>>Ly from San Diego, California. It's the cube covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back to San Diego. It's CubeCon cloud native con 2019. You're watching the cube. I'm streaming in my cohost for three days of live coverage is John Troyer and happened at welcome fresh off the keynote stage to my right is as hers as har who's the chief architect for telco at red hat and the man that was behind the scenes for a lot of it, hunting Garcia, telco solutions manager at red hat. A gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us and a very interesting keynote. So you know 5g uh, you know, my background's networking, we all watch it. Um, uh, let's say my telco provider already says that I have something related to five G on my phone that we grumble a little bit about, but we're not going to talk about that where we are going to talk about his keynote. Uh, we had a China mobile up on stage. Uh, maybe a, I love a little bit behind the scenes as you were saying. Uh, you know, the cloud native enabled not just uh, you know, the keynote and what it's living, but it gets a little bit of what >>well, sure. Um, look, when we took on this particular project to build a cloud native environment, uh, for five genes, we spent a lot of time planning and in fact this is a guy who actually did, you know, most of that work, um, to do a lot of planning in terms of picking different components and getting that together. Um, one of the things that cloud native environment allows us to do is bring things up quickly. The resilience part of it and the scale bar, right? Those are the two important components and attributes of cloud native. In fact, what happened last night was obviously one of the circuit breakers trapped and we actually lost power to that particular entire part that is onstage. I mean, nobody knows about this. I didn't talk about it as part of the keynote, but guess what? Through because it was cloud native because it was built in an automated fashion. People were able to work. Yes, they spent about three hours or so to actually get that back up. But we got it back up and running and we showed it live today. But what, I'm not trying to stress on how it failed a white fail. I'm trying to stress on how quickly things came back up and more important. The only cloud native way of doing things could have done that. Otherwise it wouldn't have been possible. All right. >>as, as the man behind the scenes there. Uh, it's great when we have, you know, here's actually the largest telco provider in the world. Uh, you know, showing what it, it's happened. So the title Kubernetes everywhere that telco edge gets a little bit of a hind, the scenes as to kind of the, the, the mission of building the solution and how you got it, you know, your, your, your customers, your partners, uh, engaged and excited to participate in. >> This is what's that very thirsting enterprise through realize. Actually, we took four months around, uh, 15 partners. And, uh, I would say partners >>because in that case, I'm taking, uh, uh, bell Canada and China mobile is a partners. They are part of the project. They were giving us a requirement, helping us all the way to it and together other, uh, more, uh, commercial partners. And of course, uh, as whatsover Allianz, like the team in the and the open interface, Allianz is, we're working with us is, was about 8,200 people working behind the scenes to get this work, uh, to have a lab, uh, directly, completely set up with a full, uh, Fuji containerized MoMA and network in France, uh, have the same in Montreal. Fuji and fogey called directly Montiel as well, uh, in one of our partners, uh, Calum labs and then bringing here the fudgey pop, uh, and have everything connected to the public cloud. So we have everything in there. So all the technology, all the mobile technology was there. >>We have enterprise technology that we're using to connect all the, all the labs and the, and the pop here with the public cloud to. Uh, um, technology and we have of course deployed as, as a, as our, uh, was mentioning. We deployed Kubernete is on the public cloud and we have as well Kubernete is open, rehabbed, open stack, uh, sorry. They had OpenShift container platform running on the, on all the premise in the lab in France and Davi, Marcia and they pop here. Uh, as I say, it was kind of an interesting enterprise. We have some hiccups last night, but uh, we were able to put that out the world telco, >>very specialized, very high service level agreements. I always want by phone to work and so a little bit, uh, uses different terminology than the rest of it sometimes. Right. And MP and VNF and VCO. But so maybe let's real to tell people a little bit like what are we actually talking about here? I mean, people also may not be following edge and, and teleco and what's actually sitting in their home town or, or it used to be embedded chips and none, it was a like Linux, but we're actually talking about installing Kubernetes clusters in a lot of different, really interesting typologies. That's absolutely true actually with the way how, and described it as perfect in the sense that we actually had Kubernetes clusters sitting in a data center environment in France, in Montreal and a remote pop that's sitting here on stage. So it was not just independent clusters but also stretch clusters where we actually had some worker nodes here that will attach back to the Montreal cluster. >>So the flexibility that it gave us was just awesome. We can't achieve that. Uh, you know, in general. But you brought up an interesting topic around, uh, you know, Getty or, uh, or, or the Teleco's operating environment, which is different and cloud native principles has, are a little bit different where they weren't very high availability, they weren't very high reliability with good amount of redundancy. Well, cloud native and actually those attributes to you. But the operational model is very different. You have to almost use codas throwaway hardware as throwaway and do a horizontal scale model to be able to build that. Whereas in the older environment, hardware was a premium switches and routers with a premium and you couldn't have a failure. So you needed all of those, you know, compliance of high availability and upgradability and so on. Here I'm upgrading processes in Linux, I'm upgrading applications. I can go deploy anytime, tear them down. Anytime I'm monitoring the infrastructure, using metrics, using telemetry. That wasn't the case before. So a