>> Hi, I'm Adrienne Davis, Customer Success Manager on the CFO-side of the house at Mirantis. With me today is Artem Andreev, Product Manager and expert, who's going to enlighten us today. >> Hello everyone. It's great to hear all of you listening to our discussion today. So my name is Artem Andreev. I'm a Product Manager for Mirantis OpenStack line of products. That includes the current product line that we have in the the next generation product line that we're about to launch quite soon. And actually this is going to be the topic of our presentation today. So the new product that we are very, very, very excited about, and that is going to be launched in a matter of several weeks, is called Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes. For those of you who have been in Mirantis quite a while already, Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes is essentially a reincarnation of our Miranti Cloud Platform version one, as we call it these days. So, and the theme has reincarnated into something more advanced, more robust, and altogether modern, that provides the same, if not more, value to our customers, but packaged in a different shape. And well, we're very excited about this new launch, and we would like to share this excitement with you Of course. As you might know, recently a few months ago, Mirantis acquired Docker Enterprise together with the advanced Kubernetes technology that Docker Enterprise provides. And we made this technology the piece and parcel of our product suite, and this naturally includes OpenStack Mirantis, OpenStack on Kubernetes as well, since this is a part of our product suite. And well, the Kubernetes technology in question, we call Docker Enterprise Container Cloud these days, I'm going to refer to this name a lot over the course of the presentation. So I would like to split today's discussions to several major parts. So for those of you who do not know what OpenStack is in general, a quick recap might be helpful to understand the value that it provides. I will discuss why someone still needs OpenStack in 2020. We will talk about what a modern OpenStack distribution is supposed to do to the expectation that is there. And of course, we will go into a bit of details of how exactly Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes works, how it helps to deploy and manage OpenStack clouds. >> So set the stage for me here. What's the base environment we were trying to get to? >> So what is OpenStack? One can think of OpenStack as a free and open source alternative to VMware, and it's a fair comparison. So OpenStack, just as VMware, operates primarily on Virtual Machines. So it gives you as a user, a clean and crispy interface to launch a virtual VM, to configure the virtual networking to plug this VM into it to configure and provision virtual storage, to attach to your VM, and do a lot of other things that actually a modern application requires to run. So the idea behind OpenStack is that you have a clean and crispy API exposed to you as a user, and alters little details and nuances of the physical infrastructure configuration provision that need to happen just for the virtual application to work are hidden, and spread across multiple components that comprise OpenStack per se. So as compared again, to a VMware, the functionality is pretty much similar, but actually OpenStack can do much more than just Vms, and it does that, at frankly speaking much less price, if we do the comparison. So what OpenStack has to offer. Naturally, the virtualization, networking, storage systems out there, it's just the basic entry level functionality. But of course, what comes with it is the identity and access management features, or practical user interface together with the CLI and command line tools to manage the cloud, orchestration functionality, to deploy your application in the form of templates, ability to manage bare metal machines, and of course, some nice and fancy extras like DNSaaS service, Metering, Secret Management, and Load Balancing. And frankly speaking, OpenStack can actually do even more, depending on the needs that you have. >> We hear so much about containers today. Do applications even need VMs anymore? Can't Kubernetes provide all these services? And even if IaaS is still needed, why would one bother with building their own private platform, if there's a wide choice of public solutions for virtualization, like Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure, and Google cloud platform? >> Well, that's a very fair question. And you're absolutely correct. So the whole trend (audio blurs) as the States. Everybody's talking about containers, everybody's doing containers, but to be realistic, yes, the market still needs VMs. There are certain use cases in the modern world. And actually these use cases are quite new, like 5G, where you require high performance in the networking for example. You might need high performance computing as well. So when this takes quite special hardware and configuration to be provided within your infrastructure, that is much more easily solved with the Vms, and not containers. Of course not to mention that, there are still legacy applications that you need to deal with, and that well, they have just switched from the server-based provision into VM-based provision, and they need to run somewhere. So they're not just ready for containers. And well, if we think about, okay, VMs are still needed, but why don't I just go to a public infrastructure as a service provider and run my workloads there? Now if you can do that, but well, you have to be prepared to pay a lot of money, once you start running your workloads at scale. So public IaaSes, they actually tend to hit your pockets heavily. And of course, if you're working in a highly regulated area, like enterprises cover (audio blurs) et cetera, so you have to comply with a lot of security regulations and data placement regulations. And well, public IaaSes, let's be frank, they're not good at providing you with this transparency. So you need to have full control over your whole stack, starting from the hardware to the very, very top. And this is why private infrastructure as a service is still a theme these days. And I believe that it's going to be a theme for at least five years more, if not more. >> So if private IaaSes are useful and demanded, why does Mirantis just stick to the OpenStack that we already have? Why did we decide to build a new product, rather than keep selling the current one? >> Well, to answer this question, first, we need to see what actually our customers believe more in infrastructure as a service platform should be able to provide. And we've compiled this list into like five criteria. Naturally, private IaaS needs to be reliable and robust, meaning that whatever happens on the underneath the API, that should not be impacting the business generated workloads, this is a must, or impacting them as little as possible, the platform needs to be secure and transparent, going back to the idea of working in the highly regulated areas. And this is again, a table stake to enter the enterprise market. The platform needs to be simple to deploy (audio blurs) 'cause well, you as an operator, you should not be thinking about the internals, but try to focus in on enabling your users with the best possible experience. Updates, updates are very important. So the platform needs to keep up with the latest software patches, bug fixes, and of course, features, and upgrading to a new version must not take weeks or months, and has as little impact on the running workloads as possible. And of course, to be able to run modern application, the platform needs to provide the comparable set of services, just as a public cloud so that you can move your application across your terms in the private or public cloud without having to change it severally, so-called the feature parity, it needs to be there. And if we look at the architecture of OpenStack, and we know OpenStack is powerful, it can do a lot. We've just discussed that, right? But the architecture of OpenStack is known to be complex. And well, tell me, how would you enable the robustness and robustness and reliability in this complex system? It's not easy, right? So, and actually this diagrams shelves, just like probably a third part of the modern update OpenStack cloud. So it's just a little illustration. It's not the whole picture. So imagine how hard it is to make a very solid platform out of this architecture. And well, naturally this also imposes some challenges to provide the transparency and security, 'cause well, the more complex the system is, the harder it is to manage, and well the harder it is to see what's on the inside, and well upgrades, yeah. One of the biggest challenges that we learned from our past previous history, well that many of our customers prefer to stay on the older version of OpenStack, just because, well, they were afraid of upgraded, cause they saw upgrades as time-consuming and risky and divorce. And well, instead of just switching to the latest and greatest software, they preferred reliability by sticking to the old stuff. Well, why? Well, 'cause potentially that meant implied certain impact on their workloads and well an upgrade required thorough planning and execution, just to be as as riskless as possible. And we are solving all of these challenges, of managing a system as complex as OpenStack is with Kubernetes. >> So how does Kubernetes solve these problems? >> Well, we look at OpenStack as a typical microservice architecture application, that is organized into multiple little moving parts, demons that are connected to each other and that talk to each other through the standard API. And altogether, that feels as very good feet to run on top of a Kubernetes cluster, because many of the modern applications, they fall exactly on the same pattern. >> How exactly did you put OpenStack on Kubernetes? >> Well, that's not easy. I'm going to be frank with you. And if you look at the architectural diagram, so this is a stack of Miranda's products represented with a focus of course, on the Mirantis OpenStack, as a central part. So what you see in the middle shelving pink, is Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes itself. And of course around that are supporting components that are needed to be there, to run OpenStack on Kubernetes successfully. So on the very bottom, there is hardware, networking, storage, computing, hardware that somebody needs to configure provision and manage, to be able to deploy the operating system on top of it. And this is just another layer of complexity that abstracts the Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes just from the under lake. So once we have operating system there, there needs to be a Kubernetes cluster, deployed and managed. And as I mentioned previously, we are using the capabilities that this Kuberenetes cluster provides to run OpenStack itself, the control plane that way, because everything in Mirantis OpenStack on Kuberentes is a container, or whatever you can think of. Of course naturally, it doesn't sound like an