(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE studios of Palo Alto California for RSA conference keynote coverage and conference coverage. I'm Sean for your host of theCUBE. We're breaking down the keynote of RSA day one kickoff. We had Mark Nunnikhoven, who's the distinguished cloud strategist at Lacework. Mark former cube alumni and expert and security has been on many times before, Mark great to see you. Thanks for coming on and helping me break down RSA conference 2021 virtual this year. Thanks for joining. >> Happy to be here. Thanks for having me John. >> You know, one of the things Mark about these security conferences is that interesting, RSA was the last conference we actually did interviews physically face to face and then the pandemic went down and it was a huge shutdown. So we're still virtual coming back to real life. So and they're virtual this year, so kind of a turn of events, but that was kind of the theme this year in the keynote. Changing the game on security, the script has been flipped, connectivity everywhere, security from day one being reinvented. Some people were holding onto the old way some people trying to get on there, on the future wave. Clearly you got the laggards and you've got the innovators all trying to kind of, you know, find their position. This has been obvious in this keynote. What's your take? >> Yeah and that was exactly it. They use that situation of being that last physical security conference, somewhat to their advantage to weave this theme of resiliency. And it's a message that we heard throughout the keynote. It's a message we're going to hear throughout the week. There's a number of talks that are tying back to this and it really hits at the core of what security aims to do. And I think aims is really the right word for it because we're not quite there yet. But it's about making sure that our technology is flexible that it expands and adapts to the situations because as we all know this year, you know basically upended everything we assumed about how our businesses were running, how our communities and society was running and we've all had to adapt. And that's what we saw at the keynote today was they acknowledged that and then woven into the message to drive that home for security providers. >> Yeah and to me one of the most notable backdrops to the entire thing was the fact that the RSA continues to operate from the sell out when Dell sold them for alright $2 billion to a consortium, private privately private equity company, Symphony Technology Group. So there they're operating now on their own. They're out in the wild, as you said, cybersecurity threats are ever increasing, the surface area has changed with cloud native. Basically RSA is a 3000 person startup basically now. So they've got secure ID, the old token business we all have anyone's had those IDs you know it's pretty solid, but now they've got to kind of put this event back together and mobile world Congress is right around the corner. They're going to try to actually have a physical event. So you have this pandemic problem of trying to get the word out and it's weird. It's kind of, I found it. It's hard to get your hands around all the news. >> It is. And it's, you know, we're definitely missing that element. You know, we've seen that throughout the year people have tried to adapt these events into a virtual format. We're missing those elements of those sorts of happenstance run-ins I know we've run into each other at a number of events just sort of in the hall, you get to catch up, but you know as part of those interactions, they're not just social but you also get a little more insight into the conference. Hey, you know, did you catch this great talk or are you going to go catch this thing later? And we're definitely missing that. And I don't think anyone's really nailed this virtual format yet. It's very difficult to wrap your head around like you said, I saw a tweet online from one InfoSec analyst today. It was pointed out, you know, there were 17 talks happening at the same time, which you know, in a physical thing you'd pick one and go to it in a virtual there's that temptation to kind of click across the channels. So even if you know what's going on it's hard to focus in these events. >> Yeah the one conference has got a really good I think virtual platform is Docker con, they have 48 panels, a lot of great stuff there. So that's one of more watching closest coming up on May 27. Check that one out. Let's get into this, let's get into the analysis. I really want to get your thoughts on this because you know, I thought the keynote was very upbeat. Clearly the realities are presenting it. Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco there and you had a bunch of industry legends in there. So let's start with, let's start with what you thought of Rowan's keynote and then we'll jump into what Chuck Robbins was saying. >> Sure yeah. And I thought, Rohit, you know, at first I questioned cause he brought up and he said, I'm going to talk about tigers, airplanes and sewing machines. And you know, as a speaker myself, I said, okay, this is either really going to work out well or it's not going to work out at all. Unfortunately, you know, Rohit head is a professional he's a great speaker and it worked out. And so he tied these three examples. So it was tiger king for Netflix, at World War II, analyzing airplane damage and a great organization in India that pivoted from sewing into creating masks and other supplies for the pandemic. He wove those three examples through with resiliency and showed adaptation. And I thought it was really really well done first of all. But as a cloud guy, I was really excited as well that that first example was Netflix. And he was referencing a chaos monkey, which is a chaos engineering tool, which I don't think a lot of security people are exposed to. So we use it very often in cloud building where essentially this tool will purposely blow up things in your environment. So it will down services. It will cut your communications off because the idea is you need to figure out how to react to these things before they happen for real. And so getting keynote time for a tool like that a very modern cloud tool, I thought was absolutely fantastic. Even if that's, you know, not so well known or not a secret in the cloud world anymore, it's very commonly understood, but getting a security audience exposure to that was great. And so you know, Rohit is a pro and it was a good kickoff and yeah, very upbeat, a lot of high energy which was great for virtual keynote. Cause sometimes that's what's really missing is that energy. >> Yeah, we like Rohit too. He's got some, he's got charisma. He also has his hand on the pulse. I think the chaos monkey point you're making is as a great call out because it's been around the DevOps community. But what that really shows I think and puts an exclamation point around this industry right now is that DevSecOps is here and it's never going away and cloud native and certainly the pandemic has shown that cloud scale speed data and now distributed computing with the edge, 5G has been mentioned, as you said, this is a real deal. So this is DevOps. This is infrastructure as code and security is being reinvented in it. This is a killer theme and it's kind of a wake-up call. What's your reaction to that? what's your take? >> Yeah, it absolutely is a wake-up call and it actually blended really well