different operating environment, but it provides actually better residency models than what telcos are actually yesterday. Yeah. >>Um, it's a complicated ecosystem to put all these pieces together. Uh, it gives, gives a little insight as to, uh, you know, red hats, leadership and uh, the, the, the partners that help you put it in. >>I will let him answer that. >>Um, is another, our first rodeo. We have been working on the vitro central office project with the, with the leaner foundation, uh, networking and Hopi NFV community for three last years. Uh, let's say, and the interesting part of this one is that even though we typically get with working with what the technology that they are using now, uh, we decided it's time to go with the technologies that we'll be using from now on. Um, but of course, uh, there is a set of partners that we need. We need to build the infrastructure from scratch. So for example, we have a Lenovo that was bringing all the, all the servers, uh, for the, for the set up in, uh, and here in San Diego, which actually the San Diego pub was built originally in Raleigh, Illinois, facilities and cheap all over the country to here for the show. Uh, and uh, then we have the fabric part. >>So the networking part, that's his cologne. Uh, this was working and bringing us the software defined fabric, uh, to connect all the different future. And then, then we start building this over layers on top. So we have, they had OpenShift container platform for the to completely deploy over metal servers. And then we start adding all the rest of the components, like the four G core fundamental Tran, like dividing for GFG radio from Altron, uh, together with Intel come Scott. That's his building. He started building the mobile part of it in Montreal, a San Diego. And then we add on top of that. Then we start adding the IMS core in the public cloud and then we connect everything through the by tuning. >>So a couple of things that I'd like to highlight in terms of coordinating partners, getting to know when they're ready, figuring out an onboarding process that gives them a sandbox to play with their configurations first before you connect them back into the main environment. Partitioning that working simultaneously with Malden, we had a Slack board that was full of messages every day. We had a nonstop, you know, every morning we had a scam call, right then it's like a scrum meeting every morning, just a daily stand up from eight 30 to nine 30. And we continue that all over the day. >>So as her, one of the things I really like to China mobile, uh, when they talked about in the keynote, first of all they said, you know, the problem is, you know, 20 by 2026, you know, it's, it's rainbows and unicorns and you know, 5g, uh, you know, will help enable so much around the planet. Seriously. Um, but you know, today she, she talked about major challenge in the rollout and infrastructure and service and capability. So, you know, help us understand a little bit the hype from reality of where we are with five G what we could expect. >>Absolutely. We are going through the hype phase right now, right? We are absolutely all the operators want FFG service to be delivered for sure. The reason why they want it to be delivered as they don't want to be left behind. Now there are some operators when we in more opportunistic and looking at 5g as a way to insert themselves into different conversations, IOT conversation, um, smart city conversation, right? Um, edge compute conversation. So they're being very strategic about how the big, the set of technologies, how they go deploy in that particular infrastructure and strategically offer capabilities and build partnerships. Nobody's going to rip out their existing three G four G network and replace that with 5g by 2026. It's not gonna happen, but what will happen by 2026 is an incremental phase of services that will be continued to offer. As an example, I'll give you, um, cable providers are looking at 5g as a way to get into homes because they can deploy in millimeter wave band a radio closer to the house and get a very high speed multi-gigabit high speed connection into the home without having to worry about what's your copper look like? >>Do I have fiber to the home? Do I have fiber to the business and so on. And so. So that's actually an interesting, >>okay, so you're saying solving the last mile issue in a very targeted use. >>Absolutely. So that's one. The other area might be running a partnership with BMW Toyota in, you know, some of these car companies to provide telemetry back from cars into their own, you know, operating environment so that they know what's going on, what's being used, how is it being used, how can we, how can we do provide diagnosis before the car actually begins to fail? Uh, big, you know, private environments like oil and gas mining, they are going to deploy public safety and security where all of these, you know, policemen on and safety personnel are required to now use body cams. Now you have video feeds coming from hundreds of people. There are deployment and incidents. Now you can take that information you need high speed broadband, you need the ability to analyze data and do analytics and provide feedback immediately so that they can actually act. So do three, this specific targeted use case, even a country like India where they're talking about using 5g for very specific use cases, not replacing your phone calling. >>I love that point. And it kind of ties back into some of the other things you were saying about the a agility and the operational model. And I relate it back to it. You know, my, again, my perception of some telco maybe 20 years old and that they had a tendency to do very monolithic projects. And you know, when you're out, when you're rolling out a infrastructure across the country, there's a certain, uh, monolithic nature to it. But you're talking about rolling out one, rolling out individual projects rolling out. That's also the advice we give to it. Try it with one thing, you know, try open shift with that one application and then also though, but it takes uh, the upskilling and the cultural model. So true with your telco petitioners who are, we're on Slack, they're with you and I, you know, I don't, I don't know if there's any relation, any other kinds of things to pull out about the mirror of, of the it transformation with telco transformation and colon Turner. That's actually a good point that you bring up, >>right? Look, the costs of building, if I have