easy task to manage this multi-layered pie. And this is where Docker Enterprise Container Cloud comes into play, 'cause this is our single pane of glass into day one and day two operations for the hardware itself, for the operating system, and for Docker Enterprise Kubernetes. So it solves the need to have this underlay ready and prepared. And once the underlay is there, you go ahead, and deploy Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes, just as another Kubernetes application, application following the same practices and tools as you use with any other applications. So naturally of course, once you have OpenStack up and running, you can use it to create your own... To give your users ability to create their own private little Kubernetes clusters inside OpenStack projects. And this is one of the measure just cases for OpenStack these days, again, being an underlay for containers. So if you look at the operator experience, how does it look like for a human operator who is responsible for deployment the management of the cloud to deal with Mirantis OpenStack on Kubernetes? So first, you deploy Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, and you use the built-in capabilities that it provides to provision your physical infrastructure, that you discover the hardware nodes, you deploy operating system there, you do configuration of the network interfaces in storage devices there, and then you deploy Kubernetes cluster on top of that. This Kubernetes cluster is going to be dedicated to Mirantis OpenStack on Kuberenetes itself. So it's a special (indistinct) general purpose thing, that well is dedicated to OpenStack. And that means that inside of this cluster, there are a bunch of life cycle management modules, running as Kubernetes operators. So OpenStack itself has its own LCM module or operator. There is a dedicated operator for Ceph, cause Ceph is our major storage solution these days, that we integrate with. Naturally, there is a dedicated lifecycle management module for Stack Light. Stack Light is our operator, logging monitoring alerting solution for OpenStack on Kubernetes, that we bundle toegether with the whole product suite. So Kubernetes operators, directly through, it keeps the TL command or through the practical records that are provided by Docker Enterprise Container Cloud, as a part of it, to deploy the OpenStack staff and Stack Light clusters one by one, and connect them together. So instead of dealing with hundreds of YAML files, while it's five definitions, five specifications, that you're supposed to provide these days and that's safe. And although data management is performed through these APIs, just as the deployment as easily. >> All of this assumes that OpenStack has containers. Now, Mirantis was containerizing back long before Kubernetes even came along. Why did we think this would be important? >> That is true. Well, we've been containerizing OpenStack for quite a while already, it's not a new thing at all. However, is the way that we deploy OpenStack as a Kubernetes application that matters, 'cause Kubernetes solves a whole bunch of challenges that we have used to deal with, with MCP1, when deploying OpenStack on top of bare operating systems as packages. So, naturally Kubernetes provides us with... Allows us to achieve reliability through the self (audio blurs) auto-scaling mechanisms. So you define a bunch of policies that describe the behavior of OpenStack control plane. And Kubernetes follows these policies when things happen, and without actually any need for human interaction. So isolation of the dependencies or OpenStack services within Docker images is a good thing, 'cause previously we had to deal with packages and conflicts in between the versions of different libraries. So now we just ship everything together as a Docker image, and I think that early in updates is an advanced feature that Kubernetes provides natively. So updating OpenStack has never been as easy as with Kubernetes. Kubernetes also provides some fancy building blocks for network and like hold balancing, and of course, collegial tunnels, and service meshes. They're also quite helpful when dealing with such a complex application like OpenStack when things need to talk to each other and without any problem in the configuration. So Helm Reconciling is a place that also has a great deal of role. So it actually is our soul for Kubernetes. We're using Helm Bubbles, which are for opens, provide for OpenStack into upstream, as our low level layer of logic to deploy OpenStack app services and connect them to each other. And they'll naturally automatic scale-up of control plane. So adding in, YouNote is easy, you just add a new Kubernetes work up with a bunch of labels there and well, it handles the distribution of the necessary service automatically. Naturally, there are certain drawbacks. So there's fancy features come at a cost. Human operators, they need to understand Kubernetes and how it works. But this is also a good thing because everything is moving towards Kubernetes these days, so you would have to learn at some point anyway. So you can use this as a chance to bring yourself to the next level of knowledge. OpenStack is not 100% Cloud Native Application by itself. Unfortunately, there are certain components that are stateful like databases, or NOAA compute services, or open-the-switch demons, and that have to be dealt with very carefully when doing operates, updates, and all the whole deployment. So there's extra life cycle management logic build team that handles these components carefully for you. So, a bit of a complexity we had to have. And naturally, Kubernetes requires resources, and keeping the resources itself to run. So you need to have this resources available and dedicated to Kubernetes control plane, to be able to control your application, that is all OpenStack and stuff. So a bit of investment is required. >> Can anybody just containerize OpenStack services and get these benefits? >> Well, yes, the idea is not new, there's a bunch of OpStream open, sorry, community projects doing pretty much the same thing. So we are not inventing a rocket here, let's be fair. However, it's only the way that Kubernetes cooks OpenStack, gives you the robustness and reliability that enterprise and like big customers actually need. And we're doing a great deal of a job, ultimating all the possible day to work polls and all these caveats complexities of the OpenStack management inside our products. Okay, at this point, I believe we shall wrap this discussion a bit up. So let me conclude for you. So OpenStack is an opensource infrastructure as a service platform, that still has its niche in 2020th, and it's going to have it's niche for at least five years. OpenStack is a powerful but very complex tool. And the complexities of OpenStack and OpenStack life cycle management, are successfully solved by Mirantis, through the capabilities of Kubernetes distribution, that provides us with the old necessary primitives to run OpenStack, just as another containerized application these days.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of SUSECON Digital brought to you by SUSE. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program one of SUSE's partners, we have Marc O'Regan, he is the CTO of EMEA for Dell Technologies. Marc, it is great to see you, we all wish, I know when I talked to Melissa Di Donato and the team, everybody was really looking forward to coming to Ireland, but at least we're talking to you in Ireland so thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks very much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. You know, really looking forward to getting you guys here, unfortunately it wasn't a beaver, once we're all safe and well, great to talk. >> Yeah, absolutely, that's the important thing. Everybody is safe, we've had theCUBE a couple of times in Dublin. I'd actually, you know, circled this one on my calendar 'cause I wanted to get back the Emerald Isle but, Marc, let's talk first, you know, the Dell and SUSE relationship you know, disclaimer, you know, I've got a little bit of background on this. You know, I was the product manager for Linux at a company known as EMC back before Dell bought them, many moons ago, so I know that, you know, Dell and the Dell EMC relationship with SUSE go back a couple of decades, but, you know, bring us into, you know, what your teams are working together and we'll go from there. >> Yeah, sure, Stu, so, quite correct, nearly a two decade long relationship with SUSE and one that we hold very dear to our heart. I think what both organizations have in common is their thirst and will to innovate and we've been doing that with SUSE for 16, 17 years, right back to, you know, SUSE Enterprise Linux sitting on, you know, PowerEdge architecture way, way back in the day into you know, some of the developments and collaborations that we, that we worked through with the SUSE teams. I remember back 2013, 2014 doing a pretty cool program with our then Fluid Cache technology. So, when you look at, you know, OLTP kind of environments, what you want to kind of get away from is the, you know, the read-write, commits and latency that are inherent in those types of environments. So, as you start to build and get more users hitting the, hitting the ecosystem, you need to be able to respond and SUSE has been absolutely, you know, instrumental to helping us build an architecture then with our Fluid Cache technology back in the day, and the SUSE technology sitting around and under that and then of course, in more recent times, really extending that innovation aspiration, I guess, has been absolutely a pleasure to, to watch and to be involved with, see it mature so some of the cool platforms that we're developing with SUSE together it's a, it's pretty neat so I'm, you know, one of those being-- >> So, Marc, yeah, well, you know, bring us up to speed, you know, right in the early days, it was, you know, Linux on the SUSE side, it was, you know, servers and storage from the Dell side, you know, today it's, you know, microservice architectures, cloud native solutions. So, you know, bring us up to speed as to some of the important technologies and obviously, you know, both companies have matured and grown and have a much broader portfolio other than they would have years ago. >> Yeah, for sure, absolutely. So, I mean, what's exciting is when you look at some of the architectures that we are building together, we're building reference architectures. So we're taking this work that we're doing together and we're building edge architectures that are suitable for small, medium, and you know, and large environments. And the common thread that pulls those three architectures together is that they are all enterprise grade architectures. And the architectures are used as frameworks. We don't always expect our customers to use them, you know, by the letter of the law, but they are a framework and, by which they can look to roll out scalable storage solutions. For example, like the Ceph, the SUSE Enterprise Storage solution that we collaborate with and have