into a Rohit second point, which was around using data. And I think, you know, having these messages put out to the, you know, what is the security conference for the year always, is really important because the rest of the business has moved forward and security teams have been a little hesitant there, we're a little behind the times compared to the rest of the business who are taking advantage of these cloud services, taking advantage of data being everywhere. So for security professionals to realize like hey there are tools that can make us better at our jobs and make us, you know, keep or help us keep pace with the business is absolutely critical because like you said, as much as you know I always cringe when I hear the term DevSecOps, it's important because security needs to be there. The reason I cringe is because I think security should be built into everything. But the challenge we have is that security teams are still a lot of us are still stuck in the past to sort of put our arms around something. And you know, if it's in that box, I'm good with it. And that just doesn't work in the cloud. We have better tools, we have better data. And that was really Rohit's key message was those tools and that data can help you be resilient, can help your organization be resilient and whether that's the situation like a pandemic or a major cyber attack, you need to be flexible. You need to be able to bounce back. >> You know, when we actually have infrastructure as code and no one ever talks about DevOps or DevSecOps you know, we've, it's over, it's in the right place, but I want to get your thoughts and seeing if you heard anything about automation because one of the things that you bring up about not liking the word DevSecOps is really around, having this new team formation, how people are organizing their developers and their operations teams. And it really is becoming programmable and that's kind of the word, but automation scales it. So that's been a big theme this year. What are you hearing? What did you hear on the keynote? Any signs of reality around automation, machine learning you mentioned data, did they dig into automation? >> Automation was on the periphery. So a lot of what they're talking about only works with automation. So, you know, the Netflix shout out for chaos monkey absolutely as an automated tool to take advantage of this data, you absolutely need to be automated but the keynote mainly focused on sort of the connectivity and the differences in how we view an organization over the last year versus moving forward. And I think that was actually a bit of a miss because as you rightfully point out, John, you need automation. The thing that baffles me as a builder, as a security guy, is that cyber criminals have been automated for years. That's how they scale. That's how they make their money. Yet we still primarily defend manually. And I don't know if you've ever tried to beat, you know the robots that are everything or really complicated video games. We don't tend to win well when we're fighting automation. So security absolutely needs to step up. The good news is looking at the agenda for the week, taking in some talks today, while it was a bit of a miss and the keynote, there is a good theme of automation throughout some of the deeper dive sessions. So it is a topic that people are aware of and moving forward. But again, I always want to see us move fast. >> Was there a reason Chuck Robbins headlines or is that simply because there are a big 800 pound gorilla in the networking space? You know, why Cisco? Are they relevant security? Is that signaling that networking is more important? As of 5G at the edge, but is Cisco the player? >> Obviously Cisco has a massive business and they are a huge player in the security industry but I think they're also representative of, you know and this was definitely Chuck's message. They were representative of this idea that security needs to be built in at every layer. So even though, you know I live on primarily the cloud technologies dealing with organizations that are built in the cloud, there is, you know, the reality of that we are all connected through a multitude of networks. And we've seen that with work from home which is a huge theme this year at the conference and the improvements in mobility with 5G and other connectivity areas like Edge and WiFi six. So having a big network player and security player like Cisco in the keynote I think is important just because their message was not just about inclusion and diversity for skills which was a theme we saw repeated in the keynote actually but it was about building security in from the start to the finish throughout. And I think that's a really important message. We can't just pick one place and say this is where we're going to build security. It needs to be built throughout all of our systems. >> If you were a Cicso listening today what was your take on that? Were you impressed? Were you blown away? Did you fall out of your chair or was it just right down the middle? >> I mean, you might fall out of your chair just cause you're sitting in it for so long taken in a virtual event. And I mean, I know that's the big downside of virtual is that your step counter is way down compared to where it should be for these conferences but there was nothing revolutionary in the opening parts of the keynote. It was just, you know sort of beating the drum that has been talked about, has been simmering in the background from sort of the more progressive side of security. So if you've been focusing on primarily traditional techniques and the on-premise world, then perhaps this was a little a bit of an eye-opener and something where you go, wow, there's, you know there's something else out here and we can move things forward. For people who are, you know, more cloud native or more into that automation space, that data space this is really just sort of a head nodding going, yeap, I agree with this. This makes sense. This is where we all should be at this point. But as we know, you know there's a very long tail insecurity and insecurity organizations. So to have that message, you know repeated from a large stage like the keynote I think was very important. >> Well you know, we're going to be, theCUBE will be onsite and virtual with our virtual platform for Amazon web services reinforced coming up in Houston. So that's going to be interesting to see and you compare contrast like an AWS reinforce which is kind of the I there I think they had the first conference two years ago so it's kind of a new conference. And then you got the old kind of RSA conference. The question I have for you, is it a just a position of almost two conferences, right? You got the cloud native AWS, which is really about, oh shared responsibility, et cetera, et cetera a lot more action happening there. And you got this conference here seem come the old school legacy players. So I want to get your thoughts on that. And I want to get your take on just just the cryptographers panel, because, you know, as I'm not saying this as a state-of-the-art that the old guys saying get off my lawn, you know crypto, we're the crypto purists, they were trashing NFTs which as you know, is all the rage. So I, and Ron rivers who wrote new co-create RSA public key technology, which is isn't everything these days. Is this a sign of just get off my lawn? Or is it a sign of the times trashing the NFTs? What's your take? >> Yeah, well, so