(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back. Lisa Martin here talking with Laureen Knudsen, a CUBE alumni. She's the Chief Transformation Officer at Broadcom and a founding member of the BizOps Coalition. Laureen, I'm excited to talk to you about an interesting topic today. Welcome back to the program. >> Thank you so much. Glad to be here. >> So we're going to be, yeah, we're going to be talking about the pros and cons of adding a Chief Digital Officer. You say, there may be some friction there, but it's going to be temporary as the benefits will be long lasting. So let's dive right in. Talk to me about what the role of a Chief Digital Officer is. Is this something that a CIO can take on? >> In some organizations, I think the CIO is taking on this role. And it's primarily focusing on what we're calling the digitization of the organization. So it's across more than just IT though. So it's looking at what kind of digital marketing should you be doing? What are your competitors doing? How can you make the most bang for your buck essentially across your entire organization? So it also includes parts that generally haven't been included in digital transformations, like your legal team or your finance team and the interactions with them. Can your contracts be digitized? Can they be made more efficient and more automated, right? So it's looking at the entire organization both internally and externally and looking at the strategy for how do you accomplish that and how do you truly make your organization as effective as it can be. >> Is this person almost like a bridge between the different lines of business and IT to get that external, internal focus? >> Yes, yeah, many people in IT don't have that business knowledge. That's a really good point. And so this person will need to have not only business knowledge but technical knowledge so they can essentially translate, right, the verbiage that is used in the different organizations and the jargon that's used to make it, to make the understanding between the two of what's needed more smooth, you know, the communication more smooth within the organization. Also focusing on customer value and making sure that, that both sides are saying the same, you know, when they use the same words, they're saying the same things. So doing that translation in that organization, across the entire company. >> Looking at it from the holistic perspective, you know, I know that the BizOps Coalition survey also showed that something that we hear that digital transformation isn't just about the technology. It's got to be all of the factors coming together aligned on business outcomes, aligned on what's the impact and the value to the customer. How is the Chief Digital Officer role going to facilitate that, not just understanding, but putting in practice that digital transformation is not just about technology? >> Well, and again, 95% of companies are confirming that, that right now they're focusing much more on business outcomes than just on technology. And so, there really is that need to, you know, what does that mean, right? When you're focusing on business outcomes, it often includes a lot of technology, but it's, you know, there's a different path to take to make sure that you're focusing on your customer outcomes. There's a lot of organizations that are looking at their apps and realizing their customers find the most value when they never have to use them. So how do you accomplish that, right? That's not adding new features in, that's not doing something new for the customer other than making it, making sure everything runs so smoothly that they never have to access your app. You know, we're running into that with a lot of business organizations like insurance companies or banking, phone, you know, telco companies, things like that where people really don't want to use the products you're creating for them if they don't have to. >> Right, adoption is always something that we talk about that can be a KPI but also a challenge. One of the things that I noticed that information that, that Broadcom provided was that Gartner says, in the next 12 months, 67% of organizations are going to be looking at hiring a Chief Digital Officer. Let's have you talk us through what are some of the forcing functions behind that? Obviously the last year has been quite, filled with quite a bit of uncertainty but we look back a couple of decades, there wasn't talk of a Chief Digital Officer. So, why this, why is there such a big uptick in the need for this role? >> Well, it's interesting 'cause Gartner originally talked about the Chief Digital Officer in about 2010 to 2012 timeframe where they were talking about the need for it. And it was a lot of, I think fast moving companies and the companies that really have made a lot of advancements in their effectiveness and their customer centricity have really grabbed onto this concept whether they've called it a Chief Digital Officer or not, but in the last year, it's forced everyone to have a digital footprint in the market. If you'll notice even your local restaurants that are family owned now have some sort of way to order their food digitally, right? So we're digitizing the entire thing and COVID is really, required every company to look at much more how they can do things electronically, any type of, you know, digitization whether it's like I've said before the marketing, or even how do you handle all of your contracts when there's no in-person signature and no, you know, fax machines to send things back and forth, right? It's all about making sure that all of that's secure and protected. So it's going across the entire organization. And that's really creating that need for somebody to be able to look at how your company can do all of those different things. Because quite frankly, the CIO already has a day job, right? Your Chief Marketing Officer already has a day job. So trying to look at how to be really innovative in these areas creates a gap, right? And people aren't finding that extra time to be able to do that and to look at how to be really streamlining their organizations and taking that innovation in with both internal and external viewpoints. >> Well, it'd be, imagine you mentioned, you know, the CIO, the CMO, the CFO having day jobs, but also one of the things it sounds to me like is important for this CDO role is to have objectivity. To be able to rise above all the different functions, the different technology stocks and probably silos that are there and really look holistically across the organization. So talk to me about some of the skills that are really required from the Chief Digital Officer. Is this someone that needs to have both an IT background and a business background, does it matter? >> I think as long as they have the knowledge of either side, that where they came from, isn't going to matter but you're going to, the problem is going to be finding the people with those dual skill sets, right? Because you're going to need somebody that can understand your business and your technology side to marry the two together. But they're also going to need to understand all the intricacies of the legal aspects that need to go into creating your products or the financial aspects of tracking what happens with your products. So they're really going to need to be not only very well educated and have a lot of experience, but the other thing they're going to need is that emotional empathy and that ability to work with everybody in the organization. Essentially if they do their job right, they'll be coming in and working with every other Vice President or chief in your organization. So there'll be helping to influence all of those people. And that can create a lot of conflict at first because you're having somebody else come in to give the CIO insights into how they can innovate technologically or to give the Chief Marketing Officer information on new ways that they can do their jobs, that they can digitize the marketing to be more effective and the right frame of mind to be able to do that. You know, hiring is going to be another place where these people will have a large imprint because they're going to need the knowledge to be able to interview all across the board for people that can help them get these new innovations into place. For example, if marketing needs to expand into more of a digital footprint to actually get the, the imprints that they need, right? How do you interview for that, when as a marketing leader, you've never run a digital part, a digital organization before. So it's really having the ability to partner with every other department in the organization and work with them, which, you know, to your point that can cause some conflicts to start off with but in the long run, it'll, it should be well worth it. >> Well, it sounds like that friction is probably unavoidable in the beginning as this person really works to understand all of the inner machinations of the organization and really identify what's best for the overall business. You mentioned empathy. And I think that's something that we've heard a lot about in the last year as leaders really needing to adopt that. And it sounds like this role for it to be such a catalyst of IT and business alignment, as it sounds like it really can be, that empathetic gene really needs to be turned on pretty high, I think. >> A 100%, right? They need to be able to be really understanding of the organization and the other people that they're working with, that those people do have a great bit of knowledge about the company that they're joining, right, generally and that they'll understand their jobs on a day-to-day basis. But the innovation parts, right, is where the Chief Digital Officer will come in. And if the Chief Digital Officer does this well, they can actually have a really big impact on the corporate culture as well which is a huge area that people are focusing on these days especially as every employee is remote. So it's a big job and a big ask and it's going to be really important for companies to hire the person with the best fit for their organization in this new role. >> You mentioned culture and that's something that is imperative but digital transformations won't be successful without the right cultural transformation. But that's easier said than done especially for organizations that have been around a while. And they're so used to the way they've done business for decades that it's hard to change that mindset, but it sounds like the Chief Digital Officer role should be one that is an influencer of that cultural change. How do you see them being able to do that within a, you know, stodgy, legacy institution? What are some of the things that they would be able to unlock? >> They should be able to re-energize portions of the company, right? If you're bringing in innovative ideas into a company that has had some difficulty hiring, right? There's a lot of companies that before the pandemic hit, were only starting to look at agile practices and things because quite frankly they couldn't hire anyone out of college to work there and they were afraid most of their workforce would retire out. So they're trying to get those people that want to be innovative, the high, the people that graduated top of their class. You're going to need the organization to change. And this is a perfect example of somebody that can come in and be a catalyst for all of that. So if they're coming up with new innovative ideas, if your marketing department wasn't transforming into a highly digital marketing department, they can come help invigorate that, right? And come up with a plan to get people in but also to train the people that are there that do want to learn these new skills in order bring the whole organization along with them. And I think they can have a huge impact if they, and get those innovative culture cycles changing. >> I'm curious if you think that, you know, given the last year and the amount of uncertainty that the pandemic has brought to the market, to the economy, now some of the challenges that leaders say, we're still going to have similar challenges in 2021. We still have a good percentage of our workforce remote. Is the role that the Chief Digital Officer can play, is that potentially going to help companies, really, is it going to help make a difference between those companies that really, not just survive this time but thrive like the winners versus the losers of tomorrow? >> I think it can, right? And a lot of this is going to be how the people that hire in the Chief Digital Officer and how much that team is willing to work with them. One of the things that we notice is the companies that do advance their culture a lot and advance in their customer centricity, the leadership level of the organization acts as a team as much as they expect to the frontline crews to act as teams. So you've got to be working together. And that goes all the way through, right? Your HR departments can't be incenting one group to work against another. You can't incent two people to have a goal, you know, to reach a goal in a different way and incent them differently so that they end up working against each other, right? This has to start being a real collaborative effort and it'll end up impacting the entire organization. But it's those companies that start looking at their leadership organization as a team, where they're all playing to make the same goals, to make their customers the most successful they can be. That's when you really start getting those changes and you really see a Chief Digital Officer having an impact versus those organizations where, you know, they'll be on the job for two to three years and it'll just go away because they've, you know, fought against themselves and not form that team culture. >> The impact is, can be tremendous from what I'm hearing. When we think about digital transformation, you know, people, processes, technology, that culture that's so important, we're also talking about that in the context of how do organizations use all their data and make the most sense of it. As more data sources become available, data's coming in faster, how does the Chief Digital Officer align with all of the data folks within an organization so that they can all have access to the right information to make data-driven decisions that are really for internal and externally looking benefits? >> Right, they can help make sense of the data that the company is collecting. One of the main things we're hearing right now is a lot of organizations are collecting a ton of data and they're either, you know, having some organization that creates metrics out of it. And that group just doesn't know really what the business does. They're relatively new to the business as a lot of data organizations are. So they go grab standard metrics and just provide, you know, shove as many metrics out. That's their output point, right? Where they get brownie points for every metric they create. And so we're hearing from a lot of leaders that, that they're getting literally hundreds of metrics a month and they have no idea what they're supposed to be doing with them or what this data is supposed to be showing them. And that's really of no benefit to anybody, right? It's a waste of time all through the organization. So the Chief Digital Officer, again, will be looking at what are the right business metrics to be tracking for that business and be working with those data officers to get the right innovation in so that you can see how well you're transforming, how well your company is actually doing, how much your customers actually do like what you're creating and the impact of the changes that you're making. So another thing we're being asked a lot of is, you know, I'm funding things and I'm being told they'll provide my customers value but when they get released I have no idea if they are, right? And the Chief Data Officer will help, be putting all the metrics that tie that in and showing telemetry gets built in. So that they've got the metrics that you need to truly run your business well. And so again, that'll be another part of the organization that the Chief Digital Officer would be working with. Along with the CIO, they'll be working with the data organizations as well. >> Well, there's so much opportunity that the chief Digital Officer role can deliver and unlock value in an organization as you've talked about. It'll be interesting, Laureen to see what happens in the next 12 months. Do we see what Gartner's predicting, 67% of companies are going to be adopting this role. I'm curious to see what the BizOps Coalition finds in the next year or so but thank you for sharing this insight. And this definitely sounds like a role where every day will be interesting, unique and not boring. (gentle upbeat music)

Narrator: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston, (upbeat intro music) it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience, wall to wall coverage, of course in the remote Cube studios in Palo Alto and Boston. Greg Lotko is here. He's with Broadcom. He's a senior vice president and general manager of the Broadcom mainframe division. Greg, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey good seeing you too, happy to be here. >> Hey, lets talk Z. You know, I got to say when Broadcom made a nearly 19 billion dollar acquisition of CA, many people, myself included said, "Huh? I don't really get it." But as you start to see what's happening, the massive CA install base and the cross selling opportunities that have come to Broadcom, you start to connect the dots and say, "Ah, maybe this does make some sense." But you know, how's it going? How's the acquisition been? It's been, you know, what now, two years since that move? >> Yeah we're coming up on two years. I think it kind of shocked the world, right? I mean, there is a lot of value there and the customers that have been using the mainframe and running their core businesses for many, many years, they knew this, right? So Broadcom came in and said, "Hey, you know, I don't think this is the cash cow "that others maybe have been treating it as." You know, we absolutely believed with some investment that you could actually drive greater value to customers and you know, what a novel concept right? You know, expand expense, invest, drive greater value, and that would be the way you'd expand revenue and profit. >> Yeah, I mean I think generally, the mainframe market is misunderstood. It obviously goes in cycles. I did a report, you know, a couple of months ago on really focusing on Z15X, it was last summer. And how historically, IBM performance overall as a company is really driven still by mainframe cycles because it all still drags so much software and services and so we're in the midst of a Z15 tailwind and so, of course, the COVID changes everything. But nonetheless it's a good business. IBM's a dominant player in that business. Customers continue to buy mainframes because it just works. It's too risky to rip 'em out. People say, "Oh, why don't you get rid of the mainframe?" No way customers are going to do that. It's running their business. So it's a fabulous business if you have a play there and clearly... (poor internet connection interrupts Dave speaking) >> Yeah, and if you think about those cycles that's largely driven by the hardware, right? As each generation comes out, and if you look at traditional pricing metrics that really look at using that capacity, or even using full capacity, that's what caused this cyclicality with the software as well but, you know, there's a lot of changes even in that space. I mean with us, with mainframe consumption licensing from Broadcom, with IBM doing tailor fit pricing, you know, the idea that you can have that headroom on the hardware and then pay as you go, pay as you grow. I think that actually will smooth out and remove some of that cyclicality from the software space. And as you said, correctly, you look at the COVID stuff going on, I mean there's an awful lot of transactions going on online. People are obviously checking their financials with the economics going on. The shipping companies are booming with what they have to do, so that's actually driving transactions up as well, to use that capacity that's in the boxes. >> Yeah, and financial services is actually in really good... I know that the stocks have been hit, but the liquidity in the banks is very, very strong because of the 2009 crisis. So the fiscal policy sort of, you know, dictated that or, you know, the public policy dictated that. And the banks are obviously huge consumers of mainframe. >> Sure. >> One of the things that IBM did years ago was to sort of embrace Linux, was one of its first moves to open up the mainframe. But it's much more than just Linux. I wonder if you could talk about sort of your point of view on open meets mainframe. >> Yeah, so open is way more than just Linux, right? I mean Linux is good, running around the mainframe. I mean that's absolutely an open paradigm from the operating system, but open is also about opening up the API's, opening up the connectivities so that it's easier to interact with the platform. And, you know, sometimes people think open is just about dealing with open source. Certainly we've made a lot of investments there. We contributed the command line interface and actually a little more than 50% of the original contribution to the Zowe project, under the OMP, the Open Mainframe Project. So that was about allowing open source technologies that interact with distributed and cloud technologies to now interact with that mainframe. So it's not just the open source technologies, but opening up the API's, so you can then connect across technologies that are on the platform or off platform. >> So what about the developer community? I mean there's obviously a lot of talk in the industry about DevOps. How does DevOps fit into the mainframe world? What about innovations like Agile? And sort of beyond DevOps, if you will. Can you comment on that? >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can bring all those paradigms, all those capabilities to the mainframe now with opening up those API's. So I mean we had a large European retail bank that has actually used the Git Bridge that we work with providing, you know, through Zowe, to connect into Endeavor, so they could leverage all the investments they had made in that existing technology over the years, but actually use the same kind of CICD pipeline, the same interaction that they do across distributed platforms and mainframe together, and open up that experience across their development community. What that really means is you're using the same concepts, the same tools that they maybe became comfortable with in university or on different platforms, to then interact with the mainframe and it's not that you're doing anything that, you know, takes away from core capabilities of the mainframe. You're still leveraging the stability, the resiliency, the through put, the service ability. But you're pressing down on it and interacting with it just like you do with other platforms. So it's really cool. And that goes beyond Linux, right? Because you're interacting with capabilities and technologies that are on the mainframe and ZOS environment. >> Yeah, and the hardened security as well, >> Absolutely. >> is another key aspect of the mainframe. Let's talk about cloud. A lot of people talk about cloud, cloud first, multicloud. Where does the mainframe fit in the cloud world? >> So, there's a lot of definitions of cloud out there, right? I mean people will talk about private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud across multiple private clouds. They'll talk about, you know, this multicloud. We actually talk about it a little differently. We think about the customer's cloud environment. You know, our institution that we're dealing with, say it's a financial institution, to their end customers, their cloud is however you interact. And you think about it. If you're checking an account balance, if you're depositing in a check, if you're doing any of these interactions, you're probably picking up a mobile device or a PC. You're dealing with an edge server, you're going back into distributed servers, and you're eventually interacting with the mainframe and then that's got to come all the way back out to you. That is our customer's cloud. So we talk about their cloud environment, and you have to think about this paradigm of allowing the mainframe to connect through and to all of that while you hit it, preserving the security. So we think of cloud as being much more expansive and the mainframe is an integral part of that, absolutely. >> Yeah, and I've seen some of your discussions where you've talked about and sort of laid out, look, you know, the mainframe sits behind all this other infrastructure that, you know, ultimately the consumer on his or her mobile phone, you know, goes through a gateway, goes through, you know, some kind of site to buy something. But, you know, ends up ultimately doing a transaction and that transaction you want to be, you know, secure. You want it to be accurate. And then how does that happen? The majority of the word's transactions are running on some kind of, you know, IBM mainframe somewhere, in someway touches that transaction. You know, as the world gets more complex, that mainframe is... I called it sort of the hardened, you know, sort of back end. And that has to evolve to be able to adapt to the changes at the front end. And that's really kind of what's happening, whether it's cloud, whether it's mobile, whether it's, you know, Linux, and other open source technology. >> Right, it's fabulous that the mainframe has, you know, IO rates and throughput that no other platform can match, but if you can't connect that to the transactions that the customer is driving to it, then you're not leveraging the value, right? So you really have to think about it from a perspective of how do you open up everything you possibly can on the mainframe while preserving that security? >> I want to end with just talking about the Broadcom portfolio. When you hit the Broadcom mainframe site, it's actually quite mind boggling, the dozens and dozens of services and software capabilities that you provide. How would you describe that portfolio and what do you see as the vision for that portfolio going forward? >> Yeah, so when people normally say portfolio, they're thinking software products, and we have hundreds of software products. But we're looking at our portfolio as more than just the software. Sometimes people talk about, hey let me just talk to you about my latest and greatest product. One of the things we were really afforded the opportunity to do with Broadcom acquiring us was to reinvest, to double down on core products that customers have had for many years and we know that they want to be able to count on for many years to come. But the other really important thing we believe about driving value to our customers was those offerings and capabilities that you put around that, you know? Think about the idea of if you want to migrate off of a competitive product, or if you want to adopt an additional product that have the ability to tie these together. Often in our customer's shops, they don't have all the skills that they need or they just don't have the capacity to do it. So we've been investing in partnership. You know, we kept our services business from, at least the resources, the people, from CA. We rolled them directly into the division and we're investing them in true partnership, working side by side with our customers to help them deploy these capabilities, get up and running, and be successful. And we believe that that's the value of a true partnership. You invest side by side to have them be successful with the software and the capabilities and their operation. >> Well, like I said, it caught a lot of people, myself included, by surprise that acquisition. It was a big number, but you could see it, you know, Broadcom's performance post. You know, the July 2018 acquisition, done quite well. Obviously COVID has affected, you know, much of the market, but it seems to be paying off great. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and sharing your insights, and best of luck going forward. Stay safe. >> Pleasure being here. Everybody here, yourself, and everybody out there, be safe, be well. Take care. >> And thank you for everybody for watching. This is theCUBE's coverage of the IBM Think 2020 digital event experience. We'll be right back, right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat outro music)