infrastructure from ground up is extremely high. If they want to completely revamp that. You're talking about replacing every single radio, you're talking about adding capacity more adding, you know, backhaul capacity and so on. So that isn't going to happen overnight. It's going to happen. It may take even more 10 years. Right. I mean in the most interesting thing, that stat stack that I saw was even LTE is going to grow. LTE subscriber count is going to grow for the next two years before it flatmates. So we're not going to LTE four G that's been around for a decade almost. Right. And it's going to still grow for the next two years, then it's going to flatten and then you'll start to see more 5g subscribers. Now back to the point that you were bringing up in terms of operational model change and in terms of how things will be I D principles applying it principles to telco. >>Um, there are still some challenges that we need to solve in Coobernetti's environment in particular, uh, to address the teleco side of the house. And in fact through this particular proof of concept, that was one of the things we were really attempting to highlight and shine a light on. Um, but in terms of operational models, what use applicable and it will now be totally applicable on the telco network, the CIC pipeline. There's delivery of applications and software that testing and integration, the, you know, um, operational models. Absolutely. Those, in fact, I actually have a number of service providers and telcos that I talked to who are actually thinking about a common platform for it end telco network. And they are now saying, okay, red hat, can you help us in terms of designing this type of a system. So I think what could speak to you a little bit about, uh, in this context is how the same infrastructure can be used for any kind of application. So you want to talk about how the community's platform can be used to deploy CNS and then to deploy applications and how you've shown that. Yeah. Well this is what, >>what we have been doing, right. So we have, uh, the coordinators platform does, is actually deploy and the services we have, all these partners are bringing their Cloudnative uh, function, uh, applications on top of that, that what we are calling the CNF the quantities and network functions. And basically what we were doing as well during the whole process is that we have, those partners are still developing, still finishing the software. So we were building and deploying at the same time and testing on the same time. So during the last four months, and even I can tell you even just to deny >>even last night, so the full CACD pipeline that we deploy in ID side, here it is in operation on the network side. >>Well yeah. So, so I, I want to give you the final word cause you know, John was talking about it cycles, you know, if you think about enterprises, how long they used to take to deploy things, uh, and what cloud data is doing for them. Uh, it sounds like we're going through a similar trends. >>Absolutely big in a big way. Um, telcos are actually deploying a private cloud environment and they're also leveraging public cloud in mind. In fact, sometimes they using public cloud as sandbox for their development to be completed until they get deployed and private. Claremont, they still need the private time enrollment for their own purposes, like security, data sovereignty and uh, you know, their own operational needs. So, but they want to make it as transparent as possible. And in fact, that was one of the things we want to also attempted to show, which is a public cloud today, a private cloud and bare metal, a private cloud on OpenStack. And it was like, and you know, it came together, it worked, but it is real. That's more important. And, uh, for enterprise and for telcos to be literally going down the same path with respect to their applications, their services and their operational models. I think this is really a dream come true. >>Well, congratulations on the demo. Uh, but even more importantly, congratulations on the progress. Great to see, uh, you know, the global impact that's going to have in the telecommunications market. Definitely look forward to hearing more than. >>Thank you very much. Thank you. The opportunity to >>actually be here. All right. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman back with lots more here from CubeCon Claude, date of con 2019 in San Diego, California. Thanks for watching the queue.

(cheerful music) >> Voiceover: Live, from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE covering Open Source Summit North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back here when we're here live with theCUBE coverage of Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America in Los Angeles, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, our next guest is Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking the Linux Foundation. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thank you, nice to be here again. >> Always good to talk networking, as Stu and I always say networking is probably the most active audience in our community, because at the end of the day, everything rolls downhill to networking when the people complain. It's like "where the hell's my WiFi, "where's the patent latency," networking SDN was supposed to solve all that. Stu, we're still talking about networking. When are we going to fix the network? It's always in the network, but important. In all seriousness, a lot of action continues and innovation to networking. >> Absolutely. >> What's the update? >> Update is very exciting. So first of all, I can confidently say that open source networking, not just networking, but open source networking is now mainstream. And it's mainstream in the telcos, in the carriers, service providers, it's getting there in the enterprise. And Linux Foundation is really proud to host eight of the top 10 projects that are in open source networking. ONAP, ODL, OPNFV, Fido, you know, the list goes on. And we're really excited about each of these projects, so good momentum. >> We've been seeing and talking about it too, we all, joking aside, the intro there, but in all seriousness we've been saying, we get better the network, it's finally happening. Has it been a maturization of the network itself, has it been industry force and what have been the forces of innovations been? OpenStack has done some great work, they're not getting a lot of love these days with some people, but still we've