built such a reference architecture for. So this is, you know, it's built on Ceph architecture under the hood, but, you know, both ourselves and SUSE have brought a level of innovation, you know, into an arena, where you need cost, and you need low latency, and you need those types of things that we spoke about, I guess a moment ago, and into, you know, this new cloud native ecosystem that you just spoke to a few moments ago. So on the cloud native side, we're also heavily collaborating, and near co-engineering with SUSE on their CaaS technologies. So here it's really interesting to look at organizations like SAP and what we're doing with data hub and SAP, it's all part of the intelligent enterprise for SAP. This is where SUSE and Dell Tech together really get, you know, into looking at how we can extract information out of data, different data repositories. You know, you may have Oracle you may have, you know, you may have HDFS, you may have Excel and you're trying to extract data and information from that data, from those different siloed environments and the CaaS technology brings its, you know, its micro, capability to the forum in that regard, our hardware architecture is the perfect fit to, to bring that scalar platform, cloud native platform into the ecosystem. >> So, you know, Marc, you've got the CTO hat on for the European theater there. When we, we've been talking to SUSE, when they talk about their innovation, obviously, the community and open-source is a big piece of what they're doing. You were just walking through some of the cloud native pieces, give us what you're seeing when it comes to, you know, how is Dell helping drive innovation, you know, and how does that connects with what you're doing with partners like SUSE. >> Yeah, well, you know, innovation is massively, massively important. So there's a number of different factors that, you know, make up a very good innovation framework or a good innovation program. And at Dell Tech we happen to have what we believe to be an extraordinarily good innovation framework. And we have a lot of R&D budget assigned to helping innovate and we get the chance to go out and work with SUSE and other partners as well. What SUSE and Dell Tech do really, really well together is bring other partners and other technologies into the mix. And, you know, this allows us to innovate, co-innovate together as part of that framework that I just mentioned. So on the Dell Tech framework, we'll obviously, you know, take technologies, you know, we'll take them, perhaps into the office of the CTO, look at new, you know, emerging tech and look at, you know, more traditional tech, for example, and we will blend those together. And, you know, as part of the process and the innovation process, we generally take a view on some of the partners that we actually want to get involved in that process. And SUSE is very much one of those partners, as a matter of fact, right now, we're doing a couple of things with SUSE, one in the labs in Walldorf in Germany, where we're looking at high availability solution that we're trying to develop and optimize there right now at this point in time. And another good example that I can think of at the moment is looking at how customers are migrating off, you know, older, more traditional platforms, they need to look at the cloud native world, they need look at how they can, platform for success in this cloud native world. And we're looking at how we can get smarter, I guess about migrating them from that, you know, extraordinarily stealthy world that they had been in the past but that needs to get from that stealthy world into an even stealthier scalable world that is, that is cloud native world. >> Yeah, Marc, you talk about customers going through these transformations, I wonder if you can help connect the dots for us as to how these types of solutions fit into customers overall cloud strategies. So, you know, obviously, you know, Dell has broad portfolio, a lot of different pieces that are on the cloud, you know, I know there's a long partnership between Dell and SUSE and like SAP solutions, we've been looking at how those modernize so, you know, where does cloud fit in and we'd love any of kind of the European insights that you can give on that overall cloud discussion. >> Yeah, sure, so, again, ourselves and SUSE go back on, in history, you know, on the cloud platforming side, I mean, we've collaborated on developing a cloud platform in the past as well. So we had an OpenStack platform that we both collaborated on and you know, it was very successful for both of us. Where I'm seeing a lot of the requirement in this multicloud world that we're kind of living in right now, is the ability to be able to build a performant scalable platform that is going to be able to respond in the cloud native ecosystem. And that is going to be able to traverse workloads from on-prem to off-prem and from different cloud platforms with different underlying dependencies there. And that's really the whole aspiration, I guess, of this open cloud ecosystem. How do we get workloads to traverse across, across those types of domain. And the other is bringing the kind of, you know, performance that's expected out of these new workloads that are starting to emerge in the cloud native spaces. And as we start to look to data and extract information from data, we are also looking to do so in an extraordinary, accurate and in an extraordinary performant way and having the right kind of architecture underneath that is absolutely, absolutely essential. So I mentioned, you know, SAP's data hub a little earlier on, that's a really, really good example. As is, a matter of fact, SAP's Leonardo framework so, you know, my background is HPC, right? So, I will always look to how we can possibly architect to get the compute engineering as close to the data sources as possible as we can. And that means having to, in some way get out of these monolithic stacks that we've been used to over the last, you know, for a number of decades into a more horizontally scaled out kind of architecture. That means landing the right architecture into those environments, being able to respond, you know, in a meaningful way that's going to ultimately drive value to users and for the users and for the providers of the services, who are building these type of, these type of ecosystems. Again, you know, as I said, you know, data hub, and some of the work that Dell Tech are doing with the CaaS platform is absolutely, you know, perfectly positioned to address those types of, those types of problems and those types of challenges. On the other side, as I mentioned, the, you know, the story solutions that we're doing with SUSE are really taking off as well. So I was involved in a number of years ago in the Ceph program on the Irish government network and, so these would have been very big. And one of the earliest to be honest, Ceph firm I was involved with probably around five, six years ago, perhaps. And the overlying architecture, funnily enough, was, as you probably have guessed by now was SUSE Enterprise. And here we are today building, you know, entire, entire Ceph scale out storage solutions with SUSE. So yeah, what we're seeing is an open ecosystem, a scalable ecosystem and a performant ecosystem that needs to be able to respond and that's what the partnership with SUSE is actually bringing. >> So, Marc, I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you is, you know, we're all dealing with the, the ripple effects of what are happening with the COVID-19 global pandemic. >> Sure. >> You know, I know I've seen online lots that Dell is doing, I'm wondering what is the impact that, you know, you're seeing and anything specific regarding, you know, how this impact partnerships and how, you know, tech communities come together in these challenging times? >> Yeah, that's a great question to end on, Stu. And I think it's times like we're living through at the moment when we see, you know, the real potential of, I guess of human and machine collaboration when you think of the industry we're in, when you think of some of the problems that we're trying to solve. Here we are, a global pandemic, we have a problem that's distributed by its very nature, and I'm trying to find patterns, I guess, I'm trying to model, you know, for the treatment of, you know, COVID-19 is something that's very, very close to our heart. So we're doing a lot on the technology side where we're looking to, as I said, model for treatment but also use distributed analytical architectures to collaborate with partners in order to be able to, you know, contribute to the effort of finding treatments for COVID-19. On the commercial side of things then Dell Tech are doing a huge amount so, you know, we're, for instance, we're designing a, we're designing a financial model or framework, if you will, where our customers and our partners have, you know, can take our infrastructure and our partners infrastructure and those collaborations that we spoke about today. And they can land them into their ecosystem with pretty much zero percent finance. And so it's kind of a, it's an opportunity where, you know, we're taking the technology and we're taking the capability to land that technology into these ecosystems at a very, very low cost, but also give organizations the breadth and opportunity to consume those technologies without having to worry about, you know, ultimately paying up front they can start to look at the financial model that will suit them and that will, that will, that will, hopefully, accelerate their time, their time to market, trying to solve some of these problem that we've been speaking about. >> Well, Marc, thank you so much for the updates. Definitely good to hear about the technology pieces as well as some of these impacts that will have a more global impact. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Stu, my pleasure. Thank you, take care and stay safe. >> Thanks, same to you. All right, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more covered from SUSECON Digital '20. Thank you, for always, for watching theCUBE. 