>> Live from San Francisco. It's the cube covering IBM thing twenty nineteen brought to you by IBM. >> Okay. Welcome back, everyone. We're live here in San Francisco for the cubes. Exclusive coverage of IBM. Think twenty nineteen for a student in our next two guests are great. Glad Co senior vice president, general manager of the mainframe division Broadcom Only with CIA and acquired Clayton Donley, head of security and immigration. Broadcom, both formerly of CIA. Big acquisition. Big value guys. Welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks a lot for having us. >> So we just talked before we came on camera here, IBM. Think a lot of cars here and software a icloud systems and software working together. Kind of thesis of the Broadcom. See a acquisition that that murder, that move was a big one. A lot of analysts liked it. Your thoughts. Now that's playing out here. Yeah, I think it was >> really interesting. If you look at what Broadcom has gone after in the marketplace, is they're They're not looking for the flash in the pan or trying to chase the next new thing. They're looking for core businesses or components. Software products that they believe are, you know, have real staying power and will be around for a decade or Mohr into the future, and then they want to invest in those and nurture they really want to be. Even if it's in a new space, they want to invest in something where they'll be number one or two in the marketplace. >> It's interesting. You're looking at the mark with cloud, you see scale. You see data, all this stuff we talked about for years and years, but it really comes back down. A systems and software working together clouds one big, complex distributed system. So all from distractions could maybe tract away. Those complexities isn't doing its end of the day. It's software plus large scale systems. This kind of was playing out. This is in the wheelhouse of what you guys do it. Can you guys had some color that trend and what needs to happen to make it more and more viable? Mohr performance easier to use? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, what we see is that customers are having a lot of problems with individual pieces of software. They're having problems when they put all this together. All right, So if you look at even to your question about Brock, come a moment ago. They sort of came in in price software through through the data center because they're providing everything. May I chips, too? Fibre channel networks and other kinds of things that are running peoples, you know, networks of the very largest scale and what their realizes when you get into the enterprise software level customers have such challenges because, you know, they don't get to cherry pick just cool things or the easy things to go integrate. They've got everything from mainframe client server to interior to whatever they picked up over the years. That stuff has to work together seamlessly to get kind of value. That makes sense. And that's why I think when you start looking at, you kind of are focus. It's on helping customers bring that together, get that value. >> It's all about the hybrid environment, because what we're getting at here is I got to make the legacy work with the new. But the beautiful thing about cloud native of some of these new micro services and containers is you don't have to kill the old Bring in the new. There's a great abstraction around software now that's making them work together. But yet the new stuff and work really great. This is the kind of the new architecture. Your thoughts on this? >> Yeah. I mean, obviously you're here a lot about that here it think right there, talking all about hybrid I T or multi cloud. I think there's a stat out there that, you know, seventy five percent of the large enterprises in the world say they'll be have multi cloud or hybrid environments by twenty twenty. I think they all have it today, Right? You think mobile mainframe, right? There's not workloads that work in isolation. You pick up your phone and you go to check your balance. It's gonna kick off a transaction that's going to go toe edge device or an edge server that's going to go through a network and maybe hit another server. And eventually it's going to go back to a mainframe to check the balance or to transfer funds or something like that. So they're having to deal with it already today. And and there's two kind of sides of the coin. You want that interaction for the developers to be common across those platforms, yet you want them to be ableto leverage on the power the strength, the security of the underlying platform without having to know all the gory details, which is, you know why. It makes a lot of sense for us mainframe and distributed. If you look across what is the CIA Technologies portfolio that Broadcom acquired, A lot of the capabilities that we have are the same capabilities that work across those environments so that the enterprise customers can interact with it one way. >> Clayton it. When I hear this environment, there's certain things that I need to worry about everywhere. It's, you know, my data. How do I protect my data? And, of course, security is one of those areas where there are lots of different environments, and unfortunately, there's lots of different considerations. Depending on which clouds I have which environment, you know, mainframe X eighty six power. You all have different considerations. The mantra I've heard that that seems to resonate is security is everyone's responsibility, you know, up and down the stack from the chip level all the way through the application. So explain where you know CIA. Now Broadcom fits in tow this picture and lives in this, you know, even more. Header. Genus world and by the way, totally agree. Multi cloud is what customers have today. Yeah, >> I mean, if you if you look at it, I mean, customers. They're building out, you say new mobile applications and and, you know, building them, his services in the cloud and so forth. But what we're finding is that the transactions and other kinds of things, they're still happening in some of these other environments. Maybe those environments still live in a data center. Maybe they've been moved to a private cloud. Maybe they're in a public cloud. Writing on my ass or some other kind of bank is a service. What we're finding is that each of you that transaction has to be protected. The guy that gives you the ability to call that transaction from a mobile app needs to be protected. All of these things need to be protected. But then you need to be able to orchestrate that. Make sure that you're laying down those based protecting those bits. Same way every time testing them the same way every time. And I think that if you look at what we're looking at and our values really in digital infrastructure management, right, but you're you're bringing all these pieces in cloud, multi cloud mainframe, All of these environments you have, You have a way to operate it, Manage it as well as for security. >> Yeah. So, Greg, you know, when I look back my career, there's something that's been repeating a lot. It's I go back to find it here, go back to the nineties. It was like, Okay, what was some of the reasons why the excess piece failed? It was like, Well, it was networking security, you know, in cloud happened. It was, well, security and management, howto like, you know, figure out some of these management of a hetero genius environment has typically been a downfall in it. It's something that we struggled at as an industry. So why will now be different? How how is the industry helping to solve that issue? And, you know, simple is something that we keep trying to hear. But, you know, actually, achieving it is pretty >> challenge. I think it's fundamentally realizing that the core large enterprises in the world today are using mainframes, right, and some of them have tried to migrate. Something's off, and it's not about complexity of migrating it off. It's about whether or not you can land somewhere that has that same security throughput, resiliency, all that kind of stuff. But if you recognize that you're gonna have these systems interacting and you recognize that we have to make it easier for people whether they're coming out of university or they're coming from a background of distributed or open source, you want to make it easier to interact. It's what's informing everything we do in our strategy and mainframe. So we talk about open, frictionless and optimized. So it's all about the idea of that mainframe system and those processes that were running, whether it's Dev ops, whether it's, you know, databases and tools, whatever we're doing, the security, the analytics that we're doing that has to be open and be able to interact with other people's tools as well as other people's platforms. Frictionless is all about the idea of you got to make it easy to do that interaction somebody that comes at this from a non mainframe context that maybe knows I calm the cartoon characters of open source. You know, get your gold for Jenkins or whatever, right that they can use that to interact with the mainframe and leverage it, and then you want to be optimized. You want to make it for the real deep technical professional to get the most out of it and focus where the expertise is, or for the novice cannot really have to need training wheels, but to be able to ride that bike right away and perform the things. So all these things you can see how their kind of informed and setting that tone of thinking about, ah, hybrid environment and connecting that mainframe in, across, not sitting as an island unto itself, >> I mean, you bring up a good point. A couple points, One is distributed. Computing has been around for a while. Mainframes. I mean, I'm old enough to remember that I was private client server way. We see the point of the main finger. >> You're gonna be >> dead soon. Most of all, kind of went away that, but it never died, right? We all know, but there's a renaissance. Rumors of my death are greatly, exactly. A lot of them didn't go down, but they were, but they were really died. But but here's the thing. There's a renaissance and mainframe because of cloud computing and cloud operations. If everything's cloud operationalized, then essentially you have a big one. Big distribute computer call resource and edges that are subsystem. So the notion of buying a mainframe isn't a platform decision. It's a right tool. The right job kind of decision, so people are not looking at mainframes was a bad decision. If it fits right, that's not like everyone should buy made friends. But if you need it, the horse power, the question is begs. The question is, why is there a renaissance and mainframes? What's the reason why people are buying them? Is it because it fits into a certain position? Is that certain scale? Is it because they could plug right into the cloud and be a big resource? >> I think there's I think there's also, ah, realization, you know, think about if you're the the newer CEO, our CTO, and you start looking at your state and you realize that you know this mainframe thing thatyou're spending twenty percent of your budget on is actually doing seventy percent of your process that you kind of look at it and you go. We'll work really cost effective. So then you start looking at? Well, where is it most cost effective. And does it make sense to use, Use it there. And then when you could tie it into everything else, when you can can get the same types of security tools and lock it down and locked the interaction down you say, Hey, this might, But this might make sense for me to do it. And I think it just ends up being dollars and cents and then the resiliency, right? I mean, when people aren't having that downtime >> plate, you're going to run your business. You want up time. If you're any commerce, you want high stamp your systems. So it really is the right tool for the world, like a thing for the right job. Is this happening? Give us the update on our people, buying more reason because it's just it's better. >> I think part of it also is, you know, why fix what isn't broken, right? The main friends running there, It's up. It's provided transactions. I think he used to have used to have this impediment to getting access, to need to find some old global guy, you need to find all this other stuff because you had your business, >> Cobol programmers. But now it runs analytics. >> It's like a It's like a foreign language to some people, right? You say Kobol was like, after one Chinese. So what? We've done those We've made it. So you don't have to learn. Cobell. You don't have to learn some specialized thing. You can come in with a prize. You come in with the technology, they teach kids and, you know, elementary school t use Java script and other kinds of things to come in access. So same things that are now in the mean >> it's basically a big iron and the old expression, big horsepower, >> horsepower, high throughput, high resiliency. >> Greg, I heard you talk about things like Dev ops that you fit in this environment. Absolutely. We've attracted. I remember, you know, when you nosy lennix on mainframe rolled out fifteen years ago. You want to do the cool new dock? Er, you know things? Absolutely. But if I look at the death ofthe people, people that are going to pay for this a lot of times they say, Well, I'm used to more that cloud model. How do I get? You know, they moved to an off ex model. We're still early in that trend, but, you know, Dizzy Syria's mainframe. Will it fit into the new modern paradigm? From a CFO standpoint, >> I definitely think so. If you if you look at a lot of the stuff that's going on in the marketplace and even concepts that we're testing with clients today around, you know you can refer to it as consumption based pricing or value based pricing, you know, looking at how much you're actually using and then charging for that with a known, you know, Hey, if I grow my capacity this much, how much am I going to pay or if I go down? I'm not going to be able to redeploy those dollars elsewhere. All those constructs are stuff that we're working with customers today on. So it is very much the idea of a cloud like environment that can either be delivered on creme through you buying your own hardware or, you know there's IBM that as easy cloud, there's folks like in so no its center that have clouds that have mainframe up in them today. >> And the developer environment clearly is going towards infrastructures code, which is the abstraction away? Just programmable infrastructure. They don't care where it was fast, right? Doesn't matter. Does it really matter >> how I look? Way contributed, too. Zoe Bright side, right? That was the command line interface, and everybody was like, Oh, my God, You know, they thought maybe we had some executives that were sitting back that had this brilliant idea. We were actually using out agile methodologies in our development, and we gave in each programming increment. We gave the engineers time to do what they wanted to do. You know, one sprint per cycle. And some of our young developers said, You know what I wish I could use, Get Jenkins and gulp and tie them into Endeavor or these other Dev ops tools or it stops tools. They developed it as an internal use tool for a command line, and we've stumbled over on accent. We said, Oh my God, this is thing We think something we think customers would want. And then, as we got talking with Rocket with IBM, Rocket had a Web interface, IBM at the mediation layer and we said, Holy cow, You know, this is something. If we got together, we contributed. We could really start a renaissance around mainframe, and a lot of people are going What? Why you've got proprietary tools and software. Why would you open up? Because the reality is we want our customers to find it easier to work with the mainframe and look out compete on the differentiation of my underlying lying product, whether it be price or function. But I want my customers to be able to tie in my software with IBM with rockets with rooms out whomever and picked because of where the value is, not because they feel locked in >> its You're going about one >> of the gripes about mainframe, right? People thought they were locked in >> lock and proprietary weird interfaces freshen, You take the friction away >> and that's not that's your father's >> mainframe. That's not today's May in front of that was exactly the old. The only kind of perception, right? We bring Lennox and all these tools and infrastructures. Code is just another resource on the network. Guys. Thanks for the insight. Appreciate Left home My mainframe. My God made my day here. So I'm free clad world final. Give a plug quickly for Broadcom. What, you guys working on. What's the big news here for you guys? Give a quick. >> Hey, I'll tell you for me, Broadcom acquiring the mainframe business is all about investment. And, I mean, we're a software business, So more than ninety percent of my expenses people, if I'm not hiring, I'm full of it. I'm not investing. I'm hiring were posted like crazy. We're hiring, We're expanding to the team, and the idea is all about there's customers have used core products for many years, and they want to count on him for many years to come. Were making those investments, and we're going to continue to invest in the new capabilities dealt, make more efficient, effective on the platform. >> Your thoughts, >> you know, I >> mean, I think that you know that, you know, it's interesting. You look a broad, calm, and a lot of people don't know. You know what's the focus right there? They're not traditionally the software space, and so >> on. They are the >> first thing you well, they are now. And one of the things that we're doing this if you look at our investment rate in R and D in general, it's up there. I mean, world class. If you look at the largest your most successful cloud players forget about, you know, your large cap. Take protect companies to sell in terms of percentage of our percentage of revenue. They spend it R and B. We're far above that. We're at a very high level. We're going to continue to invest in a lot of innovation, you know? Aye, aye. Machine Learning Dev. Ops, of course. You know, curious security is >> a cultural shift. We could see vinyl records. We're gonna come back now. You got mainframe back. How much back can I get a mainframe for? If I want to be the new cool kid on the block, you >> got to go to IBM >> for the hardware. But I could talk to you about yourself or to help you with it. You gotta mean faith for the Cube. Just have one in our house. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Thanks. Pleasure. You covered your talking mean freeze and IBM Think software. Lynn Nix, The new World Cloud Data. I I'm John's First Amendment back with more coverage after this short break

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, everyone. It's theCUBE live at MWC '23, day three of four days of CUBE coverage. It's like a cannon of CUBE content coming right at you. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We've got Dell and VMware here. Going to be talking about the ecosystem partnerships and what they're doing to further organizations in the telco industry. Please welcome Jared Woodrey, Director of Partner Engineering Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, OTEL. Odded Solomon is here as well, Director of Product Management, VMware Service Provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to theCUBE. So Jared, first question for you. Talk about OTEL. I know there's a big announcement this week, but give the audience context and understanding of what OTEL is and how it works. >> Sure. So the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab is physically located at Round Rock, Texas, it's the heart and soul of it. But this week we also just announced opening up the Cork, Ireland extension of OTEL. The reason for our existence is to to try and make it as easy as possible for both partners and customers to come together and to re-aggregate this disaggregated ecosystem. So that comes with a number of automation tools and basically just giving a known good testing environment so that tests that happen in our lab are as close to real world as they possibly can be and make it as transparent and open as possible for both partners like VMware as well as customers. >> Odded, talk about what you're doing with Dell and OTEL and give us a customer example of maybe one that you're working with or even even mentioning it by a high level descriptor if you have to. >> Yeah. So we provide a telco cloud platform, which is essentially a vertical in VMware. The telco cloud platform is serving network function vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, and so on. What we do with Dell as part of this partnership is essentially complementing the platform with some additional functionality that is not coming out of the box. We used to have a data protection in the past, but this is no longer our main business focus. So we do provide APIs that we can expose and work together with Dell PPDM solution so customer can benefit from this and leverage the partnership and have overall solution that is not coming out of the box from VMware. >> I'm curious, from a VMware perspective. VMware is associated often with the V in VMware, virtualization, and we've seen a transition over time between sort of flavors of virtualization and what is the mix currently today in the telecom space between environments that are leveraging what we would think of as more traditional virtualization with full blown Linux, Windows operating systems in a VM versus the world of containerized microservices? What does that mix look like today? Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so the VMware telco cloud platform exists for about eight years. And the V started around that time. You might heard about open stack in addition to VMware. So this has definitely helped the network equipment providers with virtualizing their network functions. Those are typically VNF, virtualized network functions, inside the VMs. Essentially we have 4G applications, so core applications, EPC, we have IMS. Those are typically, I would say maybe 80 or 90% of the ecosystem right now. 5G is associated with cloud native network functions. So 5G is getting started now, getting deployed. There is an exponential growth on the core side. Now, when we expand towards the edge of the network we see more potential growth. This is 5G ran, we see the vRAN, we see the open RAN, we see early POCs, we see field trials that are starting. We obviously has production customer now. You just spoke to one. So this is really starting, cloud native is really starting I would say about 10 to 20% of the network functions these days are cloud native. >> Jared, question for you. You mentioned data protection, a huge topic there obviously from a security perspective. Data protection used to be the responsibility of the CSPs. You guys are changing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that and what Dell's play there is? >> Yeah, so PowerProtect Data Management is a product, but it's produced by Dell. So what this does is it enables data protection over virtual cloud as well as the physical infrastructure of specifically in this case of a telecoms ecosystem. So what this does is enables an ability to rapidly redeploy and back up existing configurations all the way up to the TCP and TCA that pulls the basis of our work here with VMware. >> So you've offloaded that responsibility from the CSPs. You freed them from that. >> So the work that we did, honestly was to make sure that we have a very clear and concise and accurate procedures for how to conduct this as well. And to put this through a realistic and real world as if it was in a telecoms own production network, what did that would actually look like, and what it would take to bring it back up as well. So our responsibility is to make sure that when we when we provide these products to the customers that not only do they work exactly as their intended to, but there is also documentation to help support them and to enable them to have their exact specifications met by as well. >> Got it. So talk about a little bit about OTEL expansion into Cork. What you guys are doing together to enable CSPs here in EMEA? >> Yeah, so the reason why we opened up a facility in Cork Island was to give, for an EMEA audience, for an EMEA CSPs and ability to look and feel and touch some of the products that we're working on. It also just facilitates and ease especially for European-based partners to have a chance to very easily come to a lab environment. The difference though, honestly, is the between Round Rock, Texas and Cork Island is that it's virtually an extension of the same thing. Like the physical locations can make it easier to provide access and obviously to showcase the products that we've developed with partners. But the reality is that it's more than just the physical location. It's more about the ability and ease by which customers and partners can access the labs. >> So we should be expecting a lot of Tito's vodka to be consumed in Cork at some point. Might change the national beverage. >> We do need to have some international exchange. >> Yeah, no, that's good to know. Odded, on the VMware side of things. There's a large group of folks who have VMware skillsets. >> Odded: Correct. >> The telecom industry is moving into this world of the kind of agility that those folks are familiar with. How do people come out of the traditional VMware virtualization world and move into that world of cloud native applications and serve the telecom space? What would your recommendation be? If you were speaking at a VMUG, a VMware Users Group meeting with all of your telecom background, what would you share with them that's critical to understand about how telecom is different, or how telecom's spot in its evolution might be different than the traditional IT space? >> So we're talking about the people with the knowledge and the background of. >> Yeah, I'm a V expert, let's say. And I'm looking into the future and I hear that there are 80,000 people in Barcelona at this event, and I hear that Dell is building optimized infrastructure specifically for telecom, and that VMware is involved. And I'm an expert in VMware and I want to be involved. What do I need to do? I know it's a little bit outside of the box question, but especially against the backdrop of economic headwinds globally, there are a lot of people facing transitions. What are your thoughts there? >> So, first of all, we understand the telco requirements, we understand the telco needs, and we make sure that what we learn from the customers, what we learn from the partners is being built into the VMware products. And simplicity is number one thing that is important for us. We want the customer experience, we want the user experience to be the same as they know even though we are transitioning into cloud native networks that require more frequent upgrades and they have more complexity to be honest. And what we do in our vertical inside VMware we are focusing on automation, telco cloud automation, telco cloud service assurance. Think of it as a wrapper around the SDDC stack that we have from VMware that really simplifies the operations for the telcos because it's really a challenge about skillset. You need to be a DevOps, SRE in order to operate these networks. And things are becoming really complex. We simplify it for them with the same VMware experience. We have a very good ability to do that. We sell products in VMware. Unlike our competition that is mostly selling professional services and support, we try to focus more on the products and delivering the value. Of course, we have services offering because telcos requires some customizations, but we do focus on automation simplicity throughout our staff. >> So just follow up. So in other words the investment in education in this VMware ecosystem absolutely can be extended and applied into the telecom world. I think it's an important thing. >> I was going to add to that. Our engagement in OTEL was also something that we created a solutions brief whether we released from Mobile World Congress this week. But in conjunction with that, we also have a white paper coming out that has a much more expansive explanation and documentation of what it was that we accomplished in the work that we've done together. And that's not something that is going to be a one-off thing. This is something that will stay evergreen that we'll continue to expand both the testing scope as well as the documentation for what this solution looks like and how it can be used as well as documentation on for the V experts for how they can then leverage and realize the the potential for what we're creating together. >> Jared, does Dell look at OTEL as having the potential to facilitate the continued evolution of the actual telco industry? And if so, how? >> Well, I mean, it would be a horrible answer if I were to say no to that. >> Right. >> I think, I honestly believe that one of the most difficult things about this idea of having desired ecosystem is not just trying to put it back together, but then also how to give yourself choice. So each time that you build one of those solution sets like that exists as an island out of all the other possibilities that comes with it. And OTEL seeks to not just be able to facilitate building that first solution set. Like that's what solutions engineering can do. And that's generally done relatively protected and internally. The Open Telecom Ecosystem seeks to build that then to also provide the ability to very easily change specific components of that whether that's a hardware component, a NIC, whether a security pass just came out or a change in either TCP or TCA or we talked a little bit about for this specific engagement that it was done on TCP 2.5. >> Odded: Correct. >> Obviously there's already a 2.7 and 3.0 is coming out. It's not like we're going to sit around and write our coattails of what 2.7 has happened. So this isn't intended to be a one and done thing. So when we talk about trying to make that easier and simpler and de-risk all of the risk that comes from trying to put all these things together, it's not just the the one single solution that you built in the lab. It's what's the next one? And how do I optimize this? And I have specific requirements as a CSP, how can I take something you built that doesn't quite match it, but how do I make that adjustment? So that's what we see to do and make it as easy and as painless as possible. >> What's the engagement model with CSPs? Is it led by Dell only, VMware partner? How does that work? >> Yeah, I can take that. So that depends on the customer, but typically customers they want to choose the cloud vendor. So they come to VMware, we want VMware. Typically, they come from the IT side. They said, "Oh, we want to manage the network side of the house the same way as we manage the IT. We don't want to have special skill sets, special teams." So they move from the IT to the network side and they want VMware there. And then obviously they have an RSP process and they have hardware choices. They can go with Dell, they can go with others. We leverage vSphere, other compatibility. So we can be flexible with the customer choice. And then depending on which customer, how large they are, they select the network equipment provider that the runs on top. We position our platform as multi-vendor. So many of them choose multiple network functions providers. So we work with Dell. So assuming that the customer is choosing Dell. We work very closely with them, offering the best solution for the customer. We work with them sometimes to even design the boxes to make sure that it fits their use cases and to make sure that it works properly. So we have a partnership validation certification end-to-end from the applications all the way down to the hardware. >> It's a fascinating place in history to be right now with 5G. Something that a lot of consumers sort of assume. It's like, "Oh, hey, yeah, we're already there. What's the 6G thing going to look like?" Well, wait a minute, we're just at the beginning stages. And so you talk about disaggregation, re-aggregation, or reintegration, the importance of that. Folks like Dell have experience in that space. Folks at VMware have a lot of experience in the virtualization space, but I heard that VMware is being acquired by Broadcom, if it all goes through, of course. You don't need to comment on it. But you mentioned something, SDDC, software-defined data center. That stack is sometimes misunderstood by the public at large and maybe the folks in the EU, I will editorialize for a moment here. It is eliminating capture in a way by larger hyperscale cloud providers. It absolutely introduces more competition into the market space. So it's interesting to hear Broadcom acknowledging that this is part of the future of VMware, no matter what else happens. These capabilities that spill into the telecom space are something that they say they're going to embrace and extend. I think that's important for anyone who's evaluating this if they're concern. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, when I reintegrate, do I want VMware as part of this mix? Is that an unknown? It's pretty clear that that's something that is part of the future of VMware moving forward. That's my personal opinion based on analysis. But you brought up SDDC, so I wanted to mention that. Again, I'm not going to ask you to get into trouble on that at all. What should we be, from a broad perspective, are there any services, outcomes that are going to come out of all of this work? The agility that's being built by you folks and folks in the open world. Are there any specific things that you personally are excited about? Or when we think about consumer devices, getting data, what are the other kinds of things that this facilitates? Anything cool, either one of you. >> So specific use cases? >> Yeah, anything. It's got to be cool though. If it's not cool we're going to ask you to leave. >> All right. I'll take that challenge. (laughs) I think one of the things that is interesting for something like OTEL as an exist, as being an Open Telecom Ecosystem, there are going to be some CSPs that it's very difficult for them to have this optionality existing for themselves. Especially when you start talking about tailoring it for specific CSPs and their needs. One of the things that becomes much more available to some of the smaller CSPs is the ability to leverage OTEL and basically act as one of their pre-production labs. So this would be something that would be very specific to a customer and we would obviously make sure that it's completely isolated but the intention there would be that it would open up the ability for what would normally take a much longer time period for them to receive some of the benefits of some of the changes that are happening within the industry. But they would have immediate benefit by leveraging specifically looking OTEL to provide them some of their solutions. And I know that you were also looking for specific use cases out of it, but like that's a huge deal for a lot of CSPs around the world that don't have the ability to lay out all the different permutations that they are most interested in and start to put each one of those through a test cycle. A specific use cases for what this looks like is honestly the most exciting that I've seen for right now is on the private 5G networks. Specifically within mining industry, we have a, sorry for the audience, but we have a demo at our booth that starts to lay out exactly how it was deployed and kind of the AB of what this looked like before the world of private 5G for this mining company and what it looks like afterwards. And the ability for both safety, as well as operational costs, as well as their ability to obviously do their job better is night and day. It completely opened up a very analog system and opened up to a very digitalized system. And I would be remiss, I didn't also mention OpenBrew, which is also an example in our booth. >> We saw it last night in action. >> We saw it. >> I hope you did. So OpenBrew is small brewery in Northeast America and we basically took a very manual process of checking temperature and pressure on multiple different tanks along the entire brewing process and digitized everything for them. All of that was enabled by a private 5G deployment that's built on Dell hardware. >> You asked for cool. I think we got it. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Jared: I think beer. >> Cool brew, yes. >> Root beer, I think is trump card there. >> At least for folks from North America, we like our brew cool. >> Exactly. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell, OTEL, and VMware are doing together, what you're enabling CSPs to do and achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You watching theCUBE live from MWC '23. Day three of our coverage continues right after a short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone and welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE. We are live at MWC 23. This is day two of our coverage, we're giving you four days of coverage, but you already know that because you were here yesterday. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Dave this show is massive. I was walking in this morning and almost getting claustrophobic with the 80,000 people that are joining us. There is, seems to be at MWC 23 more interest in enterprise-class technology than we've ever seen before. What are some of the things that you've observed with that regard? >> Well I've observed a lot of people racing to the highest level messaging about how wonderful it is to have the kiss of a breeze on your cheek, and to feel the flowing wheat. (laughing) I want to hear about the actual things that make this stuff possible. >> Right. >> So I think we have a couple of guests here who can help us start to go down that path of actually understanding the real cool stuff that's behind the scenes. >> And absolutely we got some cool stuff. We've got two guests from Dell. Dave Lincoln is here, the VP of Networking and Emerging the Server Solutions, and Deania Davidson, Director Edge Server Product Planning and Management at Dell. So great to have you. >> Thank you. >> Two Daves, and a Davidson. >> (indistinct) >> Just me who stands alone here. (laughing) So guys talk about, Dave, we'll start with you the newest generation of PowerEdge servers. What's new? Why is it so exciting? What challenges for telecom operators is it solving? >> Yeah, well so this is actually Dell's largest server launch ever. It's the most expansive, which is notable because of, we have a pretty significant portfolio. We're very proud of our core mainstream portfolio. But really since the Supercompute in Dallas in November, that we started a rolling thunder of launches. MWC being part of that leading up to DTW here in May, where we're actually going to be announcing big investments in those parts of the market that are the growth segments of server. Specifically AIML, where we in, to address that. We're investing heavy in our XE series which we, as I said, we announced at Supercompute in November. And then we have to address the CSP segment, a big investment around the HS series which we just announced, and then lastly, the edge telecom segment which we're, we had the biggest investment, biggest announce in portfolio launch with XR series. >> Deania, lets dig into that. >> Yeah. >> Where we see the growth coming from you mentioned telecom CSPs with the edge. What are some of the growth opportunities there that organizations need Dell's help with to manage, so that they can deliver what they're demanding and user is wanting? >> The biggest areas being obviously, in addition the telecom has been the biggest one, but the other areas too we're seeing is in retail and manufacturing as well. And, so internally, I mean we're going to be focused on hardware, but we also have a solutions team who are working with us to build the solutions focused on retail, and edge and telecom as well on top of the servers that we'll talk about shortly. >> What are some of the biggest challenges that retailers and manufacturers are facing? And during the pandemic retailers, those that were successful pivoted very quickly to curbside delivery. >> Deania: Yeah. >> Those that didn't survive weren't able to do that digitally. >> Deania: Yeah. >> But we're seeing such demand. >> Yeah. >> At the retail edge. On the consumer side we want to get whatever we want right now. >> Yes. >> It has to be delivered, it has to be personalized. Talk a little bit more about some of the challenges there, within those two verticals and how Dell is helping to address those with the new server technologies. >> For retail, I think there's couple of things, the one is like in the fast food area. So obviously through COVID a lot of people got familiar and comfortable with driving through. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> And so there's probably a certain fast food restaurant everyone's pretty familiar with, they're pretty efficient in that, and so there are other customers who are trying to replicate that, and so how do we help them do that all, from a technology perspective. From a retail, it's one of the pickup and the online experience, but when you go into a store, I don't know about you but I go to Target, and I'm looking for something and I have kids who are kind of distracting you. Its like where is this one thing, and so I pull up the Target App for example, and it tells me where its at, right. And then obviously, stores want to make more money, so like hey, since you picked this thing, there are these things around you. So things like that is what we're having conversations with customers about. >> It's so interesting because the demand is there. >> Yeah, it is. >> And its not going to go anywhere. >> No. >> And it's certainly not going to be dialed down. We're not going to want less stuff, less often. >> Yeah (giggles) >> And as typical consumers, we don't necessarily make the association between what we're seeing in the palm of our hand on a mobile device. >> Deania: Right. >> And the infrastructure that's actually supporting all of it. >> Deania: Right. >> People hear the term Cloud and they think cloud-phone mystery. >> Yeah, magic just happens. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> But in fact, in order to support the things that we want to be able to do. >> Yeah. >> On the move, you have to optimize the server hardware. >> Deania: Yes. >> In certain ways. What does that mean exactly? When you say that its optimized, what are the sorts of decisions that you make when you're building? I think of this in the terms of Lego bricks. >> Yes, yeah >> Put together. What are some of the decisions that you make? >> So there were few key things that we really had to think about in terms of what was different from the Data center, which obviously supports the cloud environment, but it was all about how do we get closer to the customer right? How do we get things really fast and how do we compute that information really quickly. So for us, it's things like size. All right, so our server is going to weigh one of them is the size of a shoe box and (giggles), we have a picture with Dave. >> Dave: It's true. >> Took off his shoe. >> Its actually, its actually as big as a shoe. (crowd chuckles) >> It is. >> It is. >> To be fair, its a pretty big shoe. >> True, true. >> It is, but its small in relative to the old big servers that you see. >> I see what you're doing, you find a guy with a size 12, (crowd giggles) >> Yeah. >> Its the size of your shoe. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> Its literally the size of a shoe, and that's our smallest server and its the smallest one in the portfolio, its the XR 4000, and so we've actually crammed a lot of technology in there going with the Intel ZRT processors for example to get into that compute power. The XR 8000 which you'll be hearing a lot more about shortly with our next guest is one I think from a telco perspective is our flagship product, and its size was a big thing there too. Ruggedization so its like (indistinct) certification, so it can actually operate continuously in negative 5 to 55 C, which for customers, or they need that range of temperature operation, flexibility was a big thing too. In meaning that, there are some customers who wanted to have one system in different areas of deployment. So can I take this one system and configure it one way, take that same system, configure another way and have it here. So flexibility was really key for us as well, and so we'll actually be seeing that in the next segment coming. >> I think one of, some of the common things you're hearing from this is our focus on innovation, purpose build servers, so yes our times, you know economic situation like in itself is tough yeah. But far from receding we've doubled down on investment and you've seen that with the products that we are launching here, and we will be launching in the years to come. >> I imagine there's a pretty sizeable day impact to the total adjustable market for PowerEdge based on the launch what you're doing, its going to be a tam, a good size tam expansion. >> Yeah, absolutely. Depending on how you look at it, its roughly we add about $30 Billion of adjustable tam between the three purposeful series that we've launched, XE, HS and XR. >> Can you comment on, I know Dell and customers are like this. Talk about, I'd love to get both of your perspective, I'm sure you have a favorite customer stories. But talk about the involvement of the customer in the generation, and the evolution of PowerEdge. Where are they in that process? What kind of feedback do they deliver? >> Well, I mean, just to start, one thing that is essential Cortana of Dell period, is it all is about the customer. All of it, everything that we do is about the customer, and so there is a big focus at our level, from on high to get out there and talk with customers, and actually we have a pretty good story around XR8000 which is call it our flagship of the XR line that we've just announced, and because of this deep customer intimacy, there was a last minute kind of architectural design change. >> Hm-mm. >> Which actually would have been, come to find out it would have been sort of a fatal flaw for deployment. So we corrected that because of this tight intimacy with our customers. This was in two Thanksgiving ago about and, so anyways it's super cool and the fact that we were able to make a change so late in development cycle, that's a testament to a lot of the speed and, speed of innovation that we're driving, so anyway that was that's one, just case of one example. >> Hm-mm. >> Let talk about AI, we can't go to any trade show without talking about AI, the big thing right now is ChatGPT. >> Yeah. >> I was using it the other day, it's so interesting. But, the growing demand for AI, talk about how its driving the evolution of the server so that more AI use cases can become more (indistinct). >> In the edge space primarily, we actually have another product, so I guess what you'll notice in the XR line itself because there are so many different use cases and technologies that support the different use cases. We actually have a range form factor, so we have really small, I guess I would say 350 ml the size of a shoe box, you know, Dave's shoe box. (crowd chuckles) And then we also have, at the other end a 472, so still small, but a little bit bigger, but we did recognize obviously AI was coming up, and so that is our XR 7620 platform and that does support 2 GPUs right, so, like for Edge infrencing, making sure that we have the capability to support customers in that too, but also in the small one, we do also have a GPU capability there, that also helps in those other use cases as well. So we've built the platforms even though they're small to be able to handle the GPU power for customers. >> So nice tight package, a lot of power there. >> Yes. >> Beside as we've all clearly demonstrated the size of Dave's shoe. (crowd chuckles) Dave, talk about Dell's long standing commitment to really helping to rapidly evolve the server market. >> Dave: Yeah. >> Its a pivotal payer there. >> Well, like I was saying, we see innovation, I mean, this is, to us its a race to the top. You talked about racing and messaging that sort of thing, when you opened up the show here, but we see this as a race to the top, having worked at other server companies where maybe its a little bit different, maybe more of a race to the bottom source of approach. That's what I love about being at Dell. This is very much, we understand that it's innovation is that is what's going to deliver the most value for our customers. So whether its some of the first to market, first of its kind sort of innovation that you find in the XR4000, or XR8000, or any of our XE line, we know that at the end of day, that is what going to propel Dell, do the best for our customers and thereby do the best for us. To be honest, its a little bit surprising walking by some of our competitors booths, there's been like a dearth of zero, like no, like it's almost like you wouldn't even know that there was a big launch here right? >> Yeah. >> Or is it just me? >> No. >> It was a while, we've been walking around and yet we've had, and its sort of maybe I should take this as a flattery, but a lot of our competitors have been coming by to our booth everyday actually. >> Deania: Yeah, everyday. >> They came by multiple times yesterday, they came by multiple times today, they're taking pictures of our stuff I kind of want to just send 'em a sample. >> Lisa: Or your shoe. >> Right? Or just maybe my shoe right? But anyway, so I suppose I should take it as an honor. >> Deania: Yeah. >> And conversely when we've walked over there we actually get in back (indistinct), maybe I need a high Dell (indistinct). (crowd chuckles) >> We just had that experience, yeah. >> Its kind of funny but. >> Its a good position to be in. >> Yeah. >> Yes. >> You talked about the involvement of the customers, talk a bit more about Dell's ecosystem is also massive, its part of what makes Dell, Dell. >> Wait did you say ego-system? (laughing) After David just. >> You caught that? Darn it! The talk about the influence or the part of the ecosystem and also some of the feedback from the partners as you've been rapidly evolving the server market and clearly your competitors are taking notice. >> Yeah, sorry. >> Deania: That's okay. >> Dave: you want to take that? >> I mean I would say generally, one of the things that Dell prides itself on is being able to deliver the worlds best innovation into the hands of our customers, faster and better that any other, the optimal solution. So whether its you know, working with our great partners like Intel, AMD Broadcom, these sorts of folks. That is, at the end of the day that is our core mantra, again its retractor on service, doing the best, you know, what's best for the customers. And we want to bring the world's best innovation from our technology partners, get it into the hands of our partners you know, faster and better than any other option out there. >> Its a satisfying business for all of us to be in, because to your point, I made a joke about the high level messaging. But really, that's what it comes down to. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> We do these things, we feel like sometimes we're toiling in obscurity, working with the hardware. But what it delivers. >> Deania: Hm-mm. >> The experiences. >> Dave: Absolutely. >> Deania: Yes. >> Are truly meaningful. So its a fun. >> Absolutely. >> Its a really fun thing to be a part of. >> It is. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. Is there a favorite customer story that you have that really articulates the value of what Dell is doing, full PowerEdge, at the Edge? >> Its probably one I can't particularly name obviously but, it was, they have different environments, so, in one case there's like on flights or on sea vessels, and just being able to use the same box in those different environments is really cool. And they really appreciate having the small compact, where they can just take the server with them and go somewhere. That was really cool to me in terms of how they were using the products that we built for them. >> I have one that's kind of funny. It around XR8000. Again a customer I won't name but they're so proud of it, they almost kinds feel like they co defined it with us, they want to be on the patent with us so, anyways that's. >> Deania: (indistinct). >> That's what they went in for, yeah. >> So it shows the strength of the partnership that. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Of course, the ecosystem of partners, customers, CSVs, telecom Edge. Guys thank you so much for joining us today. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Sharing what's new with the PowerEdge. We can't wait to, we're just, we're cracking open the box, we saw the shoe. (laughing) And we're going to be dealing a little bit more later. So thank you. >> We're going to be able to touch something soon? >> Yes, yes. >> Yeah. >> In couple of minutes? >> Next segment I think. >> All right! >> Thanks for setting the table for that guys. We really appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> Alright, our pleasure. >> For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin . You're watching theCUBE. The leader in live tech coverage, LIVE in Barcelona, Spain, MWC 23. Don't go anywhere, we will be right back with our next guests. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about the massive $61 billion planned acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And I'm here with Phil Brotherton of NetApp to discuss the implications for customers, for the industry, and NetApp's particular point of view. Phil, welcome. Good to see you again. >> It's great to see you, Dave. >> So this topic has garnered a lot of conversation. What's your take on this epic event? What does it mean for the industry generally, and customers specifically? >> You know, I think time will tell a little bit, Dave. We're in the early days. We've, you know, so we heard the original announcements and then it's evolved a little bit, as we're going now. I think overall it'll be good for the ecosystem in the end. There's a lot you can do when you start combining what VMware can do with compute and some of the hardware assets of Broadcom. There's a lot of security things that can be brought, for example, to the infrastructure, that are very high-end and cool, and then integrated, so it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of upside for it. There's obviously a lot of concern about what it means for vendor consolidation and pricing and things like that. So time will tell. >> You know, when this announcement first came out, I wrote a piece, you know, how "Broadcom will tame the VMware beast," I called it. And, you know, looked at Broadcom's history and said they're going to cut, they're going to raise prices, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen a different tone, certainly, as Broadcom has got into the details. And I'm sure I and others maybe scared a lot of customers, but I think everybody's kind of calming down now. What are you hearing from customers about this acquisition? How are they thinking about it? >> You know, I think it varies. There's, I'd say generally we have like half our installed base, Dave, runs ESX Server, so the bulk of our customers use VMware, and generally they love VMware. And I'm talking mainly on-prem. We're just extending to the cloud now, really, at scale. And there's a lot of interest in continuing to do that, and that's really strong. The piece that's careful is this vendor, the cost issues that have come up. The things that were in your piece, actually. And what does that mean to me, and how do I balance that out? Those are the questions people are dealing with right now. >> Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of talk about the macro, the macro headwinds. Everybody's being a little cautious. The CIOs are tapping the brakes. We all sort of know that story. But we have some data from our partner ETR that ask, they go out every quarter and they survey, you know, 1500 or so IT practitioners, and they ask the ones that are planning to spend less, that are cutting, "How are you going to approach that? What's your primary methodology in terms of achieving, you know, cost optimization?" The number one, by far, answer was to consolidate redundant vendors. It was like, it's now up to about 40%. The second, distant second, was, "We're going to, you know, optimize cloud costs." You know, still significant, but it was really that consolidating the redundant vendors. Do you see that? How does NetApp fit into that? >> Yeah, that is an interesting, that's a very interesting bit of research, Dave. I think it's very right. One thing I would say is, because I've been in the infrastructure business in Silicon Valley now for 30 years. So these ups and downs are, that's a consistent thing in our industry, and I always think people should think of their infrastructure and cost management. That's always an issue, with infrastructure as cost management. What I've told customers forever is that when you look at cost management, our best customers at cost management are typically service providers. There's another aspect to cost management, is you want to automate as much as possible. And automation goes along with vendor consolidation, because how you automate different products, you don't want to have too many vendors in your layers. And what I mean by the layers of ecosystem, there's a storage layer, the network layer, the compute layer, like, the security layer, database layer, et cetera. When you think like that, everybody should pick their partners very carefully, per layer. And one last thought on this is, it's not like people are dumb, and not trying to do this. It's, when you look at what happens in the real world, acquisitions happen, things change as you go. And in these big customers, that's just normal, that things change. But you always have to have this push towards consolidating and picking your vendors very carefully. >> Also, just to follow up on that, I mean, you know, when you think about multi-cloud, and you mentioned, you know, you've got some big customers, they do a lot of M & A, it's kind of been multi-cloud by accident. "Oh, we got all these other tools and storage platforms and whatever it is." So where does NetApp fit in that whole consolidation equation? I'm thinking about, you know, cross-cloud services, which is a big VMware theme, thinking about a consistent experience, on-prem, hybrid, across the three big clouds, out to the edge. Where do you fit? >> So our view has been, and it was this view, and we extend it to the cloud, is that the data layer, so in our software, is called ONTAP, the data layer is a really important layer that provides a lot of efficiency. It only gets bigger, how you do compliance, how you do backup, DR, blah blah blah. All that data layer services needs to operate on-prem and on the clouds. So when you look at what we've done over the years, we've extended to all the clouds, our data layer. We've put controls, management tools, over the top, so that you can manage the entire data layer, on-prem and cloud, as one layer. And we're continuing to head down that path, 'cause we think that data layer is obviously the path to maximum ability to do compliance, maximum cost advantages, et cetera. So we've really been the company that set our sights on managing the data layer. Now, if you look at VMware, go up into the network layer, the compute layer, VMware is a great partner, and that's why we work with them so closely, is they're so perfect a fit for us, and they've been a great partner for 20 years for us, connecting those infrastructural data layers: compute, network, and storage. >> Well, just to stay on that for a second. I've seen recently, you kind of doubled down on your VMware alliance. You've got stuff at re:Invent I saw, with AWS, you're close to Azure, and I'm really talking about ONTAP, which is sort of an extension of what you were just talking about, Phil, which is, you know, it's kind of NetApp's storage operating system, if you will. It's a world class. But so, maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, and how you see it evolving. >> Well, so what we've been seeing consistently is, customers want to use the advantages of the cloud. So, point one. And when you have to completely refactor apps and all this stuff, it limits, it's friction. It limits what you can do, it raises costs. And what we did with VMware, VMware is this great platform for being able to run basically client-server apps on-prem and cloud, the exact same way. The problem is, when you have large data sets in the VMs, there's some cost issues and things, especially on the cloud. That drove us to work together, and do what we did. We GA-ed, we're the, so NetApp is the only independent storage, independent storage, say this right, independent storage platform certified to run with VMware cloud on Amazon. We GA-ed that last summer. We GA-ed with Azure, the Azure VMware service, a couple months ago. And you'll see news coming with GCP soon. And so the idea was, make it easy for customers to basically run in a hybrid model. And then if you back out and go, "What does that mean for you as a customer?", it's not saying you should go to the cloud, necessarily, or stay on-prem, or whatever. But it's giving you the flexibility to cost-optimize where you want to be. And from a data management point of view, ONTAP gives you the consistent data management, whichever way you decide to go. >> Yeah, so I've been following NetApp for decades, when you were Network Appliance, and I saw you go from kind of the workstation space into the enterprise. I saw you lean into virtualization really early on, and you've been a great VMware partner ever since. And you were early in cloud, so, sort of talking about, you know, that cross-cloud, what we call supercloud. I'm interested in what you're seeing in terms of specific actions that customers are taking. Like, I think about ELAs, and I think it's a two-edged sword. You know, should customers, you know, lean into ELAs right now? You know, what are you seeing there? You talked about, you know, sort of modernizing apps with things like Kubernetes, you know, cloud migration. What are some of the techniques that you're advising customers to take in the context of this acquisition? >> You know, so the basics of this are pretty easy. One is, and I think even Raghu, the CEO of VMware, has talked about this. Extending your ELA is probably a good idea. Like I said, customers love VMware, so having a commitment for a time, consistent cost management for a time is a good strategy. And I think that's why you're hearing ELA extensions being discussed. It's a good idea. The second part, and I think it goes to your surveys, that cost optimization point on the cloud is, moving to the cloud has huge advantages, but if you just kind of lift and shift, oftentimes the costs aren't realized the way you'd want. And the term "modernization," changing your app to use more Kubernetes, more cloud-native services, is often a consideration that goes into that. But that requires time. And you know, most companies have hundreds of apps, or thousands of apps, they have to consider modernizing. So you want to then think through the journey, what apps are going to move, what gets modernized, what gets lifted-shifted, how many data centers are you compressing? There's a lot of data center, the term I've been hearing is "data center evacuations," but data center consolidation. So that there's some even energy savings advantages sometimes with that. But the whole point, I mean, back up to my whole point, the whole point is having the infrastructure that gives you the flexibility to make the journey on your cost advantages and your business requirements. Not being forced to it. Like, it's not really a philosophy, it's more of a business optimization strategy. >> When you think about application modernization and Kubernetes, how does NetApp, you know, fit into that, as a data layer? >> Well, so if you kind of think, you said, like our journey, Dave, was, when we started our life, we were doing basically virtualization of volumes and things for technical customers. And the servers were always bare metal servers that we got involved with back then. This is, like, going back 20 years. Then everyone moved to VMs, and, like, it's probably, today, I mean, getting to your question in a second, but today, loosely, 20% bare metal servers, 80% virtual machines today. And containers is growing, now a big growing piece. So, if you will, sort of another level of virtual machines in containers. And containers were historically stateless, meaning the storage didn't have anything to do. Storage is always the stateful area in the architectures. But as containers are getting used more, stateful containers have become a big deal. So we've put a lot of emphasis into a product line we call Astra that is the world's best data management for containers. And that's both a cloud service and used on-prem in a lot of my customers. It's a big growth area. So that's what, when I say, like, one partner that can do data management, just, that's what we have to do. We have to keep moving with our customers to the type of data they want to store, and how do you store it most efficiently? Hey, one last thought on this is, where I really see this happening, there's a booming business right now in artificial intelligence, and we call it modern data analytics, but people combining big data lakes with AI, and that's where some of this, a lot of the container work comes in. We've extended objects, we have a thing we call file-object duality, to make it easy to bridge the old world of files to the new world of objects. Those all go hand in hand with app modernization. >> Yeah, it's a great thing about this industry. It never sits still. And you're right, it's- >> It's why I'm in it. >> Me too. Yeah, it's so much fun. There's always something. >> It is an abstraction layer. There's always going to be another abstraction layer. Serverless is another example. It's, you know, primarily stateless, that's probably going to, you know, change over time. All right, last question. In thinking about this Broadcom acquisition of VMware, in the macro climate, put a sort of bow on where NetApp fits into this equation. What's the value you bring in this context? >> Oh yeah, well it's like I said earlier, I think it's the data layer of, it's being the data layer that gives you what you guys call the supercloud, that gives you the ability to choose which cloud. Another thing, all customers are running at least two clouds, and you want to be able to pick and choose, and do it your way. So being the data layer, VMware is going to be in our infrastructures for at least as long as I'm in the computer business, Dave. I'm getting a little old. So maybe, you know, but "decades" I think is an easy prediction, and we plan to work with VMware very closely, along with our customers, as they extend from on-prem to hybrid cloud operations. That's where I think this will go. >> Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. Look at the business case for migrating off of VMware. It just doesn't make sense. It works, it's world class, it recover... They've done so much amazing, you know, they used to be called, Moritz called it the software mainframe, right? And that's kind of what it is. I mean, it means it doesn't go down, right? And it supports virtually any application, you know, around the world, so. >> And I think getting back to your original point about your article, from the very beginning, is, I think Broadcom's really getting a sense of what they've bought, and it's going to be, hopefully, I think it'll be really a fun, another fun era in our business. >> Well, and you can drive EBIT a couple of ways. You can cut, okay, fine. And I'm sure there's some redundancies that they'll find. But there's also, you can drive top-line revenue. And you know, we've seen how, you know, EMC and then Dell used that growth from VMware to throw off free cash flow, and it was just, you know, funded so much, you know, innovation. So innovation is the key. Hock Tan has talked about that a lot. I think there's a perception that Broadcom, you know, doesn't invest in R & D. That's not true. I think they just get very focused with that investment. So, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's fun being here. >> Yeah, our pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >> Enterprise tech practitioners, like most of us they want to make their lives easier so they can focus on delivering more value to their businesses. And to do so, they want to tap best of breed services in the public cloud, but at the same time connect their on-prem intellectual property to emerging applications which drive top line revenue and bottom line profits. But creating a consistent experience across clouds and on-prem estates has been an elusive capability for most organizations, forcing trade-offs and injecting friction into the system. The need to create seamless experiences is clear and the technology industry is starting to respond with platforms, architectures, and visions of what we've called the Supercloud. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis we give you a preview of Supercloud 2, the second event of its kind that we've had on the topic. Yes, folks that's right Supercloud 2 is here. As of this recording, it's just about four days away 33 guests, 21 sessions, combining live discussions and fireside chats from theCUBE's Palo Alto Studio with prerecorded conversations on the future of cloud and data. You can register for free at supercloud.world. And we are super excited about the Supercloud 2 lineup of guests whereas Supercloud 22 in August, was all about refining the definition of Supercloud testing its technical feasibility and understanding various deployment models. Supercloud 2 features practitioners, technologists and analysts discussing what customers need with real-world examples of Supercloud and will expose thinking around a new breed of cross-cloud apps, data apps, if you will that change the way machines and humans interact with each other. Now the example we'd use if you think about applications today, say a CRM system, sales reps, what are they doing? They're entering data into opportunities they're choosing products they're importing contacts, et cetera. And sure the machine can then take all that data and spit out a forecast by rep, by region, by product, et cetera. But today's applications are largely about filling in forms and or codifying processes. In the future, the Supercloud community sees a new breed of applications emerging where data resides on different clouds, in different data storages, databases, Lakehouse, et cetera. And the machine uses AI to inspect the e-commerce system the inventory data, supply chain information and other systems, and puts together a plan without any human intervention whatsoever. Think about a system that orchestrates people, places and things like an Uber for business. So at Supercloud 2, you'll hear about this vision along with some of today's challenges facing practitioners. Zhamak Dehghani, the founder of Data Mesh is a headliner. Kit Colbert also is headlining. He laid out at the first Supercloud an initial architecture for what that's going to look like. That was last August. And he's going to present his most current thinking on the topic. Veronika Durgin of Sachs will be featured and talk about data sharing across clouds and you know what she needs in the future. One of the main highlights of Supercloud 2 is a dive into Walmart's Supercloud. Other featured practitioners include Western Union Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Warner Media. We've got deep, deep technology dives with folks like Bob Muglia, David Flynn Tristan Handy of DBT Labs, Nir Zuk, the founder of Palo Alto Networks focused on security. Thomas Hazel, who's going to talk about a new type of database for Supercloud. It's several analysts including Keith Townsend Maribel Lopez, George Gilbert, Sanjeev Mohan and so many more guests, we don't have time to list them all. They're all up on supercloud.world with a full agenda, so you can check that out. Now let's take a look at some of the things that we're exploring in more detail starting with the Walmart Cloud native platform, they call it WCNP. We definitely see this as a Supercloud and we dig into it with Jack Greenfield. He's the head of architecture at Walmart. Here's a quote from Jack. "WCNP is an implementation of Kubernetes for the Walmart ecosystem. We've taken Kubernetes off the shelf as open source." By the way, they do the same thing with OpenStack. "And we have integrated it with a number of foundational services that provide other aspects of our computational environment. Kubernetes off the shelf doesn't do everything." And so what Walmart chose to do, they took a do-it-yourself approach to build a Supercloud for a variety of reasons that Jack will explain, along with Walmart's so-called triplet architecture connecting on-prem, Azure and GCP. No surprise, there's no Amazon at Walmart for obvious reasons. And what they do is they create a common experience for devs across clouds. Jack is going to talk about how Walmart is evolving its Supercloud in the future. You don't want to miss that. Now, next, let's take a look at how Veronica Durgin of SAKS thinks about data sharing across clouds. Data sharing we think is a potential killer use case for Supercloud. In fact, let's hear it in Veronica's own words. Please play the clip. >> How do we talk to each other? And more importantly, how do we data share? You know, I work with data, you know this is what I do. So if you know I want to get data from a company that's using, say Google, how do we share it in a smooth way where it doesn't have to be this crazy I don't know, SFTP file moving? So that's where I think Supercloud comes to me in my mind, is like practical applications. How do we create that mesh, that network that we can easily share data with each other? >> Now data mesh is a possible architectural approach that will enable more facile data sharing and the monetization of data products. You'll hear Zhamak Dehghani live in studio talking about what standards are missing to make this vision a reality across the Supercloud. Now one of the other things that we're really excited about is digging deeper into the right approach for Supercloud adoption. And we're going to share a preview of a debate that's going on right now in the community. Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake and Microsoft Exec was kind enough to spend some time looking at the community's supercloud definition and he felt that it needed to be simplified. So in near real time he came up with the following definition that we're showing here. I'll read it. "A Supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." So not only did Bob simplify the initial definition he's stressed that the Supercloud is a platform versus an architecture implying that the platform provider eg Snowflake, VMware, Databricks, Cohesity, et cetera is responsible for determining the architecture. Now interestingly in the shared Google doc that the working group uses to collaborate on the supercloud de definition, Dr. Nelu Mihai who is actually building a Supercloud responded as follows to Bob's assertion "We need to avoid creating many Supercloud platforms with their own architectures. If we do that, then we create other proprietary clouds on top of existing ones. We need to define an architecture of how Supercloud interfaces with all other clouds. What is the information model? What is the execution model and how users will interact with Supercloud?" What does this seemingly nuanced point tell us and why does it matter? Well, history suggests that de facto standards will emerge more quickly to resolve real world practitioner problems and catch on more quickly than consensus-based architectures and standards-based architectures. But in the long run, the ladder may serve customers better. So we'll be exploring this topic in more detail in Supercloud 2, and of course we'd love to hear what you think platform, architecture, both? Now one of the real technical gurus that we'll have in studio at Supercloud two is David Flynn. He's one of the people behind the the movement that enabled enterprise flash adoption, that craze. And he did that with Fusion IO and he is now working on a system to enable read write data access to any user in any application in any data center or on any cloud anywhere. So think of this company as a Supercloud enabler. Allow me to share an excerpt from a conversation David Flore and I had with David Flynn last year. He as well gave a lot of thought to the Supercloud definition and was really helpful with an opinionated point of view. He said something to us that was, we thought relevant. "What is the operating system for a decentralized cloud? The main two functions of an operating system or an operating environment are one the process scheduler and two, the file system. The strongest argument for supercloud is made when you go down to the platform layer and talk about it as an operating environment on which you can run all forms of applications." So a couple of implications here that will be exploring with David Flynn in studio. First we're inferring from his comment that he's in the platform camp where the platform owner is responsible for the architecture and there are obviously trade-offs there and benefits but we'll have to clarify that with him. And second, he's basically saying, you kill the concept the further you move up the stack. So the weak, the further you move the stack the weaker the supercloud argument becomes because it's just becoming SaaS. Now this is something we're going to explore to better understand is thinking on this, but also whether the existing notion of SaaS is changing and whether or not a new breed of Supercloud apps will emerge. Which brings us to this really interesting fellow that George Gilbert and I RIFed with ahead of Supercloud two. Tristan Handy, he's the founder and CEO of DBT Labs and he has a highly opinionated and technical mind. Here's what he said, "One of the things that we still don't know how to API-ify is concepts that live inside of your data warehouse inside of your data lake. These are core concepts that the business should be able to create applications around very easily. In fact, that's not the case because it involves a lot of data engineering pipeline and other work to make these available. So if you really want to make it easy to create these data experiences for users you need to have an ability to describe these metrics and then to turn them into APIs to make them accessible to application developers who have literally no idea how they're calculated behind the scenes and they don't need to." A lot of implications to this statement that will explore at Supercloud two versus Jamma Dani's data mesh comes into play here with her critique of hyper specialized data pipeline experts with little or no domain knowledge. Also the need for simplified self-service infrastructure which Kit Colbert is likely going to touch upon. Veronica Durgin of SAKS and her ideal state for data shearing along with Harveer Singh of Western Union. They got to deal with 200 locations around the world in data privacy issues, data sovereignty how do you share data safely? Same with Nick Taylor of Ionis Pharmaceutical. And not to blow your mind but Thomas Hazel and Bob Muglia deposit that to make data apps a reality across the Supercloud you have to rethink everything. You can't just let in memory databases and caching architectures take care of everything in a brute force manner. Rather you have to get down to really detailed levels even things like how data is laid out on disk, ie flash and think about rewriting applications for the Supercloud and the MLAI era. All of this and more at Supercloud two which wouldn't be complete without some data. So we pinged our friends from ETR Eric Bradley and Darren Bramberm to see if they had any data on Supercloud that we could tap. And so we're going to be analyzing a number of the players as well at Supercloud two. Now, many of you are familiar with this graphic here we show some of the players involved in delivering or enabling Supercloud-like capabilities. On the Y axis is spending momentum and on the horizontal accesses market presence or pervasiveness in the data. So netscore versus what they call overlap or end in the data. And the table insert shows how the dots are plotted now not to steal ETR's thunder but the first point is you really can't have supercloud without the hyperscale cloud platforms which is shown on this graphic. But the exciting aspect of Supercloud is the opportunity to build value on top of that hyperscale infrastructure. Snowflake here continues to show strong spending velocity as those Databricks, Hashi, Rubrik. VMware Tanzu, which we all put under the magnifying glass after the Broadcom announcements, is also showing momentum. Unfortunately due to a scheduling conflict we weren't able to get Red Hat on the program but they're clearly a player here. And we've put Cohesity and Veeam on the chart as well because backup is a likely use case across clouds and on-premises. And now one other call out that we drill down on at Supercloud two is CloudFlare, which actually uses the term supercloud maybe in a different way. They look at Supercloud really as you know, serverless on steroids. And so the data brains at ETR will have more to say on this topic at Supercloud two along with many others. Okay, so why should you attend Supercloud two? What's in it for me kind of thing? So first of all, if you're a practitioner and you want to understand what the possibilities are for doing cross-cloud services for monetizing data how your peers are doing data sharing, how some of your peers are actually building out a Supercloud you're going to get real world input from practitioners. If you're a technologist, you're trying to figure out various ways to solve problems around data, data sharing, cross-cloud service deployment there's going to be a number of deep technology experts that are going to share how they're doing it. We're also going to drill down with Walmart into a practical example of Supercloud with some other examples of how practitioners are dealing with cross-cloud complexity. Some of them, by the way, are kind of thrown up their hands and saying, Hey, we're going mono cloud. And we'll talk about the potential implications and dangers and risks of doing that. And also some of the benefits. You know, there's a question, right? Is Supercloud the same wine new bottle or is it truly something different that can drive substantive business value? So look, go to Supercloud.world it's January 17th at 9:00 AM Pacific. You can register for free and participate directly in the program. Okay, that's a wrap. I want to give a shout out to the Supercloud supporters. VMware has been a great partner as our anchor sponsor Chaos Search Proximo, and Alura as well. For contributing to the effort I want to thank Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Ken Schiffman is his supporting cast as well. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight to help get the word out on social media and at our newsletters. And Rob Ho is our editor-in-chief over at Silicon Angle. Thank you all. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast. Wherever you listen we really appreciate the support that you've given. We just saw some stats from from Buzz Sprout, we hit the top 25% we're almost at 400,000 downloads last year. So really appreciate your participation. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast and you'll find those I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. Or if you want to get ahold of me you can email me directly at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or dm me DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn post. I want you to check out etr.ai. They've got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next week at Supercloud two or next time on breaking analysis. (light music)

Hello and welcome back to Supercloud 2 where we examine the intersection of cloud and data in the 2020s. My name is Dave Vellante. Our Supercloud panel, our power panel is back. Maribel Lopez is the founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research. Sanjeev Mohan is former Gartner analyst and principal at Sanjeev Mohan. And Keith Townsend is the CTO advisor. Folks, welcome back and thanks for your participation today. Good to see you. >> Okay, great. >> Great to see you. >> Thanks. Let me start, Maribel, with you. Bob Muglia, we had a conversation as part of Supercloud the other day. And he said, "Dave, I like the work, you got to simplify this a little bit." So he said, quote, "A Supercloud is a platform." He said, "Think of it as a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers." And then Nelu Mihai said, "Well, wait a minute. This is just going to create more stove pipes. We need more standards in an architecture," which is kind of what Berkeley Sky Computing initiative is all about. So there's a sort of a debate going on. Is supercloud an architecture, a platform? Or maybe it's just another buzzword. Maribel, do you have a thought on this? >> Well, the easy answer would be to say it's just a buzzword. And then we could just kill the conversation and be done with it. But I think the term, it's more than that, right? The term actually isn't new. You can go back to at least 2016 and find references to supercloud in Cornell University or assist in other documents. So, having said this, I think we've been talking about Supercloud for a while, so I assume it's more than just a fancy buzzword. But I think it really speaks to that undeniable trend of moving towards an abstraction layer to deal with the chaos of what we consider managing multiple public and private clouds today, right? So one definition of the technology platform speaks to a set of services that allows companies to build and run that technology smoothly without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, which really gets back to something that Bob said. And some of the question is where that lives. And you could call that an abstraction layer. You could call it cross-cloud services, hybrid cloud management. So I see momentum there, like legitimate momentum with enterprise IT buyers that are trying to deal with the fact that they have multiple clouds now. So where I think we're moving is trying to define what are the specific attributes and frameworks of that that would make it so that it could be consistent across clouds. What is that layer? And maybe that's what the supercloud is. But one of the things I struggle with with supercloud is. What are we really trying to do here? Are we trying to create differentiated services in the supercloud layer? Is a supercloud just another variant of what AWS, GCP, or others do? You spoken to Walmart about its cloud native platform, and that's an example of somebody deciding to do it themselves because they need to deal with this today and not wait for some big standards thing to happen. So whatever it is, I do think it's something. I think we're trying to maybe create an architecture out of it would be a better way of saying it so that it does get to those set of principles, but it also needs to be edge aware. I think whenever we talk about supercloud, we're always talking about like the big centralized cloud. And I think we need to think about all the distributed clouds that we're looking at in edge as well. So that might be one of the ways that supercloud evolves. >> So thank you, Maribel. Keith, Brian Gracely, Gracely's law, things kind of repeat themselves. We've seen it all before. And so what Muglia brought to the forefront is this idea of a platform where the platform provider is really responsible for the architecture. Of course, the drawback is then you get a a bunch of stove pipes architectures. But practically speaking, that's kind of the way the industry has always evolved, right? >> So if we look at this from the practitioner's perspective and we talk about platforms, traditionally vendors have provided the platforms for us, whether it's distribution of lineage managed by or provided by Red Hat, Windows, servers, .NET, databases, Oracle. We think of those as platforms, things that are fundamental we can build on top. Supercloud isn't today that. It is a framework or idea, kind of a visionary goal to get to a point that we can have a platform or a framework. But what we're seeing repeated throughout the industry in customers, whether it's the Walmarts that's kind of supersized the idea of supercloud, or if it's regular end user organizations that are coming out with platform groups, groups who normalize cloud native infrastructure, AWS multi-cloud, VMware resources to look like one thing internally to their developers. We're seeing this trend that there's a desire for a platform that provides the capabilities of a supercloud. >> Thank you for that. Sanjeev, we often use Snowflake as a supercloud example, and now would presumably would be a platform with an architecture that's determined by the vendor. Maybe Databricks is pushing for a more open architecture, maybe more of that nirvana that we were talking about before to solve for supercloud. But regardless, the practitioner discussions show. At least currently, there's not a lot of cross-cloud data sharing. I think it could be a killer use case, egress charges or a barrier. But how do you see it? Will that change? Will we hide that underlying complexity and start sharing data across cloud? Is that something that you think Snowflake or others will be able to achieve? >> So I think we are already starting to see some of that happen. Snowflake is definitely one example that gets cited a lot. But even we don't talk about MongoDB in this like, but you could have a MongoDB cluster, for instance, with nodes sitting in different cloud providers. So there are companies that are starting to do it. The advantage that these companies have, let's take Snowflake as an example, it's a centralized proprietary platform. And they are building the capabilities that are needed for supercloud. So they're building things like you can push down your data transformations. They have the entire security and privacy suite. Data ops, they're adding those capabilities. And if I'm not mistaken, it'll be very soon, we will see them offer data observability. So it's all works great as long as you are in one platform. And if you want resilience, then Snowflake, Supercloud, great example. But if your primary goal is to choose the most cost-effective service irrespective of which cloud it sits in, then things start falling sideways. For example, I may be a very big Snowflake user. And I like Snowflake's resilience. I can move from one cloud to another cloud. Snowflake does it for me. But what if I want to train a very large model? Maybe Databricks is a better platform for that. So how do I do move my workload from one platform to another platform? That tooling does not exist. So we need server hybrid, cross-cloud, data ops platform. Walmart has done a great job, but they built it by themselves. Not every company is Walmart. Like Maribel and Keith said, we need standards, we need reference architectures, we need some sort of a cost control. I was just reading recently, Accenture has been public about their AWS bill. Every time they get the bill is tens of millions of lines, tens of millions 'cause there are over thousand teams using AWS. If we have not been able to corral a usage of a single cloud, now we're talking about supercloud, we've got multiple clouds, and hybrid, on-prem, and edge. So till we've got some cross-platform tooling in place, I think this will still take quite some time for it to take shape. >> It's interesting. Maribel, Walmart would tell you that their on-prem infrastructure is cheaper to run than the stuff in the cloud. but at the same time, they want the flexibility and the resiliency of their three-legged stool model. So the point as Sanjeev was making about hybrid. It's an interesting balance, isn't it, between getting your lowest cost and at the same time having best of breed and scale? >> It's basically what you're trying to optimize for, as you said, right? And by the way, to the earlier point, not everybody is at Walmart's scale, so it's not actually cheaper for everybody to have the purchasing power to make the cloud cheaper to have it on-prem. But I think what you see almost every company, large or small, moving towards is this concept of like, where do I find the agility? And is the agility in building the infrastructure for me? And typically, the thing that gives you outside advantage as an organization is not how you constructed your cloud computing infrastructure. It might be how you structured your data analytics as an example, which cloud is related to that. But how do you marry those two things? And getting back to sort of Sanjeev's point. We're in a real struggle now where one hand we want to have best of breed services and on the other hand we want it to be really easy to manage, secure, do data governance. And those two things are really at odds with each other right now. So if you want all the knobs and switches of a service like geospatial analytics and big query, you're going to have to use Google tools, right? Whereas if you want visibility across all the clouds for your application of state and understand the security and governance of that, you're kind of looking for something that's more cross-cloud tooling at that point. But whenever you talk to somebody about cross-cloud tooling, they look at you like that's not really possible. So it's a very interesting time in the market. Now, we're kind of layering this concept of supercloud on it. And some people think supercloud's about basically multi-cloud tooling, and some people think it's about a whole new architectural stack. So we're just not there yet. But it's not all about cost. I mean, cloud has not been about cost for a very, very long time. Cloud has been about how do you really make the most of your data. And this gets back to cross-cloud services like Snowflake. Why did they even exist? They existed because we had data everywhere, but we need to treat data as a unified object so that we can analyze it and get insight from it. And so that's where some of the benefit of these cross-cloud services are moving today. Still a long way to go, though, Dave. >> Keith, I reached out to my friends at ETR given the macro headwinds, And you're right, Maribel, cloud hasn't really been about just about cost savings. But I reached out to the ETR, guys, what's your data show in terms of how customers are dealing with the economic headwinds? And they said, by far, their number one strategy to cut cost is consolidating redundant vendors. And a distant second, but still notable was optimizing cloud costs. Maybe using reserve instances, or using more volume buying. Nowhere in there. And I asked them to, "Could you go look and see if you can find it?" Do we see repatriation? And you hear this a lot. You hear people whispering as analysts, "You better look into that repatriation trend." It's pretty big. You can't find it. But some of the Walmarts in the world, maybe even not repatriating, but they maybe have better cost structure on-prem. Keith, what are you seeing from the practitioners that you talk to in terms of how they're dealing with these headwinds? >> Yeah, I just got into a conversation about this just this morning with (indistinct) who is an analyst over at GigaHome. He's reading the same headlines. Repatriation is happening at large scale. I think this is kind of, we have these quiet terms now. We have quiet quitting, we have quiet hiring. I think we have quiet repatriation. Most people haven't done away with their data centers. They're still there. Whether they're completely on-premises data centers, and they own assets, or they're partnerships with QTX, Equinix, et cetera, they have these private cloud resources. What I'm seeing practically is a rebalancing of workloads. Do I really need to pay AWS for this instance of SAP that's