seen a lot of production workflows at OpenStack, OpenStack's still there, rocking and rolling. New projects are onboarding, you see the telcos getting business models around digital. What's the drivers? Why is network mainstream now? >> I think it's a very simple answer to that, and that is before 5G and IoT hit the market, network better be automated. It's a very simple requirement. And the reason is very self-explanatory, right? You can't have an IoT device on the call on hold while you get your service up (laughs). So, it's IoT, right? And it is the same thing on 5G, a lot of new use cases around cars or around low latency apps. You need automation, and in order to have automation, a carrier or a solution provider goes through a simple journey. Am I virtualized? Yes or no? Am I using the building blocks of SDN and NFV? Yes or no? And the third, which is now reality, which is, am I using open source to do it? Yes, and I'm going to do it. And that's the driver right? I mean it's all- >> Automation, when you started throwing out a lot of TLAs, you talk about SDN and NFV, we've got a four-letter acronym that we need to talk about. The Open Network Automation Platform. Why don't you bring your audience up to speed, what that is, the news that you have this week. >> Absolutely, so ONAP was launched earlier in 2017. It's a combination of two open source projects, ECOMP and Open-O, and we wanted to bring the community together versus sort of fragmented, and because our end users are asking for a harmonized solution. So we brought it together. It was launched earlier this year as we talked about, but the most significant thing is it has received tremendous support from the member community. So at OSS today, we just announced that Vodafone has joined as a platinum member. They will be on our board, and as you know Vodafone is one of the top providers. So if you add up all the subscribers that are being influenced by ONAP, they come to 55%. So out of the 4.5 billion subscribers that exist, more than 55% will be influenced by ONAP and the work that happens. That includes China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, all of the China, Bell Canada, AT&T obviously who sort of was the founding member, Orange, Reliance Jio from India. So we've got, Comcast joined earlier in the quarter, so we've got cable companies, carriers, all joining. And to be very honest, I'll probably just give you the list of all the networking vendors that are participating here, and I've list Amdocs, Cisco, Ericsson, GigaSpaces, Hua Wei, IBM, Intel, Nokia, Tech Mahindra, VMware, ZTE, Juniper, you know, you name it. >> Arpit, I mean the long story short is-- >> Just cause they're involved does that mean they're actually working-- >> They're active. Active. >> we're not going to be critical on this. >> But come on, even Cisco's involved in the open source stuff, right? >> They've very active. >> We've had lots of guests on from Cisco, Lulu Tucker's been on many many times. We know the open source there, but it used to be, networking was very proprietary. Now, it wasn't SDNs going to totally change everything, it's lots of different pieces, lots of different projects. It kind of felt like the river slowly wearing down the mountain as to this transition from proprietary to open source. >> I think what happened is if you just look at four years back, it was proprietary. Not because people liked it, that was the only game in town. When the open source industry, especially in the networking, and this is a hundred year old industry, telecom right? When it came in in the desegregated manner, hardware and software separated, control plane separated from data plane, all of that happened, and what happened suddenly was each components started becoming mature. So they're production-ready components, and what ONAP and what Linux Foundation is intending to do this year is trying to bring all the components into a system solution. So that it's easy to deploy, and all you have to do is point, click a service, everything below it will all be automated and integrated. >> Well the telcos are under a lot of pressure. I mean this has been a decade run, over-the-top they've been struggling with that from years ago, decade ago or more. But now they're getting their act together. We're seeing some signs, even VMworld. Stu, Pat Gelsinger said 5G's the next big kahuna in networking the next 20 years, you can validate it. This is going to be a 20 year changeover, so as the Linux Foundation, which essentially is the organic growth engine for this community, what do you guys see in that 20 years? Cause I see 5G's going to create all these connection points. IoT is going to be massive. That's going to increase the surface area for potential attacks. We're seeing a networking paradigm that's moving from old guards Cisco, Juniper, and some of the names you mentioned. They got to make some changes. How are they adjusting? What's going on so the next 20 years we don't have more conflict and more identity politics. >> I'll tell you one thing, I come from a vendor community, right? So I really appreciate the work they're doing. Part of the reason you would have seen in the past a vendor dragging their feet is because of fragmentation in the community. You as a vendor do not know where to put your resources, people, and where you put your money. What we're doing at the Linux Foundation is starting to harmonize all that. And once you do that and you have enough of a scale and enough of a community, there is no shortage of people and developers that the vendors are contributing to. >> John: What's some of the proof points that you can share? >> Okay, so ONAP, from start to now, about 1100 Wiki members already. That means 1100 unique developers are joining the project. Over 50 members. We ran out of VMs, I mean it's like that has not happened in any project for over five years. We had to fire up people more. So you can see that... And this is not just, these are competitors, but if you step back and look at it, they're competitors from an end user perspective, but they're solving the common problem in which they don't get any money. They don't make any money. These are things that absolutely need to happen. The plumbing, the infrastructure, the orchestration, the control layer, the data plane layer, all of that need to just happen, it should just work. And let them differentiate on top. We are actively seeing almost everybody participating significantly. >> Stu, let's hear your thoughts on