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>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to the third day of wall-to-wall coverage here at Kubecon + CloudNativeCon 2019 in San Diego. I am your host for the three days of coverage, Stu Miniman. Joining me this morning is Justin Warren. And happy to welcome back to the program, Erin Boyd who's a senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Erin, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so we had a chance to catch up in Barcelona on theCUBE there. Storage is definitely one of the faster moving areas of this ecosystem over the last two years. Why don't we start with, really, the event? So, you know, as I said, we're in day three but day zero there were a whole lot of things we had. Some of your peers at Red Hat have talked about OpenShift Commons, but storage, to my understanding had a couple of things going on. Why don't you share with our audience a little bit of that? >> Sure, so we had a SIG face-to-face for Kubernetes, it was probably one of the best attended. We had to cap the number of attendees, so about 60 different people came to talk about the future of Kubernetes in storage, and what we need to be doing to meet our customers' needs. In conjunction with that, there was a parallel session called CNS Days, which is Container Native Storage Days. That event is very customer focused, so I really enjoyed bouncing between the two of them. To go from the hypothetical, programming, architecture view, straight to what customers in the enterprise are looking at and doing, and what their real needs are. >> So from that SIG, can you actually share a little bit of where we are, where some of the requests are? We know storage is never one way to fix it, there's been some debates, there's a couple different ways to do... I mean, traditional storage, you've got block, file, and object. Cloud storage, there are more options in cloud storage today than there was, if I was to configure a server, or buy a storage array in my own data center. So where are we, what are those asks? What's on the roadmap there? >> Right, so I think for the past five years, we've been really focused on being mindful of what APIs are common across all the vendors. I think we want to ensure that we're not excluding any vendors from being part of this ecosystem. And so, with that, we've created the basis of things like persistent volumes, persistent volumes claims, storage classes to automate that, storage quotas to be able to have management and control over it. So I think now we're looking to the next evolution of... As the model's maturing, and people are actually running stateful applications on Kubernetes, we need to be addressing their needs. So things like snapshotting, eventually volume cloning, which has just gone in, and migrating. All these type of things that exist within the data plane are going to be the next evolution of things we look at in the SIG. >> Yeah, so one criticism that's been mentioned about Kubernetes a few times, that one, it's a bit complicated. But also, it didn't really deal that well with stateful sets. Stateful data management has always been, it's been a little bit lacking. That seems to have pretty much been sorted out now. As you mentioned, there's a lot more work being done on storage operators. But you're talking about some of these data management features that operators from other paradigms are kind of used to being there. When you're thinking about moving workloads to Kubernetes, or putting in new workloads on Kubernetes, if you're unsure about, "Well, will I be able to operate this in the same way that I did things before?" How do you think people should be thinking about those kind of data services in Kubernetes? >> So I think it's great that you mentioned operators. Because that was one of the key things when Rook came into the landscape, to be able to lower the complexity of taking something that requires physical storage and compute, geography, node selection. All those things, it helped people who were used to just the cloud model. I create a PVC, it's a request for storage, Amazon magically fulfills it. I don't know what's backing it. To be able to take these more complex storage systems and deploy them within the ecosystem, it also does a good job supporting our Brownfield customers, because not every customer that's coming to Kubernetes is green. So it's important that we understand that some customers want to keep their data on-prem, maybe burst to the cloud to leverage those services, but then keep their data close to home. So operators help facilitate that. >> Yeah, Erin, I hesitate a little bit to ask this, but I'm wondering if you can do a little compare, contrast for us, for what the industry had done back in OpenStack days? When I looked at storage, every traditional storage company certified their environment for OpenStack. On a storage standpoint, it feels like a different story to me when I hear about the ecosystem of operators in OpenStack. So I know you know this space, so maybe you can give us a little bit of what we learned in the past. What's similar, what's different? >> Right, well I think one of the benefits is we have a lot of the same key players. As you may know, OpenShift has pivoted from Gluster to Ceph, Ceph being the major backer of OpenStack. So we're able to take some of that technical debt, and learn our lessons from things we could improve, and apply those things within Kubernetes. I just think that it's a little slower migration, because in OpenStack, like you said, we had certification, there were different drivers. And we're trying to learn from, maybe, I wouldn't even call those mistakes, but, how can we better automate this? What can we do from an operational perspective to make it easier? >> Well I think because one of the... It felt like we were kind of taking some older models and... I'm testing it, I'm adding it. The ecosystem for operators here is different. Many of these, we're talking very much software-driven solutions. It's built for container architectures, so it's understandable that it might take a little bit longer because it's a different paradigm. >> Right, well, and I think the certification kind of... It wasn't an inhibitor but it certainly took a lot of time. And I think our take was on... We used to have all the storage providers be entry providers within Kubernetes. And with CSI, we have since started to redo the plugins and the sidecars, and move that out of core. So then the certification kind of falls outside of that instead of being more tightly wound into the platform. And I think it will allow us to have a lot more flexibility. Instead of waiting on each release, vendors can create operators, certify them themselves, have them in their own CSI driver, and move at the pace that they need to move. >> So how do you balance that need for Kubernetes to be a common operating platform that people can build on with each vendor's desire to provide their own unique capabilities that they think that they do particularly well? That's why they charge the money that they do, because they think that theirs is the best storage ever. How do you balance that tension between the need for a standard platform and to make it interoperable, but still allowing the flexibility for people to have their own kind of innovation in there? >> So when we created the storage class, for instance, to be able to create a service level over storage, to be able to provide the provisioner that we're going to use, we made the specification of that section completely opaque. And what that allowed us to do is that when vendors wrote their provisioners and now their CSI drivers, allowed them to feed in different attributes of the storage that they want to leverage, that don't necessarily have to be in core Kubernetes. So it provided a huge amount of flexibility on that. The other side of that, though, is, the feeback we get from real users is "I need backup and recovery, and I need DR, and I need that across the platform." So I really think as we look to scale this out, we have to be looking at the commonalities between all storage and bringing those APIs into Kubernetes. >> One of the things I've really liked to see in this ecosystem over the last year or so, and really highlighted at this show, we're talking a lot more about workloads and applications and how those... What works today and where we're growing. Can you speak a little bit from your world as to where we are, what's working great, what customers are deploying, and a little bit, the road map of where we still need to go? >> Sure, I think workloads are key. I mean, I think that we have to focus on the actual end-to-end delivery of that, and so we have to figure out a way that we can make the data more agile, and create interfaces to really enable that, because it's very unlikely that an enterprise company is going to rely on one cloud or stay with one cloud, or want their data in one cloud. They're going to want to have the flexibility to leverage that. So as we enable those workloads, some are very complex. We started with, "Hey, I just want to containerize my application and get it running. Now I want to have some sort of state, which is persistent storage, and now I want to be able to scale that out across n number of clusters." That's where the workloads become really important. And long term, where we need policy to automate that. My pod goes down, I restart it, it needs to know that because of, maybe, the data that that workload's producing, it can only stay in this geographical region. >> Yeah, we talk about multicloud. You mentioned data protection, data protection is something I need to do across the board. Security is something I need to do across the board. My automation needs to take all that into account. How's Red Hat helping customers get their arms around that challenge? >> Yeah, so I think Red Hat really does take a holistic view in making sure that we provide a very consistent, secure platform. I think that's one of the things that you see when you come on to OpenShift, for instance, or OKR, that you're seeing security tightened a little bit more, to ensure that you're running in the best possible way that you can, to protect your data. And then, the use of Rook Ceph, for instance, Ceph provides that universal backplane, where if you're going to have encryption or anything like that, you know it's going to be the same across that. >> It sounds like there's an opportunity here for people new to Kubernetes who have been doing things in a previous way. There's a little bit of reticence from this community to understand enterprise, they're like, "Well, actually, you're kind of doing it wrong. It's slow and inflexible." There's actually a lot of lessons that we've learned in enterprise, particularly around these workloads. Having security, having backup in DR. In the keynote this morning, there was a lot of discussion about the security that either is in Kubernetes, and some parts it's kind of lacking. I think there's a lot that both of these communities can learn from each other, so I'm seeing a lot of moves of late to be a little bit more welcoming to some people who are coming to Kubernetes from other ecosystems. To be able to bring the ideas that they have that... We've already learned these lessons before, we can take some of that knowledge and bring it into Kubernetes to help us to do that better. Do you see Red Hat bringing a lot of that expereience in its work... Red Hat's been around for quite some time now, so you've done a lot of this already. Are you bringing all of that knowledge into Kubernetes and sharing it with the ecosystem? >> Absolutley, and just like Stu pointed out, I mean, OpenStack was a big part of our evolution, and security within RHEL, and I think we absolutely should take those lessons learned and look to how we do protect our customers' data, and make sure that the platform, Kubernetes itself and as we evolve OpenShift, can provide that, and ways that we can certify that. >> Erin, you're meeting with a lot of customers. You were talking about the Day