of any other database service which provides this level of machine learning based automation which customers get with mySQL Autopilot. >> Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Last question for both of you. What are you guys working on next? What can customers expect from this collaboration specifically in this space? Maybe Nipun, you can start and then Kamaran can bring us home. >> Sure. So there are two things we are working on. One is based on the feedback we have gotten from customers, we are going to keep making the machine learning capabilities richer in HeatWave ML. That's one dimension. And the second thing is which Kamaran was alluding to earlier, We are looking at the next generation of like processes coming from AMD. And we will be seeing as to how we can more benefit from these processes whether it's the size of the L3 cache, the memory bandwidth, the network bandwidth, and such or the newer effects. And make sure that we leverage the all the greatness which the new generation of processes will offer. >> It's like an engineering playground. Kumaran, let's give you the final word. >> No, that's great. Now look with the Zen 4 CPU cores, we're also bringing in AVX 512 instruction capability. Now our implementation is a little different. It was in, in Rome and Milan, too where we use a double pump implementation. What that means is, you know, we take two cycles to do these instructions. But the key thing there is we don't lower our speed of the CPU. So there's no noisy neighbor effects. And it's something that OCI and the HeatWave has taken full advantage of. And so like, as we go out in time and we see the Zen 4 core, we can... we see up to 96 CPUs that that's going to work really well. So we're collaborating closely with, with OCI and with the HeatWave team here to make sure that we can take advantage of that. And we're also going to upgrade the memory subsystem to get to 12 channels of DDR 5. So it should be, you know there should be a fairly significant boost in absolute performance. But more important or just as importantly in TCO value for the customers, the end customers who are going to adopt this great service. >> I love their relentless innovation guys. Thanks so much for your time. We're going to have to leave it there. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, David. >> Thank you, David. >> Okay. Thank you for watching this special presentation on theCUBE. Your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> For those of you who've been following the cloud database space, you know that MySQL HeatWave has been on a technology tear over the last 24 months with Oracle claiming record breaking benchmarks relative to other database platforms. So far, those benchmarks remain industry leading as competitors have chosen not to respond, perhaps because they don't feel the need to, or maybe they don't feel that doing so would serve their interest. Regardless, the HeatWave team at Oracle has been very aggressive about its performance claims, making lots of noise, challenging the competition to respond, publishing their scripts to GitHub. But so far, there are no takers, but customers seem to be picking up on these moves by Oracle and it's likely the performance numbers resonate with them. Now, the other area we want to explore, which we haven't thus far, is the engine behind HeatWave and that is AMD. AMD's epic processors have been the powerhouse on OCI, running MySQL HeatWave since day one. And today we're going to explore how these two technology companies are working together to deliver these performance gains and some compelling TCO metrics. In fact, a recent Wikibon analysis from senior analyst Marc Staimer made some TCO comparisons in OLAP workloads relative to AWS, Snowflake, GCP, and Azure databases, you can find that research on wikibon.com. And with that, let me introduce today's guest, Nipun Agarwal senior vice president of MySQL HeatWave and Kumaran Siva, who's the corporate vice president for strategic business development at AMD. Welcome to theCUBE gentlemen. >> Welcome. Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Hey Nipun, you and I have talked a lot about this. You've been on theCUBE a number of times talking about MySQL HeatWave. But for viewers who may not have seen those episodes maybe you could give us an overview of HeatWave and how it's different from competitive cloud database offerings. >> Sure. So MySQL HeatWave is a fully managed MySQL database service offering from Oracle. It's a single database, which can be used to run transactional processing, analytics and machine learning workloads. So, in the past, MySQL has been designed and optimized for transaction processing. So customers of MySQL when they had to run, analytics machine learning, would need to extract the data out of MySQL, into some other database or service, to run analytics or machine learning. MySQL HeatWave offers a single database for running all kinds of workloads so customers don't need to extract data into some of the database. In addition to having a single database, MySQL HeatWave is also very performant compared to one up databases and also it is very price competitive. So the advantages are; single database, very performant, and very good price performance. >> Yes. And you've published some pretty impressive price performance numbers against competitors. Maybe you could describe those benchmarks and highlight some of the results, please. >> Sure. So one thing to notice that the performance of any database is going to like vary, the performance advantage is going to vary based on, the size of the data and the specific workloads, so the mileage varies, that's the first thing to know. So what we have done is, we have published multiple benchmarks. So we have benchmarks on PPCH or PPCDS and we have benchmarks on different data sizes because based on the customer's workload, the mileage is going to vary, so we want to give customers a broad range of comparisons so that they can decide for themselves. So in a specific case, where we are running on a 30 terabyte PPCH workload, HeatWave is about 18 times better price performance compared to Redshift. 18 times better compared to Redshift, about 33 times better price performance, compared to Snowflake, and 42 times better price performance compared to Google BigQuery. So, this is on 30 Terabyte PPCH. Now, if the data size is different, or the workload is different, the characteristics may vary slightly but this is just to give a flavor of the kind of performance advantage MySQL HeatWave offers. >> And then my last question before we bring in Kumaran. We've talked about the secret sauce being the tight integration between hardware and software, but would you add anything to that? What is that secret sauce in HeatWave that enables you to achieve these performance results and what does it mean for customers? >> So there are three parts to this. One is HeatWave has been designed with a scale out architecture in mind. So we have invented and implemented new algorithms for skill out query processing for analytics. The second aspect is that HeatWave has been really optimized for cloud, commodity cloud, and that's where AMD comes in. So for instance, many of the partitioning schemes we have for processing HeatWave, we optimize them for the L3 cache of the AMD processor. The thing which is very important to our customers is not just the sheer performance but the price performance, and that's where we have had a very good partnership with AMD because not only does AMD help us provide very good performance, but the price performance, right? And that all these numbers which I was showing, big part of it is because we are running on AMD which provides very good price performance. So that's the second aspect. And the third aspect is, MySQL autopilot, which provides machine learning based automation. So it's really these three things, a combination of new algorithms, design for scale out query processing, optimized for commodity cloud hardware, specifically AMD processors, and third, MySQL auto pilot which gives us this performance advantage. >> Great, thank you. So that's a good segue for AMD and Kumaran. So Kumaran, what is AMD bringing to the table? What are the, like, for instance, relevance specs of the chips that are used in Oracle cloud infrastructure and what makes them unique? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. That's a good question. So, OCI is a great customer of ours. They use what we call the top of stack devices meaning that they have the highest core count and they also are very, very fast cores. So these are currently Zen 3 cores. I think the HeatWave product is right now deployed on Zen 2 but will shortly be also on the Zen 3 core as well. But we provide in the case of OCI 64 cores. So that's the largest devices that we build. What actually happens is, because these large number of CPUs in a single package and therefore increasing the density of the node, you end up with this fantastic TCO equation and the cost per performance, the cost per for deployed services like HeatWave actually ends up being extraordinarily competitive and that's a big part of the contribution that we're bringing in here. >> So Zen 3 is the AMD micro architecture which you introduced, I think in 2017, and it's the basis for EPIC, which is sort of the enterprise grade that you really attacked the enterprise with. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit, double click on how your chips contribute specifically to HeatWave's, price performance results. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in the case of HeatWave, so as Nipun alluded to, we have very large L3 caches, right? So in our very, very top end parts just like the Milan X devices, we can go all the way up to like 768 megabytes of L3 cache. And that gives you just enormous performance and performance gains. And that's part of what we're seeing with HeatWave today and that not that they're currently on the second generation ROM based product, 'cause it's a 7,002 based product line running with the 64 cores. But as time goes on, they'll be adopting the next generation Milan as well. And the other part of it too is, as our chip led architecture has evolved, we know, so from the first generation Naples way back in 2017, we went from having multiple memory domains and a sort of NUMA architecture at the time, today we've really optimized that architecture. We use a common I/O Die that has all of the memory channels attached to it. And what that means is that, these scale out applications like HeatWave, are able to really scale very efficiently as they go from a small domain of CPUs to, for example the entire chip, all 64 cores that scaling, is been a key focus for AMD and being able to design and build architectures that can take advantage of that and then have applications like HeatWave that scale so well on it, has been, a key aim of ours. >> And Gen 3 moving up the Italian countryside. Nipun, you've taken the somewhat unusual step of posting the benchmark parameters, making them public on GitHub. Now, HeatWave is relatively new. So people felt that when Oracle gained ownership of MySQL it would let it wilt on the vine in favor of Oracle database, so you lost some ground and now, you're getting very aggressive with HeatWave. What's the reason for publishing those benchmark parameters on GitHub? >> So, the main reason for us to publish price performance numbers for HeatWave is to communicate to our customers a sense of what are the benefits they're going to get when they use HeatWave. But we want to be very transparent because as I said the performance advantages for the customers may vary, based on the data size, based on the specific workloads. So one of the reasons for us to publish, all these scripts on GitHub is for transparency. So we want customers to take a look at the scripts, know what we have done, and be confident that we stand by the numbers which we are publishing, and they're very welcome, to try these numbers themselves. In fact, we have had customers who have downloaded the scripts from GitHub and run them on our service to kind of validate. The second aspect is in some cases, they may be some deviations from what we are publishing versus what the customer would like to run in the production deployments so it provides an easy way, for customers to take the scripts, modify them in some ways which may suit their real world scenario and run to see what the performance advantages are. So that's the main reason, first, is transparency, so the customers can see what we are doing, because of the comparison, and B, if they want to modify it to suit their needs, and then see what is the performance of HeatWave, they're very welcome to do so. >> So have customers done that? Have they taken the benchmarks? And I mean, if I were a competitor, honestly, I wouldn't get into that food fight because of the impressive performance, but unless I had to, I mean, have customers picked up on that, Nipun? >> Absolutely. In fact, we have had many customers who have benchmarked the performance of MySQL HeatWave, with other services. And the fact that the scripts are available, gives them a very good starting point, and then they've also tweaked those queries in some cases, to see what the Delta would be. And in some cases, customers got back to us saying, hey the performance advantage of HeatWave is actually slightly higher than what was published and what is the reason. And the reason was, when the customers were trying, they were trying on the latest version of the service, and our benchmark results were posted let's say, two months back. So the service had improved in those two to three months and customers actually saw better performance. So yes, absolutely. We have seen customers download the scripts, try them and also modify them to some extent and then do the comparison of HeatWave with other services. >> Interesting. Maybe a question for both of you how is the competition responding to this? They haven't said, "Hey, we're going to come up "with our own benchmarks." Which is very common, you oftentimes see that. Although, for instance, Snowflake hasn't responded to data bricks, so that's not their game, but if the customers are actually, putting a lot of faith in the benchmarks and actually using that for buying decisions, then it's inevitable. But how have you seen the competition respond to the MySQL HeatWave and AMD combo? >> So maybe I can take the first track from the database service standpoint. When customers have more choice, it is invariably advantages for the customer because then the competition is going to react, right? So the way we have seen the reaction is that we do believe, that the other database services are going to take a closer eye to the price performance, right? Because if you're offering such good price performance, the vendors are already looking at it. And, you know, instances where they have offered let's say discount to the customers, to kind of at least like close the gap to some extent. And the second thing would be in terms of the capability. So like one of the things which I should have mentioned even early on, is that not only does MySQL HeatWave on AMD, provide very good price performance, say on like a small cluster, but it's all the way up to a cluster size of 64 nodes, which has about 1000 cores. So the point is, that HeatWave performs very well, both on a small system, as well as a huge scale out. And this is again, one of those things which is a differentiation compared to other services so we expect that even other database services will have to improve their offerings to provide the same good scale factor, which customers are now starting to expectancy, with MySQL HeatWave. >> Kumaran, anything you'd add to that? I mean, you guys are an arms dealer, you love all your OEMs, but at the same time, you've got chip competitors, Silicon competitors. How do you see the competitive-- >> I'd say the broader answer and the big picture for AMD, we're very maniacally focused on our customers, right? And OCI and Oracle are huge and important customers for us, and this particular use cases is extremely interesting both in that it takes advantage, very well of our architecture and it pulls out some of the value that AMD bring. I think from a big picture standpoint, our aim is to execute, to build to bring out generations of CPUs, kind of, you know, do what we say and say, sorry, say what we do and do what we say. And from that point of view, we're hitting, the schedules that we say, and being able to bring out the latest technology and bring it in a TCO value proposition that generationally keeps OCI and HeatWave ahead. That's the crux of our partnership here. >> Yeah, the execution's been obvious for the last several years. Kumaran, staying with you, how would you characterize the collaboration between, the AMD engineers and the HeatWave engineering team? How do you guys work together? >> No, I'd say we're in a very, very deep collaboration. So, there's a few aspects where, we've actually been working together very closely on the code and being able to optimize for both the large L3 cache that AMD has, and so to be able to take advantage of that. And then also, to be able to take advantage of the scaling. So going between, you know, our architecture is chip like based, so we have these, the CPU cores on, we call 'em CCDs and the inter CCD communication, there's opportunities to optimize an application level and that's something we've been engaged with. In the broader engagement, we are going back now for multiple generations with OCI, and there's a lot of input that now, kind of resonates in the product line itself. And so we value this very close collaboration with HeatWave and OCI. >> Yeah, and the cadence, Nip, and you and I have talked about this quite a bit. The cadence has been quite rapid. It's like this constant cycle every couple of months I turn around, is something new on HeatWave. But for question again, for both of you, what new things do you think that organizations, customers, are going to be able to do with MySQL HeatWave if you could look out next 12 to 18 months, is there anything you can share at this time about future collaborations? >> Right, look, 12 to 18 months is a long time. There's going to be a lot of innovation, a lot of new capabilities coming out on in MySQL HeatWave. But even based on what we are currently offering, and the trend we are seeing is that customers are bringing, more classes of workloads. So we started off with OLTP for MySQL, then it went to analytics. Then we increased it to mixed workloads, and now we offer like machine learning as alike. So one is we are seeing, more and more classes of workloads come to MySQL HeatWave. And the second is a scale, that kind of data volumes people are using HeatWave for, to process these mixed workloads, analytics machine learning OLTP, that's increasing. Now, along the way we are making it simpler to use, we are making it more cost effective use. So for instance, last time, when we talked about, we had introduced this real time elasticity and that's something which is a very, very popular feature because customers want the ability to be able to scale out, or scale down very efficiently. That's something we provided. We provided support for compression. So all of these capabilities are making it more efficient for customers to run a larger part of their workloads on MySQL HeatWave, and we will continue to make it richer in the next 12 to 18 months. >> Thank you. Kumaran, anything you'd add to that, we'll give you the last word as we got to wrap it. >> No, absolutely. So, you know, next 12 to 18 months we will have our Zen 4 CPUs out. So this could potentially go into the next generation of the OCI infrastructure. This would be with the Genoa and then Bergamo CPUs taking us to 96 and 128 cores with 12 channels at DDR five. This capability, you know, when applied to an application like HeatWave, you can see that it'll open up another order of magnitude potentially of use cases, right? And we're excited to see what customers can do do with that. It certainly will make, kind of the, this service, and the cloud in general, that this cloud migration, I think even more attractive. So we're pretty excited to see how things evolve in this period of time. >> Yeah, the innovations are coming together. Guys, thanks so much, we got to leave it there really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching this special Cube conversation, this is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time. (soft calm music)

>> Announcer: theCUBE presents "Dell Technologies World," brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of "Dell Technologies World 2022" live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited. I dunno if you heard that, a group behind me very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johnston, the SVP of channel from Equinix. Jules, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> And those people back there are very excited, if you heard that big applause when we went live. (Jules laughing) So the vibe here is fantastic for the first live "Dell Technologies World" since 2019. A lot of people here, this Expo Hall is packed. A lot of momentum here, but there's also a lot of momentum at Equinix. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Well, so many exciting things for Equinix and this partnership of Dell sort of gives us a chance to share that with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about and we just were named to the Fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively. But underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continents in 66 markets but then interconnecting them. So they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds. They have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers. So that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint has set us on the path we're on today, which we're very grateful to be at in. And really, the things that are happening with Equinix and Dell together couldn't be more of the moment. >> Talk to me about the last two years. The moments of the last two years have been very challenging >> They have. >> For everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >> Well, we, together, Dell and Equinix, what we're doing is really helping our shared interface customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation. And digital transformation is hard. It's not a one and done and it's not an overnight solution. And so, what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell IT stack in an Equinix data center to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to all the clouds and everything else they need to participate in the ecosystem. And then pairing that with these interconnected enterprises. So, Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution on-prem, some of their solution in the cloud, access public clouds and use that collectively to define what we're calling the intelligent edge, together. And that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >> Equinix is an amazing company. Like you said, it's... I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart, it'll blow your mind. Really incredibly successful. And part of the reason... It's funny, 10, 15 years ago, people thought, well... Or, 10 years ago, anyway, the cloud is going to hurt companies like Equinix. It was the exact opposite. And that's because Charles Phillips used to joke, "Friends don't let friends build data centers." >> Yes. >> And it's not a good use of capital for most companies, unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course, you have some of your own as a service offerings. >> We do. >> What's the overlap with Dell? How do they compliment each other? >> It's a good question because... And we get that. Are you and Dell in fact competitors? No, we see them as wholly complimentary. And in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call PowerEdge, which involves their servers. And PowerStore, which involves their storage, and then VxRail, which is really the hyper-converged infrastructure. And those are just a few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell. And if you think about Metal, and it's Equinix Metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what Metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance, have the equipment placed in our data centers so that they can access that capacity and according to spikes or needs that they have. That equipment in our data centers that's there for them to avail themselves of that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare Metal as a service together. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from your partner community, in terms of the partnership with Dell? Partners must be excited, the momentum there. What's going on in the partner community? >> So, that's what's near and dear to my heart since that's what I'm responsible for, Equinix's global partnerships. And they're just very excited about what we're doing with Dell. And to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell. So it makes sense that we bring it together. So, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who we'll meet with, AT&T, Orange Business Services, those folks in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kendra, Deloitte, Accenture, WiPro, DXC. All of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call Power of Three, that together we're better. Because as much as Dell and Equinix are delivering, the customers most often don't have the experience they need to execute it without a partner. So they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own. And so, they're excited about it. You see, it's a big opportunity for them from a... Of revenue services and an opportunity for them to step into a next level trusted advisor status. So partners are excited and we're going to be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. >> Do you see Equinix... 