let's tackle the NFTs then we'll do the contrast between the two conferences. But I thought the NFT, you know Ron and Addie both had really interesting ways of explaining what an NFT was, because that's most of the discussion around the NFT is exactly what are we buying or what are we investing in? And so I think it was Addie who said, you know it was basically you have a tulip then you could have a picture of a tulip and then you could have something explaining the picture of the tulip and that's what an NFT is. So I think, you know, but at the same time he recognized the value of potential for artists. So I think there was some definitely, you know get off my lawn, but also sort of the the cryptographer panels is always sort of very pragmatic, very evidence-based as shown today when they actually were talking about a paper by Schnorr who debates, whether RSA or if he has new math that he thinks can debunk RSA or at least break the algorithm. And so they had a very logical and intelligent discussion about that. But the cryptographers panel in contrast to the rest of the keynote, it's not about the hype. It's not about what's going on in the industry. It's really is truly a cryptographers panel talking about the math, talking about the fundamental underpinnings of our security things as a big nerd, I'm a huge fan but a lot of people watch that and just kind of go, okay now's a great time to grab a snack and maybe move those legs a little bit. But if you're interested in the more technical deeper dive side, it's definitely worth taking in. >> Super fascinating and I think, you know, it's funny, they said it's not even a picture of a tulip it's s pointer to a picture of a tulip. Which is technically it. >> That was it. >> It's interesting how, again, this is all fun. NFTs are, I mean, you can't help, but get an Amber by decentralization. And that, that wave is coming. It's very interesting how you got a decentralization wave coming, yet a lot of people want to hang on to the centralized view. Okay, this is an architectural conflict. Is there a balance in your mind as a techie, we look at security, certainly as the perimeter is gone that's not even debate anymore, but as we have much more of a distributed computing environment, is there a need for some sensuality and or is it going to be all decentralized in your opinion? >> Yeah that's actually a really interesting question. It's a great set up to connect both of these points of sort of the cryptographers panel and that contrast between newer conferences and RSA because the cryptographers panel brought up the fact that you can't have resilient systems unless you're going for a distributed systems, unless you're spreading things out because otherwise you're creating a central point of failure, even if it's at hyper-scale which is not resilient by definition. So that was a very interesting and very valid point. I think the reality is it's a combination of the two is that we want resilient systems that are distributed that scale up independently of other factors. You know, so if you're sitting in the cloud you're going multi-region or maybe even multicloud, you know you want this distributed area just for that as Verner from AWS calls it, you know, the reduced blast radius. So if something breaks, not everything does but then the challenge from a security and from an operational point of view, is you need that central visibility. And I think this is where automation, where machine learning and really viewing security as a data problem, comes into play. If you have the systems distributed but you can provide visibility centrally which is something we can achieve with modern cloud technologies, you kind of hit that sweet spot. You've got resilient underpinnings in your systems but you as a team can actually understand what's going on because that was a, yet another point from Carmela and from Ross on the cryptographers panel when it comes to AI and machine learning, we're at the point where we don't really understand a lot of what's going on in the algorithm we kind of understand the output and the input. So again, it tied back to that resiliency. So I think that key is distributed systems are great but you need that central visibility and you only get there through viewing things as a data problem, heavy automation and modern tooling. >> Great great insight, Mark. Great, great call out there. And great point tied in there. Let me ask you a question on your take on the keynote in the conference in general as first day gets going. Do you see this evolving from the classic enterprise kind of buyer supplier relationship to much more of a CSO driven or CXO driven? I need to start building about my teams. I got to start hiring developers, not so much in operation side. I mean, I see InfoSec is these industries are not going away. People are still buying tools and stacking up the tool shed but there's been a big trend towards platforms and shifting left from a developer CICB pipeline standpoint which speaks to scale on the cloud native side and that distributed side. So is this conference hitting that Mark, or you still think there are more hardware and service systems people? What's the makeup? What's the take? >> I think we're definitely starting to a shift. So a great example of that is the CSA. The Cloud Security Alliance always runs a day one or day zero summit at RSA. And this year it was a CSO executive summit. And whereas in previous years it's been practitioners. So that is a good sign I think, that's a positive sign to start to look at a long ignored area of security, which is how do we train the next generation of security professionals. We've always taken this traditional view. We've, you know, people go through the standard you get your CISSP, you hold onto it forever. You know, you do your time on the firewall, you go through the standard thing but I think we really need to adjust and look for people with that automation capability, with development, with better business skills and definitely better communication skills, because really as we integrate as we leave our sort of protected little cave of security, we need to be better business people and better team players. >> Well Mark, I really appreciate you coming on here. A cube alumni and a trusted resource and verified, trusted contributor. Thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts on the RSA conference and breaking down the keynote analysis, the RSA conference. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Well, what we got you here to take a minute to plug what you're doing at Lacework, what you're excited about. What's going on over there? >> Sure, I appreciate that. So I just joined Lacework, I'm a weekend. So I'm drinking from the fire hose of knowledge and what I've found so far, fantastic platform, fantastic teams. It's got me wrapped up and excited again because we're approaching, you know security from the data point of view. We're really, we're born in the cloud, built for the cloud and we're trying to help teams really gather context. And the thing that appealed to me about that was that it's not just targeting the security team. It's targeting builders, it's targeting the business, it's giving them that visibility into what's going on so that they can make informed decision. And for me, that's really what security is all about. >> Well, I appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much for sharing. >> Thank you. >> Okay CUBE coverage of RSA conference here with Lacework, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. We're here live at theCUBE in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman. It's our third day of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next two guests are from NetApp. Russell Fishman, Director of Product Management, and Keith Barto, Director of Product Management, both directors of product management. One was the former CEO of Immersive, now with NetApp for a few years. Guys, great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us, John. Thank you. >> We saw you guys in Barcelona, obviously. The NetApp story just keeps on getting better. Also, you have core customer base. Cisco's going under transformation. You guys have been transforming ever since I started seeing NetApp arrive on the scene in the 90s. Every year there's always a new innovation. But now, more than ever, you're hearing even Cisco Bellwether in the routing networking business putting up old way network, hey there's a firewall. There's some devices in there. To a completely new, obviously, cloud made in the modern era really things are changing. So what's your reaction to that? Obviously, you guys are a part of that story. You have a relationship with Cisco. What's your reaction to that? And talk about your relationship with Cisco. >> So we obviously have a huge relationship with Cisco. And most folks will know about our FlexPods, I think that's probably the most famous way that we collaborate with these guys. We just came off the back of an amazing year, five straight quarters of double-digit, year-on-year growth, killing in the market. Obviously, we have to brag a little bit, right, come on. >> It's theCUBE, come on! >> It's theCUBE, we gotta be a little bit excited about it. So we're really excited about that, it just really talks to the strength of the relationship, right? So there's a very strong relationship there, and it's been there with FlexPod for eight years, and there's been a lot of transformation, exactly to your point John, a lot of transformation during that time, a lot of focus on the clouds. So one of the questions I always get asked, is why is converged infrastructure still relevant in a cloud-first world? And it is not obvious answer, now clearly our customers think that it is, and so do our partners. But it is not obvious why that is. NetApp has gone through, you talked about transformation, NetApp has gone through this massive transformation, huge focus on clouds, I mean, we have these cloud-first, cloud-native, focus around our data management platforms. We talk about a concept called the data fabric, I don't know if you've heard of the data fabric before. >> Yeah. >> And the data fabric really talks to how, our vision for how enterprises want to manage that new digital currency that is data across all the silos that they want to leverage, right? We've been able to bring some of that goodness into FlexPod, and that's why we're still relevant now. >> Yeah, so Keith, I think back to when converging infrastructure was built as about simplification, we were gonna take all these boxes and put it down to a box and that was the new unit of measurement. Well, Russell was just talking about we've got multi-cloud, when I think of NetApp now, it's always been a software company, but now software in that multi-cloud world, help connect the dots for us, as to management of converged infrastructure into that whole multi-cloud story. >> Yeah, we were very privileged to be acquired by NetApp last March, and my company Immersive, a lot of us came actually out of Cisco. So I was one of the original FlexPod architects from Cisco and had the privilege of helping to build the network, the storage that we brought into FlexPod, and a lot of our customers and our retailers kept on saying, "How do we know we put it together properly? "How are we following the best practices from the CVDs, "from the NVAs, from the TRs?" And so we took those rules and those analytics and we put them into platform, into a SaaS-based platform, and we were able to analyze that, coming from our customers' FlexPods, from within their deployments, from within their multi-data centers, and bring that into our service, run those analytics, prove those best practices, show the deficiencies, get our resellers out there to help our customers, 'cause FlexPod is a meet in the channel play, and we relied heavily on our resellers to make it a success. >> What was the driver for that product? When you started that company and that happened, what was the main motivation behind that? Was it analytics, was it insight, what was some of the things that you guys were building in, was it operational data? >> The real reason was people kept on asking, "How do I know?" Because it's a reference architecture, not a product, "How do I know I did it right?" Because it's really important, we're gonna run our key business applications on this platform, right? My SAP, my Oracle, my Sequel, my SharePoint, my Outlook. I gotta make sure this stuff is really gonna work properly, and it's going to grow in scale with the business. So I need to make sure that those redundant links are there. I need to make sure that when I do VMWare upgrade, or a Microsoft upgrade, that the firmware is alignment with the best practices in the interoperability matrix, so we wanted to make that as easy as possible, so that from a single dashboard, you can see all of those things, you can diagnose it quickly, you can get those email alerts and notifications, and because you end up with disparate operation teams, the server team, the network team, the storage team, the hypervisor team, sometimes they don't always talk effectively with each other, and from one single dashboard, we're now able to show everybody where things are today, and then, one of my favorites, when there is a problem, you call either Services or Support, and you say, "Hey it's not working," and they say, "What did you change?" And you say, "I didn't change anything." We have that historical-- >> Finger pointing kicks in, it was his fault! >> Yeah we have the historical snapshot and trending, so we can go back and look at where things were and do a comparison to where they are today, and it allows us to have a much faster mean time to resolution. >> And what do you guys call that product now within Cisco? What's it... >> It's now called Converged Systems Advisor in NetApp. >> Awesome, so what's next for convergers. Obviously, people, both cloud growth, we're seeing the on-premise, Wikibon has reported, the true private cloud numbers, which basically say there's a lot of on-premise activity going on, that's gonna look like cloud, it's gonna operate like cloud, so they need to have that. There's migration going on, but it's not a lift and shift, to cloud, there's gonna be, obviously, the hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So, cloud folks still buy hardware, too. You gotta still run stuff, networks aren't going away, storage isn't going away, so what's next for the converged infrastructure play with FlexPod? How do you guys manage that roadmap? >> So, we just announced some things coming into, jointly with Cisco, coming into Cisco Live. One of those things we announced was something called Managed Private Cloud on FlexPods, or actually no, FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, sorry, I switch it around. And FlexPod Managed