on 24 hours a day versus just having it on-prem, moving it back to my data center? I've talked to quite a few customers who were early on to moving their static SAP workloads onto the public cloud, and they simply moved them back. Surprising, I was at VMware Explore. And we can talk about this a little bit later on. But our customers, net new, not a lot that were born in the cloud. And they get to this point where their workloads are static. And they look at something like a Kubernetes, or a OpenShift, or VMware Tanzu. And they ask the question, "Do I need the scalability of cloud?" I might consider being a net new VMware customer to deliver this base capability. So are we seeing repatriation as the number one reason? No, I think internal IT operations are just naturally come to this realization. Hey, I have these resources on premises. The private cloud technologies have moved far along enough that I can just simply move this workload back. I'm not calling it repatriation, I'm calling it rightsizing for the operating model that I have. >> Makes sense. Yeah. >> Go ahead. >> If I missed something, Dave, why we are on this topic of repatriation. I'm actually surprised that we are talking about repatriation as a very big thing. I think repatriation is happening, no doubt, but it's such a small percentage of cloud migration that to me it's a rounding error in my opinion. I think there's a bigger problem. The problem is that people don't know where the cost is. If they knew where the cost was being wasted in the cloud, they could do something about it. But if you don't know, then the easy answer is cloud costs a lot and moving it back to on-premises. I mean, take like Capital One as an example. They got rid of all the data centers. Where are they going to repatriate to? They're all in the cloud at this point. So I think my point is that data observability is one of the places that has seen a lot of traction is because of cost. Data observability, when it first came into existence, it was all about data quality. Then it was all about data pipeline reliability. And now, the number one killer use case is FinOps. >> Maribel, you had a comment? >> Yeah, I'm kind of in violent agreement with both Sanjeev and Keith. So what are we seeing here? So the first thing that we see is that many people wildly overspent in the big public cloud. They had stranded cloud credits, so to speak. The second thing is, some of them still had infrastructure that was useful. So why not use it if you find the right workloads to what Keith was talking about, if they were more static workloads, if it was already there? So there is a balancing that's going on. And then I think fundamentally, from a trend standpoint, these things aren't binary. Everybody, for a while, everything was going to go to the public cloud and then people are like, "Oh, it's kind of expensive." Then they're like, "Oh no, they're going to bring it all on-prem 'cause it's really expensive." And it's like, "Well, that doesn't necessarily get me some of the new features and functionalities I might want for some of my new workloads." So I'm going to put the workloads that have a certain set of characteristics that require cloud in the cloud. And if I have enough capability on-prem and enough IT resources to manage certain things on site, then I'm going to do that there 'cause that's a more cost-effective thing for me to do. It's not binary. That's why we went to hybrid. And then we went to multi just to describe the fact that people added multiple public clouds. And now we're talking about super, right? So I don't look at it as a one-size-fits-all for any of this. >> A a number of practitioners leading up to Supercloud2 have told us that they're solving their cloud complexity by going in monocloud. So they're putting on the blinders. Even though across the organization, there's other groups using other clouds. You're like, "In my group, we use AWS, or my group, we use Azure. And those guys over there, they use Google. We just kind of keep it separate." Are you guys hearing this in your view? Is that risky? Are they missing out on some potential to tap best of breed? What do you guys think about that? >> Everybody thinks they're monocloud. Is anybody really monocloud? It's like a group is monocloud, right? >> Right. >> This genie is out of the bottle. We're not putting the genie back in the bottle. You might think your monocloud and you go like three doors down and figure out the guy or gal is on a fundamentally different cloud, running some analytics workload that you didn't know about. So, to Sanjeev's earlier point, they don't even know where their cloud spend is. So I think the concept of monocloud, how that's actually really realized by practitioners is primary and then secondary sources. So they have a primary cloud that they run most of their stuff on, and that they try to optimize. And we still have forked workloads. Somebody decides, "Okay, this SAP runs really well on this, or these analytics workloads run really well on that cloud." And maybe that's how they parse it. But if you really looked at it, there's very few companies, if you really peaked under the hood and did an analysis that you could find an actual monocloud structure. They just want to pull it back in and make it more manageable. And I respect that. You want to do what you can to try to streamline the complexity of that. >> Yeah, we're- >> Sorry, go ahead, Keith. >> Yeah, we're doing this thing where we review AWS service every day. Just in your inbox, learn about a new AWS service cursory. There's 238 AWS products just on the AWS cloud itself. Some of them are redundant, but you get the idea. So the concept of monocloud, I'm in filing agreement with Maribel on this that, yes, a group might say I want a primary cloud. And that primary cloud may be the AWS. But have you tried the licensed Oracle database on AWS? It is really tempting to license Oracle on Oracle Cloud, Microsoft on Microsoft. And I can't get RDS anywhere but Amazon. So while I'm driven to desire the simplicity, the reality is whether be it M&A, licensing, data sovereignty. I am forced into a multi-cloud management style. But I do agree most people kind of do this one, this primary cloud, secondary cloud. And I guarantee you're going to have a third cloud or a fourth cloud whether you want to or not via shadow IT, latency, technical reasons, et cetera. >> Thank you. Sanjeev, you had a comment? >> Yeah, so I just wanted to mention, as an organization, I'm complete agreement, no organization is monocloud, at least if it's a large organization. Large organizations use all kinds of combinations of cloud providers. But when you talk about a single workload, that's where the program arises. As Keith said, the 238 services in AWS. How in the world am I going to be an expert in AWS, but then say let me bring GCP or Azure into a single workload? And that's where I think we probably will still see monocloud as being predominant because the team has developed its expertise on a particular cloud provider, and they just don't have the time of the day to go learn yet another stack. However, there are some interesting things that are happening. For example, if you look at a multi-cloud example where Oracle and Microsoft Azure have that interconnect, so that's a beautiful thing that they've done because now in the newest iteration, it's literally a few clicks. And then behind the scene, your .NET application and your Oracle database in OCI will be configured, the identities in active directory are federated. And you can just start using a database in one cloud, which is OCI, and an application, your .NET in Azure. So till we see this kind of a solution coming out of the providers, I think it's is unrealistic to expect the end users to be able to figure out multiple clouds. >> Well, I have to share with you. I can't remember if he said this on camera or if it was off camera so I'll hold off. I won't tell you who it is, but this individual was sort of complaining a little bit saying, "With AWS, I can take their best AI tools like SageMaker and I can run them on my Snowflake." He said, "I can't do that in Google. Google forces me to go to BigQuery if I want their excellent AI tools." So he was sort of pushing, kind of tweaking a little bit. Some of the vendor talked that, "Oh yeah, we're so customer-focused." Not to pick on Google, but I mean everybody will say that. And then you say, "If you're so customer-focused, why wouldn't you do a ABC?" So it's going to be interesting to see who leads that integration and how broadly it's applied. But I digress. Keith, at our first supercloud event, that was on August 9th. And it was only a few months after Broadcom announced the VMware acquisition. A lot of people, myself included said, "All right, cuts are coming." Generally, Tanzu is probably going to be under the radar, but it's Supercloud 22 and presumably VMware Explore, the company really... Well, certainly the US touted its Tanzu capabilities. I wasn't at VMware Explore Europe, but I bet you heard similar things. Hawk Tan has been blogging and very vocal about cross-cloud services and multi-cloud, which doesn't happen without Tanzu. So what did you hear, Keith, in Europe? What's your latest thinking on VMware's prospects in cross-cloud services/supercloud? >> So I think our friend and Cube, along host still be even more offended at this statement than he was when I sat in the Cube. This was maybe five years ago. There's no company better suited to help industries or companies, cross-cloud chasm than VMware. That's not a compliment. That's a reality of the industry. This is a very difficult, almost intractable problem. What I heard that VMware Europe were customers serious about this problem, even more so than the US data sovereignty is a real problem in the EU. Try being a company in Switzerland and having the Swiss data solvency issues. And there's no local cloud presence there large enough to accommodate your data needs. They had very serious questions about this. I talked to open source project leaders. Open source project leaders were asking me, why should I use the public cloud to host Kubernetes-based workloads, my projects that are building around Kubernetes, and the CNCF infrastructure? Why should I use AWS, Google, or even Azure to host these projects when that's undifferentiated? I know how to run Kubernetes, so why not run it on-premises? I don't want to deal with the hardware problems. So again, really great questions. And then there was always the specter of the problem, I think, we all had with the acquisition of VMware by Broadcom potentially. 4.5 billion in increased profitability in three years is a unbelievable amount of money when you look at the size of the problem. So a lot of the conversation in Europe was about industry at large. How do we do what regulators are asking us to do in a practical way from a true technology sense? Is VMware cross-cloud great? >> Yeah. So, VMware, obviously, to your point. OpenStack is another way of it. Actually, OpenStack, uptake is still alive and well, especially in those regions where there may not be a public cloud, or there's public policy dictating that. Walmart's using OpenStack. As you know in IT, some things never die. Question for Sanjeev. And it relates to this new breed of data apps. And Bob Muglia and Tristan Handy from DBT Labs who are participating in this program really got us thinking about this. You got data that resides in different clouds, it maybe even on-prem. And the machine polls data from different systems. No humans involved, e-commerce, ERP, et cetera. It creates a plan, outcomes. No human involvement. Today, you're on a CRM system, you're inputting, you're doing forms, you're, you're automating processes. We're talking about a new breed of apps. What are your thoughts on this? Is it real? Is it just way off in the distance? How does machine intelligence fit in? And how does supercloud fit? >> So great point. In fact, the data apps that you're talking about, I call them data products. Data products first came into limelight in the last couple of years when Jamal Duggan started talking about data mesh. I am taking data products out of the data mesh concept because data mesh, whether data mesh happens or not is analogous to data products. Data products, basically, are taking a product management view of bringing data from different sources based on what the consumer needs. We were talking earlier today about maybe it's my vacation rentals, or it may be a retail data product, it may be an investment data product. So it's a pre-packaged extraction of data from different sources. But now I have a product that has a whole lifecycle. I can version it. I have new features that get added. And it's a very business data consumer centric. It uses machine learning. For instance, I may be able to tell whether this data product has stale data. Who is using that data? Based on the usage of the data, I may have a new data products that get allocated. I may even have the ability to take existing data products, mash them up into something that I need. So if I'm going to have that kind of power to create a data product, then having a common substrate underneath, it can be very useful. And that could be supercloud where I am making API calls. I don't care where the ERP, the CRM, the survey data, the pricing engine where they sit. For me, there's a logical abstraction. And then I'm building my data product on top of that. So I see a new breed of data products coming out. To answer your question, how early we are or is this even possible? My prediction is that in 2023, we will start seeing more of data products. And then it'll take maybe two to three years for data products to become mainstream. But it's starting this year. >> A subprime mortgages were a data product, definitely were humans involved. All right, let's talk about some of the supercloud, multi-cloud players and what their future looks like. You can kind of pick your favorites. VMware, Snowflake, Databricks, Red Hat, Cisco, Dell, HP, Hashi, IBM, CloudFlare. There's many others. cohesive rubric. Keith, I wanted to start with CloudFlare because they actually use the term supercloud. and just simplifying what they said. They look at it as taking serverless to the max. You write your code and then you can deploy it in seconds worldwide, of course, across the CloudFlare infrastructure. You don't have to spin up containers, you don't go to provision instances. CloudFlare worries about all that infrastructure. What are your thoughts on CloudFlare this approach and their chances to disrupt the current cloud landscape? >> As Larry Ellison said famously once before, the network is the computer, right? I thought that was Scott McNeley. >> It wasn't Scott McNeley. I knew it was on Oracle Align. >> Oracle owns that now, owns that line. >> By purpose or acquisition. >> They should have just called it cloud. >> Yeah, they should have just called it cloud. >> Easier. >> Get ahead. >> But if you think about the CloudFlare capability, CloudFlare in its own right is becoming a decent sized cloud provider. If you have compute out at the edge, when we talk about edge in the sense of CloudFlare and points of presence, literally across the globe, you have all of this excess computer, what do you do with it? First offering, let's disrupt data in the cloud. We can't start the conversation talking about data. When they say we're going to give you object-oriented or object storage in the cloud without egress charges, that's disruptive. That we can start to think about supercloud capability of having compute EC2 run in AWS, pushing and pulling data from CloudFlare. And now, I've disrupted this roach motel data structure, and that I'm freely giving away bandwidth, basically. Well, the next layer is not that much more difficult. And I think part of CloudFlare's serverless approach or supercloud approaches so that they don't have to commit to a certain type of compute. It is advantageous. It is a feature for me to be able to go to EC2 and pick a memory heavy model, or a compute heavy model, or a network heavy model, CloudFlare is taken away those knobs. and I'm just giving code and allowing that to run. CloudFlare has a massive network. If I can put the code closest using the CloudFlare workers, if I can put that code closest to where the data is at or residing, super compelling observation. The question is, does it scale? I don't get the 238 services. While Server List is great, I have to know what I'm going to build. I don't have a Cognito, or RDS, or all these other services that make AWS, GCP, and Azure appealing from a builder's perspective. So it is a very interesting nascent start. It's great because now they can hide compute. If they don't have the capacity, they can outsource that maybe at a cost to one of the other cloud providers, but kind of hiding the compute behind the surplus architecture is a really unique approach. >> Yeah. And they're dipping their toe in the water. And they've announced an object store and a database platform and more to come. We got to wrap. So I wonder, Sanjeev and Maribel, if you could maybe pick some of your favorites from a competitive standpoint. Sanjeev, I felt like just watching Snowflake, I said, okay, in my opinion, they had the right strategy, which was to run on all the clouds, and then try to create that abstraction layer and data sharing across clouds. Even though, let's face it, most of it might be happening across regions if it's happening, but certainly outside of an individual account. But I felt like just observing them that anybody who's traditional on-prem player moving into the clouds or anybody who's a cloud native, it just makes total sense to write to the various clouds. And to the extent that you can simplify that for users, it seems to be a logical strategy. Maybe as I said before, what multi-cloud should have been. But are there companies that you're watching that you think are ahead in the game , or ones that you think are a good model for the future? >> Yes, Snowflake, definitely. In fact, one of the things we have not touched upon very much, and Keith mentioned a little bit, was data sovereignty. Data residency rules can require that certain data should be written into certain region of a certain cloud. And if my cloud provider can abstract that or my database provider, then that's perfect for me. So right now, I see Snowflake is way ahead of this pack. I would not put MongoDB too far behind. They don't really talk about this thing. They are in a different space, but now they have a lakehouse, and they've got all of these other SQL access and new capabilities that they're announcing. So I think they would be quite good with that. Oracle is always a dark forest. Oracle seems to have revived its Cloud Mojo to some extent. And it's doing some interesting stuff. Databricks is the other one. I have not seen Databricks. They've been very focused on lakehouse, unity, data catalog, and some of those pieces. But they would be the obvious challenger. And if they come into this space of supercloud, then they may bring some open source technologies that others can rely on like Delta Lake as a table format. >> Yeah. One of these infrastructure players, Dell, HPE, Cisco, even IBM. I mean, I would be making my infrastructure as programmable and cloud friendly as possible. That seems like table stakes. But Maribel, any companies that stand out to you that we should be paying attention to? >> Well, we already mentioned a bunch of them, so maybe I'll go a slightly different route. I'm watching two companies pretty closely to see what kind of traction they get in their established companies. One we already talked about, which is VMware. And the thing that's interesting about VMware is they're everywhere. And they also have the benefit of having a foot in both camps. If you want to do it the old way, the way you've always done it with VMware, they got all that going on. If you want to try to do a more cross-cloud, multi-cloud native style thing, they're really trying to build tools for that. So I think they have really good access to buyers. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in them to see how they progress. The other thing, I think, could be a sleeping horse oddly enough is Google Cloud. They've spent a lot of work and time on Anthos. They really need to create a certain set of differentiators. Well, it's not necessarily in their best interest to be the best multi-cloud player. If they decide that they want to differentiate on a different layer of the stack, let's say they want to be like the person that is really transformative, they talk about transformation cloud with analytics workloads, then maybe they do spend a good deal of time trying to help people abstract all of the other underlying infrastructure and make sure that they get the sexiest, most meaningful workloads into their cloud. So those are two people that you might not have expected me to go with, but I think it's interesting to see not just on the things that might be considered, either startups or more established independent companies, but how some of the traditional providers are trying to reinvent themselves as well. >> I'm glad you brought that up because if you think about what Google's done with Kubernetes. I mean, would Google even be relevant in the cloud without Kubernetes? I could argue both sides of that. But it was quite a gift to the industry. And there's a motivation there to do something unique and different from maybe the other cloud providers. And I'd throw in Red Hat as well. They're obviously a key player and Kubernetes. And Hashi Corp seems to be becoming the standard for application deployment, and terraform, or cross-clouds, and there are many, many others. I know we're leaving lots out, but we're out of time. Folks, I got to thank you so much for your insights and your participation in Supercloud2. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the entire Cube community. Keep it right there for more content from Supercloud2.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch. I've got a special guest with me today from Prowess Consulting. His name is Evan Touger, he's a senior technical writer with Prowess. Evan, welcome. >> Hi, great to be here. Thanks. >> So tell us a little bit about Prowess, what does Prowess do? >> Yeah, we're a consulting firm. We've been around for quite a few years, based in Bellevue, Washington. And we do quite a few projects with folks from Dell to a lot of other companies, and dive in. We have engineers, writers, production folks, so pretty much end-to-end work, doing research testing and writing, and diving into different technical topics. >> So you- in this case what we're going to be talking about is some validation studies that you've done, looking at Dell PowerEdge servers that happened to be integrating in fourth-gen EPYC processors from AMD. What were the specific workloads that you were focused on in this study? >> Yeah, this particular one was honing in on virtualization, right? You know, obviously it's pretty much ubiquitous in the industry, everybody works with virtualization in one way or another. So just getting optimal performance for virtualization was critical, or is critical for most businesses. So we just wanted to look a little deeper into, you know, how do companies evaluate that? What are they going to use to make the determination for virtualization performance as it relates to their workloads? So that led us to this study, where we looked at some benchmarks, and then went a little deeper under the hood to see what led to the results that we saw from those benchmarks. >> So when you say virtualization, does that include virtual desktop infrastructure or are we just talking about virtual machines in general? >> No, it can include both. We looked at VMs, thinking in terms of what about database performance when you're working in VMs, all the way through to VDI and companies like healthcare organizations and so forth, where it's common to roll out lots of virtual desktops, and performance is critical there as well. >> Okay, you alluded to, sort of, looking under the covers to see, you know, where these performance results were coming from. I assume what you're referencing is the idea that it's not just all about the CPU when you talk about a system. Am I correct in that assumption and- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What can you tell us? >> Well, you know, for companies evaluating, there's quite a bit to consider, obviously. So they're looking at not just raw performance but power performance. So that was part of it, and then what makes up that- those factors, right? So certainly CPU is critical to that, but then other things come into play, like the RAID controllers. So we looked a little bit there. And then networking, of course can be critical for configurations that are relying on good performance on their networks, both in terms of bandwidth and just reducing latency overall. So interconnects as well would be a big part of that. So with, with PCIe gen 5 or 5.0 pick your moniker. You know in this- in the infrastructure game, we're often playing a game of whack-a-mole, looking for the bottlenecks, you know, chasing the bottlenecks. PCIe 5 opens up a lot of bandwidth for memory and things like RAID controllers and NICs. I mean, is the bottleneck now just our imagination, Evan, have we reached a point where there are no bottlenecks? What did you see when you ran these tests? What, you know, what were you able to stress to a point where it was saturated, if anything? >> Yeah. Well, first of all, we didn't- these are particular tests were ones that we looked at industry benchmarks, and we were examining in particular to see where world records were set. And so we uncovered a few specific servers, PowerEdge servers that were pretty key there, or had a lot of- were leading in the category in a lot of areas. So that's what led us to then, okay, well why is that? What's in these servers, and what's responsible for that? So in a lot of cases they, we saw these results even with, you know, gen 4, PCIe gen 4. So there were situations where clearly there was benefit from faster interconnects and, and especially NVMe for RAID, you know, for supporting NVMe and SSDs. But all of that just leads you to the understanding that it means it can only get better, right? So going from gen 4 to- if you're seeing great results on gen 4, then gen 5 is probably going to be, you know, blow that away. >> And in this case, >> It'll be even better. >> In this case, gen 5 you're referencing PCIe >> PCIe right. Yeah, that's right. >> (indistinct) >> And then the same thing with EPYC actually holds true, some of the records, we saw records set for both 3rd and 4th gen, so- with EPYC, so the same thing there. Anywhere there's a record set on the 3rd gen, you know, makes us really- we're really looking forward to going back and seeing over the next few months, which of those records fall and are broken by newer generation versions of these servers, once they actually wrap to the newer generation processors. You know, based on, on what we're seeing for the- for what those processors can do, not only in. >> (indistinct) Go ahead. >> Sorry, just want to say, not only in terms of raw performance, but as I mentioned before, the power performance, 'cause they're very efficient, and that's a really critical consideration, right? I don't think you can overstate that for companies who are looking at, you know, have to consider expenditures and power and cooling and meeting sustainability goals and so forth. So that was really an important category in terms of what we looked at, was that power performance, not just raw performance. >> Yeah, I want to get back to that, that's a really good point. We should probably give credit where credit is due. Which Dell PowerEdge servers are we talking about that were tested and what did those interconnect components look like from a (indistinct) perspective? >> Yeah, so we focused primarily on a couple benchmarks that seemed most important for real world performance results for virtualization. TPCx-V and VMmark 3.x. the TPCx-V, that's where we saw PowerEdge R7525, R7515. They both had top scores in different categories there. That benchmark is great for looking at database workloads in particular, right? Running in virtualization settings. And then the VMmark 3.x was critical. We saw good, good results there for the 7525 and the R 7515 as well as the R 6525, in that one and that included, sorry, just checking notes to see what- >> Yeah, no, no, no, no, (indistinct) >> Included results for power performance, as I mentioned earlier, that's where we could see that. So we kind of, we saw this in a range of servers that included both 3rd gen AMD EPYC and newer 4th gen as well as I mentioned. The RAID controllers were critical in the TPCx-V. I don't think that came into play in the VM mark test, but they were definitely part of the TPCx-V benchmarks. So that's where the RAID controllers would make a difference, right? And in those tests, I think they're using PERC 11. So, you know, the newer PERC 12 controllers there, again we'd expect >> (indistinct) >> To see continued, you know, gains in newer benchmarks. That's what we'll be looking for over the next several months. >> Yeah. So I think if I've got my Dell nomenclature down, performance, no no, PowerEdge RAID Controller, is that right? >> Exactly, yeah, there you go. Right? >> With Broadcom, you know, powered by Broadcom. >> That's right. There you go. Yeah. Isn't the Dell naming scheme there PERC? >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. Back to your comment about power. So you've had a chance to take a pretty deep look at the latest stuff coming out. You're confident that- 'cause some of these servers are going to be more expensive than previous generation. Now a server is not a server is not a server, but some are awakening to the idea that there might be some sticker shock. You're confident that the bang for your buck, the bang for your kilowatt hour is actually going to be beneficial. We're actually making things better, faster, stronger, cheaper, more energy efficient. We're continuing on that curve? >> That's what I would expect to see, right. I mean, of course can't speak to to pricing without knowing, you know, where the dollars are going to land on the servers. But I would expect to see that because you're getting gains in a couple of ways. I mean, one, if the performance increases to the point where you can run more VMs, right? Get more performance out of your VMs and run more total VMs or more BDIs, then there's obviously a good, you know, payback on your investment there. And then as we were discussing earlier, just the power performance ratio, right? So if you're bringing down your power and cooling costs, if these machines are just more efficient overall, then you should see some gains there as well. So, you know, I think the key is looking at what's the total cost of ownership over, you know, a standard like a three-year period or something and what you're going to get out of it for your number of sessions, the performance for the sessions, and the overall efficiency of the machines. >> So just just to be clear with these Dell PowerEdge servers, you were able to validate world record performance. But this isn't, if you, if you look at CPU architecture, PCIe bus architecture, memory, you know, the class of memory, the class of RAID controller, the class of NIC. Those were not all state of the art in terms of at least what has been recently announced. Correct? >> Right. >> Because (indistinct) the PCI 4.0, So to your point- world records with that, you've got next-gen RAID controllers coming out, and NICs coming out. If the motherboard was PCIe 5, with commensurate memory, all of those things are getting better. >> Exactly, right. I mean you're, you're really you're just eliminating bandwidth constraints latency constraints, you know, all of that should be improved. NVMe, you know, just collectively all these things just open the doors, you know, letting more bandwidth through reducing all the latency. Those are, those are all pieces of the puzzle, right? That come together and it's all about finding the weakest link and eliminating it. And I think we're reaching the point where we're removing the biggest constraints from the systems. >> Okay. So I guess is it fair to summarize to say that with this infrastructure that you tested, you were able to set world records. This, during this year, I mean, over the next several months, things are just going to get faster and faster and faster and faster. >> That's what I would anticipate, exactly, right. If they're setting world records with these machines before some of the components are, you know, the absolute latest, it seems to me we're going to just see a continuing trend there, and more and more records should fall. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how that goes, 'cause it's already good and I think the return on investment is pretty good there. So I think it's only going to get better as these roll out. >> So let me ask you a question that's a little bit off topic. >> Okay. >> Kind of, you know, we see these gains, you know, we're all familiar with Moore's Law, we're familiar with, you know, the advancements in memory and bus architecture and everything else. We just covered SuperCompute 2022 in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. And it was fascinating talking to people about advances in AI that will be possible with new architectures. You know, most of these supercomputers that are running right now are n minus 1 or n minus 2 infrastructure, you know, they're, they're, they're PCI 3, right. And maybe two generations of processors old, because you don't just throw out a 100,000 CPU super computing environment every 18 months. It doesn't work that way. >> Exactly. >> Do you have an opinion on this question of the qualitative versus quantitative increase in computing moving forward? And, I mean, do you think that this new stuff that you're starting to do tests on is going to power a fundamental shift in computing? Or is it just going to be more consolidation, better power consumption? Do you think there's an inflection point coming? What do you think? >> That's a great question. That's a hard one to answer. I mean, it's probably a little bit of both, 'cause certainly there will be better consolidation, right? But I think that, you know, the systems, it works both ways. It just allows you to do more with less, right? And you can go either direction, you can do what you're doing now on fewer machines, you know, and get better value for it, or reduce your footprint. Or you can go the other way and say, wow, this lets us add more machines into the mix and take our our level of performance from here to here, right? So it just depends on what your focus is. Certainly with, with areas like, you know, HPC and AI and ML, having the ability to expand what you already are capable of by adding more machines that can do more is going to be your main concern. But if you're more like a small to medium sized business and the opportunity to do what you were doing on, on a much smaller footprint and for lower costs, that's really your goal, right? So I think you can use this in either direction and it should, should pay back in a lot of dividends. >> Yeah. Thanks for your thoughts. It's an interesting subject moving forward. You know, sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of the bits and bites and bobs of all the components we're studying, but they're powering something that that's going to effect effectively all of humanity as we move forward. So what else do we need to consider when it comes to what you've just validated in the virtualization testing? Anything else, anything we left out? >> I think we hit all the key points, or most of them it's, you know, really, it's just keeping in mind that it's all about the full system, the components not- you know, the processor is a obviously a key, but just removing blockages, right? Freeing up, getting rid of latency, improving bandwidth, all these things come to play. And then the power performance, as I said, I know I keep coming back to that but you know, we just, and a lot of what we work on, we just see that businesses, that's a really big concern for businesses and finding efficiency, right? And especially in an age of constrained budgets, that's a big deal. So, it's really important to have that power performance ratio. And that's one of the key things we saw that stood out to us in, in some of these benchmarks, so. >> Well, it's a big deal for me. >> It's all good. >> Yeah, I live in California and I know exactly how much I pay for a kilowatt hour of electricity. >> I bet, yeah. >> My friends in other places don't even know. So I totally understand the power constraint question. >> Yeah, it's not going to get better, so, anything you can do there, right? >> Yeah. Well Evan, this has been great. Thanks for sharing the results that Prowess has come up with, third party validation that, you know, even without the latest and greatest components in all categories, Dell PowerEdge servers are able to set world records. And I anticipate that those world records will be broken in 2023 and I expect that Prowess will be part of that process, So Thanks for that. For the rest of us- >> (indistinct) >> Here at theCUBE, I want to thank you for joining us. Stay tuned for continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, for myself and for Evan Touger. Thanks so much for joining us. (upbeat music)

>>Hello friends and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, where we are live from the show floor at AWS Reinvent. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host John Furrier. John, how was your lunch? >>My lunch was great. Wasn't very complex like it is today, so it was very easy, >>Appropriate for the conversation we're about >>To have. Great, great guests coming up Cube alumni and great question around complexity and how is wellbeing teams be good? >>Yes. And, and and on that note, let's welcome John from DeWit as well as Danny from Inox. I swear I'll be able to say that right by the end of this. Thank you guys so much for being here. How's the show going for you? >>Excellent so far. It's been a great, a great event. You know, back back to pre Covid days, >>You're still smiling day three. That's an awesome sign. John, what about you? >>Fantastic. It's, it's been busier than ever >>That that's exciting. I, I think we certainly feel that way here on the cube. We're doing dozens of videos, it's absolutely awesome. Just in case. So we can dig in a little deeper throughout the rest of the segment just in case the audience isn't familiar, let's get them acquainted with your companies. Let's start with do it John. >>Yeah, thanks Savannah. So do it as a global technology company and we're partnering with deleted cloud providers around the world and digital native companies to provide value and solve complexity. John, to your, to your introductory point with all of the complexities associated with operating in the cloud, scaling a business in the cloud, a lot of companies are just looking to sort of have somebody else take care of that problem for them or have somebody they can call when they run into, you know, into problems scaling. And so with a combination of tech, advanced technology, some of the best cloud experts in the world and unlimited tech support or we're offloading a lot of those problems for our customers and we're doing that on a global basis. So it's, it's an exciting time. >>I can imagine pretty much everyone here on the show floor is dealing with that challenge of complexity. So a couple customers for you in the house. What about you Danny? >>I, I come from a company which operates in a financial industry market. So we essentially a global broker, financial trading broker. Which what this means for those people who don't really understand, essentially we allow clients to be able to trade digitally and speculate with different pricing, pricing tools online. We offer a different products for different type of clients. We have institutional clients, we've got our affiliates, partners programs and we've got a retail clients and this is where AWS and Doit comes handy allows us to offer our products digitally across the globe. And one of the key values for us here is that we can actually offer a product in regions where other people don't. So for example, we don't compete in North America, we don't compete in EME in Europe, but we just do it in AWS to solve our complex challenges in regions that naturally by, depending on where they base, they have like issues and that's how we deliver our product. >>And which regions, Latin >>America, Latin, the entire Africa, subcontinent, middle East, southeast Asia, the culture is just demographic is different. And what you used to have here is not exactly what you have over there. And obviously that brings a lot of challenges with onboarding and clients, deposit, trading activities, CDN latency, all of >>That stuff. It's interesting how each region's different in their, their posture with the cloud. Someone roll their own, someone outta the box. So again, this brings up this theme this year guys, which is about end to end seeing purpose built like specialty solutions. A lot of solutions going end to end with data makes kind of makes it more complicated. So again, we got more complexity coming, but the greatest the cloud is, you can abstract that away. So we are seeing this is a big opportunity for partners to innovate. You're seeing a lot of joint engineering, a lot more complexities coming still, but still end to end is the end game so to speak. >>A absolutely John, I mean one, one of the sort of ways we describe what we try to do for our customers like Equinox is to be your co-pilot in the cloud, which essentially means, you know, >>What an apt analogy. >>I think so, yeah, >>Well, well >>Done there. I think it works. Yvanna. Yeah, so, so as I mentioned, these are the majority or almost all of our customers are pretty sophisticated tech savvy companies. So they don't, you know, they know for most, for the most part what they're trying to achieve. They're approaching scale, they're at scale or they're, or they're through that scale point and they, they just wanna have somebody they can call, right? They need technology to help abstract away the complex problem. So they're not doing so much manual cloud operational work or sometimes they just need help picking the next tech right to solve the end to end use case that that they're, that they're dealing with >>In business. And Danny, you're rolling out solutions so you're on, you're on the front lines, you gotta make it easier. You didn't want to get in the weeds on something that should be taken care of. >>Correct. I mean one of the reasons we go do it is you need to, in order to involve do it, you need to know your problems, understand your challenges, also like a self review only. And you have to be one way halfway through the cloud journey. You need to know your problems, what you want to achieve, where you want to end up a roadmap for the next five years, what you want to achieve. Are we fixing or developing a building? And then involve those guys to come and help you because they cannot just come with magic one and fix all your problems. You need to do that yourself. It's not like starting the journey by yourself. >>Yeah. One thing that's not played up in this event, I will say they may, I don't, they missed, maybe Verner will hit it tomorrow, but I think they kind of missed it a little bit. But the developer productivity's been a big issue. We've seen that this year. One of the big themes on the cube is developer productivity, more velocity on the development side to keep pace with what's on, what solutions are rolling out the customers. And the other one is skills gap. So, and people like, and people have old skills, like we see VMware being bought by Broadcom for instance, got a lot of IT operators at VMware, they gotta go cloud somewhere. So you got new talent, existing talent, skill gaps, people are comfortable, yet the new stuff's there, developers gotta be more productive. How do you guys see that? Cuz that's gonna be how that plays now, it's gonna impact the channel, the partnership relationship, your ability to deliver. >>What's your reaction to that first? Well I think we obviously have a tech savvy team. We've got developers, we've got dev, we've got infrastructure guys, but we only got so much resource that we can afford. And essentially by evolving due it, I've doubled our staff. So we got a tech savvy senior solution architects which comes to do the sexy stuff, actually develop and design a new better offering, better product that makes us competitive. And this is where we involved, essentially we use the due IT staff as an staff employees that our demand is richly army of qualified people. We can actually cherry pick who we want for the call to do X, Y, and Z. And they're there to, to support you. We just have to ask for help. And this is how we fill our gap from technical skills or budget constrained within, you know, within recruitment. >>And I think, I think what, what Danny is touching on, John, what you mentioned is, is really the, the sort of the core family principle of the company, right? It's hard enough for companies like Equinox to hire staff that can help them build their business and deliver the value proposition that they're, that they see, right? And so our reason for existence is to sort of take care of the rest, right? We can help, you know, operate your cloud, show you the most effective way to do that. Whether they're finops problems, whether they're DevOps problems, whether dev SEC ops problems, all of these sort of classic operational problems that get 'em the way of the core business mission. You're not in the business of running the cloud, you're in the business of delivering customer value. We can help you, you know, manage your cloud >>And it's your job to do it. >>It is to do it >>Can, couldn't raise this upon there. How long have y'all been working together? >>I would say 15 months. We took, we took a bit of a conservative approach. We hope for the baseball, prepare for the worst. So I didn't trust do it. I give them one account, start with DEF U A C because you cannot, you just have to learn the journey yourself. So I think I would, my advice for clients is give it the six months. Once you establish a relationship, build a relationship, give them one by one start slowly. You actually understand by yourself the skills, the capacity that they have. And also the, for me consultants is really important And after that just opens up and we are now involving them. We've got new project, we've got problem statement. The first thing we do, we don't Google it, we just say do it. Log a ticket, we got the team. You're >>A verb. >>Yeah. So >>In this case we have >>The puns are on list here on the Cuban general. But with something like that, it's great. >>I gotta ask you a question cuz this is interesting John. You know, we talked last year on the cube and, and again this is an example of how innovations playing out. If you look at the announcements, Adam Celski did and then sw, he had 13 or so announcements. I won't say it's getting boring, but when you hear boring, boring is good. When you start getting into these, these gaps in the platforms as it grows. I won't say they was boring cause that really wasn't boring. I like the data >>Itself. It's all fascinating, John, >>But it, but it's a lot of gap filling, you know, 50 connectors you got, you know, yeah. All glue layers being built in AI's critical. The match cloud is there. What's the innovation? You got a lot of gaps being filled, boring is good. Like Kubernetes, we say there boring means, it's being invisible. That means it's going away. What's the exciting things from your perspective in cloud here? >>Well, I think, I mean, boring is an interesting word to use cuz a company with the heritage of AWS is constantly evolving. I mean, at the core of that company's culture is innovation, technology, development and innovation. And they're building for builders as, as you know, just as well as I do. Yeah. And so, but what we find across our customer base is that companies that are scaling or at scale are using maybe a smaller set of those services, but they're really leveraging them in interesting ways. And there is a very long tail of deeper, more sophisticated fit for purpose, more specific services. And Adam announced, you know, who knows him another 20 or 30 services and it's happening year after year after year. And I think one of the things that, that Danny might attest to is, I, I spoke about the reason we exist and the reason we form the company is we hold it very, a very critical part of our mission is to stay abreast of all of those developments as they emerge so that Danny and and his crew don't have to, right? And so when they have a, a, a question about SageMaker or they have a question about sort of the new big data service that Adam has announced, we take it very seriously. Our job is to be able to answer that question quickly and >>Accurately. And I notice your shirt, if you could just give a little shirt there, ops, cloud ops, DevOps do it. The intersection of the finance, the tuning is now we're hearing a lot of price performance, cost recovery, not cost recovery, but cost management. Yeah. Optimizing. So we're seeing building scale, but now, now tuning almost a craft, the craft of the cloud is here. What's your reaction to that? It, >>It absolutely is. And this is a story as old as the cloud, honestly. And companies, you know, they'll, they'll, companies tend to follow the same sort of maturity journey when they first start, whether they're migrating to the cloud or they were born in the cloud as most of our customers are. There's a, there's a, there's an, there's an access to visibility and understanding and optimization to tuning a craft to use your term. And, and cost management truly is a 10 year old problem that is as prevalent and relevant today as it was, you know, 10 years ago. And there's a lot of talk about the economics associated with the cloud and it's not, certainly not always cheaper to run. In fact, it rarely is cheaper to run your business from any of the public cloud providers. The key is to do it and right size it and make sure it's operating in accordance and alignment with your business, right? It's okay for cloud process to go up so long as your top line is also >>Selling your proportion. You spend more cloud to save cloud. That's it's >>Penny wise, pound full. It's always a little bit, always a little bit of a, of a >>Dilemma on, on the cost saving. We didn't want to just save money. If you want to save money, just shut down your services, right? So it's about making money. So this is where do it comes, like we actually start making, okay, we spend a bit more now, but in about six months time I will be making more money. And we've just did that. We roll out the new application for all the new product offering host to AWS fully with the guys support, a lot of long, boring, boring, boring calls, but they're productive because we actually now have a better product, competitive, it's tailored for our clients, it's cost effective. And we are actually making money >>When something's invisible. It's working, you know, talking about it means it's, it's, it's operational. >>It's exactly, it's, >>Well to that point, John, one of the things we're most proud of in, you know, know this year was, was the launch of our product we called Flex Save, which essentially does exactly what you've described. It's, it's looking for automation and, and, and, and automatic ways of, yes. Saving money, but offering the opportunities to, to to improve the economics associated with your cloud infrastructure. >>Yeah. And improving the efficiency across the board. A hundred percent. It, it's, oh, it's awesome. Let's, and, and it's, it's my understanding there's some reporting and insights that you're able to then translate through from do it to your CTO and across the company. Denny, what's that like? What do you get to see working >>With them? Well, the problem is, like the CTO asked me to do all of that. It is funny he thinks that he's doing it, but essentially they have a excellent portal that basically looks up all of our instances on the one place. You got like good analytics on your cost, cost, anomalies, budget, costal location. But I didn't want to do that either. So what I have done is taken the next step. I actually sold this to the, to my company completely. So my finance teams goes there, they do it themselves, they log in, check, check, all the billing, the costal location. I actually has zero iteration with them if I don't hear anything from them, which is one of the benefits. But also there is lot of other products like the Flexe is virtually like you just click a finger and you start saving money just like that. Easy >>Is that easy button we've been talking about on >>The show? Yeah, exactly, exactly how it is. But there is obviously outside of the cost management, you actually can look at what is the resource you using do actually need it, how often you use it, think about the long term goal, what you're trying to achieve, and use the analytics to, and actually I have to say the analytics much better than AWS in, in, in, in cmp. It's, it's just more user friendly, more interactive as opposed to, you know, building the one in aws. >>It's good business model. Make things easy for your customers. Easy, simple >>To use. >>It's gotta be nice to hear John. >>Well, so first of all, thank you daddy. >>We, we work, but in all seriousness, you know, we, we work, Danny mentioned the trust word earlier. This is at the core of if we don't, if we're not able to build trust with our clients, our business is dead. It, it just doesn't exist. It can't scale. In fact, it'll go the opposite direction. And so we're, we work very, very hard to earn that trust and we're willing to start small to Danny's example, start small and grow. And that's why we're very, one of the things we're most proud of is, is how few customers tend to leave us year over year. We have customers that have been with us for 10 years. >>You know, Andy, Jesse always has, I just saw an interview, he was on the New York Times event in New York today as a CEO of Amazon. But he's always said in these build out phases, you gotta work backwards from the customer and innovate on behalf of the customer. Cause that's the answer that will always be a good answer for the outcome versus optimizing for just profit, you know what I'm saying? Or other things. So we're still in build out mode, >>You know, as a, as a, as a core fundamental sort of product concept. If you're not solving important problems for our customer, what are you, why, why are you investing? It just >>Doesn't make it. This is the beauty we do it. We actually, they wait for you to come to do the next step. They don't sell me anything. They don't bug me with emails. They're ready. When you're ready to make that journey, you just log a ticket and then come and help you. And this is the beauty. You just, it's just not your, your journey. >>I love it. That's a, that's a beautiful note to lead us to our new tradition on the cube. We have a little bit of a challenge for the both of you. We're looking for your 32nd Instagram real thought leadership sizzle anecdote. Either one of you wanna go first. John looks a little nauseous. Danny, you wanna give it a go? >>Well, we've got a few expressions, but we don't Google it. We just do it. And the key take, that's what we do now at, at, and also what we do is actually using their stuff as an influence employees richly. Like that's what we do. >>Well done, well done. Didn't even need the 30 seconds. Fantastic work, Danny. I love that. All right, John, now you do have to go. Okay, >>I'll goodness. You know, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll I'll go back to what I mentioned earlier, if that's okay. I think we, you know, we exist as a company to sort of help our customers get back to focusing on why they started the business in the first place, which is innovating and delivering value to customers. And we'll help you take care of the rest. It's as simple as that. Awesome. >>Well done. You absolutely nailed it. I wanna just acknowledge your fan club over there watching. Hello everyone from the doit team. Good job team. I love, it's very cute when guests show up with an entourage to the cube. We like to see it. You obviously deserve the entourage. You're, you're both wonderful. Thanks again for being here on the show with Oh yeah, go ahead >>John. Well, I would just like to thank Danny for, for agreeing to >>Discern, thankfully >>Great to spend time with you. Absolutely. Let's do it. >>Thank you. Yeah, >>Yeah. Fantastic gentlemen. Well thank you all for tuning into this wonderful start to the afternoon here from AWS Reinvent. We are in Las Vegas, Nevada with John Furier. My name's Savannah Peterson, you're watching The Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music playing) >> Hey, all you cool cats and kittens, and welcome back to AWS re:Invent. We are live from the show floor, here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host Paul Gillian. Paul, how you doing? We're now full blown into your first day of AWS re:Invent ever. >> Overwhelmed. >> Overwhelmed! >> Drinking from the fire hose. There's so much going on here. >> Yeah. There really is, isn't there? Anything stood out to you in that fire hose? >> I think the importance of data, hearing about a lot of tools here, a lot of talk about how organizations need to take advantage of the cloud to leverage their data more effectively, that's clearly a theme in the show. Hearing a lot about vertical industries and the move of the cloud into more verticalization which we're going to be talking about here with our next guest, among other things. Monty Bhatia, who's the Vice President of Global Systems Integrators at VMware, a company that really pioneered partnerships with AWS, as well as other cloud providers. And also Ranjit Bawa, the principal, US cloud leader for Deloitte, a company that has been a leader in vertical clouds as well as in cloudefying its customers, if you will. Welcome, thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us. >> We're happy to be here. >> Monty, I just have to say, I know I said it before, I think you might be the best dressed. >> You know, you may have to say it again. I've got to record this and show it to my wife, because she always says that I should wear age appropriate colors, and she thinks yellow and hot pinks are not age appropriate. So I've made a deal with her that when I'm traveling, and everybody else has heard the story, when I'm traveling and she's not around I can wear any colors I want. It is an attention grabber, it is a conversation starter, and I love it. >> I'm all for the talk trigger and you told me you have 32 different sets. >> That's right. >> And you're branded, right? Give us a little lapel peak. >> I am branded. (Monty and Ranjit chuckling) >> Brilliant. We don't always do a fashion segment to open each clip but I just, I couldn't let this pass, Monty- >> Thank you, I appreciate that. >> You're just absolutely, absolutely smashing it. Deloitte and VMware, you've got a unique strategic partnership. Ranjit can you tell me a little bit about that? >> Yeah, absolutely. We've been working together for close to a decade now with VMware. >> Nice. In Techland that might as well be a century. >> That's right. >> It is. (Savannah chuckling) >> And we've had a number of very successful large scale transformations across industries together, particularly as our clients are moving to cloud, which really in our world is a metaphor for modern engineering, modern technology, how tech shows up differently to support the business. So we're really excited about what we've done and where we are going together. >> I want to ask you about the transition that we see going on at AWS really going from being an infrastructure to provider to more of a platform provider for vertical applications for HPC, for AI, for specific uses. Is this a transition that you see your customers- are they applauding this transition? >> Yeah, most certainly, and we saw this coming a while ago, and as does AWS and VMware and others, that for more horizontal clouds we're going to start to move into vertical clouds that support industries and sectors and sub-sectors. So increasingly as we move from IIS to more PaaS and even into SaaS land, that is going to continue. The good news is that AWS has formed a really good foundation and a set of common frameworks that people can use to build upon. And then with VMware as well, we've started to build these vertical clouds and insurance and life sciences and healthcare and all kinds of other sectors, including manufacturing and you know, in our booth here, we have a demo of our manufacturing vertical clouds as well. So we certainly see that the direction of travel and our clients are really egging us on as well. >> So what is VMware's role in building these vertical clouds? Because you're not a vertical, I don't think of you as being a vertical services provider. >> Yeah, so from a VMware standpoint, we're going through a transition ourselves, right? It's a transformation happening at VMware. And while we are traditionally an infrastructure we're a plumbing company, right? We are, we provide all the horizontal space, that's where we need the partnership. So we do have some capability built around industries but that's where our partnership with Deloitte is very important to us because they have all these industry clouds. We have the tech platform that provides that. And then when partnering three way partnerships with you know, hyperscalers like AWS you know we can bring the scale and everything together to serve our customers. So it's very important for us to make use of our technology stack. We have customers in all industries, right? We have huge customer base, and we have customers in all industries, right? And so we want to really create that industry angle, working with our partners like Deloitte to serve those customers and working with, you know, our ecosystem partners ISV partners, hyperscaler partners. Obviously AWS is a big partner of ours and want to bring it all together to serve our customers you know, their journeys, basically. >> Let's hang out there for a second