this. You guys are both, I view you guys both as experts and influencers in this networking ecosystem, so I got to ask you both a question. CNCF has gotten a lot of traction with funding, sponsorships are off the charts, you're seeing massive tractions, Stu, where you also see that KubeCon Cloud Native, but you have native clouds, I call them native clouds, in Amazon and then soon-to-be enterprises that want to run software-defined networking. So the question is do you see the same kind of support going for your group as CNCF's getting? Is it just fashionable at this point, CNCF? Why isn't the networking getting as much love at least from a sponsorship standpoint. >> Let's define love. So if you define love as the 2017 ONS, which is our largest networking summit, we grew that 10%, everything was off the charts. The feedback, the content-- >> John: The attendance growth or sponsorships? >> Attendance, sponsorships, CFPs were 5x oversubscribed. Call for papers, for submissions, 5x oversubscribed. So we had a hard time picking the best of the best. ONS 2018 is going to be here in LA, we've already started getting requests on, you know, so we're the same boat. >> So you feel good. >> We feel good. >> Not about this, like you're winning. >> No, but I tell you-- >> There'll be positive numbers we know from the hype scale horses, Stu, answer your question and then maybe you guys can comment. So is it a matter of that there's more buzz in positioning involved in the hype side of CNCF now, and there's just meat and potatoes being done in the networking world, Stu? Cause you and I both know, if no one has nothing to say, they've got to kind of market themselves. >> So John, think back to five years ago, how much hype and buzz there was around SDN. John, you and I interviewed like Martin Casado, he just bought for $1.4 billion, all these startups, lots of VC investment, so I think we're further down the maturity curve. Now networking's always-- >> John: People going to work, they're doing their job. >> It's real, it's in production-- >> It's funny-- >> It's not parb, I always say when you move from PowerPoint to production, real things happen. >> I always say, if there's going to be sizzle, I better see some steak on the grill, so what's happening is steak is cooking right now. >> And John, so one of the things we say, networking, no offense to all my friends in networking, networking is never sexy. >> Oh, come on Stu, networking is totally sexy. >> I always say it's cool again. >> Networking has never lost its edge. >> It absolutely is majorly important, but Arpit, take us in, you know, Kubernetes is hot, containers get a lot of buzz and everything. Networking, critical piece of making sure that this works, feels like, I think back to the virtualization days, it took us 10 years to kind of solve those things that that abstraction layer broke. It feels like networking is further ahead than it was, it's moving faster, we understand it's not something that's just kind of oh we'll let the networking guys get to it eventually. Networking and security, which often has that networking tie are front and center now. >> Very good point, and I think what you have to also sort of step back and look at is what are the problems that need to be solved from an end user perspective? So the hardest networking problems at the data plane control layers, check. Next big problem that remain to be solved was orchestration, data analytics, and things like that. Check, solve, with ONAP. Now the next problems that need to be solved are containerization of enterprise app, which is where Kubernetes and... and then how does containerization work with networking? That's all the C&I, the interfaces. I would say next year, you will start to see the interworking and the blend of these "hot projects" where they can all come together. >> Stu, you were there in 2010, I looked right in the camera and said to Dave Vellante, storage is not as sexy. And Dave called it snoreage, cause snoreage is boring. (Stu laughs) >> And at that time, the storage industry went on a run. And we well-documented that. Sexy is, networking is sexy. And I think that we-- >> I call it cool. >> And I just tweeted, 25g is a good indicator of a 20 year run, and networking is the big kahuna as Pat Gelsinger said in IoT, so I think, Stu, I think it's going to be very apparent, sexy. I just don't see a lot of amplifications, so you don't see a lot of people marketing the sizzle. I think, being done I would agree, but Stu, there's more buzz and hype on the CNCF side than networking. >> That's fair. I think it is always as you said, it's the initial phase of any project that gets a lot of clicks and a lot of interest, and people want to know about it. A lot of the buzz is around, just awareness. The classic marketing cycle, and I think we're past that. It was therefore ONAP in January, we're past that. >> Alright, so here's the question, final question. So the steak is coming off the grill in our metaphor here, what are people-- what is that product, what's happening, what is the big deliverable right now from a networking standpoint that people can bet on and know that they can cross the bridge into the future with it. >> You will see a visible difference, you as in an end user, an enterprise, or a residential consumer. You will see a significant difference in terms of how you get services. It's as simple as that. Why? Because it's all automated. Network on-demand, disaster recovery, video conference services. Why did over-the-top players, why were they so successful? If you need a Gmail ID, you go in, you get one. It's right there. Try getting a T1 line five years ago. That would be six weeks, six months. So with the automation in place, the models are converging. >> So provisionings are automatically happening-- >> Provisionings, service, and then the thing that you will not see but you will see in the services impact, is the closed loop automation that has all the analytics built in. Huge, huge. I mean, network is the richest source, and by the way, I'll come back next year and I'll tell you why we are cool again. Because all of a sudden, it's like oh my god look at that data and the analytics that the network is giving me. What can I do with it? You can do AI, you can do machine learning, you can do all these things. >> Well, we're looking forward to it, the eye of the storm is kind of happening now I think in networking, Stu and I always have debates about this, cause we see a lot of great action. Question is, let's see the proof points, you guys are doing some good work. Thanks for sharing, Arpit, really appreciate, General Manager of Networking at Linux Foundation. It's theCUBE, more live coverage from Los Angeles, the Open Source Summit North America. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, be back with more live coverage after this short break. (techno music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Everyone, welcome to our special Mobile World Congress 2017 coverage. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE for two days of wall-to-wall coverage. Monday and Tuesday, February 27th and 28th, and we have on the phone right now, Lynn Comp, who's the Senior Director of the Network Platforms Group within Intel, part of the team doing the whole network transformation. The big announcements that went out prior to Mobile World Congress and hitting the ground on Monday and Tuesday of all next week in Barcelona. Lynn, great to have you on the phone. Thanks for taking the time to walk through some of the big announcements. >> Lynn: Thanks, John, for having us. It's a really exciting Mobile World Congress. We're seeing more and more of the promise of the next generation networks starting to take solution form from ingredient form a couple years ago, so it's a great, great time to be in this business. >> So 5G is happening now. You're seeing it in the network and the cloud and at the client, that you guys use the word "client" but essentially, it's the people with their smartphones and devices, wearables, AIs, and now the client is now cars, and flying drones and potentially, whatever else is connected to the Internet as an Internet of things. This has been a really big moment and I think I want to take some time to kind of unpack with you some of the complexities and kind of what's going on under the hood because 4G to 5G is a huge step up in the announcement and capabilities, and it's not just another device. There's really unique intellectual property involved, there's more power, there's a market leadership in the ecosystem, and really is a new way for service providers to achieve profitability, and get those products that are trying to connect, that need more power, more bandwidth, more capabilities. Can you take a minute just to talk about the key announcements impacting Mobile World Congress from Intel's perspective this week in your area? >> Lynn: Yeah, so we had a group of announcements that came out. Everything from solutions labs where operators are invited in to work with Nokia and Intel starting out to start working through what does it mean to try and manage a network that includes unlicensed and licensed spectrum and all these different usage models, very different model for them, to Ericsson, an initiative with GE and Honeywell and Intel, that is in Innovator's Initiative, where companies are invited to come in in the ecosystem. An early start working through what does it mean to have this kind of network capability? If you think what happened, 2G, 3G, to 4G, you start looking at the iPhone, been around for 10 years, and you've seen how the uses have changed, and how application developers have come up with completely new ways of doing things, like, who would have thought about crowdsourcing traffic patterns for driving directions? We all wanted it years ago, but it was just recently that we were able to have that on a smartphone. They're trying to unleash that with pretty unique companies. I mean, GE and Honeywell, UC Berkeley, you wouldn't necessarily think of them as being first on innovating new usage models for a wireless network, but with something like 5G, with all of these diverse use cases, you end up with a completely different ecosystem, really wanting to come in early and take advantage of the potential that's there. >> Lynn, talk about this end-to-end store because one of the things that got hidden in all the news, and certainly SiliconANGLE covered it, as well as, there was a great article in Fortune about it, but kind of talk about more of the 5G versus Qualcomm, that was kind of the big story that, the battle of the chips, if you will, and the big 5G angle there, but there's more to it and one thing that caught my attention was this end-to-end architecture, and it wasn't just Intel. You guys are a big part of that as an ingredient, but it's not just Intel, and what does that mean, end-to-end, 'cause I can see the wireless pieces and overlaying connecting devices, but where's the end-to-end fit in? Can you give some color on that? >> Lynn: Absolutely. You know what's really fascinating is you've got Intel and we've been in the cloud and heard of the genesis of what would become the consumer and the enterprise cloud from the very start, and so what we've been doing in working in that end-to-end arena is taking things like virtualization, which has allowed these service providers and enterprises to slice up compute resources and instead of having something that's completely locked and dedicated on one workload, they can create slices of different applications that all sit on the same hardware and share it, and so if you look, years ago, many of the service providers, cloud and enterprise, they were looking at utilization rights as maybe 15% of the compute power of a server, and now, a lot of them are aiming for 75 to 85% utilization, and that's just a crazy amount of (mumbles) so bringing that to this market that in traditional, we had single purpose boxes, there's various detections for one thing, but that creates a business challenge if you need to do more than one thing, so really what we're showing, for example, at Mobile World Congress, it's something that we call FlexRAN, and it's an example of how to run a radio area network on a standard server on the technology, and it does implement that network slicing. Its's very similar to the virtualization and the compute slicing, but taking advantage of it to use different bandwidths and different rates for different scenarios, whether IoT or smartphones, or even connected cars. >> So I got to ask you about, the big question I get is, first of all, thanks for that, but the big question I get is, this isn't turning into an app show, we're Mobile World Congress, and apps are everything from cars to just phone apps to network apps, et cetera, and the question that everyone's asking is, we need more bandwidth, and certainly, 5G addresses that, but the service providers are saying, "Do we really need all that power? And "When is it