(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And welcome to this CUBE conversation where we welcome an ESG senior analyst, Bob Laliberte Bob, good to see you. >> Great to see you too. Thanks for having me >> Love it, I love to have the analyst sessions. Set it up. What's your scope, what's your area of expertise? >> So my coverage area right now is networking in its entirety. So that spans everything from enterprise networking, wired, wireless, campus, data center, et cetera. All the way up through telco and, in cloud networking. >> So how do you look at the landscape? One of the big things I think about a lot is how does the shift to cloud migration? How does that affect the existing, network layers? I mean, you got Cisco as the big whale and it's just, it's amazing to me. They still have whatever percent market share they have 60, 65% of the market. Are things, what's happening in the competitive landscape. How is cloud affecting that? >> That's a great question. I think the interesting piece is so many times organizations think about the network as plumbing. But the reality is the it's really important plumbing because as you talk about cloud and things get more distributed, well, guess what connects those distributed locations? It's the network. And so organizations as they've moved to the cloud you've seen a big shift with things like SD-WAN and so forth. How do I get more efficient connectivity up to that cloud? How do I not only enable able better connectivity between my data centers in the cloud, but now all my remote workers in the cloud. And so there's been a lot of big shifts going on that have driven the importance of having not only network, but secure networks. So like I said, cloud is one thing, and you're moving your applications there. But with the pandemic you saw the remote work. Think about the network administrators who we're managing, hey, I've got to control network connections between my data centers, a couple clouds and maybe dozens maybe a hundred remote branches. And now I'm connecting to 10,000 micro branches that I need to ensure that they can connect up to these applications and so forth. Hell of a lot more complex environment today than it used to be for these network teams. When we look at the, what we're seeing, how the networking providers are responding it's by driving comprehensive end-to-end solutions. So unifying, wired, wireless, and WAN. Driving efficiencies there. You're seeing even ThousandEyes for Cisco and things like that. Because they know the Internet's becoming more integral part of the corporate network. So being able to drive those types of things being able to, I think look at how to drive those operational efficiencies through AI and ML. So one of the big shifts we've seen in networking is the transition to cloud-based network management. And obviously that couple of things that helps with, first of all, the operations teams who are working remotely can more easily access it. But once all that data is up in the cloud, it creates a platform to be able to invest in AI/ML, and be able to drive intelligent alerting and even automation. And that's really what's needed because as the environments get more distributed and complex, you need to have that those operational efficiencies that automation, that intelligence to help them. >> How has remote work and hybrid work affected sort of network, spending priorities. Obviously when the pandemic hit you had to accommodate end points. And I always have this theory okay, when people come back to the office and I know it's going to be a different world but, the HQ probably needs some love as well. So has that been a tailwind for the industry? >> Absolutely, that's what we're seeing now. I think when the pandemic first hit, everyone said I've got to ramp up my VPNs. I've got to scale out my concentrators. I've got to add more firewalls in my data center. And then after a while, when they realized this was here to stay, they said, okay we just created that hub-and-spoke network that we just got rid of with SD-WAN. So what are the better solutions we can implement? So now you're seeing them not only implement better networking solutions for the remote workers. But reimagining what the campus looks like. Because it's not going to be ever 100% full or maybe it will, but how, for how many times a year will it be 100% full? So you've got to go from 80% cubes and 20% conference and collaboration areas, to 80% collaboration areas and 20% cubes. So we're seeing a lot of transition taking place in the campus environment as organizations are deploying newer technologies like Wi-Fi 6E. That have greater bandwidth to allow for those collaboration apps to run in those collaboration areas. Instead of just having the single wired conference room for video. Everyone's got to be able to run their video, voice and video collaboration apps. >> So how do you look at the landscape now? Again, you can't talk about networking without talking about Cisco. I think they, up there, I saw you and Zeus as talking about out, Cisco's quarter and other networking topics. Their long term guidance is for 60% growth for a company that size that's really outstanding. I mean, Cisco's, really has always been an execution machine of course. And it's a new era now under Chuck. There are more than ankle biters. If you look at Arista's doing pretty well there's guys like Extreme, there's others that are out there but nobody seemed to be able to unseat Cisco. What's happening in the landscape? >> I mean, that's a great question. Cisco's just been around for so long and been so big for so