Zero thing. What's top of mind for your customers? We talk about, that Kubernetes has crossed the chasm but to get the vast majority, there's still lots of work to do. We need to, as an industry, make things simpler. What's working well, and what are some of the challenges from the customers that you've talked to? >> So I think, if you walk in, across the hall, and you see how many vendors are there, it's trying to get a handle on what I should even be doing. And as the co-lead of the CNCF Storage SIG, I think that's one of the initiatives that we take very seriously. So in addition to a storage whitepaper, we've been working on use cases that define, when should I use a data store? When should I use object? Why would I want to use file? And then really taking these real-world examples, creating use cases and actual implementations so someone can, "Oh, that's similar to my workload." Here are some tools to accelerate understanding how to get that set up. And also creating those guard rails from an architectural standpoint. You don't want to go down this path, that's not right for your workload. So we're hoping to at least provide an education around containerized storage that'll help customers. >> Yeah, I'm just curious. I think back ten years ago, I was working for a large storage company. We were having some of these same conversations. So is it very different now in the containerized, multicloud world? Or are some of the basic decision tree discussions around block, file, and object and application the same as we might have been having a decade ago? >> I think we're starting to just touch on those, and I'm glad that you brought up object. That was one of the things I talked about in Barcelona, and we actually talked about at the face-to-face. To me, it's kind of the missing piece of storage today in Kubernetes, and I think we're finally starting to see that more customers are asking for that and realizing that's an important workload to be able to support at its core. So I think, yes, we're having the same conversations again, but certainly in a different context. >> Yeah, I mean, back in the day, it was, the future is object but we don't know how we'd get there. If you look behind the scenes in most public clouds, object's running a lot of what's there. All right, Erin, I want to give you the final word. KubeCon 2019, from that storage perspective. What should people watching take away? >> That we're only beginning with storage, yeah. We still have a lot of work to do, but I think it's a wonderful community and vibrant, and I think there'll be a lot of changes in the coming years. >> All right. Well, definitely a vibrant ecosystem. Erin, thank you so much for all the updates. We'll be back with more coverage here, for Justin Warren. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Boston, MA it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. (upbeat music continues) >> It is so good to have you back with us here on theCUBE as we continue our live coverage here at the BCEC at Red Hat Summit 2019. Glad to have you watching wherever you might be, Eastern Time Zone or maybe out West. Stu Miniman, John Walls here. Our coverage continuing; sixth year we've been at this summit. Eric Kern now joins us here. Both from Lenovo, Eric and Steve Brown. Eric is the Executive Distinguished Engineer. And Steve is the Managing Partner in the Software Business Unit and the DevOps practice leader. So gentlemen good to have you with us on theCUBE. Good to see you today! >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> No surprise, right, that you're here; long term partnership, very successful get together. First off, I want your ideas or your impressions of what you've hear or what you've seen so far here in the day and a half that we've been underway. And whether it's keynote or maybe one of the side sessions, just what's your first impression of what's goin' on here? >> Yeah, I mean it's great. There's a lot of people here, a lot of activity. I mean we can see the Expo behind us. You know the food is great, lunch is great so- (laughter) >> Rub it in. (laughter continues) Rub it in just a little bit. Okay, so a little bit of news this week with regard to what you're up to. And if you would, I'm not gonna ask you to go terribly deep, but just give us an idea of what some of the headlines are you guys were sending out this week. Steve, why don't you take that? >> Yeah, so this week we announced six new reference designs and solutions, engineered solutions. But pretty excited about OpenShift 4 and certainly Rel8 after a five year I guess pause, if you will, on major releases. So that's exciting. >> So, Eric, why don't we start with building on those partnerships, talk about some of the solutions your talking to customers and some of the latest and greatest? There's a lot of interesting things we're doing; one of the things we've been doing recently is around TruScale. So TruScale is our infrastructure as a service on premise. So one of the things we do with it is we build overall solutions. So there's a number of reference architectures that we talked about with Red Hat. These solutions, think about them as having an overall CapEx price and then we convert that into a OpEx price. Probably one of the neat novel things, and this is kind of the area that I really got into, right, is around how do we build a metering system that doesn't require us to install a bunch of software and can be compatible with everything? So with TruScale what we've done is we've leveraged our what's called our xclarity controller, it's the chip basically on the motherboard, and that xclarity controller has the ability to measure power. And measure power both at the overall input consumption, as well measuring power in the CPU, the memory and the eye out. And we built an infrastructure around that. We can actually tell you exactly what percentage the system is being used and consumed based on that. And we can charge for the overall system on a monthly basis. So we have a portal that's set up for that, whether it be our hardware on its own or our hardware with the Red Hat software installed on top of it. >> So how's that effect the customer relationship then? All the sudden your- whether there was a- not I'd say a dispute, but might of been questions about how much usage am I getting? How am I using this? Why am I being billed as I'm being billed? So on and so forth. Now all the sudden you can just deliver the proof's in the pudding, right? You can say this is exactly what you're doing with this, this is exactly how much you're consuming. And I would assume from a pricing standpoint for that modeling standpoint, you give everybody a lot of comfort, I would think; right? >> You do, right. Not only do they see exactly what they're being charged for, they see exactly some of the usage on their own systems. A lot of times they don't know how well-balanced or unbalanced their systems are. And so we're actually providing real usage data. It's different than what you get in public cloud. It's different in what you get in other solutions where it's virtual allocation. So there's a difference in knowing the physical utilization versus the allocated utilization. What a lot of people do, a lot of companies do when they're renting public cloud infrastructure is they spend a lot of time in automation to actually deallocate. Right, so they're doing all this work just to try to save money. Whereas in the TruScale model, you just run it like you normally run it and you save money because you know, if you're not using it, you're not paying for it. >> John: You don't pay for it. >> Exactly, exactly. >> All right, well Steve, a lot of discussion at the show this week about OpenShift, not least this morning, OpenShift 4 was released. We've had a chance to talk to a number of customers, bring us inside, you know, Lenovo's worked with OpenShift for awhile. Oftentimes we think about the application layers like oh, it's totally divorced, I don't need to think of it. Well, we understand there's integration work that happens there and would love your insight into what is happening at he integration, where it's progressed, and any customer stories that you've got along those lines. >> Well, yeah, we've been doing a lot of work with OpenShift. I would say for an upwards of more than two years. We started with Intel and Red Hat and built a number of Intel Select solutions, reference designs, both bare metal and hyper converged. We are on our fifth edition now of the OpenShift design on Cascade Lake. We're the, I wanna say the pioneers in the industry. We have a center of competency in DevOps with software to really promote software development solutions. And we're excited with OpenShift 4 because of the CoreOS integration as well as the auto-provisioning. Key things, it makes it so much easier to adopt and integrate. >> Any customer deployments? When they come to you, what's the kind of a-ha moment that they have? Is it just the agility that it brings them? Is there anything you can share as to the customers that are actually doing this in the field? >> Well, I like to think the customers get the a-ha when they realize that there is an engineered platform that's been purpose built and they're not coddling software and tools together. It helps with the CI/CD pipeline process templating much more effectively. Overall it's, I think, a lot more streamlined than it was in the earlier editions of OpenShift, especially Open Source. So we're pretty excited with comprehensive business support. I think that businesses feel comfortable. >> Kind of a simple question, but what do you, in terms of what TruScale operates now, what is the- what are you allowing people to do now that they didn't do before? In the latest version here, what exactly is- where's, you think, this improvement? Or where's the new efficiency? What are they getting out of it that would make me, as a customer, have that- if I haven't converted yet, or if I'm perhaps ripe for the taking, what would make me jump? >> Part of it is customers don't want to be managing their infrastructure. And so this there's a big push to public cloud. They just wanna be managing their applications. They just wanna focus on what's paying the bills, right? And paying the bills are providing the IT service is all in the application layer for the most part. What TruScale allows them to do is to have that public cloud kind of management platform. So it's Lenovo premium support behind the scenes; so Lenovo is managing the hardware itself, Lenovo maintains the ownership of the hardware, so they're not even owning the hardware, very similar to public cloud. And they can go and use it on FREM. So they don't have to worry about any security issues with the public cloud. They don't have to worry about any kind of network issues, right, it's all in their data center. It's running just exactly the way they'd run CapEx, but they're running in the way that they have really liked with the public cloud infrastructure. >> So confidence, comfort, security and all that stuff right? >> Eric: There ya go. Yeah. >> Yeah, that's just- I'll