Private Cloud, it really talks to exactly what you're talking about, John, which is... What we find, cloud has fundamentally changed customers' expectations of what they want on-prem. They recognize the need on-prem, we live in a hybrid world. Those of us that've been in the industry long enough, and have a couple of gray hairs, know that there are very few transitions that are really absolute in the business. A lot of people pronounce that it's gonna be this way or that way, and the reality is, it's something in between. And that's fine because cloud is just another tool in the toolbox, and you don't want to hit every nail with the same hammer, you want to find the right tool for the right job. So what we've done is we've taken some of that cloud goodness, which really means not having to worry about the underlying infrastructure, all right. Worrying about the applications, being more application-focused, more business-value-focused, more line-of-business-focused. And being able to deliver that in a way that people can consume it on-premise. So it really feels like a FlexPod delivered like a cloud, but from a management day-to-day perspective, you don't have to do it-- >> So, it's flexible. >> It's flexible-- >> FlexPod. >> But it's done for you, so it's your little piece of cloud, sitting on-prem, and you don't have to manage it or run it day-to-day. >> Let's talk about what you just said about the whole transformation, people say a certain way, basically you're kind of saying, a lot of press, and a lot of analysts say, "Oh, you've got to do this digital transformation." Customers will take a pragmatic approach, but you guys at NetApp have been talking for a long time, I've been following it, non-disruptive operations. >> Yes. >> So what you see in the cloud if people wanna take those first three steps, but they don't want to have to overhaul anything, containers have proved to be great resource there, Kubernetes is showing a great way to have life cycle management on the app side of infrastructure. How does your customers, and Cisco customers, maintain that non-disruptive operational playbook, because Cisco guys are gonna start changing, moving up the stack too-- >> Absolutely. >> Doesn't mean storage is gonna go away, but they don't want to disrupt anything, your thoughts? >> And it doesn't mean any of it goes away, that's the funny thing, we talk about where we want to focus, but it's as much about not having to worry about the things that we had to worry about that are just there in the future, right? So it's kind of like if you went back 200 years, going to get fresh water was a big hassle, now it isn't, it's delivered to you, right? I know it sounds like a crazy analogy, but the reality is is that we shouldn't have to worry about the basics of on-premise, private cloud, it should just be automatic, it should be simple to execute, simple to manage, simple to order, simple to deploy, and then you focus on the value, so that's what we've been really focused on. >> Keith, when I listen to my friends in the networking space management's still a challenge. The punchline is usually, they hear single pane of glass, and they said that's spelled P-A-I-N. >> I've heard that one too. >> Talk a little bit about how your solutions tie into some of the broader tools out there. >> Well, we first looked at the compute layer and said, because of the extensibility of USC Manager and the API integration, we're able to take advantage of that, and be able to pull that data out, and XOS, right? We're able to do that exact same thing, and the background that we had at Cisco, and knowing those products really well, we were able to gather all the specific data we need to look at those best practices. And it's a complex architecture, but it's a very elegant architecture, because of the high availability, it can provide the performance, the non-disruptive operations that you were bringing up, John. We want to make sure that we're able to keep those things in line, so as we bring our next release of CSA out, we're going to be adding Enterprise Fibre Channel, so the new MDS switches, we're gonna be bringing our relationship with VMWare in our engine to be able to ingest the configuration of VMWare in. We're also bringing back our partner-centric reseller portal so when customer is running Converged Systems Advisor, they can share it to their reseller, and the reseller's going to be able to provide managed services, support services, and professional services to expand, to repair, to augment those existing FlexPods in their customers' environments. So we're really excited to be able to bring that solution back to our resellers-- >> What's that going to do, what's the impact of that, because I almost imagine that's going to enable them to want to be tightly integrated but also get data from their customers. What do you guys see as the value for the partners to take advantage of that? >> Well, I just met with a partner at our booth, just a few moments ago, and walked them through the solution they had never seen it before. It takes a reseller a week, or even multiple weeks, depending on the size of the FlexPod, to actually go through the configuration of the servers, the network, the storage, the hypervisors, and correlate that into a deliverable to their customer. We can do that in sub-10 minutes, sub-15 minutes. >> So faster time to the customer value. >> Faster time to customer value, faster time to resolution if there is a problem, and then again, they're running in their key business applications on this platform, we've been doing it for eight years, we want to continue to expand upon the value the FlexPod can offer. >> But I wanted to add just a couple of things to what you were saying. We talked about FlexPod really being a channel play. That's important to us in product management, not so important to our customers. What it really means to our customers is they tend to have a very close relationship with their partners. Their partners are the ones that are really enabling FlexPod for them. What we're doing with Converged Systems Advisor, is we are creating such a close relationship at a technical level, technology level, between the customer and the partner, that the partner's there to help them on a daily basis. Where there is a problem, it's almost like the telematics in your car, right? All the cars now, they're phoning back home, they're telling where there's something wrong, you get this letter or an email, you need a service, you need... This is exactly what we're achieving with the Converged System Advisor-- >> When you call support, what don't you want to hear? What's your model number, what's your serial number, what's your contract ID? Wouldn't it be great if everybody's singing off the same sheet of music? >> Well, you bring a great point there. There was so much discussion, well, converged infrastructure a public lot, those are gonna be really simple, and they're gonna be homogenous, and they're all gonna be great, but yeah, you're smiling and laughing because the reality is you're never gonna find two customers that have the same environment, no matter what you're talking about. >> No. >> So I need the tooling, I need the data and the analytics, to help get through that. I shouldn't have to spend half an hour on level one support. >> And that's all-- >> I shouldn't have to go through multiple forms the same time. >> Yes, and you're right Stu, that's always been, that's