long. And you have to also keep in mind that with Cisco it's not just about the technology, but the fact from a if you think about it from a cultural standpoint these are workers who have been trained on Cisco since, some of them since high school. The educational component that Cisco has done has groomed generations of network technologists. So when they come into the market, they're fully familiar and used to Cisco. Plus they make a really good product and they've got products that cover everything. They cover the whole gambit. So they're still able to maintain their share. They're able to grow. They're able to move. They've made a shift last year. They announced in last spring that they were going to focus more on end-to-end. So instead of just having, hey, here's a point product, here's a point product. Here's a point product. Let's think about it in its entirety. Let's deliver a complete end-to-end solution solve bigger problems for customers, which obviously makes it much harder to remove when you're just trying to remove a piece of that single problem. But the other competitors are also having good years. And I think also the rising tide floats all boats. And so because of this distributed nature, the importance of the network, everyone is doing that. Plus obviously this has to be said, the supply chain issues where people are ordering ahead as well. But organizations, you look at Arista, they've gone from just being a data center company to expanding all the way down to the campus edge, wireless, right there creating an end-to-end environment Extreme did the same thing. They went out and made a lot of acquisitions. They pulled them all together, integrated. They're all moving to this cloud based end-to-end network management. Arista has been on a tear, bringing in a lot of, not only innovative technology, but innovative technologists. So if you look at some of the organizations they bought. I keep calling it Route 128, it's 128 Technologies. So sorry folks I live in Massachusetts. It's always been Route 128. >> You Remember when don't we. 128 Technology's Mist was their big. Mist was their, Mist was kind of like their VMware. VMware to EMC was Mist was to Juniper. And so we call it the Mistification of Juniper where every organization, every company they bring in they're rolling under that and this the AI engine. So they're bringing in 128 Technologies into that. They've got their own, their own stuff under that, their wired switches. So they've got this unified wired and wireless and WAN assurance now that they have. They've been gaining a lot of traction with that. And again, for the things we were talking about because it's far more distributed and complex. You need to have, It's not like people are getting replaced. It's not like, hey, we're leveraging this automation so that we can get rid of network teams. It's because it's getting so much more complex just to have the same number of people manage that more complex environment. We need those intelligence solutions. >> So I want to ask you about network and multi-cloud. And so it's kind of tongue in cheek because we coined this term super cloud. And so what we meant by that, so here's the premise. And I wonder you could give us your perspective. Multi-cloud, I've said many times is I think largely a symptom of multi-vendor I run in this, I run in AWS or, Azure, I've done the work to understand their primitives and or Google, whatever it is. But it's not like an abstraction layer that's floating above all those but now you're starting to see that. In fact, it re:Invent in November. The ecosystem it seemed like was everybody was focused on developing what we call these super clouds. And again, it's tongue in cheek, this abstraction layer it hides the underlying complexity of the primitives and the APIs adds incremental value on top of that. So there's a company Prosimo, which Steve Herrod, is invested in and others Praveen Akkiraju, whom I'm sure you know from Viptela. Aviatrix is another company that's sort of, Steve Malaney has come on theCUBE and talked about what they're doing. Like yeah, that's super cloud. It seems like it's something new and different than just multi-cloud which is kind of connecting in to different clouds. It's that value on top. What do you think about that? And what does that mean for networking? >> That's a really good point because we are starting to see the inception of organizations going beyond having multiple cloud providers and looking at starting to deploy applications across multiple clouds. It's still really early. The vast majority of organizations are still, I use this application for this cloud and this application for that cloud. But that's the next frontier. That's what they're trying to solve is how do I create this basically cloud fabric and make it as simple as possible. And again, all the things we've been talking about how do I, instead of you having to learn Amazon, Google, Azure networking technology, learn mine, I'll take care of it, but I'll abstract all that complexity from you and make it so much simpler to be able to connect to these interconnect, and connect to them in a seamless fashion. And so that's what they're really trying to do is they're. And the hard part is it takes really sophisticated solutions to remove that high level of complexity and make it simple for an organization to do that. So yeah, absolutely. >> If I had more time I'd make it shorter as somebody who writes a lot. And I think you're right. I think it is future. It's not definitely not here today, but the other thing is it ties into digital transformation. We used