pay for that! >> Sure! (laughter) So, we've seen software move heavily towards this model whether it be SaaS or various moving CapEx to OpEx. When I look at infrastructure it's been a little bit of a slower move, especially, I've got some background on the storage side, if you look at storage, it's like oh okay. I'm conditioned as a customer to think about my capacity, my performance, and how I'm tuning everything, and I need to make adjustments, and making changes usually takes a little bit longer. Red Hat's got a lot of software products in the storage space. Help us understand how this fits in and are customers gettin' more comfortable moving from the CapEx to the OpEx for their uses? >> Yeah, good segue. So Ceph and Gluster are some really interesting storage products from Red Hat. And they fit right on our servers, and so we install them; we build big solutions around both of them. I'm actually working on big architecture for another company, for another customer out in Germany. So it's huge stuff cluster. The neat thing about it is our TruScale model allows us to actually sell them on OpEx in a storage product. And what we're measuring is the storage, what I call storage in motion versus the storage at rest. So we see all the different usages of the different servers. The servers are acting as controllers, a multi-tenant controller. And there's a lot of information that's being stored and transmitted through the systems. TruScale's just accumulating all the usage of that. And Steve, maybe you want to talk about some of the software side of it from the storage perspective, but it's really, TruScale fits right in real nicely with the storage side of it. >> I'd actually like to talk about it more comprehensively from the Red Hat software side of it. Anywho, let's talk about how they're already no certification needed. We're looking at all Red Hat applications on TruScale; whether it's OpenShift, or Rel8, Gluster, Ceph, Ansible. So we're really excited because we're not limited in the portfolio. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> Yeah. >> So, Steve, it's interesting, you used to think about, okay, what boxes am I buying, what license I'm doing. If you talk about a real true software world it should be a platform that unifies these things together. So it sounds like you're saying we're getting there. I shouldn't have to think about- give us a little bit, kind of the old way and where customers are seeing it today. >> Yeah, well we're not getting there. We're there. What that allows us to do is to take the reference designs that we have and the testing that we've previously validated with Intel and Red Hat and be able to snap pieces together. So it's just a matter of what's different and unique for the client and the client's situation and their growth pattern. What's great about TruScale is that in this model we can predicatively analyze their consumption forward based on the business growth. So for example, if you're using OpenShift and you start with a small cluster for one or two lines of business, as they adopt DevOps methodologies going from either Waterfall or Agile, we can predicatively analyze the consumption forward that they're gonna need. So they can plan years in advance as they progress. And as such, the other snap-ins, say storage, that they're gonna need for data in motion or data at rest. So it's actually smarter. And what that ends up doing is obviously saving them money, but it saves them time. The typical model is going back to IT and saying we need these severs, we need the storage and the software, and bolt it altogether. And the IT guys are hair on fire running around already. So they can, as long as IT approves it, they can sort of bypass that big, heavy lift. >> So from what you've heard of this week, with Rel8, the big launch last night, a lot of fun, right? >> Steve: Yeah. >> And then OpenShift 4 earlier today talked about- >> Yeah. >> What if there are elements to those two, either one of them, that you find most attractive? Or that really kinda jump off the page to you? Is there anything out there that you're seein' or through the demos that we saw today, or last night even that you think wow, that's cool, that's good, that this is gonna be useful for us? >> OpenShift is one of the things that we're seeing in the industry that's just really enabling the whole DevOps practice. So OpenShift is interesting from the perspective of flexibility, automation, the tooling. Rel8, of course, we've all been waiting for it, I guess for a while now probably. >> Host: Right. >> It's just the next level, the next generation. The Red Hat software, see I'm a big fan of Ceph. I mean I just like Ceph, it's just a neat storage product. It's been around for awhile, but it keeps getting better. It's kinda like the old storage product that first came out with some soft-refined storage. But the whole ecosystem around Red Hat is just very appealing. I actually, Cloudforms is one I think is a little under-utilized today. Cloudforms is a real nice cloud management platform as well. So there's a lot of interesting Red Hat software. Steve, we've done all these reference architectures, are there any ones that stick out to you? I've just been kind of rattling off some of the ones that I like. >> Yeah, I really like the CoreOS integration, 'cause we now see that acquisition really taking shape in a true productization sense, in a practical use sense. I think with Red Hat owning that asset and controlling the development, they can build out features as needed. They're not having to wait on the ecosystem or to spin different cycles for growth. So I think that's my highlight. I've been looking for that. And auto-provisioning as well. I think that's a really key benefit to it, just to make things more smooth and simple. >> Well gentlemen, thanks for the time. >> Guest: Sure. >> Nice to meet you. Look forward to seeing you down the road. We were talkin' about Lenovo, Stu and I were there a couple of years ago, Ashton Kutcher out in San Francisco, so now we get the two of you guys. You're right there with Ashton, right? (laughter) >> That's right. >> Same celebrity! Thanks for sharing the time. Good to see you guys. >> Eric: Thank you. >> Steve: You too. >> Back with more live here at Red Hat Summit 2019, we're in Boston, and you're watching theCube. (electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody. This is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I've been following trends in backup and recovery and data protection for decades and I'll tell you right now is one of the most exciting eras that I've ever seen and with me here to talk about some of the trends and some hard news is Beth Phalen. She's the president and general manager of Dell EMCs data protection division. Beth it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> It's great to be here Dave. It's always good to talk to you. >> So, there's been a subtle change in IT. Even when you go to sort of the downturn in 2008 where IT was largely a support function. It's really now becoming a fundamental enabler. Are you seeing that with your customers? >> Absolutely. The vision of IT being some back office that is segregated from the rest of the company is no longer true. What we find is customers want their application owners to be able to drive data protection and then have that compared with the central oversight so they can still have that global overview. >> The other change is, for years data has been this problem that we have to manage. I got so much data. I got to back it up or protect it, move it. It's now become a source of value. Everybody talks about digital transformation. It's all about how you get value from data. >> Yeah. And it's so interesting because it was there all the time. Right? And suddenly people have realized, yes, this is an asset that has a huge impact on our business on our customers and again makes it even more important that they can rely on getting access to that data because they're building their business on it. >> So as the head of the data protection division, it's interesting. Even the palance has changed. It used to be, when it was just tape it was backup and now it's data protection. So the mindset is shifting. >> It is and it's continuing to shift with new threats like cyber recovery and other challenges that are out there, protecting data becomes the core of what we are offering our customers. >> So let's talk a little bit more about the catalysts for that change. You got tons of data, you are able to apply now machine intelligence like you never have before and you got cloud which brings scale. So this is changing the needs of customers in the way in which they protect data. >> As customers data becomes more and more distributed across multiple cloud providers, multiple locations, it's even more important that they can answer the question, where is my data and is it protected? And that they can recover it as quickly as possible. >> And you're seeing things like DevOps, data protection strategies and data management strategies, and so supporting DevOps and analytics applications. You also have new threats like ransomware. So it's a more fundamental component of cyber. >> Yeah and you will hear us talking a little bit about cyber recovery, the new product that we introduced last year. We can't just think about data protection as backup. We have to think about it as the comprehensive way that customers can get access to their data even if they're attacked. >> So much has changed. Everything has changed. >> The level of innovation that we've been doing has been keeping up with that change. And that's one of the things that I'm most excited about as the president of this division. We've been investing in enhancing the customer experience, and cyber recovery as I mentioned and expanding into new markets into driving a new level of reliability and resiliency, building on the duration that we have. And of course expanding into the cloud. So one of the things that hasn't changed is the fundamentals of I need to get my data back, I need to be trusted. Why is it, you guys make a big deal out of being number one. You're number one in all the Gartner Magic Quadrants and so forth. Why is leadership so important to customers and what are those fundamentals that haven't changed? >> So two questions there. First, leadership is so important because we have more experience protecting data around the globe than anybody else. And that means all environments right from the multi-petabyte, major corporations to the shops have maybe a terabyte. So 24 terabytes. We're involved in it all. So that experience is important. And then those fundamentals you talked about, lowest cost to protect, fastest performance, fastest backups and resiliency, those fundamentals have to be part of any data protection product. >> The way you guys are organized, you are in chare of R&D as well, you talked about innovation before. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how your R&D investments are translating into customer value in terms of price performance. So resiliency, speed, cost. What's going on there? >> The biggest thing that I wanna talk about and highlight here is how much our investment in cloud is enabling our customers to continue to have confidence that they can get the same level of digital trust that they've had with us on prem but now as they expand into the cloud for cloud disaster recovery, long-term retention, data protection in the cloud that that confidence comes with them. And we're doing it in a way that allows them to seamlessly expand into the cloud without having to introduce additional gateways, additional hardware. It becomes an extension of their data protection infrastructure. >> So the cloud operating model is very important here. What are you guys doing for instance, admins, application owners, in terms of enabling self-service for example. >> We have the broadest application support of any company. And what we're doing is we're integrating directly with those applications. Whether it be Oracle, SAP. You can go down the list. And then of course directly integrating with VMware for the VM admins. That's not enough though because if we just did that you wouldn't be able to have one view of how your data protection policies are working. And so we pair that with centralized governance to make sure that the person in charge of the data protection for that company still could have confidence that all the right things are happening. >> So what does the data protection portfolio look like? How should we think about that? >> Three simple things, Data Domain, our new integrated appliances and data protection suite. >> Okay. Follow up question on that is, how do you, for customers, obstruct the complexity? How are you simplifying their world especially in this cloud operating module. >> Simplifying comes in multiple stages. You have to simplify the first box to backup experience. We've cut that down to an hour and a half, two hours in max. From there, you have to make sure the day-to-day tasks are simple. So things like two clicks to do cloud failover, three clicks to failback. Things like a single step to restore a file in a VMware environment and then live movement of that VM to another primary storage array. That kind of targeted customer use case simple process is core to what we've been doing to enhance the customer experience. >> Now, you guys aren't really a public cloud provider so you gotta support multiple clouds. What are you doing there in terms of both cloud support and what are you seeing in multi-cloud. >> Most customers have more than one cloud provider that they're working with. So what we do is we allow the customers specific example right from within the data domain interface to select which cloud they wanna tier to and then they can also select other cloud providers through the same interface. So, it's not a separate experience. They can focus on the Data Domain but then interact with multiple clouds. >> Awesome. Beth, thanks for taking some time here to set this up. We're gonna hear about some hard news that you guys have today. We've got some perspectives from IDC on this but right now lets take a look at what the customer says. Keep it right there. (chilled piano music) >> Phoenix Children's is a healthcare organization for kids. Everything that we do is about the kids. So we wanna make sure that all our critical data that a doctor or a nurse needs on the floors to be able to take care of a sick kid, we need to make sure it's available at any time. The data protection software that we're using from Dell EMC with Data Domain give us that protection. Our critical data are well kept and we can easily recover them. Before we moved to Data Domain we were using Veritas NetBackup and some older technology. Our backup windows were taking upwards of 20 to 24 hours. Moving to Data Domain with de-duplication we can finish our full backups in less than seven hours. The user deployment for data protection software and Data Domain was very easy for us. Our engineers, they have never worked with data protection software or Data Domain before. They were able to do some research, walk a little bit with some Dell engineers and we were able to implement the technology within a month, a month and a half. ECS for Phoenix Children's Hospital is a great technology. Simple to use, easy to manage. The benefits from a user perspective are tremendous. From an IT perspective, I can extract terabytes of data in less than an hour. When we get into a critical situation, we can rely 100% on ECS that we will get the information that the doctor or the nurse needs to take care of the kid. The data protection software and the Data Domain benefits for Phoenix Children's Hospital are great. There is a solution that works seamlessly together. I have no worries that my backups will not run. I have no worries I will not be able to recover critical applications. (chilled piano music) >> We're back with Ruya Barrett who's the vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection division. We got some hard news to get into. Ruya, let's get right into it. What are you guys announcing today? >> We are announcing a basically tremendous push with our data protection family both in Data Domain and Integrated Data Protection appliances and the software that basically makes those two rock. >> So, you've got a few capabilities that you're announcing. Cloud performance. Take us through sort of at a high level. What are the three areas that you're focused on this announcement? >> Exactly. You nailed it Dave. So three areas of announcement, exciting cloud capabilities and cloud expansion. We've been investing in cloud over the last three years and this announcement is just a furthering of those capabilities. Tremendous push around performance for an additional use cases and services that customers want. The last one but not least is basically expanded coverage and push into the mid-market space with our Data Domain 3300 and IDPA 4400. >> And this comes in the form of software that I can install on my existing appliances? >> It's all software value that really enables our appliances to do what they do best, to drive efficiency, performance but it's really the software layer that makes it sane. >> And if I'm a customer I get that software, no additional charges? >> If you have the capabilities, today you'll be able to get the expanding capabilities. No charge. >> Okay. So one of the important areas is cloud. Let's get into some of the cloud use cases. You're focused on a few of those. What are they? >> Cloud has become a really prevalent destination. So when we look at cloud and what customers wanna do with regards to data protection in the cloud, it's really a lot of use cases. The three we're gonna touch on today is really cloud tiering. Our capabilities are in cloud tiering with long time archival. So they're really trying to leverage cloud as a long time archival. The second one is really around cloud disaster recovery. To and from the cloud. So that's really important use case. That's becoming really important to our customers. And not, God forbid, for a disaster but just being able to test our disaster recovery capabilities and resiliency. And the last one is really in-cloud data protection. So those are the three use cases and we have enhancements across all three. >> Let's go deeper into those. So cloud tiering. We think of tiering. Often times you remember the big days of tiering, inbox tiering, hot data, cold data. What are you doing in cloud tiering? >> Well, cloud tiering is our way of really supporting object storage both on premises and in the cloud. And we introduced it about two years ago. And what we're really doing now is expanding that coverage, making it more efficient, giving customers the tools to be able to understand what the costs are gonna be. So one of the announcements is actually a free space estimator tool for our customers that really enables them to understand the impact of taking an application and using long-term retention using cloud tier both for their on-premise data protection capacity as well as what they need in the cloud and the cost associated. So that's a big question before customers wanna move data. Second is really broadest coverage. I mean, right now in addition to the usual suspects of AWS, Azure, Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage, we now support Ceph, we support Alibaba, we support Google Cloud. So really, how do you build out that multi-cloud deployment that we see our customers wanting to do with regards to their long-term archival needs? So really expanding that reach. So we now have the broadest coverage with regards to archiving in the cloud and using cloud for long-term retention. >> Great. Okay. Let's talk about disaster recovery. I'm really interested in this topic because the customers that we talk to they wanna incorporate disaster recovery and backup as part of a holistic strategy. You also mentioned testing. Not enough customers are able to test their DR. It's too risky, it's too hard, it's too complicated. What are you guys doing in the DR space. >> So one of the things that's I think huge and very differentiated with regards to how we approach, whether it's archive or whether it's DR or in-cloud is the fact that from an appliance standpoint you need no additional hardware or gateway to be able to leverage the capabilities. One of the things that we introduced, again cloud DR over a year ago, and we introduced it across our Data Domain appliances as well as our first entry to the mid-sized companies with IDPA DP 4400. And now what we're doing is making it available across all our models, all our appliances. And all of our appliances now have the ability to do fully orchestrated disaster recovery either for test use cases or actual disasters, God forbid, but what they are able to do. The three click failovers and the two click failbacks from the cloud. So both for failback from the cloud or in the cloud. So it's really big and important use cases for our customers right now. Again, with that, we're expanding use case coverage to now, we used to support AWS only, now we also support Azure. >> Great. Okay. The third use case you talked about was in-cloud data protection. What do you mean by that and what are you doing there? >> So one of, again, the really interesting things about our portfolio is our ability to run it as an integrated hardware-software platform or in the form of a software only deployment. So our data domain virtual addition is exactly that. You can run our Data Domain software in virtual machines. And what that allows our customers to do is whether they're running a software defined data center on prem or whether they want in-cloud capabilities and all that goodness they have been getting from Data Domain in the cloud, they now can do that very easily. And what we've done in that space with this announcement is expanded our capacity coverage. So now Data Domain Virtual Edition can cover 96 terabytes of in-cloud capability and capacity. And we've also, again, with that use case, expanded our coverage to include Google Cloud, AWS, Azure. So really expanded our coverage. >> Great. I'm