'Cause these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships. It's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and growing. Are you a dot connector in a way? Can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >> Well, so our ecosystems that we provide, wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, to the internet of things and content providers, we do see it as our role to the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers on six continents that provide those ecosystems. It is our mission to continue to grow that, enrich it, because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider. And it's the combination of the ecosystem that you'd find and the people you can connect to at Equinix. And then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >> And it's a lot of technology underneath these. It's that first layer one, I guess, if you will, of the data center, right? And so, a lot of your customers or your partner's customers, they just don't want to be in that business as we were saying before. I mean, it's just too expensive. The power requirements are going through the roof. So you got to be really good at managing power. >> You do. In fact... So first of all, you're right. It's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that commitment to keep a data center they would manage themselves at the level that Equinix is able to invest. So it's very difficult for people to do it themselves. But even show... Another point you mentioned actually about the power, is near and dear to our hearts because Equinix is super committed to sustainability. And so we've made a commitment to wholly renewable energy. And it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives. So partners like AT&T meet their connected climate goals. So we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. >> And that's... How do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air. Is it being near the Columbia River? What's your strategy in that regard? >> On sustainable... I have to be honest to you. I would be out of my depth if I didn't say... >> This is the high level, yeah. >> So we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that and then experts people who, all they do is really help us to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that. And then also to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six continents. It's not the same options to reduce your power consumption and your burden are different in Africa as we just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India or than they are in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey, and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that, >> But you're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >> And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it. And we do see other people following, which is a good thing for all of us. >> Well, how important is that in your partnership conversations. That partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has. >> Partners care a lot about it, but customers ask us both all the time. We increasingly see a portion of an RFP or scope of work asking, "Before I decide to go with Equinix and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment. Tell me about your commitment." And so, we are committed to it, but customers are demanding it too. >> So it's... >> Where do you... Go ahead please. >> Oh, I was just going to say, it's coming from the voice of the customer, which Equinix is listening to, we know Dell is listening to it as well. >> I'm sorry, one more time. >> That the sustainability, the ESG demand is coming from the customers, as you were saying. >> Both. I mean, we want to do the right thing and we've made commitments to it, but our customers are holding us accountable to it. And sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us. And it is for companies like Dell and it is for partners and customers. >> It really is... It's up there with security in terms of the board level conversation. Where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the next let's call it three to five years. In your business you can look out that far. >> Well, I think that our partners and by that I mean Dell's and our mutual partners, We've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinix and Dell. So our partners are going to be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey. Whether they want to buy Apex as a service, whether they want to buy Equinix Metal, whether they want to have a partner put together bespoke, do-it-yourself combination with other services. I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are going to embrace multiple versions of that so that they can to meet the customer where they are and take them. >> Well. That's incredibly important these days to meet the customer where they are, the customers have a lot of choice. >> It is. >> But everything that we're all doing is for the customer ultimately at the end of the day. >> Yes, it is. And you know, the customers are getting savvier, but we are all still early in this journey as far as the edge. I think we are all still grappling that. Right now we like to say that as customers are looking to define that, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an awfully robust set of choices for now. And then we want to continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >> Well, that's the thing about your business? It's optionality. I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff, but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. >> Jules: You can, >> And you can put anything in your data center. That's IT. >> You can, but you may not know what you need yet. And so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions, architects and our sales to people together, but they'll talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of on-prem and in an Equinix data center, and maybe some public and future proofing, leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud-based services a year to five years from now than they are even thinking about today. And, they may expand their edge over time, because they may see that as at the customer end point. Today, most businesses are still using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change. And so we want to be there when it does. >> Yeah. That's a great point because you don't want to necessarily have to rip it out every co couple of years. If you can have an architecture that can grow. Yeah, sure. You might want to upgrade it. >> Well, and that's one of the most appealing things about services like Metal where they also do prevent that sort of rip and replace, but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages. And being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinix data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. >> Have you also seen this? You mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in a last few years. How much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap, on folks coming to Equinix saying, "Help, we don't have the resources here to do this ourselves." >> We have been fortunate to be... If you're asking me how the reservation has affected us as a company. >> No your customers. >> Oh customers it has. Oh, okay I get it. So it is a challenge for them, but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent, but partners are filling that gap. And we with Equinix being forced to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest. And so we put them together with our partners and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >> Well that's the most important thing, filling those gaps. >> You ever been inside one of these ultra modern data centers? >> I have not, not yet. It's pretty cool, isn't it? >> Have you ever had a tour of one? >> I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind? >> Well, they come with all the requisite biometrics and man traps and all of the sort of bells and whistles that are actually the first slay of physical security, but then once you get into the data center, then we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. >> Yeah, it's good. And you know, it's not like you drive by the data center, and there's a big sign that says, here's the data center. They're trying to stay a little hidden and then like getting in, it's like getting into Fort Knox. It's probably harder. And then, but then the it's like this giant clean room. It's amazingly clean and just huge. It'll blow your mind. >> And inside the data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside their, the most direct roam reps to the cloud. So you would expect there's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure clean... >> Cooling systems and power systems that are just... >> Pristine environment for sure. >> Amazing engineering. >> It is really. >> We need a tour. >> Do you let people tour your data center? >> I will bring both of you on a tour. >> Awesome. >> Be my guests. >> I would love to. Great. >> Sounds fantastic. Would love to. >> We'll bring a camera. (laughing) Oh, no, we're not allowed. >> Not today. >> No phones, no phones sequester. So what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we've all gotten to be together in so long? >> We are excited about the conversations that we're going to have, power of three that I was talking about. So, we really pride ourselves on having that combination add up to more to benefit the customer. And so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts. Equinix and Dell will meet with almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us. So I am most excited about those conversations and about the education I'm going to get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently, because that is good choice for the market. That is good choice for the customer set, for the enterprises out there. So that's what I'm most excited about. >> Awesome, sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week. But thank you for coming on Jules, >> Oh my pleasure, thank you. talking about... >> How Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner program is growing and of course the momentum of the company. Can't wait to see what happens next year. >> Thank you. Thank you. Well, we will aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. >> Thanks Jules. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage day one, "Dell Technologies World" live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (slow upbeat music)

>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World 2022 Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited I dunno if you heard that. A group behind me very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave Vallante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johnston, the SVP of channel from Equinix. Jules, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >> And those people back there are very excited if you heard that. Big applause going went live. So the vibe here is fantastic for the first live Dell Technologies World since 2019, a lot of people here, this expo hall is packed, lot of momentum here but there's also a lot of momentum at Equinix. Talk to us about what's going on. >> Well, you know, so many exciting things for Equinix and, you know, in this partnership of Dell, it sort of gives us a chance to share that with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about, and we just, we named to the Fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively but underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continents in 66 markets, but then interconnecting them so they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds, they have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers. So that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint, has set us on the path we're on today which we're very grateful to be at in and really the things that are happening with Equinix and Dell together couldn't be more of the moment. >> Talk to me about that. The last two years, the moments of the last two years have been very challenging. >> They have been. >> For everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >> Well, you know, we at together, Dell and Equinix what we're doing is really helping our shared interface customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation and digital transformation is hard, it's not of one and done and it's not an overnight solution and so what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell IT stack in an Equinix data center, to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to our all the clouds and everything else they need to participate in the ecosystem and then pairing that with, you know these interconnected enterprises. So Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution OnPrem, some of their solution in the cloud, access public clouds and use that collectively to define what we're calling the intelligent edge together and that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers, but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >> Eqiuinix's an amazing company, like you said, I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart it'll blow your mind, really incredibly successful and part of the reason is funny, you know, 10, 15 years ago people thought, well, oh, 10 years ago anyway, the cloud is going to hurt companies like Equinix. It was exact opposite and that's because, you know Charles Phillips used to joke, friends don't let friends build data centers. >> Yes. >> Right? And it's not a good use of capital for most companies unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course you have some of your own as a service offerings. >> We do. >> What's the overlap with Dell? How do they compliment each other? >> It's a good question because, you know, and we get that are you and Dell in fact competitors? And no we see them as wholly complimentary and in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call PowerEdge which involves their servers and PowerStore which involves their storage and then VxRail which is really the hyperconverged infrastructure and those are a few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell and if you think about metal and it's Equinix Metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance have the equipment placed in our data center so that they can access that capacity and according to spikes or needs that they have. That equipment in our data centers that's there for them to avail themselves to that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare metal as a service together. >> What are some of the things that you're hearing from your partner community in terms of the partnership with Dell? Are partners must be excited the momentum there. What's going on in the partner community? >> So, you know, that's what near and dear to my heart since that's what I'm responsible for Equinix's global partnerships, and they are very excited about what we're doing with Dell and to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell so it makes sense that we bring it together. So, you know, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who we'll meet with the AT&T, Orange Business Services, those folks in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kyndryl, Deloitte, Accenture, Wipro all, DXC, all of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call power three that together we're better because as much as Dell and Equinix are delivering, the customers most often don't have the experience they need to execute it without a partner so they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own and so if they're excited about it, it's a big opportunity for them from a revenue services and an opportunity for them to step into a next level trusted advisor status so partners are excited and we're going to be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. >> Do you see Equinix, you know, 'cause these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships, it's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and growing. Are you a dot connector in a way? Can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >> Well, so our ecosystems that we provide wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, to the internet, things many and content providers that we are, we do see it as our role to, you know, the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers on six continents that provide those ecosystems, it is our mission to continue to grow that and enrich it because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider and it's the combination of the ecosystem that you find and the people you can connect to at Equinix and then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >> And there's a lot of technology underneath these, it's that first layer one I guess if you will of the data center, right? And so a lot of your customers or your partners customers, they just don't want to be in that business as we were saying before, I mean it's just too expensive, the power requirements are going through the roof so you got to be really good at managing power. >> You do. In fact, you know, so first of all, you're right, it's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that kind of commitment to keep a data center they would manage themselves at the level that Equinix is able to invest so it's very difficult for people to do it themselves but even show, another point you mentioned actually about the power is near and dear to our hearts because Equinix is super committed to sustainability and so we've made a commitment to wholly renewable energy and it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives or partners like AT&T meet their connected climate goals. So we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, so that, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. >> And that's, how do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air or is it being near the Columbia River? What's your strategy in that regard? >> It's sustainable. I have to be honest to you. I would be out of my depth if I didn't say. >> This is at high level. >> So we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that and then experts. People who, you know who all they do is really help us to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that and then also to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six continents it's not the same options to reduce your power consumption and your burden are different in Africa as we just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India or than they are in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that. >> But you're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >> And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it and we do see other people following which is a good thing for all of us. >> Well how important is that in your partnership conversations that partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has? >> Partners care a lot about it but customers ask us both all the time. I mean, we increasingly see a portion of an RFP or a scope of work asking, before I decide to go with Equinix and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment, tell me about your commitment and so we are committed to it but customers are demanding it too. >> So it's com-- >> Where do you. Go ahead please. >> Oh I was just going to say, it's coming from the voice of the customer which EquinIx is listening to we know Dell is listening to it as well. >> I'm sorry one more time? >> That the sustainability of the ESG demand is coming from the customers you were saying? >> It both, like I mean, we want to do the right thing and we've made commitments to it but our customers are holding us accountable to it and, you know, sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us and it is for companies like Dell and it is for our partners and customers. >> It really is. I mean, it's up there with security. >> It is. >> In terms of the board level conversation. Where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the next, let's call it three to five years? In your business you can look out that far. >> Well, you know, I think that they, our partners, and that I mean Dell's and our mutual partners, you know, we've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinix and Dell so our partners are going to be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey, whether they want to buy Apex as a service, whether they want to buy Equinix Metal, whether they want to have a partner put together bespoke do it yourself combination with other services. I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are going to embrace multiple versions of that so that they can, you know, to meet the customer where they are and take them. >> Well that's incredibly important these days to meet the customer where they are. The customers have a lot of choice. >> It is. >> But everything that we're all doing is for the customer ultimately at the end of the day. >> Yes, it is and, you know, the customers are getting savvier but we are all still early in this journey, as far as the edge, you know, I mean, I think we're all still grappling that. For right now we like to say that as customers are looking to define that, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an awfully robust set of choices for now and then we want to continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >> Well that's the thing about your business, it's optionality. I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. >> You can. >> And you can put anything in your data center, that's IT. >> You can, but you may not know what you need yet and so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions architects and our sales people together with Dell talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of OnPrem and in an Equinix data center and maybe some public and future proofing, leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud-based services a year to five years from now than the year you're even thinking about today and they may expand their edge over time because they may sort of see that at the customer end point. Today most businesses are still sort of using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change and so we want to be there when it does. >> Yeah, that's a great point because you don't want to necessarily have to rip it out every couple of years if you can have an architecture that can grow. Yeah sure, you might want to upgrade it. >> Well, and that's one of the most appealing things about services like metal, where they also, they do sort of prevent that sort of rip and replace but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So you know, this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages, and being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinix data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. >> Have you also seen this, you mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in the last few years, how much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap, on folks coming to Equinix saying help, we don't have the resources here to do this ourselves? >> We have been fortunate to to be... If you're asking about how the reservation has affected us as a company. >> No your customers. >> Oh our customers it has. >> Yes. >> Oh, okay. >> Yes. >> So it is a challenge for them but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent but partners are filling that gap and we've at Equinix have been fortunate to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest and so we put them together with our partners and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >> Well that's the most important thing, filling those gaps. >> You ever been inside one of these ultra modern data centers? >> I have not, not yet. >> It's pretty cool, isn't it? I mean-- >> Have you ever had a tour of one? >> I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind. >> Well I mean, they come with all the requisite, bio metrics and man traps and all of the sort bells and whistles that are actually the first layer of physical security, but then once you get into the data center then we have sort of, we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. So it's-- >> Yeah, it's good and you know, it's not like you drive by the data center and there's a big sign that says here's the data center, it is kind of, they're trying to stay a little hidden and then it's, getting in it's like getting into fork knots. It's probably harder but then, it's like this giant clean room, right? It's amazingly clean and just huge. It'll blow your mind. >> Inside these data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside the most direct RomReps to the cloud so you would expect. There's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure, clean-- >> Cooling systems and power systems and it's just. >> Pristine environment for sure. >> Amazing engineering. >> It is. >> So I need a tour. >> You should. Do you let people tour your data centers? >> Well I will bring both of you on a tour. >> Awesome. >> Be my guests. >> I would love to. Yeah, great. >> It sounds fantastic. >> We'd love to. >> So last couple-- >> We'll bring a camera. (both laugh) Oh, no, not allowed. >> Not today. No phones, no phones sequester. >> So what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we we've all gotten to be together in so long? >> So well, you know, we are excited about the conversations that we're going to have power of three that I was talking about. So you know, we really pride ourselves on sort of having that combination add up to more to benefit the customer and so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts for Equinix and Dell will meet with, you know almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us so I am most excited about those conversations and about the education I'm going to get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently because that is good choice for the market, that is good choice for the customer set so for the enterprises out there so that's what I'm most excited about. >> Awesome, sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week, but thank you for coming on Jules talking about-- >> Oh, my pleasure >> An hour of Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner, your program is growing and of course the momentum of the company. Can't wait to see what happens next year. >> Thank you. Thank you, we will aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. >> Thanks Jules. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's Live Coverage day one Dell Technologies World Live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of day. One of Dell technologies world 2022. Live from the Venetian in Las Vegas. They're excited. I dunno if you heard that a group behind me, very excited to be here. Lisa Martin, Dave ante. We're very pleased to welcome Jules Johns SVP of channel from McQuin. Jill, welcome to the program. >>Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. >>And those people back there are very excited. If you heard that big applause >>That >>Went live <laugh> so the, the vibe here is fantastic for the first live Dell technologies world since 2019. A lot of people here, this expo hall is packed a lot of, of momentum here, but there's also a lot of momentum critics. Talk to us about what's going on. >>Well, and you know, so, so many exciting things for Equinex and, you know, in this partnership of Dell, it gives us a chance to, to share that, uh, with partners here throughout the conference. So we are very excited, as you said about, and we just, we named to the fortune 500 this year, 77 quarters of growth consecutively, but underpinning that is having made huge investments in what is the world's largest footprint of global data centers, 240 of them on six continent in 66 markets, but then interconnecting them. So they have the connections that Dell customers need to the clouds. They have the connections that they need to all of the future SaaS providers, so that foresight to put together that interconnection network across our footprint has set us on the path we're on today, which we're very grateful, um, to be at in. And, and really this, the things that are happening with Equinex and Dell together can, couldn't be more of the moment. >>Talk to me about that. The, the last two years, the moments of the last two years have been very challenging. They have for everyone. How has the partnership evolved in that time? >>Well, you know, we at together, Dell and Equinix, what we're doing is really helping, helping our shared interface, customers navigate the complexities of their digital transformation and, and digital transformation is hard and it's not a one and done, and it's not an overnight solution. And so what we are doing is partnering with Dell to think about putting a dedicated Dell it stack in an Equinex data center to give customers that sovereign adjacency so that they can have that security proximate to our, all the clouds and, and, and all, everything else. They need to participate in the ecosystem. And then pairing that with, you know, these interconnected enterprises. So Dell and we are helping customers then be able to have some of their solution on Preem some of their solution in the cloud access, public clouds, and use that collectively to diff fine. We're calling the intelligent edge together. And that intelligent edge means so many different things to customers, but it is really our honor to work together with Dell to help each customer define that for themselves. >>E's amazing company, like you said, it's, it's, you know, I didn't realize it was that many consecutive quarters, but it's a 60 billion plus market cap. If you look at the stock chart, blow your mind, really incredibly successful. And part of the reason it's funny, you know, 10, 15 years ago, people thought, well, oh, 10 years ago, anyway, the cloud is gonna hurt companies like equity. It was exact opposite it. And, and that's because, you know, Charles Phillips used to joke friends. Don't let friends build data centers. Yes. Right. And, and it's not a good use of capital for most companies, unless you're in the data center business. Now, of course you have some of your own as a service offerings. We do. What's the overlap with, with Dell? How do they compliment each other? It, >>It's a good question because, you know, and we get that, are you and Dell in fact competitors, and no, we see them as who complimentary. And in fact, we're working with Dell to bring to market things like something we call power edge, which involves their servers and power store, which involves their storage. And, and then V RIL, which is really the hyperconverged infrastructure. And those are just few first of a series of offerings we expect to bring to market with Dell. And if you think about metal and, and it's Equinex metal that people sometimes think is a competitor, but what metal does for customers is it really allows them to advance, have the equipment placed in our data centers so that they can access that capacity. And according to spikes or needs that they have that equipment in our data centers, that's there for them to avail themselves of that capacity is most often Dell equipment. So we are really doing and executing that bare metal is a service together. >>What are some of the, the things that you're hearing from, from your partner community, in terms of the partnership with Dell, what are partners supposed be excited, the momentum there what's going on in the partner community? >>So, you know, that is that's, that's what near and dear to my heart, since that's what I'm responsible for. Equinex is global partnerships, and they are very excited about what we're doing with Dell. And to be honest with you, all of our top partners are also top partners of Dell. So it makes that we bring it together. So, you know, big categories of partners like the world's largest global network service providers, some of whom are here and who will meet with the at T orange business services. Those folks, in addition to the world's largest global systems integrators, Kendra, Deloitte, Accenture, we pro, uh, all DXC. All of these are partners that Dell and we will meet with together to further our, what we call power three, that together we're better because as much as Dell and Equinex are delivering the customers, most often don't have the experience. They need to execute it without a partner. So they are relying on those partners to take what we are doing and make it their own. And so, so if they're excited about it, it is a, it's a big opportunity for them from a, a revenue services, a and an opportunity for them to step into a next level, trusted advisor status. So partners are excited and, and we're gonna be spending a lot of time with them the next few days. Do you >>See Equinix? You know, these cuz these partnerships are not bespoke partnerships, it's an ecosystem that's organic and evolving and, and growing. Can it be, are you a dot connector in a way, can it be a flywheel effect in your ecosystem? >>Well, I mean our, so our E ecosystems that, um, that we provide wide range of those from high frequency trading to connected cars, um, to the internet things, many and content providers that we are, we do see it as our role to, you know, the 10,000 and growing customers that are in our 240 data centers and six continents that provide those ecosystems. It's, it is our mission to continue to grow that and enrich it because that does differentiate us greatly from another data center provider. And it's the combination of the ecosystem that you find and the people you can connect to at Equinex, and then also the leverage of our fabric in order to be able to access your future needs. >>And it's a lot of technology underneath these, you know, it's that first layer one, I guess, if you will, of the data center, right. And so a lot of your, your customers or your cus your partner's customers, they just don't want to be in that business. As we were saying before, I mean, it's just too expensive. The, the power requirements are going through the roof, so you gotta be really good at managing power. >>You do. In fact, you know, so first of all, you're right, it's extremely difficult for them to also be able to make that kind of commitment, to keep a data center. They would ran, they would manage themselves at the level that Equinex is able to invest. So it's very difficult for people to do it themselves, but even show another, you mentioned actually about the power is near and dear to our hearts because is super committed to sustainability. And so we've made a commitment to holy renewable energy. And it's something that we talk a lot about how we also help partners like Dell meet their initiatives, so, or partners like at T meet their connected climate goals. So we, we are actually using that and coming together with Dell on that story, so