coming?" "What's the timing of all this?" So, specific question to you is, Lynn, is what is Intel doing to accelerate the network transformation for the service providers to get 5G ready, 'cause that seems to be the main theme as the orientation of where the progress bar is relative to is it ready for primetime, is it here and now, is it out in the future, is this kind of a pre-announcement, so there's kind of some confusion. Clarify that up. Where's the progress bar and how is Intel accelerating network transformation for folks in the service provider vis-a-vis 5G-ready? >> Lynn: So there's a couple things. So let me start with the accelerating piece because it also relates to the end-to-end piece. When you look at the way that networks have been constructed all the way, end-to-end, it has traditionally been a very, very limited set of solution providers, and they tend to survive pretty granular, pretty high-granular functions, so the appliance, the full appliance, software, hardware, everything, and I would look at some of the smartphones up until you could put new applications on it, as appliances, it did voice, and so, we have this service provider begging us for many years, "Give us an ecosystem that looks like server and PC. "I want a building block ecosystem. "I want to be able to take advantage of fast and free wires "in software and hardware. "I need people to come innovate, "like they go innovate on Amazon," and so building an ecosystem, so Intel Network Builders is something that was started about three years ago, and we had, oh, half dozen to maybe 12 different vendors who were part of it, mostly software vendors. Since then, we have 250-plus number and they range from service providers like GT and Telefonica all the way to the hardware vendors like Cisco and Ericsson, and then the software vendors that you would expect. So that's one thing that we've been really working, for a few years now, on giving these operators building block approaches, supporting them in open source. We had a big announcement from AT&T, talking about how they're putting about seven millions lines of code into the Linux Foundation, and its code has been deployed in their network already, so pretty big departure from normal practice, and then today, we had an announcement that came out, where not only did AT&T and Bell Canada and Orange in that community. Now we've got China Mobile, China Telecom, and a project called Open-O, also joining forces. If you were to map out the topics for these operators, we've got almost all of the top ten. They are joining this project to completely change the way that they run their networks, and that translates into the kind of innovation, the kind of applications that consumers love, that they're already getting out of the cloud, now they can begin to get that piece of innovation and creativity in the network as well. So the building block approach seems to be your strategy for the ecosystem. What's the challenge to keep that rolling and cohesive? How are you guys going to foster that growth on the ecosystem? You guys going to be doing a lot of joint marketing, funding, projects, and (chuckles) how are you going to foster that continuing growth? >> Lynn: Well there's a couple, it's such an opportunity-rich environment right now. Even things that you would assume would be normal and kind of standard practice, like standardized benchmarking, because you want apples-to-apples performance comparison. Well that's something that this industry really hasn't had. We've done very conceptualized testing, so we're working with the operators in a project called OPNSG to make sure that the operators have a uniform way, even if it's synthetic benchmark, but they at least understand this synthetic benchmark has this kind of performance, so they start really being able to translate and have the vendors do comparisons on paper, and they can actually do better comparisons without having to do six months of testing, so that's a really big deal. The other thing that I do want to also say about 5G is we're in a pre-standards world right now. ITU and 3GPP will have standards dropped in 2018 and 2020 is when it will be final, but every time that you're looking at a new wireless standard, there's a lot of pretrials that are happening, and that's because you want to test before you state everything has to work a specific way, so there was a trial just announced in December, with Erisson, AT&T in Austin, Texas in the Intel offices, and so if you happen to be in that office, you're starting to be able to experiment with what you could possibly get out of 5G. You'll see more of that with the Olympics in 2018 and 2020, where you've got, Japan and Korea have said we're going to have 5G at those Olympics. >> So I got to ask you some of the questions that we are going to have some guests on here in theCUBE in the Palo Alto coverage around NFV, network function virtualization, plays right into the software-defined networking virtualization world, so why is NFV and SDN so vital to the network transformation? Why now and what's happening in those two areas, and what's the enabler? >> Lynn: The enabler really started about 10 years ago, the real inspiration for it, when we were all in a world of packet processing engines and network processors, and we had some people in our research labs that realized that a lot of the efficiency in doing packet processing quickly came from parallelism, and we knew there were about two or three years to wait, but that was when multi-core came out, and so this thing called data plane development kit was born. We've referred to it as DPDK. It's now an industry organization, not an Intel invention anymore. The industry's starting to foster it. Now is really when the operators realized, "I can run a network on a general purpose processor." (coughs) Excuse me, so they can use cores for running operating systems and applications, of course, they always do that for compute cores, but they can also use the compute cores for passing packets back and forth. The line rates that we're getting are astonishing. 