because you you see, you both see extraordinarily large customers across different verticals and industries. Talk about some of the trends that you might be seeing that transcend across all of them. Ranjit, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, it's a great question. You know, certainly more, you know, sort of fundamentally, we see this as a huge opportunity this decade. Many folks that I work with call this the roaring twenties all over again. You know, hopefully it won't end the same way as the last one. But in many ways, every client of ours, across every industry, is going through a huge disruption as they're thinking about the businesses they're in, the products they serve, the segments they support, the client demographics that are changing. So that's one big mega sort of trend. The other one is the rate of change. I think most everybody's dealing with the rate of change of technology, right? You come here last year and this year there are a thousand new services. Every day they release five or seven more and every other, you know, technology provider out there as well. So our clients in general are struggling with how do they embrace and adopt this change quickly. >> Right. >> And today they're not set up for that, right? >> Decision overload too, so much. >> Absolutely. >> That one, and then their ability to be able to absorb this change, right? A typical client of ours, enterprise client, has a three to four year journey to embrace new technology. That's the refresh cycle. But now we see that half life going down to three months and six months. So large part of this transformation is how do you build that muscle to be able to deal with this change that's only going to continue to accelerate. So not only are we helping them think about new products and new businesses, but also how to build this muscle and fundamentally change the way they deliver technology. And that's, I think also a place where our partnership is really valuable. >> It's like your sprint muscles versus your marathon muscles, you know? >> Right. >> You're totally fast, which is an entirely different set. >> Exactly right. >> What about you Monty? >> Yeah, and so from a technology standpoint, also one of the biggest trends that we are seeing, you know, two years ago when you looked at it, you know it was all about hyperscaler, public cloud, cloud first. Now we're seeing more of a multicloud approach, right? We're seeing that pull back in towards hybrid cloud. I know John talks about the- >> The Super cloud. >> The Super cloud, right? >> Yes, one of our favorite- >> I know Deloitte talks about Meta cloud, we talk about cross cloud services. So that's a trend that's coming up. And, and you know, we're, from a VM VMware standpoint we're very well positioned in the multicloud space, you know, our partnership with other hyperscalers, actually all cloud providers and then our partnerships with, you know, system integrators like Deloitte, it is really helping us propel, you know that solution to our customers. And so that's a big trend we're seeing around the multicloud and the modern application space. >> How, I mean the multicloud issue seem to be very hot a couple of years ago to die down, at least with, you know, the amount of coverage that's afforded to it. Is that because customers are less interested in multiple clouds or is it because that's become simply part of the landscape? >> Yeah, well, you know, I think it's there was a recent study done that over 70% of the enterprise customers are inherently multicloud, right? And multicloud just doesn't meet the hyperscalers, right? We take multicloud as the hyperscalers the private cloud, the edge cloud, the industry cloud. They've got data all over the place, right? So inherently, most enterprises are multicloud. They're realizing it now that the, when they're lock-in is an issue with them. And so, you know, over 70% of the hundred customers are actually looking at building that orchestration layer on top of the clouds which can provide them a, you know, a more meaningful and simplified decision making for their cloud workloads. >> And maybe to add to that, John, I think your point about the fascination with multicloud four or five years ago and how that tapered off I think the use case people were solving for back then was to have three different cloud options for the same workload. That they could swap between those three, maybe they could arbitrage on cost, et cetera. That in our view is a fool's errand because it's just the you know, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. But what we are seeing now is for different workloads you want to give people optionality. So you an edge computing workload you're serving a restaurant, you need that to run on a different cloud provider because they have better analytics the better geospatial data, that's fine. But your main core application, we run on a different cloud. So you're still supporting multicloud but you're not confusing the same workload to be trying to run them on multiple clouds at the same time or things of that nature. So I think that's where it's kind of moving towards. >> So I, we've talked a lot about big partnerships. One of the exciting trends at the show is all the new collaboration that's happening. I love that you've been partners for a decade. It shows a long term commitment to the community. If I'm an AWS customer who has not yet taken advantage of your fabulous partnership, what is it about it that makes it so magic? Give me a little bit of the pitch. >> So.. >> Go for it, Monty. You're rolling, I like it. (Monty chuckling) Let's go with it. >> Right. So I think for an AWS customer, so we have, VMware has an offering that we built with AWS VMC on AWS right? I think there is a real value in it. There are specific use cases that create a financial benefit an operational benefit for the customers, right? We've traditionally not done a great job of elevating that message. And that's our goal, right? That's our goal is to make sure that the VMC on AWS offering, it's not a competitive offering to AWS, it's actually a complimentary offering. It helps everybody, it helps the customer, it helps VMware it helps AWS in bringing all these pieces together to solve the customer problems. There are certain use cases that are really good for moving to a native cloud like AWS. There are definitely use cases, there are financial advantages, operational advantages that the customers will get out of doing the VMC on AWS offering. And again, our partnerships with our, you know, most strategic partners, who are bringing the industry expertise on top of it will even accelerate that even faster. >> I know you're not at liberty to talking at length about the Broadcom acquisition but can you offer our listeners any insight into what will be continued, what Broadcom's approach or attitude toward the partnerships that you've already built and how strong those are, how committed they are to continuing them. >> You know, there's things we can share, there's things we cannot share and I'll let Ranjit talk about it, but from our standpoint, I think, you know, know what Broadcom has openly stated, we'll say that again, right? They are looking at this as a very strategic acquisition. From their standpoint, they've made it clear that multicloud and modern applications are two of the big strategic initiatives they want to continue. They've also stated openly that, you know, in order for us to scale, we still need these partnerships. And so the partnerships and the ecosystem that VMware has built, you know, it's going to be looked upon as, you know, something they'll continue to do for at least for the near future. You know, what's going to happen in future, we don't know. But in the near future, they don't want to disrupt the partnership, the channel programs that we've already built, you know? And that's very important to us because that's one of our biggest go-to market routes through the partners. >> And most importantly, that logo isn't changing. So you get to wear all of your- >> Well, yes, I was worried if they change the logo then I have to reorder my T-shirts again. But now, you know, we're good for now. (Monty chuckling) >> We're good for now. You both are such wonderfully seasoned veterans so you don't look it like we talked about earlier, but both of you with 20 plus years of experience in the industry. We're doing a new thing on theCUBE this show, where we're looking for your 30 second hot take. Think of it as your thought leadership sizzle reel. What is the most important story or theme coming out of this year's show? I'll see who looks most ready. Monty looks ready. All right, let's go. >> Well, you know, I, you know, one of the things that I've seen, and I've been coming to re:Invents for quite some time you know, this is my sixth re:Ivent, but I really like the ecosystem story that is now building, right? It used to be from an Amazon standpoint, it used to be always customer obsession, which is still there, but they've added partner obsession now, right? And that's a new thing. That means now they are focusing on the ecosystem, just like we are focusing, just like Deloitte is focusing on ecosystem and that to me is a trend worth talking about. >> I love that. And very holistic and very astute. All right, Ranjit, what about you? >> Well, first I love the energy. It almost feels like there was no pandemic, right? So that's a good reminder- >> We're all ready for that feeling- >> and hopefully we're world beyond what we've been through. I also think, you know to that point, there's a lot more focus on ecosystem plays that move beyond just the less lift and shift with the cloud. But let's be thoughtful about changing the way you serve your clients, the capabilities you want to deliver. And a lot of that is through the ecosystem around client problems and working backwards from clients I think is also amazing. >> Yeah. >> And finally, I'm also always energized by the the team that's here or the folks that are here. I think it's become more pervasive, you know, earlier on it was more CIOs and, you know, senior execs. I think we're seeing a lot more across the organization, which is a great way to drive adoption and things. >> Really beautiful point. I love that. The diversity here is definitely noticeable. This is a cheeky thing to say live, but I noticed this is probably the first tech conference I've ever been to as a woman where I, there was actually a line for the restroom. Normally we're straight in at these and it's a silly thing. Yeah, now at breaks I have to allow a little extra time, but it was one of those moments where I very much noticed it earlier today and had to text to know I was going to be a little later back to the set, but I think it- I'm glad you brought that up cuz this community is special, it's inclusive, it's collaborative, it's massive companies as well as tiny startups from all over the world. It's very exciting. I really enjoyed talking with both of you. I hope we get to have you back on the show. It was fun. It was fashionable. Ranjit, Monty, thank you both so much for bringing your energy and your thoughts >> We'd love to come back. Yes, we'd love to come back in hot pink next time and talk about. >> I mean, the Deloitte consultants usually know how to thread up but (Savannah chuckling) >> I know. I'm seriously overshadowed >> And I'm wearing my neons next time. I wear a very brave pink. So generally speaking, although the sequence were- We'll definitely do it. Thank you so much for being here, and thank all of you for tuning in for our continuous live coverage here from AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas in Nevada. My name is Savannah Peterson with Paul Gillian. We are theCUBE and we are the source for leading and spicy, zesty, fashionable tech coverage. (upbeat music playing)

>>Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back to The Cube's Thrilling live coverage of AWS Reinvent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm joined by my fantastic co-host, John Farer. John, things are really ramping up in here. Day one. >>Yep, it's packed already. I heard 70,000 maybe attendees really this year. I just saw that on Twitter. Again, it continues to show that over the past 10 years we've been here, you're seeing some of the players that were here from the beginning growing up and getting bigger and stronger, becoming more platforms, not just point solutions. You're seeing new entrants coming in, new startups, and the innovation you start to see happening, it's really compelling to fun to watch. And our next segment, we have multi 10 time Cube alumni coming on and a first timer, so it should be great. We'll get into some of the innovation, >>Not only as this guest went on the cube 10 times, he also spoke at the first AWS reinvent, just like you were covering it here with Cube. But without further ado, please welcome Ronan and Kevin from NetApp. Thank you gentlemen, both for being here and for matching in your dark blue. How's the show going for you? Ronan, I'm gonna ask you first, you've been here since the beginning. How does it feel in 2022? >>First, it's amazing to see so many people, right? So many humans in one place, flesh and blood. And it's also amazing to see, it's such a celebration for people in the cloud, right? Like this is our, this is our event, the people in the cloud. I'm really, really happy to be here and be in the cube as well. >>Fantastic. It, it is a party, it's a cloud party. Yes. How are you feeling being here, Kevin? I'm >>Feeling great. I mean, going all the way back to the early days of Spot T, which was the start that eventually got acquired as Spot by NetApp. I mean this was, this was our big event. This is what we lived for. We've gone, I've gone from everything, one of the smaller booths out here on the floor all the way up to the, the huge booth that we have today. So we've kind of grown along with the AWS ecosystem and it's just a lot of fun to get here, see all the customers and talk to everybody. >>That's a lot of fun. Fun. That's the theme that we've been talking about. And we wrote a story about on, on Silicon Angle, more that growth from that getting in and getting bigger, not just an ISV or part of the startup showcase or ecosystem. The progression of the investment on how cloud has changed deliverables. You've been part of that wave. What's the biggest walk away, what's, and what's the most important thing going on now cuz it's not stopping. You got new interests coming in and the folks are rising with the tide and getting platforms built around their products. >>Yeah, I would say, you know, years ago is, is cloud in my decision path and now it's cloud is in my decision path. How much is it and how am I going to use it? And I think especially coming up over the next year, macroeconomic events and everything going on is how do I make my next dollar in the cloud go further than my last dollar? Because I know I'm gonna be there, I know I'm gonna be growing in the cloud, so how do I effectively use it to run my business going forward? >>All right, take a minute to explain Spot now part of NetApp. What's the story? What take us through for the folks that aren't familiar with the journey, where it's come from, where it's today? >>Sure. So SPOT is all about cloud optimization. We help all of our customers deploy scale and optimize their applications in the cloud. And what we do is everything from VMs to containers to any type of custom application you want to deploy, we analyze those applications, we find the best price point to run them, we right size them, we do the automation so your DevOps team doesn't have to do it. And we basically make the whole cloud serverless for you at the end of the day. So whatever you're doing in the cloud, we'll manage that for you from the lowest level of the stack all the way up to the highest level financials. >>Is this what you call the evolved cloud state? >>It is in the evolve clouds a little bit more, and Ronan can touch on that a little bit too. The Evolve clouds not only the public cloud but also the cloud that you're building OnPrem, right? A lot of big companies, it's not necessarily a hundred percent one way or the other. The Evolve cloud is which cloud am I on? Am I on an OnPrem cloud and a public cloud or am I on multiple public clouds in an OnPrem cloud? And I think Ronan, you probably have an opinion on that too. >>Yeah, and and I think what we are hearing from our customers is that many of them are in a situation where a lot of their data has been built for years on premises. They're accelerating their move to the cloud, some of them are accelerating, they're moving into multiple cloud and that situation of an on-prem that is becoming cloudy and cloudy all the time. And then accelerated cloud adoption. This is what the customers are calling the Evolve cloud and that's what we're trying to support them in that journey. >>How many customers are you supporting in this Evolve cloud? You made it seem like you can just turnkey this for everyone, which I am here >>For it. Yeah, just to be clear, I mean we have thousands of customers, right? Everything from your small startups, people just getting going with a few VMs all the way to people scaling to tens and thousands of VMs in the cloud or even beyond VM services and you know, tens of millions of spend a month. You know, people are putting a lot of investment into the cloud and we have all walks of life under our, you know, customer portfolio. >>You know, multi-cloud has been a big topic in the industry. We call it super cloud. Cause we think super cloud kind of more represents the destination to multi-cloud. I mean everyone has multiple clouds, but they're best of breed defaults. They're not by design in most cases, but we're starting to see traction towards that potential common level services fix to late. See, I still think we're on the performance game now, so I have to ask, ask you guys. Performance has becoming back in VO speeds and feeds back during the data center days. Well, I wouldn't wanna talk speeds and feeds of solutions and then cloud comes in. Now we're at the era of cloud where people are moving their workloads there. There's a lot more automation going on, A lot more, as you said, part of the decision. It is the path. Yeah. So they say, now I wanna run my workloads on the better, faster infrastructure. No developer wants to run their apps on the slower hardware. >>I think that's a tall up for you. Ronan go. >>I mean, I put out my story, no developer ever said, give me the slower software performance and and pay more fast, >>Fastest find too fastest. >>Speed feeds your back, >>Right? And and performance comes in different, in different parameters, right? They think it is come throughput, it comes through latency. And I think even a stronger word today is price performance, right? How much am I paying for the performance that that I need? NetApp is actually offering a very, very big advantage for customers on both the high end performance as well as in the dollar per performance. That is, that is needed. This is actually one of the key differentiator that Fsx for NetApp on top is an AWS storage based on the NetApp on top storage operating system. This is one of the biggest advantages it is offering. It is SAP certified, for example, where latency is the key, is the key item. It is offering new and fastest throughput available, but also leveraging some advanced features like tiering and so on, is offering unique competitive advantage in the dollar for performance specifically. >>And why, why is performance important now, in your opinion? Obviously besides the obvious of no one wants to run their stuff on the slower infrastructure, but why are some people so into it now? >>I think performance as a single parameter is, is definitely a key influencer of the user experience. None, none of us will, will compromise our our experience. The second part is performance is critical when scale is happening, right? And especially with the scale of data performance to handle massive amounts of data is is becoming more and more critical. The last thing that I'll emphasize is again is the dollar for performance. The more data you have, the more you need to handle, the more critical for you is to handle it in a cost effective way. This is kind of, that's kind of in the, in the, in the secret sauce of the success of every workload. >>There isn't a company or person here who's not thinking about doing more faster for cheaper. So you're certainly got your finger on the pulse With that, I wanna talk about a, a customer case study. A little birdie told me that a major US airline recently just had a mass of when we're where according to my notes response time and customer experience was improved by 17 x. Now that's the type of thing that cuts cost big time. Can one of you tell me a little bit more about that? >>Yeah, so I think we all flew here somehow, right? >>Exactly. It's airlines matter. Probably most folks listening, they're >>Doing very well right now. Yes, the >>Airlines and I think we all also needed to deal with changes in the flights with, with really enormous amount of complexity in managing a business like that. We actually rank and choose what, what airline to use among other things based on the level of service that they give us. And especially at the time of crunch, a lot of users are looking through a lot of data to try to optimize, >>Plus all of them who just work this holiday weekend sidebar >>E Exactly right. Can't even, and Thanksgiving is one of these crunch times that are in the middle of this. So 70 x improvement in performance means a loss seven >>Zero or >>17 1 7 1 7 x Right? >>Well, and especially when we're talking about it looks like 50,000, 50,000 messages per minute that this customer was processing. Yes. That that's a lot. That's almost a thousand messages a second. Wow. I think my math tees up there. Yeah. >>It does allow them to operate in the next level of scale and really increase their support for the customer. It also allows them to be more efficient when it comes to cost. Now they need less infrastructure to give better service across the board. The nice thing is that it didn't require them for a lot of work. Sometimes when the customers are doing their journey to the cloud, one of the things that kind of hold them back is like, is either the fear or, or maybe is the, the concern of how much effort will it take me to achieve the same performance or even a better performance in the cloud? They are a live example that not only can you achieve, you can actually exceed the performance that I have on premises and really give customer a better service >>Customer a better service. And reliability is extremely important there. 99.9%. 99% >>99. Yes. >>Yes. That second nine obviously being very important, especially when we're talking about the order of magnitude of, of data and, and actions being taken place. How much of a priority is, is reliability and security for y'all as a team? >>So reliability is a key item for, for everybody, especially in crunch times. But reliability goes beyond the nines. Specifically reliability goes into how simple it is for you to enable backup n dr, how protected are you against ransomware? This is where netup and, and including the fsx for NETUP on top richness of data management makes a huge difference. If you are able to make your copy undeletable, that is actually a game changer when it comes to, to data protection. And this is, this is something that in the past requires a lot of work, opening vaults and other things. Yeah. Now it becomes a very simple configuration that is attached to every net up on top storage, no matter where it is. >>We heard some news at VMware explorer this past fall. Early fall. You guys were there. We saw the Broadcom acquisition. Looks like it's gonna get finalized maybe sooner than later. Lot of, so a lot of speculation around VMware. Someone called the VMware like where is VMware as in where they now, nice pun it was, it was actually Nutanix people, they go at each other all the time. But Broadcom's gonna keep vse and that's where the bread and butter, that's the, that's the goose that lays the Golden eggs. Customers are there. How do you guys see your piece there with VMware cloud on AWS that integrates solution? You guys have a big part of that ecosystem. We've covered it for years. I mean we've been to every VM world now called explorer. You guys have a huge customer base with VMware customers. What's the, what's the outlook? >>Yeah, and, and I think the important part is that a big part of the enterprise workloads are running on VMware and they will continue to run on VMware in, in, in the future. And most of them will try to run in a hybrid mode if not moving completely to the cloud. The cloud give them unparallel scale, it give them DR and backup opportunities. It does a lot of goodness to that. The partnership that NetApp brings with both VMware as well ass as well as other cloud vendors is actually a game changer. Because the minute that you go to the cloud, things like DR and backup have a different economics connected to them. Suddenly you can do compute less dr definitely on backup you can actually achieve massive savings. NetApp is the only data store that is certified to run with VMware cloud. And that actually opens to the customer's huge opportunity for unparalleled data protection as well as real, real savings, hard savings. And customers that look today and they say, I'm gonna shrink my data center, I'm gonna focus on, on moving certain things to the cloud, DR and backup and especially DR and backup VMware might be one of the easiest, fastest things to take into the cloud. And the partnership betweens VMware and NetApp might actually give you >>And the ONAP is great solution. Fsx there? Yes. I think you guys got a real advantage here and I want to get into something that's kind of a gloom and doom. I don't have to go negative on this one, Savannah, but they me nervous John. But you know, if you look at the economic realities you got a lot of companies like that are in the back of a Druva, Netta, Druva, cohesive rub. Others, you know, they, you know, there's a, their generational cloud who breaks through. What's the unique thing? Because you know there's gonna be challenges in the economy and customers are gonna vote with their wallets and they start to see as they make these architectural decisions, you guys are in the middle of it. There's not, there may not be enough to go around and the musical chairs might stop or, or not, I'm not sure. But I feel like if there's gonna be a consolidation, what does that look like? What are customers thinking? Backup recovery, cloud. That's a unique thing. You mentioned economics, it's not, you can't take the old strategy and put it there from five, 10 years ago. What's different now? >>Yeah, I think when it comes to data protection, there is a real change in, in the technology landscape that opened the door for a lot of new vendors to come and offer. Should we expect consolidation? I think microeconomic outside and other things will probably drive some of that to happen. I think there is one more parameter, John, that I wanna mention in this context, which is simplicity. Many of the storage vendors, including us, including aws, you wanna make as much of the backup NDR at basically a simple checkbox that you choose together with your main workload. This is another key capabilities that is, that is being, bringing and changing the market, >>But it also needs to move up. So it's not only simplicity, it's also about moving to the applications that you use, use, and just having it baked in. It's not about you going out and finding a replication. It's like what Ronan said, we gotta make it simple and then we gotta bake it into what they use. So one of our most recent acquisitions of Insta Cluster allows us to provide our customers with open source databases and data streaming services. When those sit on top of on tap and they sit on top of spots, infrastructure optimization, you get all that for free through the database that you use. So you don't worry about it. Your database is replicated, it's highly available, and it's running at the best cost. That's where it's going. >>Awesome. >>You also recently purchased Cloud Checker as well. Yes. Do you just purchase wonderful things all the time? We >>Do. We do. We, >>I'm not >>The, if he walk and act around and then we find the best thing and then we, we break out the checkbook, no, but more seriously, it, it rounds out what customers need for the cloud. So a lot of our customers come from storage, but they need to operate the entire cloud around the storage that they have. Cloud Checker gives us that financial visibility across every single dollar that you spend in the cloud and also gives us a better go to market motion with our MSPs and our distributors than we had in the past. So we're really excited about what cloud checker can unlock for us in >>The future. Makes a lot of sense and congratulations on all the extremely exciting things going on. Our final and closing question for our guests on this year's show is we would love your, your Instagram hot take your 32nd hot take on the most important stories, messages, themes of AWS reinvent 2022. Ronan, I'm gonna start with you cause you have a smirk >>And you do it one day ahead of the keynotes, one day ahead with you. >>You can give us a little tease a little from you. >>I think that pandemic or no pandemic face to face or no face to face, the innovation in the cloud is, is actually breaking all records. And I think this year specifically, you will see a lot of focus on data and scale. I think that's, these are two amazing things that you'll see, I think doubling down. But I'm also anxious to see tomorrow, so I'll learn more about it. >>All right. We might have to chat with you a little bit after tomorrow. Is keynotes and whatnot coming up? What >>About you? I think you're gonna hear a lot about cost. How much are you spending? How far are your dollars going? How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities? How, how efficient are you being with your dollars in the cloud? I think that's gonna be a huge topic. It's on everybody's mind. It's the macro economics situation right now. I think it's gonna be in every session of the keynote tomorrow. All >>Right, so every >>Session. Every session, >>A bulk thing. John, we're gonna have >>That. >>I'm with him. You know, all S in general, you >>Guys have, and go look up what I said. >>Yeah, >>We'll go back and look at, >>I'm gonna check on you >>On that. The record now states. There you go, Kevin. Thank both. Put it down so much. We hope that it's a stellar show for Spotify, my NetApp. Thank you. And that we have you 10 more times and more than just this once and yeah, I, I can't wait to see, well, I can't wait to hear when your predictions are accurate tomorrow and we get to learn a lot more. >>No, you gotta go to all the sessions down just to check his >>Math on that. Yeah, no, exactly. Now we have to do our homework just to call him out. Not that we're competitive or those types of people at all. John. No. On that note, thank you both for being here with us. John, thank you so much. Thank you all for tuning in from home. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada here at AWS Reinvent with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