this again, throw that buzzword around but, companies not just tech company, I mean everybody's becoming like a tech company, but organizations, financial services companies, healthcare they're building their own clouds on top of the hyperscalers who spend $100 billion a year on CapEx. And that seems to be a trend that I think is going to take legs over this next decade. Just like in the previous decade everybody was thinking, okay, we're going to SaaSify our business softwares (indistinct) the world. And now it's software and cloud services are the way in which I'm going to create customer experiences. >> Correct, yeah. It's why should I go out and make an investment in technology when the technology's already there? And I can rent it for when I need it scale it as I need it and, and do all of that. I agree with that. I think that's something that we're seeing. The interesting part though is that when we look at our data points, probably let than 40% of the applications and workloads are in the cloud today. So there's still a role that the corporate data center plays. We are seeing over time. They expect that to progress and transition but I think there's still always going to be maybe a quarter of the workloads and applications may never leave. Depending on how they're built, et cetera. So there's always going to be that distributed environment where you've got workloads in the private data centers, workloads in multiple public clouds. And also, the big thing too is don't forget about the edge. We're seeing a lot more edge activity take place as organizations recognize, as they deploy more IOT devices, and want to get realtime business insights they've got to deploy the compute there. >> Well, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about, but going back to what you just said, which is, I agree with you. So that suggests to me, Bob that we're just kind of, with cloud just entering the steep part of the S curve. Amazon's headed toward $100 billion, run rate business. Maybe they probably won't get there this year but they will next year. We're entering that steep growth phase, really could be. It's incredible. But I wanted to ask you about the edge. Because you're right is we got to move compute to the edge, ARM is going to dominate. I would think, the edge. They already are with our smartphones. How do you see the cloud guys participating in the edge? Whether it was Andy Jassy, or now Adam Selipsky or anybody at Amazon. They have the dogma of in the fullness of time all workloads are going to be in the cloud. So they either have to change their definition of cloud. Or they're wrong. So what's your thought on that? >> I think it really starts coming down to what's your definition of edge. And so, much like when the cloud technologies first came about and you had all the shadow IT. Everyone running off, and everyone thought oh this is all great, until you realized you had to operationalize it and you had to pull the brakes. Stop doing that. We're going to make sure IT operations. >> Call the CIO up. Exactly, finding out where stuff was by going through accounting and seeing credit card charges. For the edge what we've seen I think is maybe organizations really saying I've got to deploy my servers in my own site. Right at that edge in order to get the lowest possible latency. And so what I think we're starting to see is organizations looking at that and saying, okay well I'm in a metro and I've got 25 locations in a metro. And I've deployed technology to every single one of those sites. Do I need it there? Or can I put it in an Equinix facility that's less than five milliseconds from all 25 sites? So I think there's starting to be this pragmatic approach of looking at let's look at the edge, let's take a look at what type of latencies. What is our definition of real time. When do we actually need the data and so forth? What kind of connectivity do we have? And then from there figure out how we go about connecting it. And so for companies like AWS and Google and Azure a lot of them there's local zones and things like that. They're deploying them in those colos because they don't have data centers in every metro but they can leverage an Equinix. They can leverage someone else's hardware that's there to deploy their software stack within that location. So I think that's something that we're starting to see more and more of as the edge. And obviously the association with the telcos as well. They've got a great footprint. If you want to get close to the edge with their colos Their home offices and things like that and whatnot. Their ability to move the compute closer to the edge, the base stations of the antennas and things like that, are certainly significant. And that's why you're seeing the wavelengths and things like that, programs like that. >> So I was going to close, but there some really interesting topics you just brought up. Call it whatever you going to call it near edge, far edge or deep edge. And you mentioned real time. Yeah. So for those Equinix data centers, I don't need, true real time. But for Tesla, I need real time. I need real time inference at the edge probably using a bunch of ARM cores and I can't go back to any cloud. How do you look at that? Both, I would think big markets. Do you have a sense as to, is one bigger than the other? Are they both just enormous or we don't even know yet. >> I'm not sure that we know yet. I think certainly, it's riding the tail of the IOTs. So the more sensors, the more things that are deployed the more that, that data businesses realize they can leverage that data to make real time