160 gigabits per second, which at the time, we were getting six million packets per second. Very unimpressive 10 years ago, but now, for many of those applications, we're at line rate, so that allows you to then separate the hardware and the software, which is where virtualization comes in, and when you do that, you aren't actually embedding software and hardware together in creating an appliance that, if you needed to do a software update, you might as well update the hardware, too, 'cause there's absolutely no new software load that can happen unless you're in an environment with virtualization or something like containers. So that's why NFV, network function virtualization is important. Gives the operator the ability to use general purpose processors for more than one thing, and have the ability to have future proofing of workloads where a new application or a new use becomes really popular, you don't have to issue new hardware, they just need to spin up the new virtual machine and be able to put function in it. >> So that, I got-- >> Lynn: If you went back and, we were talking about 5G and all of this new way of managing the network, now management in orchestration, it's really important but SDN is also really critical, both for cloud and for comm, because it gives you one map of the connections on the network, so you know what is connected where, and it gives you the ability to remotely change how the servers or how the hardware is connected together. If you were going to ask the CIO, "What's your biggest problem today?" they would tell you that it's almost impossible for them to be able to spin up a fully functional, new application that meets all the security protocols because they don't have a network map of everything that's connected to everything. They don't really have an easy way to be able to issue a command and then have all of the reconfigurations happen. A lot of the information's embedded in router tables. >> Yeah. >> Lynn: So it makes it very, very hard to take advantage of a really complicated network connection map, and be agile. That's where SDN comes in. It just kind of like a command control center, whereas NFV gives them the ability to have agility and spin up new functions very quickly. >> Yeah, and certainly that's where the good security part of the action is. Lynn, I want to get your final thoughts on the final question is this Mobile World Congress, it really encapsulates years and years in the industry of kind of a tipping point, and this is kind of my observation, and I want to get your thoughts on this and reaction to it, is the telcos and the service providers are finally at a moment where there's been so much pressure on the business model. We heard this, you can go on back many, many years ago, "Oh, over the top, " and you're starting to see more and more pressure. This seems to be the year that people have a focus on seeing a straight and narrow set of solutions, building blocks and a ecosystem that poised to go to the next level, where there can be a business model that actually can scale, whether it's scaling the edge, or having the core of the network work well, and up and down the stack. Can you talk about the key challenges that these service providers have to do to address that key profitability equation that being a sustainable entity rather than being the pipes? >> Lynn: Well it comes down to being able to respond to the needs of the user. I will refer to a couple demos that we have in the data center section of our booth, and one of them is so impressive to China Telecom that have put together on complete commercial off-the-shelf hardware that a cloud vendor might use. A demo that shows 4K video running from a virtualized, fixed wireline connection, so one of the cable kind of usage. Now 4K video goes over a virtualized environment from a cable-like environment, to what we call virtual INF, and that's the way that you get different messages passed between different kinds of systems. So INF is wireless, so they've got 4K video from cable out to a wireless capability, running in a virtualized environment at performance in hardware that can be used in the cloud, it could be used in communication service providers 'cause it's general purpose. That kind of capability gives a company like China Telecom the flexibility they need, so with 5G, it's the usage model for 5G that's most important. Turns out to be fixed wireless, because it's so expensive for them to deploy in fiber, well, they have the ability to do it and they can spin it up, maybe not in real time, but certainly, it's not going to take a three-month rollout. >> Yes, and-- >> Lynn: So hopefully, that gives you one example. >> Well that's great enablement 'cause in a lot of execution, well, I thought it gave me one more idea for a question, so since I have my final, final question for you is, what are you most excited about 'cause you sounded super excited with that demo. What other exciting things are happening in the Intel demo area from Intel that's exciting for you, that you could share with the folks listening and watching? >> Lynn: So, I used to never be a believer in augmented reality. (John chuckling) I thought, who's going to walk around with goggles, it's just silly, (coughs) it seemed to me like a toy and maybe I shouldn't admit that on a radio show but I became a believer, and I started to really understand how powerful it could be when Pokemon Go took over all the world in over the summer, to this, an immersive experience, and it's sort of reality, but you're interacting with a brand, or in the booth, we have a really cool virtual reality demo and it was with Nokia next and it's showing 5G network transformation. The thing about virtual reality, we have to really have low latency for it to feel real, quote-unquote, and so, it harnesses the power that we can see just emerging with 5G, and then we get this really great immersive experience, so that, I think, is one that innovate how popular brands like Disney or Disney World or Disneyland, that immersive experience, so I think we're just starting to scratch the surface on the opportunities there. >> Lynn, thanks so much for spending the time. Know you got to go and run. Thanks so much for the commentary. We are low latency here inside theCUBE, bringing you all the action. It's a good title for a show, low latency. Really fast, bringing all the action. Lynn, thanks so much for sharing the color and congratulations on your success at Mobile World Congress and looking forward to getting more post-show, post-mortem after the event's over. Thanks for taking the time. We'll be back with more coverage of Mobile World Congress for a special CUBE live in studio in Palo Alto, covering all the action in Barcelona on Monday and Tuesday, 27th and 28th. I'm John Furrier. Wrap it with more after this short break, thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music) (bright electronic music)