always been the mantra for FlexPod since the word dot. We don't get to an 11 billion dollar install base unless you're doing something right, and the word, the reason the word flex is in there, it's a dichotomy, whenever you go into these sorts of discussions, do you make it really fixed, right? Which is almost like, I call it like straight jacket, right. But you know what you get, right? Or do you make it flexible, right? And the flexibility really addresses the business need as opposed to the technology need. So the product guys love it when it's fixed, the customers love it when it's flexible. >> Yeah, you're talking about basically, changes... You want changes to be rolling with the... Technology rolling with the changes. >> Yes. >> Not be stuck in the straight jacket, or we'll also say tailor-made suit, but things change, you wanna... Fashion changes, so this is a real big issue, and talk about support, I think the ideal outcome is not to even call support, with analytics and push notifications and AI, you can almost see what DevNet's doing here, around how developer are getting involved with DevOps and network DevOps. Coders can come in and use the analytics, if tightly integrated in, so that you get the notifications, or they know exactly your environment. Is that, how far along are you guys on that path, because analytics play a big role, you've got the command center there, the Converged Systems Advisor, implies advising, resolution, prescription, what's the vision? >> So Immersive was a Cisco solution partner at the very beginning, so we were a part of this group right behind us, and it was exciting to be a part of that, to attend Cisco Live and be a part of DevNet, and we expanded upon, as you mentioned, the API, integrations of all these platforms, and when cluster data ONTAP came out for NetApp, we did the exact same thing, right? So we get integrated with NetApp, and very easily able to bring all that data in. Now, massaging that data is the hard part, right? Understanding what is noise and what is the real goodness, so you have to find those best practices, look at the hard work that our teams have done around validated designs between Cisco and NetApp, and look at the best practices that come from those particular pieces of hardware. And then once that intelligence is built, correlating that in the cloud service is really where the magic happens. So our teams are back there talking with the network experts the storage experts, the compute networks, the virtualization experts, and so when we have that data, and now you can decision-eer, right? You can start advising your resellers. So we bring up the rules dashboard, and then we do have alerting that we can send to ticketing systems to the remedies, the ServiceNows-- >> It's interesting, I'd love to get the product perspective on this, and across the bigger picture, because the trend we're seeing, certainly on theCUBE, over the past few years, and most recently this year, is the move from device, hardware, to system. So the systems approach really becomes more of a holistic view where, you're looking at the holistic view of multiple things happening. >> Yes. >> It's not just, this is the box, here's where the rack is, command line interface, you guys taking that same approach, can you just add some color on NetApp's vision on looking at holistically, 'cause that's really where software shines. >> No, no, and that's absolutely, so we have a way of seeing FlexPod as a, we call it a converged system, and for that exact reason. So what CSA is able to do is look at anything that happens within that converged system and the context of the overall system, and that really is the key, right? When you understand things in context it means so much more. Just think about when you listen to someone talk, a word taken out of context means nothing, right? So when we listen to that infrastructure, what it tells us is understood in context. And what it will ultimately do, and I think you were kind of hinting at this, John, the vision here is that there will be self-healing infrastructures, self-healing converged systems, just like the cloud, right? So we are continuously monitoring the configuration, the availability, and other aspects of your converged system and we are able to take action to make sure it stays on the rails. >> We saw you guys at the RSA event, you guys had a small little party we went to, and we were riffing, having fun with some of the NetApp folks, and the big trend in cloud is server-less. So the joke was, is this storage-less solution coming? To your point about this, if you think about it, it's just storage somewhere. This is kind of a joke, but it's also kind of nuanced. This is elastic-- >> No, no! It's absolutely true, if you look at NetApp's strategy, if you look at our cloud strategy, we're the first third-party branded services part of the AGI core services, we're not in the marketplace, we're actually part of AGI core. It's NetApp cloud volumes for AGI, and a customer doesn't know what's going on behind the scenes but let's be clear, we're talking about software-defined storage here, right? >> And cloud-ified, too, as well, talk about cloud operations. >> Yeah, still at the end of the day, for us, our intellectual property is not really tied to hardware, we obviously use that as a way to get our intellectual property in the hands of our customers. But we're not tied to a-- >> You guys made a good bet on cloud, I remember talking before Kurian took over, you guys were kicking the tires on Amazon years ago. >> Yes, yes, yes, that's right. >> So it's not like a Johnny-come-lately to the cloud, you guys have been deep in the core. >> Absolutely. >> To end this segment, I wanted to get your thoughts, because you guys are here at Cisco Live, what should the audience understand that couldn't make it out here as the top story at Cisco Live, and what is your role with Cisco here, what's the big story, top line, high-order bit, NetApp, Cisco story. >> So I'll go first, and I'll let my friend here go second. We were really excited coming into Cisco Live, right. We had this pretty big announcement last week, there were a few different aspects to it, but I'll talk about two of them. A new focus between Cisco and NetApp on verticals around FlexPod, and what that really means is that we're focused on very specific verticals, including healthcare, but there'll be others that come down the line. We announced a new solution base on Epic PHR. We announced some lead customers, including the Mercy Technology Services, which is part of the Mercy Hospital group. So that was super exciting, I think what it does is it just demonstrates that our focus is on the outcomes, as opposed to the actual infrastructure, the infrastructure is the way to deliver that. So we're very excited about that at Cisco. The second thing that we announced was, I said, mentioned this Managed Private Cloud, we actually announced it with four of our major joint partners, Dimension Data, ProAct, Microland, and oh my Lord, ePlus, yes of course. That was super exciting as well, and what it does is it captures the imagination, and it's always very fun when you're standing at a booth, and people say, "Oh, I've known FlexPod, "I've seen you guys around." But there's always something new to talk about. >> The relevance is more than ever. >> Absolutely. >> Keith, what wave is NetApp riding right now, if you look at the Cisco action going on, what