business insights to drive either better experiences. And if you're in retail. So location based services and real time offer management it doesn't do any good to offer a coupon for something that you've, that's 40 yards behind you. That that's past, like you said with the cars there's, I've seen some studies recently. They say, well, based on the latency, if the command is to stop and you're at one millisecond, it stops within four inches. If you are at 50 milliseconds, it stops 10 feet later. That's a big difference. And I don't know if those numbers are right but you get the idea about the impact, what the real time impact is of. >> Margin is not huge. >> Exactly, so that's where organizations, I think first and foremost need to take a pragmatic approach to determine what is real time for us. What's our definition of it. And then that can lead them to where do I need to place this compute technology? And then that goes to how do I then connect to it? So for the Teslas and so forth, obviously you're going to want 5G connections if possible. Ultra low latency and not just any 5G. The good stuff, the millimeter bandwidth stuff that that's the ultra low latency. >> So let's wrap. So, what's going on in your research world obviously the big, big acquisition tech target they seem to be investing in ESG. You guys are really growing and hiring. That's awesome. Any research that you're working on? >> Yeah, there's a couple of couple of projects we have going on right now. We're wrapping up a four part distributed cloud research series. So we did it on distributed cloud infrastructure. Applications, observability. And now this last one is on the edge. Coincidentally. So we're working on that. We've got some new network modernization research that we've published. And we're going to be looking, from a networking perspective looking at end-to-end network modernization which will be coming out soon. >> Awesome, Bob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. I really would love to have you back and chat about some of those things. Observability hot space. God, I wish we had more time. >> Absolutely, appreciate it, thanks. >> And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Mhm Yes. Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch, instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch so it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing, if you've got a high availability top of rack up environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start, they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where I don't know, you might have some regulated services, right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up, configure apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right, Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East west traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication you said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these. So, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said, it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP. Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right. But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch, enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical, as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. >>Mhm.

>>Thank you. >>Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me, deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch. Instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch. So it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing if you've got a high availability top of rack it environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where, I don't know you might have some regulated services. Right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up configure, apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run, >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean, I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center, as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this. Because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right. Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East West traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust, always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well, like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication. You said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these so, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack, adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right? But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E. Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences. Um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. Yeah. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we've heard from the folks at Pluribus Networks and NVIDIA about their effort to transform cloud networking and unify bespoke infrastructure. Now, let's get the perspective from an independent analyst. And to do so, we welcome in ESG senior analyst, Bob Laliberte. Bob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our East Coast studios. >> Oh, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> So this idea of unified cloud networking approach, how serious is it? What's driving it? >> There's certainly a lot of drivers behind it, but probably the first and foremost is the fact that application environments are becoming a lot more distributed, right? So the IT pendulum tends to swing back and forth, and we're definitely on one that's swinging from consolidated to distributed. And so applications are being deployed in