that, and, and then helping to amplify that with our partners. And, >>And that's, that's how do you do that? That's putting data centers where you can cool with ambient air. Is it being near the Columbia river? How what's, what's your strategy in that regard, >>Uh, and sustainable. I have to be honest to you. I, uh, I would be out of my depth if I didn't say >>This is the high level. Yeah. >>So, um, we are deploying some of the latest technologies about that, and then experts people who, you know, who all they do is really help us to, um, to reduce the carbon footprint and be able to offset that, be able to use solar, be able to use wind, be able to take advantage of that. And then also to, um, to navigate what's available when you're in 240 locations on six cotton, it's not the same options to reduce your power consumption. And your burden are different in Africa, as you just discovered with our main one acquisition than they are in India, or then they are in, in other parts of the world. So it is for us a journey, and we've been assembling a lot of the talent to do that, but >>You're so large now, even a small percentage improvement can really move the needle. >>And I think because we are the largest, it is incumbent upon us to really set the standard and be committed to it. And, um, and we do see other people following, which is, is a good thing for all of us. Well, >>How important is that in your partnership conversations that partners have that same focus and commitment on ESG that Equinix has >>Partners care a lot about it, but, uh, customers ask us both all the time. I mean, we increasingly see a portion of an RFP or a scope of work asking before I decide to go with Equinex and Dell, tell me how you're going to impact the environment. Tell me about your commitment. And so, um, so we are committed to it, but customers are demanding it to >>Where >>Do you go ahead please? >>Oh, I was just gonna say, it's, it's coming from the, from the voice of a customer, which Equinox is listening to, we know Dell is listening to it as well. >>I'm so >>Sorry. One more time that, that the, the sustainability of the ESG demand is coming from the customers. You were saying, it, >>It both like, I mean, we wanna do the right thing and we've made commitments to it, but our customers are holding us accountable to it. And, you know, sustainability is now a board level priority. It is for us. And it is for companies like Dell and it is for partners and customers. >>It really is. It's it's, I mean, it's up there with security in terms of the board level conversation, where do you want to see the partner ecosystem in the, the, the next let's call it three to five years in your business? You can look out that far. >>Well, you know, I, I think that, um, they, our partners, um, and I, that, I mean, Dells and our mutual partners, you know, are, we've been listening to customers with Dell to deliver a flexible set of options for how customers would consume Equinex and Dell. So our partners are gonna be integrating a variety of those in order to meet the customer where they are in that journey, whether they wanna buy apex as a service, whether they wanna buy Equinex metal, whether they wanna have car some, uh, a partner put together, bespoke, do it yourself, combination with other services. Uh, I, I mean, the customers are going to demand a choice of options. I think partners are gonna embrace multiple versions of that so that they can, you know, to meet the customer where they are and take them >>Well, that's, that's incredibly important these days to meet customer where they are, the customers have a lot of choice. It is, but everything that we're all doing is for the customer, ultimately at the end of the day, <laugh> >>Yes, it, it, it, it is. And, and, you know, the customers are getting Savier, but we are all still early in this journey, as far as the edge, you know, I mean, I think we are all still, um, we're all still grappling at the, at for right now. We like to say that as customers are looking to define that the, the footprint that we offer together with Dell gives them an, an awfully robust set of choices for now. And then we wanna continue to invest and expand to be wherever they need us. >>Well, that's the thing about your business? It's it's optionality. I mean, you can't, I mean, the cloud has a lot of stuff, but you can't get everything you want in the cloud. You can, and you can put anything in your data center. That's, that's, you know, it, >>You can, but you may not know what you need yet. And so that's one of the things we spend a lot of time having our solutions, architects and our sales people together, but they'll talk about future proofing, their strategy. So future proofing, that combination of OnPrem and in an Equinex data center, and maybe some public and future proofing leveraging our fabric so that they might elect different SaaS space services or cloud based services a year to five years from now than the year, even thinking about today. And, and they may expand their edge over time, because they may, they may sort of see that as a, at the customer end point today, most businesses are still sort of using a footprint like ours as their edge, but that could change. And so we wanna be there when it does. >>Yeah. That's a great point because you don't wanna necessarily have to rip it out every cup of years. If you, if you, if you can have a, an architecture that can grow. Yeah, sure. You might want to upgrade it >>Well, and it's one, that's one of the most appealing things about services like metal, where they also, uh, they do sort of prevent that sort of rip and replace, but they also help people navigate the supply chain shortages that are going on right now. So this that's been, this has been a trying two years for supply chain shortages, and being able to take advantage of Dell equipment already staged at an Equinex data center and partners can then bring their customers a quicker immediate response. Have >>You also seen this? You mentioned the supply chain shortages, some of the many challenges that we've experienced in a last few years, how much of a factor has the great resignation been? The labor shortages, the cybersecurity skills gap on, on folks coming, Tolin saying help. We don't have the resources here to do this ourselves. >>We have been fortunate to, to not, to, to be, um, if you're asking about how the reservation has affected us as a company, no, >>Your customers >>Or customers that has oh, okay. Yes. So it is, it is a challenge for them, but it's an opportunity for our partners. So what I see there is it's been challenging for customers to hold onto that talent, but partners are filling that gap and we've access Aon fortunate to hold onto a lot of our best and brightest. And so we put them together with our partner and we try to help customers fill those gaps. >>Well, that's most important thing, filling those gaps. >>You, you ever been one in inside one of these ultra modern data centers? I have not, >>Not yet. >>It's pretty cool. Isn't it? I mean, >>Have you, have you ever had a tour of one? >>I I've never had a tour of an Equinix data center, but I've seen some modern data centers that will blow your mind. Well, >>I mean, they, they come with all the requisite, uh, bio and man traps and all of the bells and, and, and whistles that are actually the first slay of physical security. But then once you get into the data center, then we have sort, we get into the virtual and the digital security that you would expect. So it's, >>Yeah, it's good. And you know, it's not like you drive by the data center, it's a big sign. Here's the data center. It is kind of, you know, they're trying to stay a little hidden and then like, it's get in. It's like getting into fork knots. It's probably harder. And then, but then the it's, it's like this giant clean room, right? It's amazingly clean and just huge. >>There are all >>Your >>Mind. And inside this data centers, all the world's networks come together and peer, and then we have inside their, the, the most direct rom reps to the cloud. So you would expect there, there's a, there's a lot of wires and pipes running very neatly through a very secure, >>Clean systems and power system >>Environment. For sure. >>Amazing engineering. >>It is really >>A >>Tour. You should, you, if they do, you let people tour >>Your, I, I will bring both of you on a tour. Awesome. >>I, my guess >>Would love to. >>Yeah. Great. Sounds fantastic >>On that. So >>Last >>Couple, we'll bring a camera. <laugh> Oh, no, we're not allowed. Not today. >>No phones, no phones sequester. So what, what are some of the things that you're excited about seeing and hearing the next couple of days as this is the first time we've all gotten to be together in so long? >>So, um, well, you know, we are excited about the conversations that we're gonna have power of three that I was talking about. So, you know, we really pride ourselves on sort of having that combination add up to more, to benefit the customer. And so this will be sort of a coming out party of sorts for Equinex and Dell will meet with you almost 20 different global partners that are really important to both of us. So I am most excited about those conversations and about, uh, the education I'm gonna get on the ways they're thinking about integrating it differently, because that is good choice for the market. That is good choice for the customer set. So for the enterprises out there, so that I'm most excited about. Awesome. >>Sounds like tremendous opportunity, lots going on this week, but thank you for coming on, just talking An hour of Equinix and Dell better together, the way that your channel partner program is growing. And of course the momentum of the company will can't wait to see what happens next year. Thank >>You. Thank you. Well, we aim to deliver and thank you again for having us. Thanks, >>Jules. Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cubes live coverage day one, Dell technologies world live from Las Vegas, stick around. We'll be right back with our next guest.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this CUBE conversation where we're going to go deep into system performance. We're here with an expert. Kim Leyenaar is the Principal Performance Architect at Broadcom. Kim. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks so much too. >> So you have a deep background in performance, performance assessment, benchmarking, modeling. Tell us a little bit about your background, your role. >> Thanks. So I've been a storage performance engineer and architect for about 22 years. And I'm specifically been for abroad with Broadcom for I think next month is going to be my 14 year mark. So what I do there is initially I built and I manage their international performance team, but about six years ago I moved back into architecture, and what my roles right now are is I generate performance projections for all of our next generation products. And then I also work on marketing material and I interface with a lot of the customers and debugging customer issues, and looking at how our customers are actually using our storage. >> Great. Now we have a graphic that we want to share. It talks to how storage has evolved over the past decade. So my question is what changes have you seen in storage and how has that impacted the way you approach benchmarking. In this graphic we got sort of big four items that impact performance, memory processor, IO pathways, and the storage media itself, but walk us through this data if you would. >> Sure. So what I put together is a little bit of what we've seen over the past 15 to 20 years. So I've been doing this for about 22 years and kind of going back and focusing a little bit on the storage, we looked back at hard disk, they ruled for. And nearly they had almost 50 years of ruling. And our first hard drive that came out back in the 1950s was only capable of five megabytes in capacity. and one and a half iOS per second. It had almost a full second in terms of seat time. So we've come a long way since then. But when I first came on, we were looking at Ultra 320 SCSI. And one of the biggest memories that I have of that was my office is located close to our tech support. And I could hear the first question was always, what's your termination like? And so we had some challenges with SCSI, and then we moved on into SAS and data protocols. And we continued to move on. But right now, back in the early 2000s when I came on board, the best drives really could do maybe 400 iOS per second. Maybe two 250 megabytes per second, with millisecond response times. And so when I was benchmarking way back when it was always like, well, IOPS are IOPS. We were always faster than what the drives to do. And that was just how it was. The drives were always the bottleneck in the system. And so things started changing though by the early 2000s, mid 2000s. We started seeing different technologies come out. We started seeing that virtualization and multi-tenant infrastructures becoming really popular. And then we had cloud computing that was well on the horizon. And so at this point, we're like, well, wait a minute, we really can't make processors that much faster. And so everybody got excited to include (indistinct) and the home came out but, they had two cores per processor and four cores per processor. And so we saw a little time period where actually the processing capability kind of pulled ahead of everybody else. And memory was falling behind. We had good old DVR, 2, 6, 67. It was new with the time, but we only had maybe one or two memory channels per processor. And then in 2007 we saw disk capacity hit one terabyte. And we started seeing a little bit of an imbalance because we were seeing these drives are getting massive, but their performance per drive was not really kind of keeping up. So now we see a revolution around 2010. And my co-worker and I at the time, we have these little USB discs, if you recall, we would put them in. They were so fast. We were joking at the time. "Hey, you know what, wonder if we could make a raid array out of these little USB disks?" They were just so fast. The idea was actually kind of crazy until we started seeing it actually happen. So in 2010 SSD started revolutionizing storage. And the first SSDs that we really worked with these plaint LS-300 and they were amazing because they were so over-provisioned that they had almost the same reader, right performance. But to go from a drive that could do maybe 400 IOS per second to a drive like 40,000 plus iOS per second, really changed our thought process about how our storage controller could actually try and keep up with the rest of the system. So we started falling behind. That was a big challenge for us. And then in 2014, NVMe came around as well. So now we've got these drives, they're 30 terabytes. They can do one and a half million iOS per second, and over 6,000 megabytes per second. But they were expensive. So people start relegating SSDs more towards tiered storage or cash. And as the prices of these drives kind of came down, they became a lot more mainstream. And then the memory channels started picking up. And they started doubling every few years. And we're looking now at DVR 5 4800. And now we're looking at cores that used to go from two to four cores per processor up to 48 with some of the latest different processes that are out there. So our ability to consume the computing and the storage resources, it's astounding, you know, it's like that whole saying, 'build it and they will come.' Because I'm always amazed, I'm like, how are we going to possibly utilize all this memory bandwidth? How are we going to utilize all these cores? But we do. And the trick to this is having just a balanced infrastructure. It's really critical. Because if you have a performance mismatch between your server and your storage, you really lose a lot of productivity and it does impact your revenue. >> So that's such a key point. Pardon, begin that slide up again with the four points. And that last point that you made Kim about balance. And so here you have these, electronic speeds with memory and IO, and then you've got the spinning disc, this mechanical disc. You mentioned that SSD kind of changed the game, but it used to be, when I looked at benchmarks, it was always the D stage bandwidth of the cash out to the spinning disc was always the bottleneck. And, you go back to the days of you it's symmetrics, right? The huge backend disk bandwidth was how they dealt with that. But, and then you had things the oxymoron of the day was high spin speed disks of a high performance disk. Compared to memories. And, so the next chart that we have is show some really amazing performance increases over the years. And so you see these bars on the left-hand side, it looks at historical performance for 4k random IOPS. And on the right-hand side, it's the storage controller performance for sequential bandwidth from 2008 to 2022. That's 22 is that yellow line. It's astounding the increases. I wonder if you could tell us what we're looking at here, when did SSD come in and how did that affect your thinking? (laughs) >> So I remember back in 2007, we were kind of on the precipice of SSDs. We saw it, the writing was on the wall. We had our first three gig SAS and SATA capable HPAs that had come out. And it was a shock because we were like, wow, we're going to really quickly become the bottleneck once this becomes more mainstream. And you're so right though about people work in, building these massive hard drive based back ends in order to handle kind of that tiered architecture that we were seeing that back in the early 2010s kind of when the pricing was just so sky high. And I remember looking at our SAS controllers, our very first one, and that was when I first came in at 2007. We had just launched our first SAS controller. We're so proud of ourselves. And I started going how many IOPS can this thing, even handled? We couldn't even attach enough drives to figure it out. So what we would do is we'd do these little tricks where we would do a five 12 byte read, and we would do it on a 4k boundary, so that it was actually reading sequentially from the disc, but we were handling these discrete IOPS. So we were like, oh, we can do around 35,000. Well, that's just not going to hit it anymore. Bandwidth wise we were doing great. Really our limitation and our bottleneck on bandwidth was always either the host or the backend. So, our controllers are there basically, there were three bottlenecks for our storage controllers. The first one is the bottleneck from the host to the controller. So that is typically a PCIe connection. And then there's another bottleneck on the controller to the disc. And that's really the number of ports that we have. And then the third one is the discs themselves. So in typical storage, that's what we look at. And we say, well, how do we improve this? So some of these are just kind of evolutionary, such as PCIE generations. And we're going to talk a little bit about that, but some of them are really revolutionary, and those are some of the things that we've been doing over the last five or six years to try and make sure that we are no longer the bottleneck. And we can enable these really, really fast drives. >> So can I ask a question? I'm sorry to interrupted but on these blue bars here. So these all spinning disks, I presume, out years they're not. Like when did flash come in to these blue bars? is that..you said 27 you started looking at it, but on these benchmarks, is it all spinning disc? Is it all flash? How should we interpret that? >> No, no. Initially they were actually all hard drives. And the way that we would identify, the max iOS would be by doing very small sequential reads to these hard drives. We just didn't have SSDs at that point. And then somewhere around 2010 is where we.. it was very early in that chart, we were able to start incorporating SSD technology into our benchmarking. And so what you're looking at here is really the max that our controller is capable of. So we would throw as many drives as we could and do what we needed to do in order to just make sure our controller was the bottleneck and what can we expose. >> So the drive then when SSD came in was no longer the bottleneck. So you guys had to sort of invent and rethink sort of how, what your innovation and your technology, because, I mean, these are astounding increases in performance. I mean, I think in the left-hand side, we've built this out pad, you got 170 X increase for the 4k random IOPS, and you've got a 20 X increase for the sequential bandwidth. How were you able to achieve that level of performance over time? >> Well, in terms of the sequential bandwidth, really those come naturally by increases in the PCIe or the SAS generation. So we just make sure we stay out of the way, and we enable that bandwidth. But the IOPS that's where it got really, really tricky. So we had to start thinking about different things. So, first of all, we started optimizing all of our pathways, all of our IO management, we increased the processing capabilities on our IO controllers. We added more on-chip memory. We started putting in IO accelerators, these hardware accelerators. We put in SAS poor kind of enhancements. We even went and improved our driver to make sure that our driver was as thin as possible. So we can make sure that we can enable all the IOPS on systems. But a big thing happening a few couple of generations ago was we started introducing something called tri capable controllers, which means that you could attach NVMe. You could attach SAS or you could attach SATA. So you could have this really amazing deployment of storage infrastructure based around your customized needs and your cost requirements by using one controller. >> Yeah. So anybody who's ever been to a trade show where they were displaying a glass case with a Winchester disc drive, for example, you see it's spinning and its actuators is moving, wow, that's so fast. Well, no. That's like a tourist slower. It's like a snail compared to the system's speed. So it's, in a way life was easy back in those days, because when you did a right to a disk, you had plenty of time to do stuff, right. And now it's changed. And so I want to talk about Gen3 versus Gen4, and how all this relates to what's new in Gen4 and the impacts of PCIe here, you have a chart here that you've shared with us that talks to that. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that, Kim. >> Sure. But first, you said something that kind of hit my funny bone there. And I remember I made a visit once about 15 or 20 years ago to IBM. And this gentleman actually had one of those old ones in his office and he referred to them as disk files. And he never until the day he retired, he'd never stopped calling them disc files. And it's kind of funny to be a part of that history. >> Yeah. DASD. They used to call it. (both laughing) >> SD, DASD. I used to get all kinds of, you know, you don't know what it was like back then, but yeah. But now nowadays we've got it quite easily enabled because back then, we had, SD DASD and all that. And then, ATA and then SCSI, well now we've got PCIe. And what's fabulous about PCIe is that it just has the generations are already planned out. It's incredible. You know, we're looking at right now, Gen3 moving to Gen4, and that's a lot about what we're going to be talking about. And that's what we're trying to test out. What is Gen4 PCIe when to bias? And it really is. It's fantastic. And PCIe came around about 18 years ago and Broadcom is, and we do participate and contribute to the PCIe SIG, which is, who develops the standards for PCIe, but the host in both our host interface in our NVMe desk and utilize the standards. So this is really, really a big deal, really critical for us. But if you take a look here, you can see that in terms of the capabilities of it, it's really is buying us a lot. So most of our drives right now NVMe drives tend to be by four. And a lot of people will connect them. And what that means is four lanes of NVMe and a lot of people that will connect them either at by one or by two kind of depending on what their storage infrastructure will allow. But the majority of them you could buy, or there are so, as you can see right now, we've gone from eight gig transfers per second to 16 gig of transfers per second. What that means is for a by four, we're going from one drive being able to do 4,000 to do an almost 8,000 megabytes per second. And in terms of those 4k IOPS that really evade us, they were really really tough sometimes to squeeze out of these drives, but now we're got 1 million, all we have to 2 million, it's just, it's insane. You know, just the increase in performance. And there's a lot of other standards that are going to be sitting on top of PCIe. So it's not going away anytime soon. We've got to open standards like CXL and things like that, but we also have graphics cards. You've got all of your hosts connections, they're also sitting on PCIe. So it's fantastic. It's backwards, it's orbits compatible, and it really is going to be our future. >> So this is all well and good. And I think I really believe that a lot of times in our industry, the challenges in the plumbing are underappreciated. But let's make it real for the audience because we have all these new workloads coming out, AI, heavily data oriented. So I want to get your thoughts on what types of workloads are going to benefit from Gen4 performance increases. In other words, what does it mean for application performance? You shared a chart that lists some of the key workloads, and I wonder if we could go through those. >> Yeah, yeah. I could have a large list of different workloads that are able to consume large amounts of data, whether or not it's in small or large kind of bytes of data. But as you know right now, and I said earlier, our ability to consume these compute and storage resources is amazing. So you build it and we'll use it. And the world's data we're expected to grow 61% to 175 zettabytes by the year 2025, according to IDC. So that's just a lot of data to manage. It's a lot of data to have, and it's something that's sitting around, but to be useful, you have to actually be able to access it. And that's kind of where we come in. So who is accessing it? What kind of applications? I spend a lot of time trying to understand that. And recently I attended a virtual conference SDC and what I like to do when I attend these conferences is to try to figure out what the buzz words are. What's everybody talking about? Because every year it's a little bit different, but this year was edge, edge everything. And so I kind of put edge on there first in, even you can ask anybody what's edge computing and it's going to mean a lot of different things, but basically it's all the computing outside of the cloud. That's happening typically at the edge of the network. So it tends to encompass a lot of real time processing on those instant data. So in the data is usually coming from either users or different sensors. It's that last mile. It's where we kind of put a lot of our content caching. And, I uncovered some interesting stuff when I was attending this virtual conference and they say only about 25% of all the usable data actually even reach the data center. The rest is ephemeral and it's localized, locally and in real time. So what it does is in the goal of edge computing is to try and reduce the bandwidth costs for these kinds of IOT devices that go over a long distance. But the reality is the growth of real-time applications that require these kinds of local processing are going to drive this technology forward over the coming years. So Dave, your toaster and your dishwasher they're, IOT edge devices probably in the next year, if they're not already. So edge is a really big one and consumes a lot of the data. >> The buzzword does your now is met the metaverse, it's almost like the movie, the matrix is going to come in real time. But the fact is it's all this data, a lot of videos, some of the ones that I would call out here, you mentioned facial recognition, real-time analytics. A lot of the edge is going to be real-time inferencing, applying AI. And these are just a massive, massive data sets that you again, you and of course your customers are enabling. >> When we first came out with our very first Gen3 product, our marketing team actually asked me, "Hey, how can we show users how they can consume this?" So I actually set up a head to environment. I decided I'm going to learn how to do this. I set up this massive environment with Hadoop, and at the time they called big data, the 3V's, I don't know if you remember these big 3Vs, the volume, velocity and variety. Well Dave, did you know, there are now 10 Vs? So besides those three, we got velocity, we got valued, we got variability, validity, vulnerability, volatility, visualization. So I'm thinking we need just to add another beat of that. >> Yeah. (both laughing) Well, that's interesting. You mentioned that, and that sort of came out of the big data world, a dupe world, which was very centralized. You're seeing the cloud is expanding, the world's getting, you know, data is by its very nature decentralized. And so you've got to have the ability to do an analysis in place. A lot of the edge analytics are going to be done in real time. Yes, sure. Some of it's going to go back in the cloud for detailed modeling, but we are the next decade Kim, ain't going to be like the last I often say. (laughing) I'll give you the last word. I mean, how do you see this sort of evolving, who's going to be adopting this stuff. Give us a sort of a timeframe for this kind of rollout in your world. >> In terms of the timeframe. I mean really nobody knows, but we feel like Gen5, that it's coming out next year. It may not be a full rollout, but we're going to start seeing Gen5 devices and Gen5 infrastructure is being built out over the next year. And then follow very, very, very quickly by Gen6. And so what we're seeing though is, we're starting to see these graphics processors, These GPU's, and I'm coming out as well, that are going to be connecting, using PCIe interfaces as well. So being able to access lots and lots and lots of data locally is going to be a really, really big deal and order because worldwide, all of our companies they're using business analytics. Data is money. And the person that actually can improve their operational efficiency, bolster those sales and increase your customer satisfaction. Those are the companies that are going on to