they're going through, what should people know about the big wave that you guys are taking advantage of right now? >> I think the big wave is absolutely gotta be what we're doing with the hyperscalers. We by far have taken the industry by storm, when you think about what we've done with Microsoft, what we're doing with Google, you know, sorry? >> And Amazon. >> And Amazon, thank you. >> Small companies. >> Yeah, just small hyperscalers, right? It's amazing what we can do with cloud ONTAP, across those vendors, and when we look at what our customers have done with FlexPod, and their relationship with Cisco and NetApp, and our ability to work together to help customers get their data from their core data centers to cloud, back, to their customers, and for us to be able to use analytics the way we do on FlexPod, I think there's a real opportunity-- >> And riding the scale wave too, scaling is huge. Everyone's talking about large-scale, talking about hyperscale as that is the largest scale you can see. >> Well, and our ability to control where the data lives, right? Because you want to be able to hold control of your data, and being able to use familiar tools like what you're already using in your own data center and in your own converged infrastructures, being able to use that ONTAP operating system to be able to control that experience is gonna be very important. >> Guys, thanks for coming in for the NetApp update, great news, great alignment with Cisco. It's a large-scale world, and certainly, the world is changing, storage is gonna be a critical part of it, server, storage, infrastructure, cloud operations on-premise, and in the cloud. TheCUBE, bringing you live coverage. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more day three of three days of coverage here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live, we'll be right back. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE! Covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Day Two of VeeamON 2018 in Chicago. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Dante Orsini is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Biz Dev at iland. CUBE alum. Good friend of theCUBE. Great to see you again. >> Great to see ya. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> What's happening with iland these days, in the world of cloud service providers? >> Well Dave, it's been insane for us. Obviously Veeam's a huge partner of ours. We've been working together for what, seven years now I think. And it's just amazing to see the growth of this company. Right? We've integrated Veeam -- our relationship. We started off basically providing managed backup many, many moons ago. But six years ago we started to build our own platform, on top of Veeam, on top of Cisco, on top of HPE. Customers really wanted to see more control. They wanted greater levels of security. They really wanted a true enterprise cloud. To do that we had to enhance the VMware stack. We had chose to take Veeam and integrate them via their API. Today if somebody deploys anything in the world with iland, it's automatically backed up by Veeam. If you fast forward a bit, as you see what Veeam's done to innovate with cloud and multi cloud, they've really helped build our business. >> Dante, if you go and look back before the whole cloud wave, the typical service provider. They would have one of everything. You'd walk down the aisles and there'd be whatever it was. An EMC box. A digital box. Whatever it was. Did virtualization change that? Were you able to consolidate? Create a platform. Create a simpler environment to manage. Or is there still a lot of bespoke infrastructure lying around? >> Yeah, that's a great question. For us, I'd love to tell you we hit it right the first time twelve years ago. But no. Just like you said. There's all sorts of different technologies right? But I think what we've done is we quickly standardized. We leverage Cisco UCS from a compute perspective. We leverage some of their storage platforms for the things that we do with Veeam Cloud Connect Backup. We actually help them drive the validation of that product before it came to market. We operate at scale with them. Same thing with Veeam. We're their the largest cloud provider in the world right now. As far as leveraging Veeam technologies. In addition to that on the storage front, we also because of the demands of the environment, we really want to deliver a secure cloud service. Encryption is table stakes, and has been for years. HPE Nimble plays a critical role for us there. That's really our stack. Cisco from a network and a compute perspective, VMware with the hypervisor, and HPE from a storage perspective. >> It's sounds like you've taken some very cost effective platforms. Nimble, Veeam, etc. And then architected an enterprise class solution. You guys are adding value around that as an integrator and obviously a service provider. >> Yup, correct. And I think the market is demanding more and more from a cloud provider. People want true transparency. They want control over the infrastructure. For us it's like, how can we develop an API? So we can make this platform extensible. And then still work with the customers that are struggling with the promise of cloud. And Stu, you see this all the time, right? >> Yeah, and Dante, one of the things we're discussing here is it's a very hybrid world. As Veeam said, customers are doing lots of SAAS. They're using service providers. They have their own data centers. They're using a few public clouds. One of the things I've been watching real closely is companies like iland and the other cloud service providers Amazon and Microsoft aren't the enemy anymore. It's, well we actually have to partner with them on some services. We do some things locally. Maybe give us your viewpoint on how that's changed in the last couple of years. >> Yeah, great question. I would tell you that we're not quite there yet, Stu. From my perspective. You guys know, we're known best for providing disaster recovery as a service. That's where we've made a name in the space. But the irony is we've really focused on building this cloud infrastructure. So an I as platform. And ironically that's the majority of our revenue. When we look at public, clearly it is a hybrid world. Where we spend a lot of time, is investing in how can we highly automate the integration? Because we know that people are going to have workloads everywhere. The idea is, think about it from a recovery perspective. If I'm protecting your traditional workloads. And you've got a dev team that's using various different services that are proprietary to a public cloud, that stuff's got to talk to each other in a true resiliency capacity. We wanted to make sure that people could actually highly automate and orchestrate a failover to us, a test to us. But also integrate the connectivity portion of that. Right? Making sure that all these things can talk together is important. You understand as well as I do, as these cloud architectures change, become more modern, and they're more service driven. The traditional, I'm going to move from point A to point B is no longer in play. It's how can I have more diversity amongst my vendor base? If I'm using containers. You've got a globally distributed architecture. If I can deploy some of that with iland, and some of that maybe using Kubernetes, that gives me diversity for recovery. >> Dante, you've hit one of the key things we've