multiple private data centers, multiple public cloud locations, edge locations. And as a result of that, what you're seeing is a lot of complexity. So organizations are having to deal with this highly disparate environment. They have to secure it. They have to ensure connectivity to it. And all that's driving up complexity. In fact, when we asked, in one of our last surveys last year about network complexity, more than half, 54% came out and said, "Hey, our network environment is now either more or significantly more complex than it used to be." And as a result of that, what you're seeing is it's really impacting agility. So everyone's moving to these modern application environments, distributing them across areas so they can improve agility, yet it's creating more complexity. So a little bit counter to the fact and really counter to their overarching digital transformation initiatives. From what we've seen, 9 out 10 organizations today are either beginning, in process, or have a mature digital transformation process or initiative, but their top goals, when you look at them, and it probably shouldn't be a surprise, the number one goal is driving operational efficiency. So it makes sense. I've distributed my environment to create agility but I've created a lot of complexity. So now, I need these tools that are going to help me drive operational efficiency, drive better experiences. >> Got it. I mean, I love how you bring in the data. ESG does a great job with that. The question is, is it about just unifying existing networks or is there sort of a need to rethink, kind of do over how networks are built? >> That's a really good point. Because certainly, unifying networks helps, right. Driving any kind of operational efficiency helps. But in this particular case, because we've made the transition to new application architectures and the impact that's having as well, it's really about changing and bringing in new frameworks and new network architectures to accommodate those new application architectures. And by that, what I'm talking about is the fact that these new modern application architectures, microservices, containers, are driving a lot more east-west traffic. So in the old days, it used to be easier. North-south coming out of the server, one application per server, things like that. Right now, you've got hundreds, if not thousands, of microservices communicating with each other, users communicating to 'em. So there's a lot more traffic, and a lot of it's taking place within the servers themselves. The other issue that you're starting to see as well, from that security perspective, when we were all consolidated, we had those perimeter-based, legacy, castle-and-moat security architectures, but that doesn't work anymore when the applications aren't in the castle, right. When everything's spread out, that no longer happens. So we're absolutely seeing organizations trying to make a shift. And I think much like, if you think about the shift that we're seeing with all the remote workers in the SASE framework to enable a secure framework there, it's almost the same thing. We're seeing this distributed services framework come up to support the applications better within the data centers, within the cloud data centers, so that you can drive that security closer to those applications and make sure they're fully protected. And that's really driving a lot of the zero trust stuff you hear, right? So never trust, always verify, making sure that everything is really secure. Microsegmentation's another big area. So ensuring that these applications, when they're connected to each other, they're fully segmented out. And again, because if someone does get a breach, if they are in your data center, you want to limit the blast radius, you want to limit the amount of damage that's done. So that by doing that, it really makes it a lot harder for them to see everything that's in there. >> You mentioned zero trust. It used to be a buzzword and now it's become a mandate. And I love the moat analogy. You build a moat to protect the queen in the castle. The queen's left the castle. It's just distributed. So how should we think about this Pluribus and NVIDIA solution? There's a spectrum. Help us understand that. You got appliances. You got pure software solutions. You got what Pluribus is doing with NVIDIA. Help us understand that. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think as organizations recognize the need to distribute their services closer to the applications, they're trying different models. So from a legacy approach, from a security perspective, they've got decentralized firewalls that they're deploying within their data centers. The hard part for that is, if you want all this traffic to be secured, you're actually sending it out of the server, up through the rack, usually to a different location in the data center and back. So with the need for agility, with the need for performance, right, that adds a lot of latency. Plus, when you start needing to scale, that means adding more and more network connections, more and more appliances. So it can get very costly, as well as impacting the performance. The other way that organizations are seeking to solve this problem is by taking the software itself and deploying it on the servers, okay? So it's a great approach, right? It brings it really close to the applications. But the things you start running into there, there's a couple of things. One is that you start seeing that the DevOps team start taking on that networking and security responsibility. >> Which they don't want to do. >> They don't want to