win. And those are the companies that are going to be able to effectively store, retrieve and analyze all the data that they're collecting over the years. And that requires an abundance of data. >> Data is money and it's interesting. It kind of all goes back to when Steve jobs decided to put flash inside of an iPhone and the industry exploded, consumer economics kicked in 5G now edge AI, a lot of the things you talked about, GPU's the neural processing unit. It's all going to be coming together in this decade. Very exciting. Kim, thanks so much for sharing this data and your perspectives. I'd love to have you back when you got some new perspectives, new benchmark data. Let's do that. Okay. >> I look forward to it. Thanks so much. >> You're very welcome. And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Mhm. Mhm Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS summit here. Public sector summit here in Washington, D. C. I'm john for your host, We're live at a physical event. People face to face. We're here with the cube on the ground back in business. Of course we have a virtual cube. We got the cube studios in Palo alto in boston. We're gonna bring you all the great coverage and our next guest is parallel casa, Anita Casanova got it. Chief of Channels at Pegasystems, also known as mega official titles, head of global partner ecosystem. But you're known as the Chief of channels. >>Absolutely, thank >>you for coming on. >>Absolutely nice to be here face to face in an event. >>Feel happy, feels good. It feels great. People are happy. I'm still good attendance. Considering what it is about 5, 6000 people roughly give or take maybe up to 7000, who knows. But you guys have a really strong relationship with AWS, you're the chief of the channel. You guys have a great enabling product that crashes itself, as you guys say. So let's get into it before explain what PEG A does. >>Okay, so paga he's a $1 billion dollar company. It's a software company and we call it that software built itself Because we are definitely here to crash customer complexity. So we do it by three doing three things, 1-1 customer engagement customers, customer service and also intelligent automation. So we are a platform and we are helping any single client that has a complex solution to make it simple and to have a good customer experience. >>So I got it wrong. It doesn't crash itself, it crashes complexity, It builds itself okay there it is. All right, I got that out of the way. Software that crashes itself actually doesn't really kind of doesn't sound like a compelling products, but it's not the case. So I gotta ask you So ecosystems are a big part of the cloud amazon has a great ecosystem but the ecosystem has ecosystem is starting to see an expansion of the cloud business with the software model. With cloud scale. What are you guys doing in the channel within the public sector? How do you guys work, how do people engage with you? >>Okay, so first of all we we were always very friendly channel partner but we were using our partners only for implementation because our product is so so uh built for each of the clients, there's a lot of services opportunity and we have very strong peg a practices in the different partners. But last year when I came in I came in almost 16 months ago we decided that we wanted also to improve our our sales with the partners. So we are engaging with partners and to and from the beginning of a sale cycle and brainstorming on what the client needs in order to be more efficient to reduce cost to the moment of the implementation. So we have been working with several uh system integrators, some resellers and with aws as our cloud platform. So we have been moving everything we can to the peg, a cloud that is on aws and clients are are really happy to be modernized in there because there you have the security, the scalability then you the new versions of the product without having to be worrying about it because it's done by our support. >>So it's software on amazon. So customers can buy your software through the marketplace or whatever through a partner or the marketplace and then they can still use the higher level services at in AWS, correct? >>They can use a high services in AWS or with any other partner system Integrator that also works with AWS and we have many cases where we are we we use the power of three. Right. We work with AWS accenture and and for example, Peg or we can use lay does or or booz allen or a parrot on any of the partners that are here in government. >>So you know, the channel equation, you're the chief of the channel. Channel channels love simplicity, simple products to buy. They love products that can throw off gross profit. And you said services, how is that going? Are you guys seeing a good economic equation with your partners? >>Well, our partners do between five and 10 IX of uh, of the revenue that we do on software on services. So that equation definitely works and they love it for that. At the same time we have invested five x the quantity of people that we have supporting the channel. For example, here in government we have invested also two or three times on the rest of the of the business. But there has been definitely good investments for partners. The partners are happy with us because again they not only they can do a good business one off, they can then radiate one. You usually clients one day once they buy peg for one of their use cases or case management as we call it, they usually want to replicate it in other cases and that is where the partners are doing enormous money because they are replicating the same use case in different departments. >>That's the way it's supposed to be, it's their touching the customer, they're adding value on top of your product. So they get to have the best of both worlds high margins on the profits and the services but yet worked with the customer directly to engage, make sure they get the right solution from you and a W. S together. >>Absolutely. Okay, >>what are the key challenges that you find that partners need to solve and overcome to keep this this this equation going. What do you guys focus on? You mentioned more people, what are some of the trends in the public cloud? I mean public sector area? What's this with the dynamics? >>So in in this moment the whole world is with a huge need of digital transformation the every single client but especially in government, they had all digital transformation projects. But they were going at slow motion because of the situation of the pandemic that I don't even want to name it again because everybody's talking about it but it's a reality. These projects have to accelerate 10 times. So whatever it was going to be done in five years has been done in one. So the biggest challenge that we are having is to ensure that we have that capacity to support all these projects that are being done very fast and and for that that's why we also need our partners right Because they have big mega practices. They have been investing as well as we are to ensure that we cover all those needs and but for now we are doing well and so that's that's right. We are growing as a company and with the partners >>carol great to have you on board with the company now kicking some butt now in the channel, Chief of channel good margins happy customers growth. What are some of the use case successes that you've had. Can you name a few customers and what they've done and what's their best practice? >>Well we have, I will name some government because we are in a public secretary event but we have and I will name north America although we also have in the rest of the world. So U. S. Census. That is something that everybody has done right. Even if you did in your mobile, you did it on paper, you did it on the phone. All of that was managed by paga And for the first time ever there was zero than downtime. Not a single problem to access the web. For example, the the US census took us 50% less expense than the one that we did in 2010 just because we use this digital approach And then we also were 50% more efficient because we needed, we didn't need to use all that paper storage that was used in the past. So we taxpayers have to be happy because they really spend less than what they should have spent on this topic. So definitely that was one of the biggest cases that we have in 2020. We have other, we took big big projects like the US and or we do smaller projects and there's one that is not small but that is smaller, that is the New Jersey court that caught my attention because I imagine myself in a situation like that that you are like my mistake taken to the court and you and they are, they are you have to defend yourself that was taking three hours and it's stressful, right? And you don't have to be there if you don't need to And this process got to 20 minutes, that is also reduction and expenses even jail expenses sometimes. So that was one that we did as well. And and that was just by making four legacy systems getting to one having a much faster experience on that. So >>a lot of migrations, a lot of cloud native re factoring going on in the applications sounds like >>yes. What we do is whatever legacy systems you have, we managed to ensure that we connect them all and to have a front line so that you can access information real time and that you can as a user and that you can really have a better experience whatever you do today, whatever company telco company you have, bank you use, I can guarantee you have you have, you speak to you just don't know about >>that. It's under the covers. I gotta ask you my final question. So you guys really doing some good business out here, what if people watching here trying to understand the dynamics of public sector market? What's your take, what's your what do you what would you say, that person? What's the big story happening in public sector? >>Well, to begin with, I'm not a public sector experts, I'm sure that there's a lot of public sector experts out there that can tell me, oh no, you missed this point. But what I have seen in these days that I have been here with the team is that the government needs to act fast in order to digitalized all these projects. So one of our partners yesterday was telling me that there is a mandate in in the army for example to move everything to cloud. How do you do it? They don't even know they're there, there are people that they don't they don't know how to do this. So our partners are building solutions to help them faster get into the cloud because they have to do it by the end of the year. And these are the key things that we are working on with partners to build solutions that can really can access for robust and they can >>escape. It's a very robust ecosystem. Yes, So amazon is an ecosystem you guys and you have an ecosystem. >>It's an ecosystem of ecosystems and that is what works right because Amazon has very good sellers for example, very good people that know the clients and they have a lot of experience but they are not specialized in what to do >>with the channel. These >>other partners have a peg a practice, they are experts and as I told you this is about crushing complexity. So it's making you need to understand the technology and the details behind it to make the best solution to the client. >>Corolla. Great to have you on very dynamic. Love, Love chatting with you Corolla Cazenove >>Cazenove >>Cazenove chief of channels that Pegasystems also known as peg a great to have you on, congratulations on your success. Ecosystems within an ecosystem crushing complexity. Mr que bringing you all the signal out there from the noise. I'm john Kerry. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this "Cube Conversation." My name is Dave Vellante and you know, containers, they used to be stateless and ephemeral but they're maturing very rapidly. As cloud native workloads become more functional and they go mainstream persisting, and protecting the data that lives inside of containers, is becoming more important to organizations. Enterprise capabilities such as high availability or reliability, scalability and other features are now more fundamental and important and containers are linchpin of hybrid cloud, cross-cloud and edge strategies. Now fusing these capabilities together across these regions in an abstraction layer that hides that underlying complexity of the infrastructure, is where the entire enterprise technology industry is headed. But how do you do that without making endless copies of data and managing versions not to mention the complexities and costs of doing so. And with me to talk about how IBM thinks about and is solving these challenges are Eric Herzog, who's the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Storage Channels. For the IBM Storage Division is Sam Werner is the vice president of offering management and the business line executive for IBM Storage. Guys, great to see you again, wish should, were face to face but thanks for coming on "theCUBE." >> Great to be here. >> Thanks Dave, as always. >> All right guys, you heard me my little spiel there about the problem statement. Eric, maybe you could start us off. I mean, is it on point? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we see is containers are going mainstream. I frame it very similarly to what happened with virtualization, right? It got brought in by the dev team, the test team, the applications team, and then eventually of course, it became the main state. Containers is going through exactly that right now. Brought in by the dev ops people, the software teams. And now it's becoming again, persistent, real use clients that want to deploy a million of them. Just the way they historically have deployed a million virtual machines, now they want a million containers or 2 million. So now it's going mainstream and the feature functions that you need once you take it out of the test sort of play with stage to the real production phase, really changes the ball game on the features you need, the quality of what you get, and the types of things you need the underlying storage and the data services that go with that storage,. to do in a fully container world. >> So Sam how'd we get here? I mean, container has been around forever. You look inside a Linux, right? But then they did, as Eric said, go mainstream. But it started out the, kind of little experimental, As I said, their femoral didn't really need to persist them, but it's changed very quickly. Maybe you could talk to that evolution and how we got here. >> I mean, well, it's been a look, this is all about agility right? It's about enterprises trying to accelerate their innovation. They started off by using virtual machines to try to accelerate access to IT for developers, and developers are constantly out, running ahead. They got to go faster and they have to deliver new applications. Business lines need to figure out new ways to engage with their customers. Especially now with the past year we had it even further accelerated this need to engage with customers in new ways. So it's about being agile. Containers promise or provide a lot of the capabilities you need to be agile. What enterprises are discovering, a lot of these initiatives are starting within the business lines and they're building these applications or making these architectural decisions, building dev ops environments on containers. And what they're finding is they're not bringing the infrastructure teams along with them. And they're running into challenges that are inhibiting their ability to achieve the agility they want because their storage needs aren't keeping up. So this is a big challenge that enterprises face. They want to use containers to build a more agile environment to do things like dev ops, but they need to bring the infrastructure teams along. And that's what we're focused on now. Is how do you make that agile infrastructure to support these new container worlds? >> Got it, so Eric, you guys made an announcement to directly address these issues. Like it's kind of a fire hose of innovation. Maybe you could take us through and then we can unpack that a little bit. >> Sure, so what we did is on April 27th, we announced IBM Spectrum Fusion. This is a fully container native software defined storage technology that integrates a number of proven battle-hardened technologies that IBM has been deploying in the enterprise for many years. That includes a global scalable file system that can span edge core and cloud seamlessly with a single copy of the data. So no more data silos and no more 12 copies of the data which of course drive up CapEx and OpEx. Spectrum Fusion reduces that and makes it easier to manage. Cuts the cost from a CapEx perspective and cuts a cost for an OpEx perspective. By being fully container native, it's ready to go for the container centric world and could span all types of areas. So what we've done is create a storage foundation which is what you need at the bottom. So things like the single global namespace, single accessibility, we have local caching. So with your edge core cloud, regardless of where the data is, you think the data's right with you, even if it physically is not. So that allows people to work on it. We have file locking and other technologies to ensure that the data is always good. And then of course we'd imbued it with the HA Disaster Recovery, the backup and restore technology, which we've had for years and have now made of fully container native. So spectrum fusion basically takes several elements of IBM's existing portfolio has made them container native and brought them together into a single piece of software. And we'll provide that both as a software defined storage technology early in 2022. And our first pass will be as a hyperconverged appliance which will be available next quarter in Q3 of 2021. That of course means it'll come with compute, it'll come with storage, come with a rack even, come with networking. And because we can preload everything for the end users or for our business partners, it would also include Kubernetes, Red Gat OpenShift and Red Hat's virtualization technology all in one simple package, all ease of use and a single management gooey to manage everything, both the software side and the physical infrastructure that's part of the hyperconverged system level technologies. >> So, maybe it can help us understand the architecture and maybe the prevailing ways in which people approach container storage, what's the stack look like? And how have you guys approached it? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Really, there's three layers that we look at when we talk about container native storage. It starts with the storage foundation which is the layer that actually lays the data out onto media and does it in an efficient way and makes that data available where it's needed. So that's the core of it. And the quality of your storage services above that depend on the quality of the foundation that you start with. Then you go up to the storage services layer. This is where you bring in capabilities like HA and DR. People take this for granted, I think as they move to containers. We're talking about moving mission critical applications now into a container and hybrid cloud world. How do you actually achieve the same levels of high availability you did in the past? If you look at what large enterprises do, they run three site, for site replication of their data with hyper swap and they can ensure high availability. How do you bring that into a Kubernetes environment? Are you ready to do that? We talk about how only 20% of applications have really moved into a hybrid cloud world. The thing that's inhibiting the other 80% these types of challenges, okay? So the storage services include HA DR, data protection, data governance, data discovery. You talked about making multiple copies of data creates complexity, it also creates risk and security exposures. If you have multiple copies of data, if you needed data to be available in the cloud you're making a copy there. How do you keep track of that? How do you destroy the copy when you're done with it? How do you keep track of governance and GDPR, right? So if I have to delete data about a person how do I delete it everywhere? So there's a lot of these different challenges. These are the storage services. So we talk about a storage services layer. So layer one data foundation, layer two storage services, and then there needs to be connection into the application runtime. There has to be application awareness to do things like high availability and application consistent backup and recovery. So then you have to create the connection. And so in our case, we're focused on open shift, right? When we talk about Kubernetes how do you create the knowledge between layer two, the storage services and layer three of the application services? >> And so this is your three layer cake. And then as far as like the policies that I want to inject, you got an API out and entries in, can use whatever policy engine I want. How does that work? >> So we're creating consistent sets of APIs to bring those storage services up into the application, run time. We in IBM have things like IBM cloud satellite which bring the IBM public cloud experience to your data center and give you a hybrid cloud or into other public cloud environments giving you one hybrid cloud management experience. We'll integrate there, giving you that consistent set of storage services within an IBM cloud satellite. We're also working with Red Hat on their Advanced Cluster Manager, also known as RACM to create a multi-cluster management of your Kubernetes environment and giving that consistent experience. Again, one common set of APIs. >> So the appliance comes first? Is that a no? Okay, so is that just time to market or is there a sort of enduring demand for appliances? Some customers, you know, they want that, maybe you could explain that strategy. >> Yeah, so first let me take it back a second. Look at our existing portfolio. Our award-winning products are both software defined and system-based. So for example Spectrum Virtualize comes on our flash system. Spectrum Scale comes on our elastic storage system. And we've had this model where we provide the exact same software, both on an array or as standalone piece of software. This is unique in the storage industry. When you look at our competitors, when they've got something that's embedded in their array, their array manager, if you will, that's not what they'll try to sell you. It's software defined storage. And of course, many of them don't offer software defined storage in any way, shape or form. So we've done both. So with spectrum fusion, we'll have a hyper-converged configuration which will be available in Q3. We'll have a software defined configuration which were available at the very beginning of 2022. So you wanted to get out of this market feedback from our clients, feedback from our business partners by doing a container native HCI technology, we're way ahead. We're going to where the park is. We're throwing the ball ahead of the wide receiver. If you're a soccer fan, we're making sure that the mid guy got it to the forward ahead of time so you could kick the goal right in. That's what we're doing. Other technologies lead with virtualization, which is great but virtualization is kind of old hat, right? VMware and other virtualization layers have been around for 20 now. Container is where the world is going. And by the way, we'll support everything. We still have customers in certain worlds that are using bare metal, guess what? We work fine with that. We worked fine with virtual as we have a tight integration with both hyper V and VMware. So some customers will still do that. And containers is a new wave. So with spectrum fusion, we are riding the wave not fighting the wave and that way we could meet all the needs, right? Bare metal, virtual environments, and container environments in a way that is all based on the end users applications, workloads, and use cases. What goes, where and IBM Storage can provide all of it. So we'll give them two methods of consumption, by early next year. And we started with a hyper-converged first because, A, we felt we had a lead, truly a lead. Other people are leading with virtualization. We're leading with OpenShift and containers where the first full container-native OpenShift ground up based hyper-converged of anyone in the industry versus somebody who's done VMware or some other virtualization layer and then sort of glommed on containers and as an afterthought. We're going to where the market is moving, not to where the market has been. >> So just follow up on that. You kind of, you got the sort of Switzerland DNA. And it's not just OpenShift and Red Hat and the open source ethos. I mean, it just goes all the way back to San Volume Controller back in the day where you could virtualize anybody's storage. How is that carrying through to this announcement? >> So Spectrum Fusion is doing the same thing. Spectrum Fusion, which has many key elements brought in from our history with Spectrum Scale supports not IBM storage, for example, EMC Isilon NFS. It will support, Fusion will support Spectrum Scale, Fusion will support our elastic storage system. Fusion will support NetApp filers as well. Fusion will support IBM cloud object storage both software defined storage, or as an array technology and Amazon S3 object stores and any other object storage vendor who's compliant with S3. All of those can be part of the global namespace, scalable file system. We can bring in, for example, object data without making a duplicate copy. The normal way to do that as you make a duplicate copy. So you had a copy in the object store. You make a copy and to bring that into the file. Well, guess what, we don't have to do that. So again, cutting CapEx and OpEx and ease of management. But just as we do with our flash systems product and our Spectrum Virtualize and the SAN Volume Controller, we support over 550 storage arrays that are not ours that are our competitors. With Spectrum Fusion, we've done the same thing, fusion, scale the IBM ESS, IBM cloud object storage, Amazon S3 object store, as well as other compliance, EMC Isilon NFS, and NFS from NetApp. And by the way, we can do the discovery model as well not just integration in the system. So we've made sure that we really do protect existing investments. And we try to eliminate, particularly with discovery capability, you've got AI or analytics software connecting with the API, into the discovery technology. You don't have to traverse and try to find things because the discovery will create real time, metadata cataloging, and indexing, not just of our storage but the other storage I'd mentioned, which is the competition. So talk about making it easier to use, particularly for people who are heterogeneous in their storage environment, which is pretty much the bulk of the global fortune 1500, for sure. And so we're allowing them to use multiple vendors but derive real value with Spectrum Fusion and get all the capabilities of Spectrum Fusion and all the advantages of the enterprise data services but not just for our own product but for the other products as well that aren't ours. >> So Sam, we understand the downside of copies, but then, so you're not doing multiple copies. How do you deal with latency? What's the secret sauce here? Is it the file system? Is there other magic in here? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll build a little bit off of what Eric said, but look one of the really great and unique things about Spectrum Scale is its ability to consume any storage. And we can actually allow you to bring in data sets from where they are. It could have originated in object storage we'll cash it into the file system. It can be on any block storage. It can literally be on any storage you can imagine as long as you can integrate a file system with it. And as you know most applications run on top of the file system. So it naturally fits into your application stack. Spectrum Scale uniquely is a globally parallel file system. So there's not very many of them in the world and there's none that can achieve what Spectrum Scale can do. We have customers running in the exabytes of data and the performance improves with scales. So you can actually deploy Spectrum Scale on-prem, build out an environment of it, consuming whatever storage you have. Then you can go into AWS or IBM cloud or Azure, deploy an instance of it and it will now extend your file system into that cloud. Or you can deploy it at the edge and it'll extend your file system to that edge. This gives you the exact same set of files and visibility and we'll cash in only what's needed. Normally you would have to make a copy of data into the other environment. Then you'd have to deal with that copy later, let's say you were doing a cloud bursting use case. Let's look at that as an example, to make this real. You're running an application on-prem. You want to spin up more compute in the cloud for your AI. The data normally you'd have to make a copy of the data. You'd run your AI. They have to figure out what to do with that data. Do you copy some of the fact? Do we sync them? Do you delete it? What do you do? With Spectrum Scale just automatically cash in whatever you need. It'll run there and you get assigned to spin it down. Your copy is still on-prem. You know, no data is lost. We can actually deal with all of those scenarios for you. And then if you look at what's happening at the edge, a lot of say video surveillance, data pouring in. Looking at the manufacturing {for} looking for defects. You can run a AI right at the edge, make it available in the cloud, make that data available in your data center. Again, one file system going across all. And that's something unique in our data foundation built on Spectrum Scale. >> So there's some metadata magic in there as well, and that intelligence based on location. And okay, so you're smart enough to know where the data lives. What's the sweet spot for this Eric? Are there any particular use cases or industries that we should be focused on or is it through? >> Sure, so first let's talk about the industries. We see certain industries going more container quicker than other industries. So first is financial services. We see it happening there. Manufacturing, Sam already talked about AI based manufacturing platforms. We actually have a couple clients right now. We're doing autonomous driving software with us on containers right now, even before Spectrum Fusion with Spectrum Scale. We see public of course, healthcare and in healthcare don't just think delivery at IBM. That includes the research guys. So the genomic companies, the biotech companies, the drug companies are all included in that. And then of course, retail, both on-prem and off-prem. So those are sort of the industries. Then we see from an application workload, basically AI analytics and big data applications or workloads are the key things that Spectrum Fusion helps you because of its file system. It's high performance. And those applications are tending to spread across core ,edge and cloud. So those applications are spreading out. They're becoming broader than just running in the data center. And by the way they want to run it just into the data center, that's fine. Or perfect example, we had giant global auto manufacturer. They've got factories all over. And if you think there isn't compute resources in every factory, there is because those factories I just saw an article, actually, those factories cost about a billion dollars to build them, a billion. So they've got their own IT, now it's connected to their core data center as well. So that's a perfect example that enterprise edge where spectrum fusion would be an ideal solution whether they did it as software defined only, or of course when you got a billion dollar factory, just to make it let alone produce the autos or whatever you're producing. Silicon, for example, those fabs, all cost a billion. That's where the enterprise edge fits in very well with Spectrum Fusion. >> So are those industries, what's driving the adoption of containers? Is it just, they just want to modernize? Is it because they're doing some of those workloads that you mentioned or is there's edge? Like you mentioned manufacturing, I could see that potentially being an edge is the driver. >> Well, it's a little bit of all of those Dave. For example, virtualization came out and virtualization offered advantages over bare metal, okay? Now containerization has come out and containerization is offering advantage over virtualization. The good thing at IBM is we know we can support all three. And we know again, in the global fortune 2000, 1500 they're probably going to run all three based on the application workload or use case. And our storage is really good at bare metal. Very good at virtualization environments. And now with Spectrum Fusion are container native outstanding for container based environments. So we see these big companies will probably have all three and IBM storage is one of the few vendors if not the only vendor that could adroitly support all three of those various workload types. So that's why we see this as a huge advantage. And again, the market is going to containers. We are, I'm a native California. You don't fight the wave, you ride the wave. and the wave is containers and we're riding that wave. >> If you don't ride the wave you become driftwood as Pat Gelsinger would say. >> And that is true, another native California. I'm a whole boss. >> So okay, so, I wonder Sam I sort of hinted upfront in my little narrative there but the way we see this, as you've got on-prem hybrid, you got public clouds across cloud moving to the edge. Open shift is I said is the linchpin to enabling some of those. And what we see is this layer that abstracts the complexity, hides the underlying complexity of the infrastructure that becomes kind of an implementation detail. Eric talked about skating to the park or whatever sports analogy you want to use. Is that where the park is headed? >> Yeah, I mean, look, the bottom line is you have to remove the complexity for the developers. Again, the name of the game here is all about agility. You asked why these industries are implementing containers? It's about accelerating their innovation and their services for their customers. It's about leveraging AI to gain better insights about their customers and delivering what they want and proving their experience. So if it's all about agility developers don't want to wait around for infrastructure. You need to automate it as much as possible. So it's about building infrastructure that's automated, which requires consistent API APIs. And it requires abstracting out the complexity of things like HA and DR. You don't want every application owner to have to figure out how to implement that. You want to make those storage services available and easy for a developer to implement and integrate into what they're doing. You want to ensure security across everything you do as you bring more and more of your data of your information about your customers into these container worlds. You've got to have security rock solid. You can't leave any exposures there and you can't afford downtime. There's increasing threats from things like ransomware. You don't see it in the news every day but it happens every single day. So how do you make sure you can recover when an event happens to you? So yes, you need to build a abstracted layer of storage services and you need to make it simply available to the developers in these dev ops environments. And that's what we're doing with spectrum fusion. We're taking, I think, extremely unique and one of a kind storage foundation with Spectrum Scale that gives you single namespace globally. And we're building onto it an incredible set of storage services, making extremely simple to deploy enterprise class container applications. >> So what's the bottom line business impact. I mean, how does this change? I mean, Sam, you I think articulated very well through all about serving the developers versus you know, storage, admin provisioning, a LUN. So how does this change my organization, my business? What's the impact there? >> I've mentioned one other point that we talk about an IBM a lot, which is the AI ladder. And it's about how do you take all of this information you have and be able to take it to build new insights, to give your company and advantage. An incumbent in an industry shouldn't be able to be disrupted if they're able to leverage all the data they have about the industry and their customers. But in order to do that, you have to be able to get to a single source of data and be able to build it into the fabric of your business operations. So that all decisions you're making in your company, all services you deliver to your customers, are built on that data foundation and information and the only way to do that and infuse it into your culture is to make this stuff real time. And the only way to do that is to build out a containerized application environment that has access to real-time data. The ultimate outcome, sorry, I know you asked for business results is that you will, in real time understand your clients, understand your industry and deliver the best possible services. And the absolute, business outcome is you will continue to gain market share and your environment and grow revenue. I mean, that's the outcome every business wants. >> Yeah, it's all about speed. Everybody's kind of, everybody's last year was forced into digital transformation. It was sort of rushed into and compressed and now they get some time to do it right. And so modernizing apps, containers, dev ops developer led sort of initiatives are really key to modernization. All right, Eric, we've got, we're out of time but give us the bottom summary. We didn't talk, actually, we had to talk about the 3,200. Maybe you could give us a little insight on that before we close. >> Sure, so in addition to what we're doing with Fusion we also introduced a new elastic storage system, 3,200 and it's all flash. It gets 80 gigs, a second sustained at the node level and we can cluster them infinitely. So for example, I've got 10 of them. I'm delivering 800 gigabytes, a second sustained. And of course, AI, big data analytic workloads are extremely, extremely susceptible to bandwidth and or data transfer rate. That's what they need to deliver their application base properly. It comes with Spectrum Scale built in so that comes with it. So you get the advantage of Spectrum Scale. We talked a lot about Spectrum Scale because it is if you will, one of the three fathers of spectrum fusion. So it's ideal with it's highly parallel file system. It's used all over in high performance computing and super computing, in drug research, in health care in finance, probably about 80% of the world's largest banks in the world use Spectrum Scale already for AI, big data analytics. So the new 3,200 is an all flash version twice as fast as the older version and all the benefit of Spectrum Scale including the ability of seamlessly integrating into existing Spectrum Scale or ESS deployments. And when Fusion comes out, you'll be able to have Fusion. And you could also add 3,200 to it if you want to do that because of the capability of our global namespace and our single file system across edge, core and cloud. So that's the 3,200 in a nutshell, Dave. >> All right, give us a bottom line, Eric. And we got to go, what's the bumper sticker. >> Yeah, bumper sticker is, you got to ride the wave of containers and IBM storage is company that can take you there so that you win the big surfing context and get the big prize. >> Eric and Sam, thanks so much, guys. It's great to see you and miss you guys. Hopefully we'll get together soon. So get your jabs and we'll have a beer. >> All right. >> All right, thanks, Dave. >> Nice talking to you. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for "theCUBE." We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(smart gentle music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, got two great guests here from AWS, Bob Wise, General Manager of Kubernetes for Amazon Web Services and Peder Ulander, Head of product marketing for the enterprise developer and open-source at AWS. Gentlemen, you guys are the core leaders in the AWS open-source initiatives. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE here for Red Hat Summit. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Good to be here. >> So the innovation that's come from people building on top of the cloud has just been amazing. You guys, props to Amazon Web Services for constantly adding more and raising the bar on more services every year. You guys do that, and now public cloud has become so popular, and so important that now Hybrid has pushed the Edge. You got outpost with Amazon you see everyone following suit. It's pretty much clear vote of confidence from the customers that, Hybrid is the operating model of the future. And that really is about the Edge. So I want to chat with you about the open-source intersection there, so let's get into it. So we're here at Red Hat Summit. So Red Hat's an open-source company and timing is great for them. Now, part of IBM you guys have had a relationship with Red Hat for some time. Can you tell us about the partnership and how it's working together? >> Yeah, absolutely. Why don't I take that one? AWS and Red Hat have been strategic partners since, shoot, I think it's 2008 or so in the early days of AWS, when engaging with customers, we wanted to ensure that AWS was the best place for enterprises to run their Red Hat workloads. And this is super important when you think about, what Red Hat has accomplished with RHEL in the enterprise, it's running SAP, it's running Oracle's, it's running all different types of core business applications, as well as a lot of the new things that customers are innovating. And so having that relationship to ensure that not only did it work on AWS, but it actually scaled we had integration of services, we had the performance, the price all of the things that were so critical to customers was critical from day one. And we continue to evolve this relationship over time. As you see us coming into Red Hat Summit this year. >> Well, again, to the hard news here also the new service Red Hat OpenShift servers on AWS known as ROSA, the A for Amazon Red Hat OpenShift, A for Amazon Web Services, a clever acronym but really it's on AWS. What exactly is this service? What does it do? And who is it designed for? >> Well, I'll let me jump in on this one. Maybe let's start with the why? Why ROSA? Customers love using OpenShift, but they also want to use AWS. They want the best of both. So they want their peanut butter and their chocolate together in a single confection. A lot of those customers have deployed AWS, have deployed OpenShift on AWS. They want managed service simplified supply chain. We want to be able to streamline moving on premises, OpenShift workloads to AWS, naturally want good integration with AWS services. So as to the, what? Our new service jointly operated is supported by Red Hat and AWS to provide a fully managed to OpenShifts on AWS. So again, like lot of customers have been running OpenShift on AWS before this time, but of course they were managing it themselves typically. And so now they get a fully managed option with also simplified supply chain. Single support channels, single billing. >> You know, were talking before we came on camera about the acronym on AWS and people build on the clouds kind of like it's no big deal to say that, but I know it means something. I want to explain, you guys to explain this on because I know I've been scolded saying things on theCUBE that were kind of misspoken because it's easy to say, Oh yeah, I built that app. We built all this stuff on theCUBE was on AWS, but it's not on AWS. It means something from a designation standpoint what does on AWS mean? 'Cause this is OpenShift servers on AWS, we see this other companies have their products on AWS. This is specific designation. Can you share, please. >> John, when you see the branding of something like Red Hat on AWS, what that basically signals to our customers is that this is joint engineering work. This is the top of the strategic partners where we actually do a lot of joint engineering and work to make sure that we're driving the right integrations and the right experience, make sure that these things are accessible and discoverable in our console. They're treated effectively as a first-class service inside of the AWS ecosystem. So it's, there's not many of the on's, if you will. You think about SAP on VMware cloud, on AWS, and now Red Hat OpenShift on AWS, it really is that signal that helps give customers the confidence of tested, tried, trued, supported and validated service on top of AWS. And we think that's significantly better than anything else. It's easy to run an image on a VM and stuffed it into a cloud service to make it available, but customers want better, customer want tighter experiences. They want to be able to take advantage of all the great things that we have from a scale availability and performance perspective. And that's really what we're pushing towards. >> Yeah. I've seen examples specifically where when partners work with Amazon at that level of joint engineering, deeper partnerships. The results were pretty significant on the business side. So congratulations to you guys working with OpenShift and Red Hat, that's real testament to their product. But I got to ask you guys, pull the Amazon playbook out and challenge you guys, or just, create a new some commentary around the process of working backwards. Every time I talked to Andy Jassy, he always says, we work backwards from the customer and we get the requirements, and we're listening to customers. Okay, great. He loves that, he loves to say that it's true. I know that I've seen that. What is the customer work backwards document look like here? What is the, what was the need and what made this become such an important part of AWS? What was the, and then what are they saying now, now that the products out there? >> Well, OpenShift has a very wide footprint as does AWS. Some working backwards documents kind of write themselves, because now the customer demand is so strong that there's just no avoiding it. Now, it really just becomes about making sure you have a good plan so it becomes much more operational at that point. ROSA's definitely one of those services. We had so much demand and as a result, no surprise that we're getting a lot of enthusiasm for customers because so many of them asked us for it. (crosstalk) >> What's been the reaction in asking demand. That's kind of got the sense of that, but okay. So there's demand now, what's the what's the use cases? What are customers saying? What's the reaction been? >> Lot of the use cases are these Hybrid kind of use cases where a customer has a big OpenShift footprint. What we see from a lot of these customers is a strong demand for consistency in order to reduce IT sprawl. What they really want to do is have the smallest number of simplest environments they can. And so when customers that standardized on OpenShift really wants to be able to standardize OpenShifts, both in their on premises environment and on AWS and get managed service options just to remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> Hey, what's your take on the product marketing side of this, where you got open-source becoming very enterprise specific, Red Hat's been there for a very long time. I've been user of Red Hat since the beginning and following them, and Linux, obviously is Linux where that's come from. But what features specifically jump out in this offering that customers are resonating around? What's the vibe here? >> John, you kind of alluded to it early on, which is I don't know that I'd necessarily call it Hybrid but the reality is our customers have environments that are on premises in the cloud and all the way out to the Edge. Today, when you think of a lot of solutions and services, it's a fractured experience that they have between those three locations. And one of our biggest commitments to our customers, just to make things super simple, remove the complexity do all of the hard work, which means, customers are looking for a consistent experience environment and tooling that spans data center to cloud, to Edge. And that's probably the biggest kind of core asset here for customers who might have standardized on OpenShift in the data centers. They come to the cloud, they want to continue to leverage those skills. I think probably one of the, an interesting one is we headed down in this path, we all know Delta Airlines. Delta is a great example of a customer who, joint customer, who have been doing stuff inside of AWS for a long time. They've been standardizing on Red Hat for a long time and bringing this together just gave them that simple extension to take their investment in Red Hat OpenShift and leverage their experience. And again, the scale and performance of what AWS brings them. >> Next question, what's next for a Red Hat OpenShift on AWS in your work with Red Hat. Where does this go next? What's the big to-do item, what do you guys see as the vision? >> I'm glad you mentioned open-source collaboration at the start there. We're taking to point out is that AWS works on the Kubernetes project upstream as does the Red Hat teams. So one of the ways that we collaborate with the Red Hat team is in open-source. One of those projects is on a new project called ACK. It was on controllers for Kubernetes and this is a kind of Kubernetes friendly way for my customers to use an API to manage AWS services. So that's one of the things that we're looking forward to as that goes GA wobbling out into both ROSA and onto our other services. >> Awesome. I got to ask you guys this while you're here, because it's very rare to get two luminaries within AWS on the open-source side. This has been a huge build-out over the many, many years for AWS, and some people really kind of don't understand kind of the position. So take a minute to clarify the position of AWS on open-source. You guys are very active in a lot of projects. You mentioned upstream with Kubernetes in other areas. I've had many countries with Adrian Cockcroft on this, as well as others within AWS. Huge proponents web services, I mean, you go back to the original Amazon. I mean, Jeff Barr was saying 15 years ago some of those API's are still in play here. API's back in 15 years ago, that was kind of not main stream at that time. So you had open standards, really made Amazon web services successful and you guys are continuing it but as the modern era is very enterprise, like and you see a lot of legacy, you seeing a lot more operations that they're going to be driven by open technologies that you guys are investing in. I'll take a minute to explain what AWS is doing and what you guys care about and your mission? >> Yeah. Well, why don't I start? And then we'll kick it over to Bob 'cause I think Bob can also talk about some of the key contribution sides, but the best way to think about it is kind of in three different pillars. So let's start with the first one, which is, around the fact of ensuring that our customer's favorite open-source projects run best on AWS. Since 2006, we've been helping our customers operationalize their open-source investments and really kind of achieve that scale and focus more on how they use and innovate on the products versus how they set up and run. And for myself being an open-source since the late 90s, the biggest opportunity, yet challenge was the access to the technology, but it still required you as a customer to learn how to set up, configure, operationalized support and sustain. AWS removes that heavy lifting and, again, back to that earlier point from the beginning of AWS, we helped customers scale and implement their Apache services, their database services, all of these different types of open-source projects to make them really work exceptionally well on AWS. And back to that point, make sure that AWS was the best place for their open-source projects. I think the second thing that we do, and you're seeing that today with what we're doing with ROSA and Red Hat is we partner with open-source leaders from Red Hat to Redis and Confluent to a number of different players out there, Grafana, and Prometheus, to even foundations like the LF and the CNCF. We partner with these leaders to ensure that we're working together to grow grow the overall experience and the overall the overall pie, if you will. And this kind of gets into that point you were making John in that, the old world legacy proprietary stuff, there's a huge chance for refresh and new opportunity and rethinking or modernization if you will, as you come into the cloud having the expertise and the partnerships with these key players is as enterprises move in, is so crucial. And then the third piece I'd like to talk about that's important to our open-source strategies is really around contribution. We have a number of projects that we've delivered ourselves. I think the two most recent ones that really come top of mind for me is, what we did with Babel Fish, as well as with OpenSearch. So contributing and driving a true open-source project that helps our customers, take advantage of things like an SQL, a proprietary to open-source SQL conversion tool, or what we're doing to make Elasticsearch, the opportune or the primary open platform for our customers. But it's not just about those services, it's also collaborating with key industry initiatives. Bob's at the forefront of that with what we're doing with the CNCF around things, like Kubernetes and Prometheus et cetera, Bob you want to jump in on some of that? >> Sure, I think the one thing I would add here is that customers love using those open-source projects. The one of the challenges with them frequently is security. And this is job zero to AWS. So a lot of the collaboration work we do, a lot of the work that we do on upstream projects is go specifically around kind of security oriented things because that is what customers expect when they come to get a managed service at AWS. Some of those efforts are somewhat unsung because you generally do more work and less talk, in security oriented things. But projects across AWS, that's always a key contribution focus for us. >> Good way to call out security too. I think that's being built-in to the everything now, that's an operating model. People call it shift-left day two operations. Whatever you want to look at it. You got this nice formation going between under the hood kind of programmability of the infrastructure at scale. And then you have the modern application development which is just beginning, programmable DevSecOps. It's funny, Bob, I'd love to get your take on this because I remember in the 80s and during the Unix generation I used to peddle software under the table. Like, here's a copy of, you just don't tell anyone, people in the younger generation don't get the fact that it wasn't always open. And so now you have open and you have this idea of an enterprise that's going to be a system management system view. So you got engineering and you got computer science kind of coming together, this SRE middle layer. You're hearing that as a, kind of a new discipline. So DevOps kind of has won. I mean, we kind of knew this for many, many years. I said this in 2013 on theCUBE actually at re-inventing. I just recently shared that clip. But okay, now you've got SecOps, DevSecOps. So now you have an era where it's a system thinking and open-source is driving all of that. So can you share your perspective because this is kind of where the puck is going. It's an open to open world. That's going to have to be open and scalable. How does open-source and you guys take it to the next level to give that same scale and reliability? What's your vision? >> The key here is really around automation and what we're seeing you could look at Kubernetes. Kubernetes, is essentially a robot. It was like the early design of it was built around robotics principles. So it's a giant software robot and the world has changed. If you just look at the influx of all kinds of automation to not just the DevOps world but to all industries, you see a similar kind of trend. And so the world of IT operations person is changing from doing the work that the robot did and replacing it with the robot to managing large numbers of robots. And in this case, the robots are like a little early and a little hard to talk to. And so, you end up using languages like YAML and other things, but it turns out robots still just do what you tell them to do. And so one of the things you have to do is be really, really careful because robots will go and do whatever it is you ask them to do. On the other hand, they're really, really good at doing that. So in the security area, they take the research points to the largest single source of security issues, being people making manual mistakes. And a lot of people are still a little bit terrified if human beings aren't touching things on the way to production. In AWS, we're terrified if humans aren't touching it. And that is a super hard chasm to cross and open-source projects have really, are really playing a big role in what's really a IT wide migration to a whole new set of, not just tools, but organizational approaches. >> What's your reaction to that? Because we're talking that essentially software concepts, because if you write bad code, the code will execute what you did. So assuming it compiles left in the old days. Now, if you're going to scale a large scale operations that has dynamic capabilities, services being initiated in terminating tear down up started, you need the automation, but if you really don't design it right, you could be screwed. This is a huge deal. >> This is one reason why we've put so much effort into getops that you can think of it as a more narrowly defined subset of the DevOps world with a specific set of principles around using kind of simplified declarative approaches, along with robots that converge the desired state, converge the system to the desired state. And when you get into large distributed systems, you end up needing to take those kinds of approaches to get it to work at scale. Otherwise you have problems. >> Yeah, just adding to that. And it's funny, you said DevOps has won. I actually think DevOps has won, but DevOps hasn't changed (indistinct) Bob, you were right, the reality is it was founded back what quite a while ago, it was more around CICD in the enterprise and the closed data center. And it was one of those where automation and runbooks took addressed the fact that, every pair of hands between service requests and service delivery recreated or created an issue. So that growth and that mental model of moving from a waterfall, agile to DevOps, you built it, you run it, type of a model, I think is really, really important. But as it comes out into the cloud, you no longer have those controls of the data center and you actually have infinite scale. So back to your point of you got to get this right. You have to architect correctly you have to make sure that your code is good, you have to make sure that you have full visibility. This is where it gets really interesting at AWS. And some of the things that we're tying in. So whether we're talking about getops like what Bob just went through, or what you brought up with DevSecOps, you also have things like, AIOps. And so looking at how we take our machine learning tools to really implement the appropriate types of code reviews to assessing your infrastructure or your choices against well-architected principles and providing automated remediation is key, adding to that is observability, developers, especially in a highly distributed environment need to have better understanding, fidelity and touchpoints of what's going on with our application as it runs in production. And so what we do with regards to the work we have in observability around Grafana and Prometheus projects only accelerate that co-whole concept of continuous monitoring and continuous observability, and then kind of really, adding to that, I think it was last month, we introduce our fault injection simulator, a chaos engineering tool that, again takes advantage of all of this automation and machine learning to really help our developers, our customers operate at scale. And make sure that when they are releasing code, they're releasing code that is not just great in a small sense, it works on my laptop, but it works great in a highly distributed massively scaled environment around the globe. >> You know, this is one of the things that impresses me about Red Hat this year. And I've said this before all the covers events I've covered with them is that they get the cloud scale piece and I think their relationship with you guys shows that I think, DevOps has won, but it's the gift that keeps giving in open-source because what you have here is no longer