been as an industry struggling with. That pace of change is just so rapid. How do you internally deal with that pace of change? As to I architected something today, and tomorrow there's something new. Tell us what you're hearing from your customers as to how they make their decisions and sort through this constantly changing Rubrik? >> Well it's definitely insane. We see all sorts of various different use cases, depending on the industry. And that pressure to innovate at the speed of light is, really people struggle with it. I think from our perspective, there's a couple things that we're doing. One, we actually wrote our own assessment application. We call it iland Catalyst. This was really designed to help both our customers as well as our partners. Cause we go to market through a lot of partners as well, to help streamline this pre-sales process for a customer. Again, we focus squarely on the VMware infrastructure stack. Being able to pull an inventory of what somebody has in their environment. And then go through and select resource pools and VM's, for whatever the purpose. Whether they're looking to work and shift workloads. Or whether they're looking to protect them from a backup or DR perspective, we're able to mitigate all the challenges associated with that. To your point. As people are looking at cloud, it's like okay. Is this cloud thing real? And how's it apply to my business? What can I really do with this? And by the way, I got to deal with my budget also. What's this stuff cost? We've got some really smart people. But you can't scale our smartest people globally. We wanted to really drive that into an application. It's really helped get people to outcomes much quicker. So do it right first. >> Dante, if you reverse back a few years ago, VMware was calling Amazon a book seller. Amazon was calling guys like VMware the old guard. The old way. They kissed and hugged last year. You must've loved that first of all. Because it was like, great, VMware specialist. We'll just drive truck through that opportunity, because we get service provision, cloud, VMware stack, boom. Now fast forward. They've got this little kumbaya thing going on. How do you now differentiate from that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. First of all, VMware, obviously a very strategic partner. I think they've got a long road ahead of them. On some of the things that they're doing. I think the promise of where they're going is great. But I still think there's a lot of folks that struggle with the idea. Think about co-mingling my traditional workloads. And then trying to integrate cloud native services on top of it. I think it's a tall order. We'll see where it goes. We're keeping a close eye on it. But in the interim for us, we continue to see folks that are saying, look I want to get out of the data center business. I've built my data center on VMware. I need to have much greater levels of control and visibility. And you need to make this easy on me. From that perspective, we've been able to do really, really well. We work with a lot of service providers that are looking for that level of a consultative approach. But also want to realize the benefits of a cloud. The point being is, I want a great cloud but it needs to be enterprise class. And I also need to know that I might need help architecting that migration. >> Well that's the key, right? You're not going to get that from an Amazon. They're not going to come into your shop. They're not going to hold your hand through it. They're not going to help you build the architecture route. And help you manage it on an ongoing basis. >> Dante, it's May 2018, so I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about GDPR. >> Hey Stu, I love you man! This is great. You guys know we operate globally, and have for over a decade. GDPR we were way out in front of this. I'm not sure if you follow, The BSI just came out with a new standard. 10012, I believe. I think our Compliance and DPO Officer would be pretty proud of me for remembering that one. >> Dave: I'm proud of ya. >> It's tailor made for GDPR. We've been pre-certified, one of four companies that did it. We do a ton in the security side and the compliance side. And I know they go hand in hand. We went through a global audit last year. On the back of some of the ISO work we do with the CSA, the Cloud Security Alliance. And actually came out with a gold star certification. Sounds juvenile, right? A gold star, woo hoo! But it's a big deal. Only iland and Microsoft have actually achieved that level of certification. Yeah. On the compliance side we're way out in front of GDPR. We're doing a lot from a thought leadership perspective in educating both the partners and the marketplace. I think it's going to see what happens with Brexit also. I think you'll see the rest of the world kind of find their way to their own type of regulation. >> What do all those acronyms mean for your customers in terms of GDPR compliance? How does that turn into value for them, and make their life easier? Can you explain? >> I think right now the whole market's been in my opinion has been ill prepared for this. You see a lot of people scrambling. Being able to identify what data is going to fall under that regulation. How you treat the data. How you're able to account for the data. And also destroy the data. And validate that. Is frankly I see some of the biggest sweeping change in marketing. I see marketing people really scrambling. Because they have to make sure that they double-opt in. Cause the fines for breaching this are unbelievable. I think you're going to see the regulators make an example out of certain people. >> No doubt. >> Quickly. >> There's going to be some examples. They're going to go after the guys with deep pockets first. But the fines are... What are the fines? Four, is it 10% of the turnover? No, 4% of turnover. >> 4% of your previous year's turnover. >> Which is insane. >> Yep, yep. >> That's going to hurt. >> Or something like 20 million pounds, something like that. >> Which ever is greater. >> Which ever is greater. Yes! Yes, exactly. Yup. >> It's pretty onerous. Dante, VeeamON 2018, we'll give you closing thoughts. >> Fantastic event, right. Just super appreciative for our relationship with Veeam. They've been behind us. They've been behind this whole cloud provider community. I mean guys, you know this. Raat Mere and team had the ability to go take this stuff to a public cloud many moons ago. They chose to enable a managed cloud provider market first. We are very grateful for that. >> Awesome. Hey thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. >> My pleasure. >> As always. >> Yup, go Yankees! >> Oh whoa, time out. >> Go Yankees. >> While we're on the topic. Listen, you can't beat the Red Sox in April. Okay, you know that, right? >> Yeah, here we go. >> So it's going to be interesting to see. I mean I have predicted the Yankees take the east, and they go to the World Series. But you got to be excited as a Yankees fan. >> Could be a good year. >> I've always liked Brian Cashman. I think he's one of the best GM's in the business. Watch his moves at the trading deadline. He's going to beef up the bullpen. I hope the Sox can hang tough with him because anything can happen. >> It's true, anything can happen. >> Hey, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys, thank you. >> Go Sox. >> Dig it. >> Keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.