do, right. And the operations teams loses a little bit of visibility into that. Plus, when you load the software onto the server, you're taking up precious CPU cycles. So if you're really wanting your applications to perform at an optimized state, having additional software on there isn't going to do it. So when we think about all those types of things, right, and certainly, the other side effects of that is the impact in the performance, but there's also a cost. So if you have to buy more servers, because your CPUs are being utilized, right, and you have hundreds or thousands of servers, right, those costs are going to add up. So what NVIDIA and Pluribus have done by working together is to be able to take some of those services and be able to deploy them onto a SmartNIC, right, be able to deploy the DPU-based SmartNIC into the servers themselves, and then Pluribus has come in and said, "We're going to create that unified fabric across the networking space into those networking services all the way down to the server." So the benefits of having that are pretty clear in that you're offloading that capability from the server. So your CPUs are optimized. You're saving a lot of money. You're not having to go outside of the server and go to a different rack somewhere else in the data center. So your performance is going to be optimized as well. You're not going to incur any latency hit for every round trip to the firewall and back. So I think all those things are really important, plus the fact that you're going to see, from an organizational aspect, we talked about the DevOps and NetOps teams, the network operations teams now can work with the security teams to establish the security policies and the networking policies so that the DevOps teams don't have to worry about that. So essentially, they just create the guardrails and let the DevOps team run, 'cause that's what they want. They want that agility and speed. >> Your point about CPU cycles is key. I mean, it's estimated that 25 to 30% of CPU cycles in the data center are wasted. The cores are wasted doing storage offload or networking or security offload. And I've said many times, everybody needs a Nitro, like the Amazon Nitro. You can only buy Amazon Nitro if you go into AWS, right. But everybody needs a Nitro. So is that how we should think about this? >> Yeah, that's a great analogy to think about this. And I think I would take it a step further because it's almost the opposite end of the spectrum, because Pluribus and NVIDIA are doing this in a very open way. And so Pluribus has always been a proponent of open networking. And so what they're trying to do is extend that now to these distributed services. So Leverage working with NVIDIA is also open as well, being able to bring that to bear so that organizations cannot only take advantage of these distributed services, but also that unified networking fabric, that unified cloud fabric, across that environment from the server across the switches. The other key piece of what Pluribus is doing, because they've been doing this for a while now and they've been doing it with the older application environments and the older server environments, they're able to provide that unified networking experience across a host of different types of servers and platforms. So you can have not only the modern application supported, but also the legacy environments, bare metal. You could go any type of virtualization, you can run containers, et cetera. So a wide gambit of different technologies hosting those applications, supported by a unified cloud fabric from Pluribus. >> So what does that mean for the customer? I don't have to rip and replace my whole infrastructure right? >> Yeah, well, think what it does, again, from that operational efficiency, when you're going from a legacy environment to that modern environment, it helps with the migration, it helps you accelerate that migration because you're not switching different management systems to accomplish that. You've got the same, unified networking fabric that you've been working with to enable you to run your legacy as well as transfer over to those modern applications as well. >> Got it, so your people are comfortable with the skillsets, et cetera. All right, I'll give you the last word. Give us the bottom line here. >> So I think, obviously, with all the modern applications that are coming out, the distributed application environments, it's really posing a lot of risk on these organizations to be able to get not only security, but also visibility into those environments. And so organizations have to find solutions. As I said at the beginning, they're looking to drive operational efficiency. So getting operational efficiency from a unified cloud networking solution, that it goes from the server across the servers to multiple different environments, right, in different cloud environments, is certainly going to help organizations drive that operational efficiency, it's going to help them save money for visibility, for security, and even open networking. So a great opportunity for organizations, especially large enterprises, cloud providers, who are trying to build that hyperscale-like environment. You mentioned the Nitro card. This is a great way to do it with an open solution. >> Love it. Bob, thanks so much for coming in and sharing your insights. I appreciate it. >> You're welcome, thanks. >> All right, in a moment, I'll be back to give you some closing thoughts on unified cloud networking and the key takeaways from today. You're watching "theCUBE", your leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)