a conversation about the cloud moving to the cloud. It's the cloud has become the operating model. So the conversation shifts to much more complicated enterprise or, and or intelligent Edge, and whether it's industrial or human or whatever, you got a data problem. So that's about a programmability issue at scale. So what's interesting is that Red Hat is on those bandwagon. It's an operating system. I mean, basically it's a distributed computing paradigm, essentially ala AWS concept as a cloud. Now it goes to the Edge, it's just distributed services via an open-source. So what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's back to the original point, John where I said, any CIO is thinking about their IT environment from data center to cloud, to Edge and the more consistency automation and, kind of tools that they're at their disposal to enable them to create that kind of, I think you started to talk about an infrastructure the whole as code infrastructure's code, it's now, almost everything is code. And that starts with the operating system, obviously. And that's why this is so critical that we're partnering with companies like Red Hat on our vision and their vision, because they aligned to where our customers were ultimately going. Bob, you want to, you want to add to that? >> Bob: No, I think you said it. >> John: You guys are crushing it. Bob, one quick question for you, while I got you here. You mentioned getops, I've heard this before, I kind of understand it. Can you just quickly define from your perspective. What is getops? >> Sure, well, getops is really taking the, I said before it's a kind of narrowed version of DevOps. Sure, it's infrastructure is code. Sure, you're doing things incrementally but the getops principle, it's back to like, what are the good, what are the best practices we are managing large numbers, large numbers of robots. And in this case, it's around this idea of declarative intent. So instead of having systems that reach into production and change things, what you do is you set up the defined declared state of the system that you want and then leave the robots to constantly work to converge the state there. That seems kind of nebulous. Let me give you like a really concrete example from Kubernetes, by the way the entire Kubernetes system design is based on this. You say, I want five pods running in production and that's running my application. So what Kubernetes does is it sits there and it constantly checks, Oh, I'm supposed to have five pods. Do I have five? Well, what happens if the machine running one of those pods goes away. Now, suddenly it goes and checks and says, Oh, I'm supposed to have five pods, but there's four pods. What action do I take to now try to get the system back to the state. So you don't have a system running, reaching out and checking externally to Kubernetes, you let Kubernetes do the heavy lifting there. And so it goes through, goes through a loop of, Oh, I need to start a new pod and then it converges the system state back to running five pods. So it's really taking that kind of declarative intent combined with constant convergence loops to fully production at scale. >> That's awesome. Well, we do a whole segment on state and stateless future, but we don't have time. I do want to summarize real quick. We're here at the Red Hat Summit 2021. You got Red Hat OpenShift on AWS. The big news, Bob and Peder tell us quickly in summary, why AWS? Why Red Hat? Why better together? Give the quick overview, Bob, we'll start with you. >> Bob, you want to kick us off? >> I'm going to repeat peanut butter and chocolate. Customers love OpenShift, they love managed services. They want a simplified operations, simplified supply chain. So you get the best of both worlds. You get the OpenShift that you want fully managed on AWS, where you get all of the security and scale. Yeah, I can't add much to that. Other than saying, Red Hat is powerhouse obviously on data centers it is the operating system of the data center. Bringing together the best in the cloud, with the best in the data center is such a huge benefit to our customers. Because back to your point, John, our customers are thinking about what are they doing from data center to cloud, to Edge and bringing the best of those pieces together in a seamless solution is so, so critical. And that that's why AW. (indistinct) >> Thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. I just want to give you guys a plug for you and being humble, but you've worked in the CNCF and standards bodies has been well, well known and I'm getting the word out. Congratulations for the commitment to open-source. Really appreciate the community. Thanks you, thank you for your time. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, Cube coverage here, covering Red Hat Summit 2021. I'm John Ferry, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (smart gentle music)

(gentle music) >> From around the globe, it's the Cube! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Well, welcome back to the Cube and our IBM Think initiative and today a fascinating subject with a dramatic shift that's going on in the Middle East and specifically in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. There is a significant partnership that has just recently been launched called SARIE, which is the Saudi Arabian real interbank express. And it basically is a, a dramatic move to make the kingdom cashless - and IBM is very much at the center of that. With me to talk about that role is Elhadji Cisse who at IBM is the MEA head of payments which of course is middle East and Africa. Elhadji, good to have you with us all the way from Dubai. Good to see you today. >> The pleasure's all mine. >> Good. Well, thank you for joining us. And let's, let's talk about this initiative. First off, the problem or at least the challenge that IBM and its partners are trying to solve and now how you're going about it. So let's just paint that 30,000 foot level, if you will, then we'll dive in a little deeper. >> All right. So if you look at the countries in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and in much of the region, Middle East and Africa, we have very cash driven society. And this provides lots of challenges in terms of government point of view, businesses' point of view. And even the consumer point of view. The cash transaction is becoming less and less traceable. You are less likely to see where the cash is going, where the cash is coming from. Maintaining the cash also is becoming more and more expensive in terms of security, in terms of recycling the cash, holding the cash, transacting the cash, all of that has to be taken into consideration. And the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with the help of the crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has a visionary vision 2030 to be put in place that will enable them to revolutionize the entire financial sector. There's a segment within that called the FSDB, the financial sector development program. And that program, within that program, they have a goal to develop a digital platform that will enhance and enable the society to go to a more cashless society and also help define a full end to end digital environment for the, for the kingdom. >> So when you think about the scale of this, I mean it's almost mindblowing in a way, because in many cases we've been talking about with various of your colleagues at IBM, different initiatives that involve an organization or involve maybe a more regional partnership or something like that. This is national, right? This is every banking institution in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Businesses, government entities. I mean, if you would, share with me some of the complexity of this in terms of a project of that scale and, and trying to bring together these disparate systems that all have a different kind of legacy overhang, if you will, right. And now you're trying to modernize everybody moving towards the same goal in 2030, I think it's mind blowing. >> Yeah, it is. It is, John. And if you look at the complexity, if I may speak a little bit about how complex it is, let's start with the team. The team has been a full diverse team. We have 10 different nationalities. We have team from America, Canada, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, China, UK, Pakistan, India. I mean, you name it. We have the whole globe pretty much. Every single region, Australia also was there. We had the team of that magnitude. In addition to that, as you rightfully stated, we're not building a system for a particular company or particular industry. It is for the entire country, all the banks of Saudi Arabia: the 11 national banks and the 12 additional international banks that are there. The global corporates, such as the Telco corporation, the oil corporation that are there. All of them needs to be onboarded into this including the 17 million or 20 some million population that are there. Now, the keys to this that we have is that our partners, MasterCard and Saudi payments, we have mandated ourself not to divide ourselves into three teams. We have to go with this as one single team. This was the motto of the project. This is what made us successful. We didn't differentiate between IBM, MasterCard, or Saudi payment. We all went together and addressed every single challenge as a team with the three different layers. And that's what helped us become successful with this engagement. >> So let's look at the initiatives specifically then in terms of the technology that's driving this. We talk a lot about the digital transformation that's occurring in the world. And again, it's kind of a catch all phrase, but this truly is a almost a magical transformation that you're going through. So how did you address the various workloads, what's going to be done where and how, and by whom. And then this integration that has to go on with that, not only are you centralizing a lot of these functions but you also have to distribute them to institutions across the kingdom. So if you would share a little bit of insight on that. >> Yeah. So if you look, if you look at the architecture that we have put in place, it's really a very agile and flexible architecture in a way that we have put in a central entity, which is the payment hub that is, that will handle all the payments solution that is there. And we put the flexibility for all the consumers because we have different banks. If you look at the banks industry, we have banks that are very mature, banks that have a medium level of maturity, and some that are absolutely not mature at all. And with this solution that we have to get involved, we have to be Azure 222 enabled, which is the new language that we will be using. Now, the infrastructure that we put in place have enabled that flexibility, otherwise we will never going to be successful. You cannot come to a country and say everybody needs to be onboarded into this language. Everybody needs to be operating this way. No, that will never going to work. We have taken that into consideration from the beginning. We knew this would be a challenge and we put different tools within IBM that we have put in place in order to go to mitigate those, such as the WTX, which is the Webster transformation exchanger that enables us to transform messages from and to Azure 222 or to Azure 222 or to any type of format that the customer have, any of the customer would be the banks. So we encapsulate that. Another challenge that we have is on the on boarding aspect. A lot of banks, again depending on their maturity level, we have to be ready with different environment for them to be, to catch up with us. Not everybody will be able to onboard on the same time. So by leveraging our RTVS solution, the rational testable service virtualization, it enables us to mitigate, to virtualize an entire ecosystem, make it look like it is a physical environment for the banks to use as a test as opposed to in the normal circumstances, purchasing additional hardware additional software, additional components and doing that, we're just virtualizing it for those who are ready for a system testing, those who are ready for a performance test, those who're ready for any type of non-functional requirements testing aspect. So these tools and this mechanism have helped us with our complex system integration methodology to mitigate this complexity and make it easy for the ecosystem to be onboarded and make us successful in this deal. >> And you raised a really interesting point in terms of the maturity of different levels of technology within the banking institutions there. You've got, you know, I'm sure, as you pointed out, some very small enterprises, right? Very small towns, very small institutions whose systems might not be as sophisticated or as mature, basically. So ultimately, how do you tie all that in together so that there might be a very large institution that has a very robust set of infrastructure and processes in place. And then you've got it communicating with a very small institution. You've got to be a great translator, right? I mean, IBM does here. Because you don't have them sometimes basically talking the same language, literally in this case. >> Yes, absolutely. And this is really our forte. We are the system integrators of choice in this region. And this goes without saying, because of our platform and our processes and our people that we put together. If you look at this, this example again, on the integration layer, we've enabled two lines of communication, two channels for the community. They could either go for API if they are very mature or they could go to MQ which is a low level of, I won't say a low level, but a very old fashioned way of communicating. On that aspect, they not only they have two protocols to get to us, they can use any message format that they want as long as we agree and we have an end check on the language that they're going to be using. And this integration layer or the system of integration that we have built that enables us to add that flexibility on both entities. >> So this was just launched. I mean literally just launched. What's your timeline in order to have full or I guess, reasonable implementation. >> That's a great question. Actually, the average is 24 to 30 months. We have broken the world record. We have implemented this magnificent solution within 18 months. It's actually a 17 month and a half of implementation. With the scope that we have, that is onboarding all the banks, having deferred net settlement, having the Azure 222, billing solution on it. We had the, we had the billing we had the dispute management, we had the single proxies. We have the debit cap and limit management and the portal solution. So we have all of these component within 17 and a half month. This breaks the world record of implementing an instant payment solution globally. >> We'll call Guinness and get you in the book then. It is a remarkable achievement. It really is. And you know, and you've talked about some of the the values here in terms of reduced transaction costs. Greater stability, greater security, greater transactional relationships, I imagine market liquidity, right? In your thought, I mean, tie all that together for our viewers in terms of impact and what you think this kind of partnership is going to create in terms of changing the way basically financial services are delivered in the kingdom. >> So it will change a lot. And the impact in the economy, like I said this is going to be on a three-fold. One, from a consumer point of view, you'll be able to save time in making your transactions. You will be able to trace your transactions and be able to have enough data to understand how you're managing your budget in your annual transaction. From a business point of view, you will be able to save yourself from theft. I mean, again, having cash in your business, it will tend to having more people coming in and stealing them from you either your employees or your customers or anybody else. But having a cashless business nobody can literally steal your money. They can only steal your phone or steal your gadget that you have for that aspect. Managing and maintaining cash also is a big problem. Now from a government point of view, this is where it gets very interesting, especially for Saudi Arabia, the taxation of the employees or the payment of it, the trustability of all of that and being able to trace it and being able to say, okay how much tax you will need to pay by end of the year without you doing the calculation. That information was already provided to the government. And as a central bank, the printing of cash, maintaining cash, storing cash, securing cash all of those costs will be going away. This is why the country wanted to go into a cashless society. >> Well, it's a fascinating endeavor. And certainly congratulations on that front. We're talking about real time payments and really making a significant difference in in how services are delivered in the kingdom and Elhadji, I certainly have appreciated your time here today and talking about it and and wish you all the best down the road. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it. >> All right. So we're talking about the journey to a cashless society in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what Elhadji is doing and what IBM is doing to make that happen. I'm John Wallace and thanks for joining us here on the Cube!

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome back to this cube conversation, on cube on cloud startups. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're wrapping up the closing keynote fireside chat of the AWS showcase, the hottest startups in data and cloud. We've got some great guests here to eluminate what's happened and why it's important. And Michael Skok who's the founding partner, Michael Skok founding partner of Underscore VC, Mike Feinstein, principal business development manager, and the best Ben Haynes CIO advisor Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Gentlemen, thank you for joining me for this closing keynote for the AWS showcase. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, first of all-- >> Happy to be here >> Guys, do you guys have a unique background from startup funding, growing companies, managing these partners at AWS and being a practitioner with Ben here. The first question I have is, what is the real market opportunity? We've heard from McKinsey that there's a trillion dollars of unlocked value in cloud and that really is going to come from all enterprises big and small. So the question is that that's what every wants to know. What's the secret answer key to the to the test if you are a business. 'Cause you don't want to be on the wrong side of cloud history here. There is a playbook, there's some formation of patterns and there's some playbook things happening out there. How do you guys see this? >> Well, I can try to take a crack at that. First of all I think, there's not only one playbook, you know, only one recipe. If it's a trillion dollar opportunity, that's in the aggregate. There's many different types of opportunities. I think you could have existing companies that are maybe older line companies that need to change the way they're doing things. You can have the younger companies that are trying to take advantage of all the data they've already collected and try to get more value out of it. There could be some radically different types of opportunities with newer technology. I think, you know, for each company just like each of the companies here at the showcase today, they are targeting some, you know, segment of this. Each of those segments is already large. And I think you're going to see a wide range of solutions taking hold here. >> Yeah, cloud drives a lot of value. Michael, I want to get your thoughts. You know, you've seen the software revolution you know, over the years. This time it seems to be accelerated, the time to value, if you're a startup. I mean, you couldn't ask for the perfect storm for our innovation if you're coming out of MIT, Stanford, any college. If you're not even going to school you can get in cloud, do anything. Starting software now is not as hard as it was or its different. What's your perspective because you know, these companies are adding treated value and they're going into an enterprise market that wants scale, they want the reliability. How do you see this evolving? >> You know, the very first time I saw Bezos get on stage and pitch AWS he said one thing which is, "We take away all the hard stuff about starting a software business and let you focus on the innovation." And I think that's still applies. So you're dead right John. And honestly, most founders don't want to spend any time on anything other than unique piece of innovation that they're going to deliver for their customers. So, I think that is fabulous news. I'm going to joke for a second, so I think we're all under shooting on this number. I mean, the reality is that every part of compute infrastructure that we talk about today was built from an infrastructure that's you know, decades old. By which I mean 30 to 50 decades in some 30 to 50 years in some cases. And we look forward in 30 to 50 years, we won't be talking about cloud or everything else. We'll be just talking about computing or whatever it is that we want to talk about at the edge. Or the application of data that you know, in a car and an ARVR heads up display that's helping surgeons work across the world. The fact is the only way this is really going to work is on the cloud. So I think it's a multi-trillion dollar opportunity, we're just taking a snapshot of it right now. And we're in an interesting point because of course digital transformation has been rapidly accelerated. I mean, there's all these jokes about you know, we've had five years of transformation in five months. I don't really care what the number is but what is obvious is that we couldn't have gone off to work and to play and to teach and all these other things without the cloud. And we just took it for granted but a year ago, that's what we all did and look, they're thriving. This whole thing is that, you know, a live broadcast that we're doing on the cloud. So yeah, I think it's a very big opportunity and whatever sector I think to Mike's point, that you look at and all the companies that you've seen this morning prove that, if you want to innovate today, you start on the cloud. Your cloud native as I would say. And as you grow, you will be a cloud assumed. It will be the basis on which everybody wants to access your products and services. So I'm excited about the future if you can't tell. >> I totally subscribe to that. Ben, I want to get your take as the CIO, now advisor to companies. If you're going to look at what Michael's laying out, which is born in the cloud native, they have an advantage, an inherent advantage right out of the gate. They have speed agility and scale. If you're an existing business you say, "Wait a minute I'm going to be competed against these hot startups." There's some serious fear of missing out and fear of getting screwed, right? I mean, you might go out of business. So this is the real threat. This is not just talked about, there's real examples now playing out. So as a practitioner, thinking about re-architecting or rejuvenating or pivoting or just being competitive. It's really the pressure's there. How do you see this? >> Yeah I know it really is. And every enterprise company and through every decade is it's a buyer versus build conversation. And with the cloud opportunities, you can actually build a lot quicker or you can leverage companies that can even go quicker than you that have a focus on innovation. 'Cause sometimes enterprise companies, it's hard to focus on the really cool stuff and that's going to bring value but maybe it won't. So if you can partner with someone and some of these companies that you just showcase, start doing some amazing things. That can actually help accelerate your own internal innovation a lot quicker than trying to spool up your own team. >> We heard some companies talking about day two operations lift and shift, not a layup either. I mean, lift and shift if not done properly as it's well discussed. And McKinsey actually puts that in their report as there's other point outs. It's not a no brainer. I mean, it's a no brainer to go to the cloud but if you lift and shift without really thinking it through or remediating anything, it could be, it could cost more. And you got the CAPEX and OPEX dynamics. So, certainly cloud is happening and this kind of gives a great segue into our next topic that I'd love to get you guys to weigh in on. And that is the business model, the business structure, business organization. Michael you brought up some interesting topics around, some of the new ideas that could be, you know, decentralized or just different consumption capabilities on both sides of the equation. So, the market's there, trillions and trillions of dollars are shifting and the spoils will go to the ones who are smart and agile and fast. But the business model, you could have it, you could be in the right market, but the wrong business model. Who wants to take the first cut at that? >> Mike do you want to go? >> Sure, I'd be happy to. I think that, you know, I mean again, there's not there only going to be one answer but I think one of the things that really make sense is that the business models can be much more consumption-based. You're certainly not going to see annual software licenses that you saw in the old world. Things are going to be much more consumption-based obviously software is a service type of models. And you're going to see, I think lots of different innovations. I've also seen a lot of companies that are starting up kind of based on open source as like a first foray. So there's an open source project that really catches hold. And then a company comes up behind it to both enhance it and to also provide support and to make it a real enterprise offering. But they get there early quick adoption of the frontline engineers by starting off with an open source project. And that's a model that I've seen work quite well. And I think it's a very interesting one. So, you know, the most important thing is that the business model has to be one that's as flexible as what the solutions are that you're trying to get the customers to adopt. The old way of everything being kind of locked in and rigid isn't going to work in this world 'cause you have to just really be agile. >> I want to come back to you Mike in a second on this 'cause I know Amazon's got some innovative go to market stuff. Michael you've written about this, I've read many blog posts on your side about SaaS piece. What's your take on business structure. I mean, obviously with remote, it's clear people are recognizing virtual companies are available. You mentioned you know, edge and compute, and these new app, these emerging technologies. Does the business structure and models shift? Do you have to be on certain side of this business model innovation? How do you view? 'Cause you're seeing the startups who are usually crazy at first, but then they become correct at the end of the day. What's your take? >> Well first of all, I love this debate because it's over. We used to have things that were not successful that would become shelfware. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. There is no shelfware. You're either live and being used or you're dead. So the great news about this is, it's very visible. You know, you can measure every person's connection to you for how long and what they're doing. And so the people that are smart, don't start with this question, the business model. They start with what am I actually doing for my user that's in value them? So I'll give you some examples like build on Mike's team. So, you know, I backed a company called Acquia. But it was based on an open source project called Drupal. Which was initially used for content management. Great, but people started building on it and over time, it became used for everything from the Olympics and hosting, you know, theirs to the Grammy's, to you know, pick your favorite consumer brand that was using it to host all of their different brands and being very particular about giving people the experiences. So, it's now a digital experience platform. But the reason that it grew successfully as a company is because on top of the open source project, we could see what people were doing. And so we built what in effect was the basis for them to get comfortable. By the way, Amazon is very fundamental partner in this was, became an investor extremely helpful. And again, took away all the heavy lifting so we could focus on the innovation. And so that's an example of what's going on. And the model there is very simple. People are paying for what they use to put that digital experience of that, to create a great customer journey. And for people to have the experience that obviously you know, makes the brand look good or makes the audience feel great if it's the Grammy's or whatever it is. So I think that's one example, but I'll give you two others because they are totally different. And one of the most recent investments we made is in a company called Coder. Which is a doc spelled backwards. and it's a new kind of doc that enables people to collaborate and to bring data and graphics and workflow and everything else, all into the simplicity of what's like opening up a doc. And they don't actually charge anybody who uses their docs. They just charge for people who make their docs. So its a make a best pricing, which is very interesting. They've got phenomenal metrics. I mean they're like over 140% net dollar retention, which is astoundingly good. And they grew over three and a half times last year. So that's another model, but it's consumer and it's, you know, as I said, make a price. And then, you know, another company we've been involved with if I look at it way back was Demand Web. It was the first e-commerce on demand company. We didn't charge for the software at all. We didn't charge for anything in fact. what we did was to take a percentage of the sales that went through the platform. And of course everybody loved that because, you know, if we were selling more or getting better uplift then everybody started to do very well. So, you know, the world's biggest brands moved online and started using our platform because they didn't want to create all that infrastructure. Another totally different model. And I could go on but the point is, if you start from the customer viewpoint like what are you doing for the customer? Are you helping them sell more? Or are you helping them build more effective business processes or better experiences? I think you've got a fantastic opportunity to build a great model in the cloud. >> Yeah, it's a great point. I think that's a great highlight also call out for expectations become the experience, as the old saying goes. If a customer sees value in something, you don't have to be tied to old ways of selling or pricing. And this brings up, Ben, I want to tie in you in here and maybe bring Mike back in. As an enterprise, it used to be the old adage of, well startups are unreliable, blah, blah, blah, you know, they got to get certified and enterprise usually do things more complicated than say consumer businesses. But now Amazon has all kinds of go to market. They have the marketplace, they have all kinds of the partner networks. This certification integration is a huge part of this. So back to, you know, Michael's point of, if you're dead you're dead or knows it, but if you're alive you usually have some momentum it's usually well understood, but then you have to integrate. So it has to be consumable for the enterprise. So Ben, how do you see that? Because at the end of the day, there's this desire for the better product and the better use case. That can, how do I procure it? Integration? These used to be really hard problems. Seems to be getting easier or are they? What's your take? >> Not 100%. I mean, even five years ago you would have to ask a lot of startups for a single sign on and as table stakes now. So the smart ones are understanding the enterprise principles that we need and a lot of it is around security. And then, they're building that from the start, from the start of their products. And so if you get out of that security hurdle, the stability so far is a lot more improved because they are, you know, a lot more focused and moving in a really, really quick way which can help companies, you know, move quickly. So definitely seen an improvement and there's still, the major entry point is credit card, small user base, small pricing, so you're not dealing with procurement. And building your way up into the big purchase model, right? And that model hasn't changed except the start is a lot lot quicker and a lot easier to get going. >> You know, I remember the story of the Amazon web stores, how they won the CIA contract is someone put a test on a credit card and IBM had the deal in their back pocket. They had the Ivory Tower sales call, Michael, you know the playbook on enterprise sales, you know, you got the oracles and you guys call it the top golf tournament smoothing and then you got the middle and then you got the bottoms up you got the, you know, the data dogs of the world who can just come in with freemium. So there's different approaches. How do you guys see that? Michael and Mike, I'd love for you to weigh in on this because this is really where there's no one answer, but depending upon the use case, there's certain motions that work better. Can you elaborate on which companies should pay attention to what and how customers should understand how they're buying? >> Yeah, I can go first on that. I think that first of all, with every customer it's going to be a little different situation, depends on the scale of the solution. But I find that, these very large kind of, you know, make a huge decision and buy some really big thing all at once. That's not happening very much anymore. As you said John, people are kind of building up it's either a grassroots adoption that then becomes an enterprise sale, or there is some trials or smaller deployments that then build up at enterprise sales. Companies can't make those huge mistake. So if they're going to make a big commitment it's based on confidence, that's come from earlier success. And one of the things that we do at AWS in addition to kind of helping enterprises choose the right technology partners, such as many of the companies here today. We also have solutions partners that can help them analyze the market and make the choice and help them implement it. So depending on the level of help that they need, there's lots of different resources that are going to be available to help them make the right choice the first time. >> Michael, your thoughts on this, because ecosystems are a part of the entire thing and partnering with Amazon or any cloud player, you need to be secure. You need to have all the certifications. But the end of the day, if it works, it works. And you can consume it whatever way you can. I mean, you can buy download through the marketplace. You can go direct, it's free. What do you see as the best mix of go to market from a cloud standpoint? Given that there's a variety of different use cases. >> Well, I'm going to play off Ben and Mike on this one and say, you know, there's a perfect example of what Ben brought up, which is single sign on. For some companies, if you don't have that you just can't get in the door. And at the other extreme to what Mike is saying, you know, there are reasons why people want to try stuff before they buy it. And so, you've got to find some way in between these two things to either partner with the right people that have the whole product solution to work with you. So, you know, if you don't have single sign on, you know, go work with Okta. And if you don't have all the certification that's needed well, work with AWS and you know, take it on that side of cash and have better security than anybody. So there's all sorts of ways to do this. But the bottom line is I think you got to be able to share value before you charge. And I'll give you two examples that are extreme in our portfolio, because I think it will show the sort of the edge with these two things. You know, the first one is a company called Popcart. It's been featured a lot in the press because when COVID hit, nobody could find whatever it was, that TP or you know, the latest supplies that they wanted. And so Popcart basically made it possible for people to say, "Okay, go track all the favorite suppliers." Whether it's your Walmarts or your Targets or your Amazons, et cetera. And they would come back and show you the best price and (indistinct) it cost you nothing. Once you started buying of course they were getting (indistinct) fees and they're transferring obviously values so everybody's doing well. It's a win-win, doesn't cost the consumer anything. So we love those strategies because, you know, whenever you can make value for people without costing them anything, that is great. The second one is the complete opposite. And again, it's an interesting example, you know, to Ben's point about how you have to work with existing solutions in some cases, or in some cases across more things to the cloud. So it's a company called Cloud Serum. It's also one we've partnered with AWS on. They basically help you save money as you use AWS. And it turns out that's important on the way in because you need to know how much it's going to cost to run what you're already doing off premises, sorry off the cloud, into the cloud. And secondly, when you move it there to optimize that spend so you don't suddenly find yourself in a situation where you can't afford to run the product or service. So simply put, you know, this is the future. We have to find ways to specifically make it easy again from the customer standpoint. The get value as quickly as possible and not to push them into anything that feels like, Oh my God, that's a big elephant of a risk that I don't obviously want to take on. >> Well, I'd like to ask the next question to Michael and Ben. This is about risk management from an enterprise perspective. And the reason Michael we just want to get you in here 'cause you do risk for living. You take risks, you venture out and put bets on horses if you will. You bet on the startups and the growing companies. So if I'm a customer and this is a thing that I'm seeing both in the public and private sector where partnerships are super critical. Especially in public right now. Public private partnerships, cybersecurity and data, huge initiatives. I saw General Keith Alexander talking about this, about his company and a variety of reliance on the private problem. No one winning formula anymore. Now as an enterprise, how do they up level their skill? How do you speak to enterprises who are watching and learning as they're taking the steps to be cloud native. They're training their people, they're trying to get their IT staff to be superpowers. They got to do all these. They got to rejuvenate, they got to innovate. So one of the things that they got to take in is new partnerships. How can an enterprise look at these 10 companies and others as partners? And how should the startups that are growing, become partners for the enterprise? Because if they can crack that code, some say that's the magical formula. Can you guys weigh in on that? (overlapping chatter) >> Look, the unfortunate starting point is that they need to have a serious commitment to wanting to change. And you're seeing a lot of that 'cause it is popping up now and they're all nodding their heads. But this needs people, it needs investment, and it needs to be super important, not just to prior, right? And some urgency. And with that behind you, you can find the right companies and start partnering to move things forward. A lot of companies don't understand their risk profile and we're still stuck in this you know, the old days of global network yet infiltrated, right? And that's sort of that its like, "Oh my God, we're done." And it's a lot more complicated now. And there needs to be a lot of education about the value of privacy and trust to our consumers. And once the executive team understands that then the investments follow. The challenge there is everyone's waiting, hoping that nothing goes wrong. When something goes wrong, oh, we better address that, right? And so how do we get ahead of that? And you need a very proactive CSO and CIO and CTO and all three if you have them really pushing this agenda and explaining what these risks are. >> Michael, your thoughts. Startups can be a great enabler for companies to change. They have their, you know, they're faster. They bring in new tech to the scenario scene. What's your analysis? >> Again, I'll use an example to speak to some of the things that Ben's talking about. Which is, let's say you decide you want to have all of your data analysis in the cloud. It turns out Amazon's got a phenomenal set of services that you can use. Do everything from ingest and then wrangle your data and get it cleaned up, and then build one of the apps to gain insight on it and use AI and ML to make that whole thing work. But even Amazon will be the first to tell you that if you have all their services, you need a team understand the development, the operations and the security, DevSecOps, it's typically what it's referred to. And most people don't have that. If you're sure and then say you're fortune 1000, you'll build that team. You'll have, you know, a hundred people doing that. But once you get below that, even in the mid tier, even in a few billion dollar companies, it's actually very hard to have those skills and keep them up to date. So companies are actually getting built that do all of that for you, that effectively, you know, make your services into a product that can be run end to end. And we've invested in one and again we partnered with Amazon on gold Kazina. They effectively make the data lake as a service. And they're effectively building on top of all the Amazon services in orchestrating and managing all that DevSecOps for you. So you don't need that team. And they do it in, you know, days or weeks, not months or years. And so I think that the point that Ben made is a really good one. Which is, you know, you've got to make it a priority and invest in it. And it doesn't just happen. It's a new set of skills, they're different. They require obviously everything from the very earliest stage of development in the cloud, all the way through to the sort of managing and running a bit. And of course maintaining it all securely and unscalable, et cetera. (overlapping chatter) >> It's interesting you bring up that Amazon's got great security. You mentioned that earlier. Mike, I wanted to bring you in because you guys it's graduating a lot of startups, graduating, it's not like they're in school or anything, but they're really, you're building on top of AWS which is already, you know, all the SOC report, all the infrastructure's there. You guys have a high bar on security. So coming out of the AWS ecosystem is not for the faint of heart. I mean, you got to kind of go through and I've heard from many startups that you know, that's a grueling process. And this is, should be good news for the enterprise. How are you guys seeing that partnership? What's the pattern recognition that we can share with enterprises adopting startups coming on the cloud? What can they expect? What are some best practices? What are the things to look for in adopting startup technologies? >> Yeah, so as you know we have a shared security model where we do the security for the physical infrastructure that we're operating, and then we try to share best practices to our partners who really own the security for their applications. Well, one of the benefits we have particularly with the AWS partner network is that, we will help vet these companies, we will review their security architecture, we'll make recommendations. We have a lot of great building blocks of services they can use to build their applications, so that they have a much better chance of really delivering a more secure total application to the enterprise customer. Now of course the enterprise customers still should be checking this and making sure that all of these products meet their needs because that is their ultimate responsibility. But by leveraging the ecosystem we have, the infrastructure we have and the strength of our partners, they can start off with a much more secure application or use case than they would if they were trying to build it from scratch. >> All right. Also, I want to get these guys out of the way in on this last question, before we jump into the wrap up. products and technologies, what is the most important thing enterprises should be focused on? It could be a list of three or four or five that they should be focused on from emerging technologies or a technology secret sauce perspective. Meaning, I'm going to leverage some new things we're going to build and do or buy from cloud scale. What are the most important product technology issues they need to be paying attention to? >> I think I'll run with that first. There's a major, major opportunity with data. We've gone through this whole cycle of creating data lakes that tended to data's forms and big data was going to solve everything. Enterprises are sitting on an amazing amount of information. And anything that can be done to, I actually get insights out of that, and I don't mean dashboards, PI tools, they're like a dime a dozen. How can we leverage AI and ML to really start getting some insights a lot quicker and a lot more value to the company from the data they owns. Anything around that, to me is a major opportunity. >> Now I'm going to go just a little bit deeper on that 'cause I would agree with all those points that Ben made. I think one of the real key points is to make sure that they're really leveraging the data that they have in kind of in place. Pulling in data from all their disparate apps, not trying to generate some new set of data, but really trying to leverage what they have so they can get live information from the disparate apps. Whether it's Salesforce or other systems they might have. I also think it's important to give users the tools to do a lot of their own analytics. So I think definitely, you know, kind of dashboards are a dime a dozen as Ben said, but the more you can do to make it really easy for users to do their own thing, so they're not relying on some central department to create some kind of report for them, but they can innovate on their own and do their own analytics of the data. I think its really critical to help companies move faster. >> Michael? >> I'll just build on that with an example because I think Ben and Mike gave two very good things, you know, data and making it self service to the users et cetera So, an example is one of our companies called Salsify, which is B2B commerce. So they're enabling brands to get their products out into the various different channels the day that people buy them on. Which by the way, an incredible number of channels have been created, whether it's, you know, Instagram at one extreme or of course you know, traditional commerce sites is another. And it's actually impossible to get all of the different capabilities of your product fully explained in the right format in each of those channels humanly. You actually have to use a computer. So that highlights the first thing I was thinking is very important is, what could you not do before that you can now do in the cloud? And you know, do in a distributed fashion. So that's a good example. The second thing is, and Mike said it very well, you know, if you can give people the data that Ben was referring to in a way that they line a business user, in this case, a brand manager, or for example the merchandiser can actually use, they'll quickly tell you, "Oh, these three channels are really not worth us spending a lot of money on. We need waste promotion on them. But look at this one, this one's really taking up. This TikTok thing is actually worth paying attention to. Why don't we enable people to buy, you know, products there?" And then focus in on it. And Salsify, by the way, is you know, I can give you stats with every different customer they've got, but they've got huge brands. The sort of Nestlés, the L'Oreals et cetera. Where they're measuring in terms of hundreds of percent of sales increase, because of using the data of Ben's point and making itself service to Mike's point. >> Awesome. Thought exercise for this little toss up question, for anyone who wants to grab it. If you had unlimited budget for R&D, and you wanted to play the long game and you wanted to take some territory down in the future. What technology and what area would you start carving out and protecting and owning or thinking about or digging into. There's a variety of great stuff out there and you know, being prepared for potentially any wildcards, what would it be? >> Well, I don't mind jumping in. That's a tough question. Whatever I did, I would start with machine learning. I think we're still just starting to see the benefits of what this can do across all of different applications. You know, if you look at what AWS has been doing, we, you know, we recently, many of our new service offerings are integrating machine learning in order to optimize automatically, to find the right solution automatically, to find errors in code automatically. And I think you're going to see more and more machine learning built into all types of line of business applications. Sales, marketing, finance, customer service. You know, you already see some of it but I think it's going to happen more and more. So if I was going to bet on one core thing, it would be that. >> I'll jump on that just because I-- >> You're VC, do you think about this as an easy one for you. >> Well, yes or no (indistinct) that I've been a VC now for too long. I was you know (indistinct) for 21 years. I could have answered that question pretty well but in the last 19 of becoming a VC, I've become ruined by just capital being put behind things. But in all seriousness, I think Mike is right. I think every single application is going to get not just reinvented completely reimagined by ML. Because there's so much of what we do that there is indeed managing the data to try to understand how to improve the business process. And when you can do that in an automated fashion and with a continuous close loop that improves it, it takes away all the drudgery and things like humans or the other extreme, you know, manufacturing. And in-between anything that goes from border to cash faster is going to be good for business. And that's going to require ML. So it's an exciting time ahead. That's where we're putting our money. >> Ben, are you going to go off the board here or you're going to stay with machine learning and dating, go wild card here. Blockchain? AR? VR? (overlapping chatter) >> Well I'd have to say ML and AI applying to privacy and trust. Privacy and trust is going to be a currency that a lot of companies need to deal with for a long time coming. And anything you can do to speed that up and honestly remove the human element, and like Michael said, there's a lot of, before there's a lot of services on AWS that are very creative. There's a lot of security built-in But it's that one S3 bucket that someone left open on the internet, that causes the breach. So how are we automating that? Like how do we take the humans out of this process? So we don't make human errors to really get some security happening. >> I think trust is an interesting one. Trust is kind of data as well. I mean, communities are, misinformation, we saw that with elections, huge. Again, that's back to data. We're back to data again. >> You know, John if I may, I'd like to add to that though. It's a good example of something that none of us can predict. Which is, what will be a fundamentally new way of doing this that we haven't really thought of? And, you know, the blockchain is effectively created a means for people to do distributed computing and also, you know, sharing of data, et cetera. Without the human being in the middle and getting rid of many of the intermediaries that we thought were necessary. So, I don't know whether it's the next blockchain or there's blockchain itself, but I have a feeling that this whole issue of trust will become very different when we have new infrastructure. >> I think I agree with everyone here. The data's key. I come back down to data whether you're telling the sovereignty misinformation, the data is there. Okay. Final, final question before we wrap up. This has been amazing on a more serious note for the enterprise folks out there and people in general and around the world. If you guys could give a color commentary answer to, what the post COVID world will look like. With respect to technology adoption, societal impact and technology for potentially good and aura for business. Now that we're coming closer to vaccines and real life again, what is the post COVID world going to look like? What do we learn from it? And how does that translate into everyday in real life benefits? >> Well, I think one of the things that we've seen is that people have realized you can do a lot of work without being in the office. You could be anywhere as long as you can access the data and make the insights from it that you need to. And so I think there's going to be an expectation on the part of users, that there'll be able to do that all the time. They'll be able to do analytics on their phone. They'll be able to do it from wherever they are. They'll be able to do it quickly and they'll be able to get access to the information that they need. And that's going to force companies to continue to be responsive to the expectations and the needs of their users, so that they can keep people productive and have happy employees. Otherwise they're going to go work somewhere else. >> Michael, any thoughts? Post COVID, what do we learn? What happens next? >> You said one key thing Mike, expectations. And I think we're going to live in a very difficult world because expectations are completely unclear. And you might think it's based on age, or you might think it's based on industry or geography, etc. The reality is people have such wildly different expectations and you know, we've tried to do surveys and to try and understand, you know, whether there are some patterns here. I think it's going to be one word, hybrid. And how we deal with hybrid is going to be a major leadership challenge. Because it's impossible to predict what people will do and how they will behave and how they want to for example, go to school or to you know, go to work or play, et cetera. And so I think the third word that I would use is flexibility. You know, we just have to be agile and flexible until we figure out, you know, how this is going to settle out, to get the best of both worlds, because there's so much that we've learned that has been to your point, really beneficial. The more productivity taking out the community. But there's also a lot of things that people really want to get back to such as social interaction, you know, connecting with their friends and living their lives. >> Ben, final word. >> So I'll just drill in on that a little bit deeper. The war on talent, if we talk about tech, if we talk a lot about data, AI, ML. That it's going to be a big differentiator for the companies that are willing to maintain a work from home and your top level resources are going to be dictating where they're working from. And they've seen our work now. And you know, if you're not flexible with how you're running your organization, you will start to lose talent. And companies are going to have to get their head around that as we move forward. >> Gentlemen, thank you very much for your time. That's a great wrap up to this cube on cloud, the AWS startup showcase. Thank you very much on behalf of Dave Vellante, myself, the entire cube team and Amazon web services. Thank you very much for closing out the keynote. Thanks for your time. >> Thank you John and thanks Amazon for a great day. >> Yeah, thank you John. >> Okay, that's a wrap for today. Amazing event. Great keynote, great commentary, 10 amazing companies out there growing, great traction. Cloud startup, cloud scale, cloud value for the enterprise. I'm John Furrier on behalf of theCUBE and Dave Vellante, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> [Female VoiceOver] From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with our leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello and welcome to the CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier. Cloud Native News and industry coverage. There are two great guests here to break down what's going on in Cloud Native. we got Rancher Labs, Jim Sarale, Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances and Bryce Cracco Product Manager for NetApp HCI. Guys, thanks for coming on this breaking news around Cloud Native. I mean, this has been really all about Cloud Native for the past year and a half, but this year, certainly with the pandemic, the modern applications are being pushed out faster and faster. A lot of pressure. So congratulations on this announcement, Jim set us up. What is the News? I saw some articles, we've got a story get hit and SiliconANGLE. What's the news with NetApp with Rancher Labs? >> Yeah, thank you. And you're right, we are seeing a vast push with, with the crazy times that we're in right now, but the news really is, you know, Rancher formerly launching our OEM program and launching that with with our Marquee partner with NetApp, you know, when companies get to a certain juncture, you know, an OEM relationship and sometimes means just more of a marketing type relationship but as everybody knows, Rancher is, you know, one of the industry leading multicloud, multi Kubernetes cluster management solutions, open source. And you know, what that means is we're an agnostic play for, for those that are trying to leverage Kubernetes, we've talked with NetApp, we struck a deal with them for them to embed us on their HCI platform. And when you talk about our early in program and, and the things that it entails is really around, you know, how do you get contract vehicles to map go to market strategies? How do you get support, engineering, integration, development, all of those things align with partners. It's not an easy task. It's very important to the go to the kind of go to market strategy that we have. And I think, you know, not only with the market adoption around Kubernetes, Ranchers agnostic play in open source and then obviously, you know, Ranchers come a long way. Our products tried and true. We have nearly 500 customers. We're seeing those customers lean back into some of the OEMs and to the software vendors to have them do more and get them more, I guess, ready for the things that they're doing, an IT operations, how the have dev you know, the app DevOps folks are trying to do more and get applications to market faster. So we're really suited well for organizations like NetApp to take our technology bundle in it and really make it better for their customers experience. So the program allows for contract vehicles, direct integration, support, engineering, pricing, because not one size fits all. As you see the evolution from On-prem to cloud IoT Edge, a lot of different devices from 100s of dollars to 1000s. So Ranchers committed to making sure that we align our products and pricing to fit some of those low compute platforms and also be able to right size our business model to make them successful. >> Well, congratulations, I love the term OEM still kind of hangs around, I'm old enough to remember when it was actually equipment not software, original equipment manufacturer, which essentially, you're essentially letting NetApp embed your code into their equipment or their software. But this is the relationship of a channel and indirect channel for Rancher which you guys are launching, which is total validation. Appreciate that, I like to get into the NetApp side. Bryce, if you don't mind, because, you know, obviously cloud's not new to NetApp storage becoming more critical, hybrid clouds more important. Tell us about the transformation of HCI because I think this is where Kubernetes and it starts to fit in when you see the cloud native surge coming in. How are you guys looking at this opportunity? >> Yeah, you bet when you, when you look at it from a converged infrastructure or hyper-converged infrastructure or hybrid cloud infrastructure perspective. It's always been about simplicity, right. We're not doing anything in the HCI market in general that can't be otherwise done. It's just making it much simpler, reducing that that learning curve and reducing that time to value that our IT customers get. And so I think we saw it, you know, converged infrastructure