>>We're back at Super Computing, 22 in Dallas, winding down the final day here. A big show floor behind me. Lots of excitement out there, wouldn't you say, Dave? Just >>Oh, it's crazy. I mean, any, any time you have NASA presentations going on and, and steampunk iterations of cooling systems that the, you know, it's, it's >>The greatest. I've been to hundreds of trade shows. I don't think I've ever seen NASA exhibiting at one like they are here. Dave Nicholson, my co-host. I'm Paul Gell, in which with us is Satish Ier. He is the vice president of emerging services at Dell Technologies and Satit, thanks for joining us on the cube. >>Thank you. Paul, >>What are emerging services? >>Emerging services are actually the growth areas for Dell. So it's telecom, it's cloud, it's edge. So we, we especially focus on all the growth vectors for, for the companies. >>And, and one of the key areas that comes under your jurisdiction is called apex. Now I'm sure there are people who don't know what Apex is. Can you just give us a quick definition? >>Absolutely. So Apex is actually Dells for a into cloud, and I manage the Apex services business. So this is our way of actually bringing cloud experience to our customers, OnPrem and in color. >>But, but it's not a cloud. I mean, you don't, you don't have a Dell cloud, right? It's, it's of infrastructure as >>A service. It's infrastructure and platform and solutions as a service. Yes, we don't have our own e of a public cloud, but we want to, you know, this is a multi-cloud world, so technically customers want to consume where they want to consume. So this is Dell's way of actually, you know, supporting a multi-cloud strategy for our customers. >>You, you mentioned something just ahead of us going on air. A great way to describe Apex, to contrast Apex with CapEx. There's no c there's no cash up front necessary. Yeah, I thought that was great. Explain that, explain that a little more. Well, >>I mean, you know, one, one of the main things about cloud is the consumption model, right? So customers would like to pay for what they consume, they would like to pay in a subscription. They would like to not prepay CapEx ahead of time. They want that economic option, right? So I think that's one of the key tenets for anything in cloud. So I think it's important for us to recognize that and think Apex is basically a way by which customers pay for what they consume, right? So that's a absolutely a key tenant for how, how we want to design Apex. So it's absolutely right. >>And, and among those services are high performance computing services. Now I was not familiar with that as an offering in the Apex line. What constitutes a high performance computing Apex service? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, this conference is great, like you said, you know, I, there's so many HPC and high performance computing folks here, but one of the things is, you know, fundamentally, if you look at high performance computing ecosystem, it is quite complex, right? And when you call it as an Apex HPC or Apex offering offer, it brings a lot of the cloud economics and cloud, you know, experience to the HPC offer. So fundamentally, it's about our ability for customers to pay for what they consume. It's where Dell takes a lot of the day to day management of the infrastructure on our own so that customers don't need to do the grunge work of managing it, and they can really focus on the actual workload, which actually they run on the CHPC ecosystem. So it, it is, it is high performance computing offer, but instead of them buying the infrastructure, running all of that by themself, we make it super easy for customers to consume and manage it across, you know, proven designs, which Dell always implements across these verticals. >>So what, what makes the high performance computing offering as opposed to, to a rack of powered servers? What do you add in to make it >>Hpc? Ah, that's a great question. So, I mean, you know, so this is a platform, right? So we are not just selling infrastructure by the drink. So we actually are fundamentally, it's based on, you know, we, we, we launch two validated designs, one for life science sales, one for manufacturing. So we actually know how these PPO work together, how they actually are validated design tested solution. And we also, it's a platform. So we actually integrate the softwares on the top. So it's just not the infrastructure. So we actually integrate a cluster manager, we integrate a job scheduler, we integrate a contained orchestration layer. So a lot of these things, customers have to do it by themself, right? If they're buy the infrastructure. So by basically we are actually giving a platform or an ecosystem for our customers to run their workloads. So make it easy for them to actually consume those. >>That's Now is this, is this available on premises for customer? >>Yeah, so we, we, we make it available customers both ways. So we make it available OnPrem for customers who want to, you know, kind of, they want to take that, take that economics. We also make it available in a colo environment if the customers want to actually, you know, extend colo as that OnPrem environment. So we do both. >>What are, what are the requirements for a customer before you roll that equipment in? How do they sort of have to set the groundwork for, >>For Well, I think, you know, fundamentally it starts off with what the actual use case is, right? So, so if you really look at, you know, the two validated designs we talked about, you know, one for, you know, healthcare life sciences, and one other one for manufacturing, they do have fundamentally different requirements in terms of what you need from those infrastructure systems. So, you know, the customers initially figure out, okay, how do they actually require something which is going to require a lot of memory intensive loads, or do they actually require something which has got a lot of compute power. So, you know, it all depends on what they would require in terms of the workloads to be, and then we do havet sizing. So we do have small, medium, large, we have, you know, multiple infrastructure options, CPU core options. Sometimes the customer would also wanna say, you know what, as long as the regular CPUs, I also want some GPU power on top of that. So those are determinations typically a customer makes as part of the ecosystem, right? And so those are things which would, they would talk to us about to say, okay, what is my best option in terms of, you know, kind of workloads I wanna run? And then they can make a determination in terms of how, how they would actually going. >>So this, this is probably a particularly interesting time to be looking at something like HPC via Apex with, with this season of Rolling Thunder from various partners that you have, you know? Yep. We're, we're all expecting that Intel is gonna be rolling out new CPU sets from a powered perspective. You have your 16th generation of PowerEdge servers coming out, P C I E, gen five, and all of the components from partners like Invidia and Broadcom, et cetera, plugging into them. Yep. What, what does that, what does that look like from your, from your perch in terms of talking to customers who maybe, maybe they're doing things traditionally and they're likely to be not, not fif not 15 G, not generation 15 servers. Yeah. But probably more like 14. Yeah, you're offering a pretty huge uplift. Yep. What, what do those conversations look >>Like? I mean, customers, so talking about partners, right? I mean, of course Dell, you know, we, we, we don't bring any solutions to the market without really working with all of our partners, whether that's at the infrastructure level, like you talked about, you know, Intel, amd, Broadcom, right? All the chip vendors, all the way to software layer, right? So we have cluster managers, we have communities orchestrators. So we usually what we do is we bring the best in class, whether it's a software player or a hardware player, right? And we bring it together as a solution. So we do give the customers a choice, and the customers always want to pick what you they know actually is awesome, right? So they that, that we actually do that. And, you know, and one of the main aspects of, especially when you talk about these things, bringing it as a service, right? >>We take a lot of guesswork away from our customer, right? You know, one of the good example of HPC is capacity, right? So customers, these are very, you know, I would say very intensive systems. Very complex systems, right? So customers would like to buy certain amount of capacity, they would like to grow and, you know, come back, right? So give, giving them the flexibility to actually consume more if they want, giving them the buffer and coming down. All of those things are very important as we actually design these things, right? And that takes some, you know, customers are given a choice, but it actually, they don't need to worry about, oh, you know, what happens if I actually have a spike, right? There's already buffer capacity built in. So those are awesome things. When we talk about things as a service, >>When customers are doing their ROI analysis, buying CapEx on-prem versus, versus using Apex, is there a point, is there a crossover point typically at which it's probably a better deal for them to, to go OnPrem? >>Yeah, I mean, it it like specifically talking about hpc, right? I mean, why, you know, we do have a ma no, a lot of customers consume high performance compute and public cloud, right? That's not gonna go away, right? But there are certain reasons why they would look at OnPrem or they would look at, for example, Ola environment, right? One of the main reasons they would like to do that is purely have to do with cost, right? These are pretty expensive systems, right? There is a lot of ingress, egress, there is a lot of data going back and forth, right? Public cloud, you know, it costs money to put data in or actually pull data back, right? And the second one is data residency and security requirements, right? A lot of these things are probably proprietary set of information. We talked about life sciences, there's a lot of research, right? >>Manufacturing, a lot of these things are just, just in time decision making, right? You are on a factory floor, you gotta be able to do that. Now there is a latency requirement. So I mean, I think a lot of things play, you know, plays into this outside of just cost, but data residency requirements, ingress, egress are big things. And when you're talking about mass moments of data you wanna put and pull it back in, they would like to kind of keep it close, keep it local, and you know, get a, get a, get a price >>Point. Nevertheless, I mean, we were just talking to Ian Coley from aws and he was talking about how customers have the need to sort of move workloads back and forth between the cloud and on-prem. That's something that they're addressing without posts. You are very much in the, in the on-prem world. Do you have, or will you have facilities for customers to move workloads back and forth? Yeah, >>I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, Dell's cloud strategy is multi-cloud, right? So we basically, so it kind of falls into three, I mean we, some customers, some workloads are suited always for public cloud. It's easier to consume, right? There are, you know, customers also consume on-prem, the customers also consuming Kohler. And we also have like Dell's amazing piece of software like storage software. You know, we make some of these things available for customers to consume a software IP on their public cloud, right? So, you know, so this is our multi-cloud strategy. So we announced a project in Alpine, in Delta fold. So you know, if you look at those, basically customers are saying, I love your Dell IP on this, on this product, on the storage, can you make it available through, in this public environment, whether, you know, it's any of the hyper skill players. So if we do all of that, right? So I think it's, it shows that, you know, it's not always tied to an infrastructure, right? Customers want to consume the best thumb and if we need to be consumed in hyperscale, we can make it available. >>Do you support containers? >>Yeah, we do support containers on hpc. We have, we have two container orchestrators we have to support. We, we, we have aner similarity, we also have a container options to customers. Both options. >>What kind of customers are you signing up for the, for the HPC offerings? Are they university research centers or is it tend to be smaller >>Companies? It, it's, it's, you know, the last three days, this conference has been great. We probably had like, you know, many, many customers talking to us. But HC somewhere in the range of 40, 50 customers, I would probably say lot of interest from educational institutions, universities research, to your point, a lot of interest from manufacturing, factory floor automation. A lot of customers want to do dynamic simulations on factory floor. That is also quite a bit of interest from life sciences pharmacies because you know, like I said, we have two designs, one on life sciences, one on manufacturing, both with different dynamics on the infrastructure. So yeah, quite a, quite a few interest definitely from academics, from life sciences, manufacturing. We also have a lot of financials, big banks, you know, who wants to simulate a lot of the, you know, brokerage, a lot of, lot of financial data because we have some, you know, really optimized hardware we announced in Dell for, especially for financial services. So there's quite a bit of interest from financial services as well. >>That's why that was great. We often think of Dell as, as the organization that democratizes all things in it eventually. And, and, and, and in that context, you know, this is super computing 22 HPC is like the little sibling trailing around, trailing behind the super computing trend. But we definitely have seen this move out of just purely academia into the business world. Dell is clearly a leader in that space. How has Apex overall been doing since you rolled out that strategy, what, two couple? It's been, it's been a couple years now, hasn't it? >>Yeah, it's been less than two years. >>How are, how are, how are mainstream Dell customers embracing Apex versus the traditional, you know, maybe 18 months to three year upgrade cycle CapEx? Yeah, >>I mean I look, I, I think that is absolutely strong momentum for Apex and like we, Paul pointed out earlier, we started with, you know, making the infrastructure and the platforms available to customers to consume as a service, right? We have options for customers, you know, to where Dell can fully manage everything end to end, take a lot of the pain points away, like we talked about because you know, managing a cloud scale, you know, basically environment for the customers, we also have options where customers would say, you know what, I actually have a pretty sophisticated IT organization. I want Dell to manage the infrastructure, but up to this level in the layer up to the guest operating system, I'll take care of the rest, right? So we are seeing customers who are coming to us with various requirements in terms of saying, I can do up to here, but you take all of this pain point away from me or you do everything for me. >>It all depends on the customer. So we do have wide interest. So our, I would say our products and the portfolio set in Apex is expanding and we are also learning, right? We are getting a lot of feedback from customers in terms of what they would like to see on some of these offers. Like the example we just talked about in terms of making some of the software IP available on a public cloud where they'll look at Dell as a software player, right? That's also is absolutely critical. So I think we are giving customers a lot of choices. Our, I would say the choice factor and you know, we are democratizing, like you said, expanding in terms of the customer choices. And I >>Think it's, we're almost outta our time, but I do wanna be sure we get to Dell validated designs, which you've mentioned a couple of times. How specific are the, well, what's the purpose of these designs? How specific are they? >>They, they are, I mean I, you know, so the most of these valid, I mean, again, we look at these industries, right? And we look at understanding exactly how would, I mean we have huge embedded base of customers utilizing HPC across our ecosystem in Dell, right? So a lot of them are CapEx customers. We actually do have an active customer profile. So these validated designs takes into account a lot of customer feedback, lot of partner feedback in terms of how they utilize this. And when you build these solutions, which are kind of end to end and integrated, you need to start anchoring on something, right? And a lot of these things have different characteristics. So these validated design basically prove to us that, you know, it gives a very good jump off point for customers. That's the way I look at it, right? So a lot of them will come to the table with, they don't come to the blank sheet of paper when they say, oh, you know what I'm, this, this is my characteristics of what I want. I think this is a great point for me to start from, right? So I think that that gives that, and plus it's the power of validation, really, right? We test, validate, integrate, so they know it works, right? So all of those are hypercritical. When you talk to, >>And you mentioned healthcare, you, you mentioned manufacturing, other design >>Factoring. We just announced validated design for financial services as well, I think a couple of days ago in the event. So yep, we are expanding all those DVDs so that we, we can, we can give our customers a choice. >>We're out of time. Sat ier. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. At the center of the move to subscription to everything as a service, everything is on a subscription basis. You really are on the leading edge of where, where your industry is going. Thanks for joining us. >>Thank you, Paul. Thank you Dave. >>Paul Gillum with Dave Nicholson here from Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, wrapping up the show this afternoon and stay with us for, they'll be half more soon.

(Intro music) >> Welcome back. We're LIVE here from SuperComputing 22 in Dallas Paul Gillin, for Silicon Angle in theCUBE with my guest host Dave... excuse me. And our, our guest today, this segment is Kim Leyenaar who is a storage performance architect at Broadcom. And the topic of this conversation is, is is networking, it's connectivity. I guess, how does that relate to the work of a storage performance architect? >> Well, that's a really good question. So yeah, I have been focused on storage performance for about 22 years. But even, even if we're talking about just storage the entire, all the components have a really big impact on ultimately how quickly you can access your data. So, you know, the, the switches the memory bandwidth, the, the expanders the just the different protocols that you're using. And so, and the big part of is actually ethernet because as you know, data's not siloed anymore. You have to be able to access it from anywhere in the world. >> Dave: So wait, so you're telling me that we're just not living in a CPU centric world now? >> Ha ha ha >> Because it is it is sort of interesting. When we talk about supercomputing and high performance computing we're always talking about clustering systems. So how do you connect those systems? Isn't that, isn't that kind of your, your wheelhouse? >> Kim: It really is. >> Dave: At Broadcom. >> It's, it is, it is Broadcom's wheelhouse. We are all about interconnectivity and we own the interconnectivity. You know, you know, years ago it was, 'Hey, you know buy this new server because, you know, we we've added more cores or we've got better memory.' But now you've got all this siloed data and we've got you know, we've got this, this stuff or defined kind of environment now this composable environments where, hey if you need more networking, just plug this in or just go here and just allocate yourself more. So what we're seeing is these silos really of, 'hey here's our compute, here's your networking, here's your storage.' And so, how do you put those all together? The thing is interconnectivity. So, that's really what we specialize in. I'm really, you know, I'm really happy to be here to talk about some of the things that that we do to enable high performance computing. >> Paul: Now we're seeing, you know, new breed of AI computers being built with multiple GPUs very large amounts of data being transferred between them. And the internet really has become a, a bottleneck. The interconnect has become a bottle, a bottleneck. Is that something that Broadcom is working on alleviating? >> Kim: Absolutely. So we work with a lot of different, there's there's a lot of different standards that we work with to define so that we can make sure that we work everywhere. So even if you're just a dentist's office that's deploying one server, or we're talking about these hyperscalers that are, you know that have thousands or, you know tens of thousands of servers, you know, we're working on making sure that the next generation is able to outperform the previous generation. Not only that, but we found that, you know with these siloed things, if, if you add more storage but that means we're going to eat up six cores using that it's not really as useful. So Broadcom's really been focused on trying to offload the CPU. So we're offloading it from, you know data security, data protection, you know, we're we do packet sniffing ourselves and things like that. So no longer do we rely on the CPU to do that kind of processing for us but we become very smart devices all on our own so that they work very well in these kind of environments. >> Dave: So how about, give, give us an example. I know a lot of the discussion here has been around using ethernet as the connectivity layer. >> Yes. >> You know, in in, in the past, people would think about supercomputing as exclusively being InfiniBand based. >> Ha ha ha. >> But give, give us an idea of what Broadcom is doing in the ethernet space. What, you know, what's what are the advantages of using ethernet? >> Kim: So we've made two really big announcements. The first one is our Tomahawk five ethernet switch. So it's a 400 gigi ethernet switch. And the other thing we announced too was our Thor. So we have, these are our network controllers that also support up to 400 gigi each as well. So, those two alone, it just, it's amazing to me how much data we're able to transfer with those. But not only that, but they're super super intelligent controllers too. And then we realized, you know, hey, we're we're managing all this data, let's go ahead and offload the CPU. So we actually adopted the Rocky Standards. So that's one of the things that puts us above InfiniBand is that ethernet is ubiquitous, it's everywhere. And InfiniBand is primarily just owned by one or two companies. And, and so, and it's also a lot more expensive. So ethernet is just, it's everywhere. And now with the, with the Rocky standards, we're working along with, it's, it's, it does what you're talking about much better than, you know predecessors. >> Tell us about the Rocky Standards. I'm not familiar with it. I'm sure some of our listeners are not. What is the Rocky standard? >> Kim: Ha ha ha. So it's our DNA over converged to ethernet. I'm not a Rocky expert myself but I am an expert on how to offload the CPU. And so one of the things it does is instead of using the CPU to transfer the data from, you know the user space over to the next, you know server when you're transferring it we actually will do it ourselves. So we'll handle it ourselves. We will take it, we will move it across the wire and we will put it in that remote computer. And we don't have to ask the CPU to do anything to get involved in that. So big, you know, it's a big savings. >> Yeah, I mean in, in a nutshell, because there are parts of the InfiniBand protocol that are essentially embedded in RDMA over converged ethernet. So... >> Right. >> So if you can, if you can leverage kind of the best of both worlds, but have it in an ethernet environment which is already ubiquitous, it seems like it's, kind of democratizing supercomputing and, and HPC and I know you guys are big partners with Dell as an example, you guys work with all sorts of other people. >> Kim: Yeah. >> But let's say, let's say somebody is going to be doing ethernet for connectivity, you also offer switches? >> Kim: We do, actually. >> So is that, I mean that's another piece of the puzzle. >> That's a big piece of the puzzle. So we just released our, our Atlas 2 switch. It is a PCIE Gen Five switch. And... >> Dave: What does that mean? What does Gen five, what does that mean? >> Oh, Gen Five PCIE, it's it's a magic connectivity right now. So, you know, we talk about the Sapphire Rapids release as well as the GENUWA release. I know that those, you know those have been talked about a lot here. I've been walking around and everybody's talking about it. Well, those enable the Gen Five PCIE interfaces. So we've been able to double the bandwidth from the Gen Four up to the Gen Five. So, in order to, to support that we do now have our Atlas two PCIE Gen Five switch. And it allows you to connect especially around here we're talking about, you know artificial intelligence and machine learning. A lot of these are relying on the GPU and the DPU that you see, you know a lot of people talking about enabling. So by in, you know, putting these switches in the servers you can connect multitudes of not only NVME devices but also these GPUs and these, these CPUs. So besides that we also have the storage component of it too. So to support that, we we just recently have released our 9,500 series HBAs which support 24 gig SAS. And you know, this is kind of a, this is kind of a big deal for some of our hyperscalers that say, Hey, look our next generation, we're putting a hundred hard drives in. So we're like, you know, so a lot of it is maybe for cold storage, but by giving them that 24 gig bandwidth and by having these mass 24 gig SAS expanders that allows these hyperscalers to build up their systems. >> Paul: And how are you supporting the HPC community at large? And what are you doing that's exclusively for supercomputing? >> Kim: Exclusively for? So we're doing the interconnectivity really for them. You know, you can have as, as much compute power as you want, but these are very data hungry applications and a lot of that data is not sitting right in the box. A lot of that data is sitting in some other country or in some other city, or just the box next door. So to be able to move that data around, you know there's a new concept where they say, you know do the compute where the data is and then there's another kind of, you know the other way is move the data around which is a lot easier kind of sometimes, but so we're allowing us to move that data around. So for that, you know, we do have our our tomahawk switches, we've got our Thor NICS and of course we got, you know, the really wide pipe. So our, our new 9,500 series HBA and RAID controllers not only allow us to do, so we're doing 28 gigabytes a second that we can trans through the one controller, and that's on protected data. So we can actually have the high availability protected data of RAID 5 or RAID 6, or RAID 10 in the box giving in 27 gigabytes a second. So it's, it's unheard of the latency that we're seeing even off of this too, we have a right cash latency that is sub 8 microseconds that is lower than most of the NVME drives that you see, you know that are available today. So, so you know we're able to support these applications that require really low latency as well as data protection. >> Dave: So, so often when we talk about the underlying hardware, it's a it's a game of, you know, whack-a-mole chase the bottleneck. And so you've mentioned PCIE five, a lot of folks who will be implementing five, gen five PCIE five are coming off of three, not even four. >> Kim: I know. >> So make, so, so they're not just getting a last generation to this generation bump but they're getting a two generations, bump. >> Kim: They are. >> How does that, is it the case that it would never make sense to use a next gen or a current gen card in an older generation bus because of the mismatch and performance? Are these things all designed to work together? >> Uh... That's a really tough question. I want to say, no, it doesn't make sense. It, it really makes sense just to kind of move things forward and buy a card that's made for the bus it's in. However, that's not always the case. So for instance, our 9,500 controller is a Gen four PCIE but what we did, we doubled the PCIE so it's a by 16, even though it's a gen four, it's a by 16. So we're getting really, really good bandwidth out of it. As I said before, you know, we're getting 28, 27.8 or almost 28 gigabytes a second bandwidth out of that by doubling the PCIE bus. >> Dave: But they worked together, it all works together? >> All works together. You can put, you can put our Gen four and a Gen five all day long and they work beautifully. Yeah. We, we do work to validate that. >> We're almost out our time. But I, I want to ask you a more, nuts and bolts question, about storage. And we've heard for, you know, for years of the aerial density of hard disk has been reached and there's really no, no way to excel. There's no way to make the, the dish any denser. What is the future of the hard disk look like as a storage medium? >> Kim: Multi actuator actually, we're seeing a lot of multi-actuator. I was surprised to see it come across my desk, you know because our 9,500 actually does support multi-actuator. And, and, and so it was really neat after I've been working with hard drives for 22 years and I remember when they could do 30 megabytes a second, and that was amazing. That was like, wow, 30 megabytes a second. And then, about 15 years ago, they hit around 200 to 250 megabytes a second, and they stayed there. They haven't gone anywhere. What they have done is they've increased the density so that you can have more storage. So you can easily go out and buy 15 to 30 terabyte drive, but you're not going to get any more performance. So what they've done is they've added multiple actuators. So each one of these can do its own streaming and each one of these can actually do their own seeking. So you can get two and four. And I've even seen a talk about, you know eight actuator per disc. I, I don't think that, I think that's still theory, but but they could implement those. So that's one of the things that we're seeing. >> Paul: Old technology somehow finds a way to, to remain current. >> It does. >> Even it does even in the face of new alternatives. Kim Leyenaar, Storage Architect, Storage Performance Architect at Broadcom Thanks so much for being here with us today. Thank you so much for having me. >> This is Paul Gillin with Dave Nicholson here at SuperComputing 22. We'll be right back. (Outro music)

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

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