and hyper-converged infrastructure, all start out with virtualization is kind of the top layer that's facilitated but now obviously Kubernetes is becoming table stakes in the enterprise. So I think we're seeing all the vendors in the space, put in some kind of automatic deployment of Kubernetes or some easier deployment of Kubernetes, making Kubernetes that top layer rather than just virtualization. And, you know, this is a really great opportunity for us at NetApp to be able to do that. Not only with just any Kubernetes package but one that's very well regarded and beloved in the DevOps communities and that's Rancher. So what we have here is kind of something that's great for IT, and really great for DevOps in terms of being able to centralize multi cluster management across a hybrid cloud ecosystem and really empower those DevOps teams, what they to do what they need to do but still keeping IT at the center of it. >> You know, it's interesting, you know, shift left for security DevOps here, DevSecOps, it's all kind of happening with software, software defined, software operated. This is what this is the new operating environment. What is the use cases that presents itself well for this is it from a customer standpoint? Is it they're looking for certain things when you look at the product definition, you say, okay we have NetApp, we have Rancher. Take me through that thinking, what's the customer use case? What are they getting out of this? >> Sure, I think there's a variety of use cases where you see Kubernetes coming into play. And one of the great things about NetApp HCI, is it's not just simple infrastructure but it's also very scalable infrastructure. So that's where a lot of these types of products fall down. As we get to such such a scale point they don't work because of our scalability and our ability to handle mixed workloads. We can really handle any number of use cases. So in a Kubernetes context, this could be anything from IT departments who are going to containerized applications for their own, you know, the applications that they themselves manage, like ERP systems and so forth that are starting to get containerized. It could also be for bespoke applications that the companies are writing themselves, the DevOps teams that actually write the code that makes the company work. And so there, there's kind of a wide variety of use cases in there that are starting to go to Kubernetes. If not there already, the DevOps teams largely are already using Kubernetes. And this is just a great way to centralize it on on one kind of easy button, but yet very scalable and highly performing infrastructure for that kind of consolidation. >> Jim, this is the holy grail we've you guys have been doing since the beginning of Rancher Labs, programmable infrastructure, infrastructure as code, you couldn't get any clear or here when you start to have mainstream, you know, programmable storage and still programmable networking. All of this is happening. This is what we had hoped for the world's now gone full containers. Now you've got Kubernetes and IDC still shows that the enterprises are only like 30 to 40%. Even deep in their toes in on containers. If that, so you see a coupe call and you see all that at VM world, you'll see that re-invent you're going to see mainstream IT, the classic IT with DevOps. What's your reaction to that? Because there this, you know, what's your, what's your what's your take on this? >> Yeah I think you're absolutely right, we are scratching the surface and I think that we will see IT really embrace, right. This, this becomes the opportunity for business enablement to take, to take shape across all different avenues, IT is building infrastructure and make it, you know, allowing compute to be available. And this is kind of, we'll see this surge, not just the IT operations but really having the different groups from app devs to the business line owners, to those pushing applications, understanding the entire ecosystem. You know, we're talking about NetApp and HCI today but you can think of cross the edge, data center edge cloud, retail point of sale systems, getting immediate updates, dealing with IT operations and the compute platforms. It's really just endless. And we're excited. I think the OEM program is going to allow companies like NetApp and in other verticals and industries to really take shape and take advantage of what Rancher's offering to help them be more efficient across what their critical business apps are trying to do. >> Well, congratulations on NetApp, they're very smart company. They've got savvy customers and they're very loyal. Bryce, with that in mind, what's been the reaction you laid out the use cases when you bring this to market with your customers and partners? What's the feedback thumbs up on this and what's the vibe? >> Yeah, we've had some really enthusiastic early reaction, a couple early customers looking at it. You know, it's been a lot of fun and people are really excited that one of the great things about doing this with Rancher is that it's, it's purely open source software. So, you know, our customers love that. It's, there's, it's kind of a low risk proposition for them. They're very well, well hedged they can push this button and get it started on their NetApp HCI with very little, very little lead up to that very little advanced knowledge and just kind of get started. It's actually there's no incremental costs to use it on NetApp HCI. It's just, if you want a joint support model that it, that that there's a fee. And so you can kind of think of it as an indefinite trial period in a way. And I think that's created a lot of early interest and I think yeah I think it's going to be a really great option for our customers. It's going to add a lot of value to the NetApp HCI product. And so far, everyone's been very excited about it. >> You know, I was talking with Dave Vellante, my co-host in the CUBE also does a lot of storage research, knows NetApp as well. We were also commenting about this dynamic and we kind of call this out in 2016 when VMware was having trouble with the cloud operations. And then they decided to get rid of everything and just partner with Amazon. Everyone's like, that's horrible. It's going to be terrible. They're going to lose all their customers but we pointed out and I think this is true here. And I want to get your reaction, both of you guys, if you don't mind commenting what turned out to be the case was is that there was a clear distinction and operator of infrastructure and software development environments with higher level cloud native services. And they're not necessarily competing directly. They're kind of coming together, this idea of operating infrastructure and IT concept when it goes software and goes cloud, it's not a win, lose dynamic. You have software and you get people often need to operate that either code it or run it. So at large scale, this is where HCI kind of fits in Bryce, right? I mean, because now you got the edge, it's more devices. I mean, this is more infrastructure to run. So more, more stuff you've got to operate all this stuff. It's not going to ever go away. You guys react to that. What do you think? >> Sure. Yeah, I think I mean, from a NetApp perspective our customers use all kinds of infrastructure. They use public cloud infrastructure and NetApp has a really great public cloud focused portfolio, around public cloud services. So that's certainly a market that would be playing in our customers use. And it's part of the landscape, as you say, edge, of course also, and you know, with this solution I think it fits right into that because Rancher becomes this kind of container orchestration control plane. That's hosted on an HCI but can span this hybrid multi-cloud and edge environment all from that kind of centralized location. >> I think the simplification of the workloads is a huge deal. Jim, your, your thoughts on this? I see you've got this great program. You have the OEM program and you got an indirect partner, rising tide floats all boats here with, with this market. What's your take? >> Absolutely. And what better way to launch this program with somebody like NetApp? So yeah, you know, Rancher from its inception has been an open source platform agnostic. I think that will help, you know, help us, not just us but NetApp and other OEM partners, depending on operating system, legacy systems, verticals, industries, we're all playing a part in it. On-prem cloud, hybrid cloud, you know, I think Ranchers really well suited, for this advancement strictly by the way that we've continued in our philosophy of building an open source agnostic platform to help organizations, OEMs, ISBs, cloud providers, you name it. I think that Rancher is really well suited for, you know, kind of taking this additional ride, if you will, right. We're seeing we're all seeing it. And as you pointed out, it's less than 30% adoption today. We're all hoping for that to increase exponentially. >> Yeah, when you go mainstream, you get a lot of issues. Bryce, final question on the news analysis here. Why Rancher Labs from a NetApp perspective, what was the what was the deciding factor for you guys? >> Well, they just made a lot of sense for us to partner with. Again, the open source nature of it and the free nature of it made it really low barrier to entry for our customers. We really liked that. We also like they're very open and agnostic approach. So, you know, nothing that we're doing here with Rancher has to be at the expense of any other relationships that we have. And that was really that was really an important consideration. You know, it's, it's a very low risk, low cost, easy to get going solution for our customers. And there's very, there's no fear of lock-in with it. And so it's basically just all potential upsides and no potential downsides. And I think it's a really great solution for both IT and for DevOps, which was really critical. >> Real quick question on the customer expectation. Are you guys going to support Rancher? How does a customer get impacted by this? Obviously NetApp has, has their own supporters or is there a joint support? Is you guys going to handle that? How does the customer deal with that touches? >> Yeah, that's, that's really the crux of the deal. There is NetApp is able to provide frontline support for our customers or NetApp HCI customers, if they've, if they've purchased the Rancher support package through NetApp, they can get support for it through NetApp. And we're able to pass tickets back and forth between the companies as needed. So you don't have to have any guesswork about where where the problem and the stack might lie. You just opened your support ticket with NetApp and we can make sure it gets resolved. So that's been a really great part of the deal. >> Well, gentlemen, thanks for coming on. Appreciate the news insight. I do want to ask one final question, while I got you both here. If you don't mind, as we come in to the end of the year 2020, what a crazy year it's been between the pandemic and just the just the shift and the massive sea change of how virtual virtualization, not, you know, server or storage virtualization, but you know, the virtual world we live in remote everything, pandemic, uncertainty the digital transformation is just full throttle just more and more pressure. As we come out of cloud native CUBE con and AWS reinvent, we had VM all this activity. What do you guys think of the most important stories that customers should pay attention to in cloud native? What's what's the high order bit? What's the one thing or two things that really are notable that people should pay attention to that's important? Bryce, we'll start with you. >> I think it's bringing Kubernetes into the mainstream, right? I mean, that's what we see happening. How do you do that in a way that continues to give DevOps the flexibility they need and empower them and the way that Kubernetes does, but but also brings it into the mainstream. That's what I think what everyone's trying to solve right now >> Jim, your take on the most important story people should pay attention to. >> I think the same, I think Kubernetes adoption and really getting that education and people up to speed to start making that transformation. You know, quicker and getting that adoption rate up. I think we'll see a lot of benefits. Like you said, remote virtual in Kubernetes is kind of that framework that needs to get out there, be prevalent and and all of us take advantage, and start working together. >> All right, we'll leave it there. Guys, congratulations on the deal. NetApp embedding Kubernetes and Rancher support inside their hyper-converged infrastructure HCI. Bryce, Jim, thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto. Normally when we do these in person but it's remote with the pandemic, giving you the latest continuing the cube virtual coverage, here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation with Commvault, I'm Lisa Martin, looking forward to having a spirited conversation with my two guests, please welcome Janet Giesen, the VP of Operations and Programs for Metallic, A Commvault Venture. Janet, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's happy to be here. >> And joining us from EMEA is Mark Jow, the EMEA VP of Technical Sales at Commvault. Hey Mark, good afternoon to you. >> Good afternoon Lisa, it's great to be here with you. >> So just about a year or so ago, theCUBE had the pleasure of being at Commvault GO 2019 and where Metallic was launched, so happy birthday to Metallic. Some evolution and some recent news. Janet, walk us through what you guys have accomplished recently. >> Absolutely, so last year we launched with three product offerings to Metallic, Office 365 Backup, Endpoint Backup and Backup of Core data like VMs and files. In that year since we started with US only, we're now in Canada and Australia, as well as now in our first set of countries in EMEA which Mark will talk about it a little bit and we've greatly expanded our product offerings. One of the things we did, we just launched the discovery, which is a big deal for folks especially looking for compliance applications and their data protection. So we've had a real journey here and just this quarter, as you see we are doubling our product offerings to Metallic and tripling our country availability. So we're doing a lot and we're a leader in the data protection as a service space. >> A lot accomplished in just a 12 month time period, give me a little bit of a preview Janet, why was metallic launched last year for North America, US expanded to Canada and then I see it was announced... It was launched in Australia, New Zealand in the late summer 2020. I know that the cloud market... Their cloud adoption is quite high but give us a little bit of an overview of the actual go to market sequence from a regional perspective. >> Absolutely, and I'll want Mark to really take this one as well. We started in US only in our initial launch, that's where our first launch event was. That's where a lot of our pilot customers were, and then we expanded to Canada, Australia now EMEA, and this is very thoughtful. You have one chance to really launch in a geography. And we wanted it to take all the steps, whether it was compliance, trademarking, cloud storage availability. We leveraged our partnership with Microsoft and Azure for these launches. And really making sure we had everything lined up to best serve our customers. Mark what would you say about this strategy as well? >> Yeah, I think certainly, I mean the strategy is the right one, it's the right one for following reasons. If you look back to 12 months ago, I think in Colorado, I had a GO user event when we launched Metallic, I was fortunate enough to be hosting a number of EMEA partners and customers, and they were clamoring for the product, they're excited by it, they wanted it. We were (indistinct) some cases pressured to think about releasing it earlier. But all those customers wanted a product that was reversed, secure and coping with specific EMEA requirements that they have for the product in particular GDPR and supporting levels of compliance and data privacy that EMEA has rigorous standards for. And I think if you look at Commvault as a company, you know we take our customer's data extremely seriously. We've got one channels to get this right as Janet said, and I expect our customers absolutely expect and deserve right first time. And so when we launch a product like Metallic with the diversity of workloads, the rigorous high performance and secure environments, we want to make sure it's tested properly, it's compliant in all the jurisdictions. And even in Europe, we think about Europe, it's not one given country, even the EU have different countries with different legal and tax nuances. We want to make sure that when our customers get Metallic, 'cause our customers thankfully first launch in EMEA now can. That purchasing, that user experience is seamless sales and frictionless, and the product stands the promises that we make to those customers. So fully behind half phased release for Metallic as are some of our initial early adopter customers in the geographies that we've launched in already. >> So let's talk about some of the massive changes that we've all experienced since last year, Mark I would stick with you, talk to us about some of the changes that you seen from EMEA customers with respect to data protection and data security 'cause we've seen a lot of things going on globally, ransomware on the rise, every 11 seconds there's a ransomware attack. What are some of the recent challenges that you're hearing from customers that you believe Metallic EMEA is going to resolve? >> Yeah, I mean certainly even before the current COVID crisis, we were seeing a huge increase in uptake of customers wanting to use SaaS applications and to protect SaaS workloads. And the growth thing adoption of Office 365 clearly has driven the need for compelling SaaS based solutions for that market. You overlay on that, the situation that COVID has created for us all. Which in reality is denying our customers with its two most valuable important assets, access to premises and access to staff. And increasingly the staff it does have access to a storing, protecting, generating and creating data, not in the data center, not in the cloud but on laptops. So really for us it's a perfect opportunity and we're seeing an increase in demand from our customers wanting rapid solutions to protecting and managing data, to have low footprint in terms of skills and staff and to reduce the need for them to buy physical infrastructure and to expand an already at capacity set premises. And in many cases they can't even get access to, so it's very much a perfect storm for the solution that Metallic provides. >> Yeah Janet, following onto that and just in terms of when Mark mentioned, you know especially when this first happened, not being able to get access to the premises, this massive pivot to work from home and suddenly millions of endpoints scattered globally. Talk to us about some of the things that you saw here in North America in terms of customer demands changing. >> Oh that's a great question, we absolutely saw changes. I mean I go back to what Satya Nadella said, the CEO of Microsoft. He even said in April and may that what we are seeing is two years of digital transformation happening in a two month period. And that's absolutely what we're seeing, so the interest in fact as Mark mentioned, and then interest in protecting endpoints, your laptops and your desktop, as you have an increasingly remote and distributed workforce has completely changed. I mean when we spoke to you last year ago, we had endpoint backup more for completeness to round out our portfolio. We didn't expect it to be a lead offering and take off the way it has. But now with the changes everyone's seeing and with what IT teams need to do with what security teams and cloud architects need to do, we're absolutely seeing that need for endpoint protection grow. >> Yeah, and just to add to that Lisa is the endpoint potentially is also seeing a change and a shift in the types of markets that are looking to Metallic as a solution, recall that we originally targeted Metallic and SMB mid market, market where people were looking for simple, predictable, low cost but yet still scalable infrastructure. The massive drive to protect endpoints and to maintain compliance and control of data there, is actually driving large enterprise customers to Commvault and Metallic as a solution for protecting not hundreds of endpoints, not thousands, not tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of endpoints for some of the customers that we're not talking to. >> And that's probably going to be something that we see becomes permanent. You know we're seeing so many leaders, Satya Nadella you mentioned Janet, we've heard other ones, Antonio Neri from HPE saying you know I expect at least 50% of the workforce to stay remote. So this is... Was a big need, it was a big boom and a good amount of this is probably not going to change. How is Metallic positioned to help your customers not just survive this time but be able to thrive and become the winners of tomorrow? >> I think one real advantage of Metallic is the two technologies that it's built on top of, one is Metallic part of Commvault, so what we can do is evolve with the needs of our customers, take all that IP, all those patents decide what workloads are going to help our customers through this times and release those as new offerings delivered as PaaS, it allows us to be agile and to pivot as needed. And that's what you see as I said we're doubling our product offering, we're taking that feedback in real time and that's something we'll be announcing very soon, next month. In addition to that, we're also build on top of Microsoft Azure. So we're leveraging certainly their enterprise scalability, the trust and security that they have because we're really something that flexes from the one terabyte dataset to the 10,000 terabyte as you're looking to scale and protect your infrastructure. So we are poised to take on that agility, that time like these demand. >> Do you think, oh go ahead Mark. >> I think just to add to that as well is if you look at our existing customers that have been traditionally using on-prem Commvault complete software or they bought on a perpetual or subscription basis. A number of those have been looking for Metallic to protect some specific workloads, like endpoint for example, but the way we've done this is, the Metallic solution on the on-prem solution are manageable from a single Commvault interface, a command central interface. So it's not a temporary decision to move to SaaS and then that customer then has to move it back in order to control and manage it in an on-prem environment. They get the best of both worlds from two solutions fit for the purpose they are intended from a company that has a 20 year reputation in designing, building and selling scalable, secure data protection infrastructure. >> Reasonable question in terms of the management console. So for example Mark, the situation that you're talking about customers that may have been using Commvault on-prem for a long time now have had in the last year and now in EMEA the opportunity to leverage SaaS data protection for Office Microsoft 365 for example, endpoints. Talk to me a little bit about the management of that, if a customer, legacy Commvault customer has been using on-prem and now they add Metallic for SaaS, data protection for say Microsoft 365, is that managed by a single console? >> Exactly, it's managed by a command center console. So they can see, manage, control report, all of data that exists within the Metallic SaaS based solution, and that sits within that on-prem or their hybrid cloud environment, giving them that, that total flexibility. And with the recent announcement, the launch earlier in October of MCSS on Microsoft, sorry at Metallic Cloud Storage Solution, that also helps their customers that aren't yet looking to move to metallic, to make the step, to put some of their on-prem data rapidly and easily into cloud as a target, as a metallic cloud storage service. And that's a future stepping stone to a full metallic software as a service solution, should they so choose for a 365 or endpoint? So we're giving customers the ability to move from self-manage to fully managed with a SaaS solution in the middle. >> And for that target market perspective, Mark, some of the things that we've seen globally that are new targets, you mentioned ransomware on the rise, healthcare organizations, schools and governments, are there any specific industries that are going to be leading edge for Metallic in EMEA. >> What we've seen from the initial market data and the market uptake by segment from the America's names that launched is interest from every sector, but a particular interest from the sectors where technology is a key differentiator, particularly finance, banking, insurance, and the telco sector, the tech sector and the retail sector. Interestingly enough, we're also seeing in the government and public services sector from our recent Azure launch and some of the demand and interest in EMEA is validating this, customers in public sector organizations, central and local government who traditionally have been fixated on the CapEx buying model and on-prem solutions, moving and starting to look increasingly at SaaS to get solutions up running, protected and secured rapidly in the cloud. And so we're seeing an encouraging up-taking public sector organizations, which are using SaaS as a way to move from CapEx to OPEX models which is particularly reassuring. >> And Janet question for you if we look at data protection as a service, the fastest growing market segment rather in data protection market, what are some of the things that knowing Metallic's first year in the evolution, the changes that the world has seen, but also this demand for data protection as a service, what are some of the things that we can expect in Metallic's second year? >> Yeah so, first you're absolutely right. Data protection as a service is becoming increasingly popular. You know these are cloud based solutions, also known as backup as a service. And I think what we're finding as we talk to customers is everyone has a cloud based initiative, whether they're starting it or they're well on their way. So having a data protection as a service solution like Metallic can either be your first move into the cloud starting with your backup targets and leveraging MCSS as Mark explained as one way to do that, or it can just be another point in a customer's hybrid story. How they're starting to leverage data protection as a service, SaaS delivery. And there's this whole notion now of SaaS for SaaS. Now you need SaaS backup for your SaaS application to follow how the data moves, and that's what we're doing for Office 365. In the second year, we're certainly aiming to continue increasing our workload, supported the products that... And continuing our geo-expansion as we are right now with the EMEA, this is certainly critical as we continue. We'll also be looking to engage local partners, we work with resellers and distributors today, and we're also going to continue expanding our offerings in Azure marketplace. We went live in Azure marketplace last quarter and we're seeing transactions come through there and we want to continue building out our marketplace model as well. >> Last question Janet, you mentioned SaaS for SaaS and there's been a lot of talk about that recently with customers in every segment. And there was this sort of this a shared responsibility model that Microsoft has in Salesforce right in box. But it's been interesting and a lot of customers I've spoken with in the last few months in salesforce ended support for the data recovery service I think in end of July going, wait we thought it was in the cloud, we have to back it up. So is that another direction in terms of Metallics future of being able to protect more types of SaaS workloads besides Microsoft 365? >> Well that's certainly the idea and starting with Office 365, is how do we compliment what Microsoft already offers. Office 365 Salesforce, all of these tools, they are workflow tools, they're integral in organizations or they're just holding critical data. So how do we compliment that through data backup and protection that give them the controls they need. Whether it's policy customization, smart configurations to help them through this and now E discovery on top to be able to search and manage compliance needs. So we really want to be that kind of extra security blanket for all of these SaaS applications and that's really what we're aiming to do over time but Office 365 is our focus right now. >> Yeah, I think just pick out Lisa on Janet's point about the two points of scale for us about scaling out and launching in new markets and bringing new workloads into the Metallic portfolio. You know one of the things that we understand is we clearly we've seen significant demand for Office 365 and endpoint ussually as for Metallic. But let's also not lose sight of the fact that a number of organizations are coming to us to protect their VMs and their file server environments so being initially in small environments. And they're starting to ask us specifically about our plans to incorporate additional enterprise type on-prem workloads in a Metallic environment. And the fact that we've built 20 years of expertise in IOP in that space, we've been probably the quickest to launch the most innovative and wide this range of workloads in our on-prem and subscription based software makes it far easier for us to pivot and to extend over time rapidly, the workloads that Metallic supports for customers wanting to move traditionally on-prem workloads. That I'll just say 365 endpoint but VMs and other database workloads into the cloud. And that's a unique differentiator for where Metallic can take our customers, not just geographically but in terms of the diversity of workloads that we'll be able to cover. >> Great point Mark, absolutely. >> Well thank you both for explaining the evolution of Metallic, A Commvault Venture in its first year, giving us an insight into some of the recent new announcements and a peek into what's to come. Janet, Mark, we appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thank you. >> That's being a pleasure, thank you. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE conversation. (upbeat music)