interested in performance as well because everybody wants more performance but are we talking about backup performance, restore performance? What are you doing in that area? >> Perfect. And one of the things, when we talk about performance, one of the big use cases we're seeing that's driving performance is that customers wanna make their backup copies do more. They wanna use it for application test and development, they wanna use it for instant access to their VMs, instant access and restores for their VMs. So performance is being fueled by some additional services that customers wanna see on their backup copies. So basically one of the things that we've done with this announcement is improved our performance across all of these use cases. So for application test of test of development, you can have access to instant VMs. Up to 32 instant access and restore capabilities with VMs. We have improved our cash utilization. So now you can basically support a lot more IOPS, leveraging our cash, enhanced cash, four times as many IOPS as we were doing before. So up to 40,000 IOPS with almost no latency. So tremendous, again, improvement in use cases. Restores. Customers are always wanting to do restores faster and faster. So file restores is no exception to that. So with multi-streaming capability, we now have the opportunity and the capabilities to do file restores two times faster on premise and four times faster from cloud. So again, cloud is a big, everything we do, there's a cloud component to it. And that performance is no exception to that. >> The last thing I wanna touch on is mid-market. So you guys made an announcement this past summer. And so it sounds like you're doubling down on that space. Give us the update. >> Sure. So we introduced the Data Domain 3300 and our customers have been asking for a new capacity point. So one of the things we're introducing with this release is an eight terabyte version of Data Domain 3300 that goes and scales up to 32 terabytes. In addition to that, we're supporting faster networking with 10 gig E support as well as virtual tape libraries over Fiber Channels. So virtual tape libraries are also back and we're supporting with Data Domain 3300. So again, tremendous improvements and capabilities that we've introduced for mid-market in the form of Data Domain 3300 as well as the DP4400 which is our integrated appliance. So, again, how do we bring all that enterprise goodness to a much broader segment of the market in the right form factor and right capacity points. >> Love it. You guys are on a nice cadence. Last summer, we had this announcement, we got Dell Technologies World coming up in May, actually end of April, now May. So looking forward to seeing you there. Thanks so much for taking us through these announcements. >> Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Now, let's go Phil Goodwin. Phil Goodwin was an analyst at IDC. And IDC has done a ton of research on the economic impact of moving to sort of modern data protection environment, they've interviewed about a thousand customers and they had deep dive interviews with about a dozen. So let's hear from Phil Goodwin in IDC and we'll be right back. (chilled music) >> IDC research shows that 60% of organizations will be executing on a digital transformaion strategy by 2020, barely a year away. The purpose of digital transformation is to make the organization more competitive with faster, more accurate information and timely information driving driving business decisions. If any digital transformation effort is to be successful, data availability must be a foundational part in the effort. Our research also shows that 48.5% or nearly half of all digital transformation projects involve improvements to the organizations data protection efforts. Purpose-built backup appliances or PBBAs have been the cornerstone for many data protection efforts. PBBAs provide faster, more reliable backup with fewer job failures than traditional tape infrastructure. More importantly, they support faster data restoration in the event of loss. Because they have very high data de-duplication rates, sometimes 40 to one or more, organizations can retain data onsite longer at a lower overall cost thereby improving data availability and TCO. PBBAs may be configured as a target device or disk-based appliance that can be used by any backup software as a backup target or as integrated appliances that include all hardware and software needed for fast efficient backups. The main customer advantages are rapid deployment, simple management and flexible growth options. The Dell EMC line of PBBAs is a broad portfolio that includes Data Domain appliances and the recently introduced Integrated Data Protection Appliances. Dell EMC Data Domain appliances have been in the PBBA market for more than 15 years. According to IDC market tracker data as of December 20th, 2018, Dell EMC with Data Domain and IDPA currently holds a 57.5% market share of PBBA appliances for both target and integrated devices. Dell EMC PBBAs have support for cloud data protection including cloud long term retention, cloud disaster recovery and protection for workloads running in the cloud. Recently IDC conducted a business value study among Dell EMC data protection customers. Our business value studies seek to identify and quantify real world customer experiences and financial impact of specific products. This study surveyed more than 1000 medium-sized organizations worldwide as well as provided in-depth interviews with a number of them. We found several highlights in the study including a 225% five-year ROI. In numerical terms, this translated to $218,928 of ROI per 100 terabytes of data per year. We also found a 50% lower cost of operating a data protection environment, a 71% faster data recovery window, 33% more frequent backups and 45% more efficient data protection staff. To learn more about IDC's business value study of Dell EMC data protection and measurable customer impact, we invite you to download the IDC white paper titled, The Business Value of Data Protection in IT Transformation sponsored by Dell EMC. (bouncy techno music) >> We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth, thanks again for helping us with this session and taking us through the news. We've heard about, from a customer, their perspective, some of the problems and challenges that they face, we heard about the hard news from Ruya. Phil Goodwin at IDC gave us a great overview of the customer research that they've done. So, lets bring it home. What are the key takeaways of today? >> First and foremost, this market is hot. It is important and it is changing rapidly. So that's number one. Data protection is a very dynamic and exciting market. Number two is, at Dell EMC, we've been modernizing our portfolio over the past three years and now we're at this exciting point where customers can take advantage of all of our strenth put in multi-cloud environment, in a commercial environment, for cyber recovery. So we've expanded where people can take the value from our portfolio. And I would just want people to know that if they haven't taken a look at the Dell EMC data protection portfolio recently, it's time to take another look. We appreciate all of our customers and what they do for us. We have such a great relationship with our customer base. We wanna make sure that they know what's coming, what's here today and how we're gonna work with them in the future. >> Alright. Well, great. Congratulations on the announcement. You guys have been hard at work. It is a hot space. A lot of action going on. Where can people find more information? >> Go back to dellemc.com, it's all there. >> Great. Well, thank you very much Beth. >> Thank you Dave. >> And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE. (chilled music)

>> Live from New York, it's theCUBE, covering theCUBE New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back. This is theCUBE live in New York City for theCUBE NYC, #CUBENYC. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem, which has now merged into cloud. All things coming together. It's really about AI, it's about developers, it's about operations, it's about data scientists. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Brent Compton, Technical Marketing Director for Storage Business at Red Hat. As you know, we cover Red Hat Summit and great to have the conversation. Open source, DevOps is the theme here. Brent, thanks for joining us, thanks for coming on. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> We've been talking about the role of AI and AI needs data and data needs storage, which is what you do, but if you look at what's going on in the marketplace, kind of an architectural shift. It's harder to find a cloud architect than it is to find diamonds these days. You can't find a good cloud architect. Cloud is driving a lot of the action. Data is a big part of that. What's Red Hat doing in this area and what's emerging for you guys in this data landscape? >> Really, the days of specialists are over. You mentioned it's more difficult to find a cloud architect than find diamonds. What we see is the infrastructure, it's become less about compute as storage and networking. It's the architect that can bring the confluence of those specialties together. One of the things that we see is people bringing their analytics workloads onto the common platforms where they've been running the rest of their enterprise applications. For instance, if they're running a lot of their enterprise applications on AWS, of course, they want to run their analytics workloads in AWS and that's EMRs long since in the history books. Likewise, if they're running a lot of their enterprise applications on OpenStack, it's natural that they want to run a lot of their analytics workloads on the same type of dynamically provisioned infrastructure. Emerging, of course, we just announced on Monday this week with Hortonworks and IBM, if they're running a lot of their enterprise applications on a Kubernetes substrate like OpenShift, they want to run their analytics workloads on that same kind of agile infrastructure. >> Talk about the private cloud impact and hybrid cloud because obviously we just talked to the CEO of Hortonworks. Normally it's about early days, about Hadoop, data legs and then data planes. They had a good vision. They're years into it, but I like what Hortonworks is doing. But he said Kubernetes, on a data show Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud concept, containers. This is really enabling a lot of value and you guys have OpenShift which became very successful over the past few years, the growth has been phenomenal. So congratulations, but it's pointing to a bigger trend and that is that the infrastructure software, the platform as a service is becoming the middleware, the glue, if you will, and Kubernetes and containers are facilitating a new architecture for developers and operators. How important is that with you guys, and what's the impact of the customer when they think, okay I'm going to have an agile DevOps environment, workload portability, but do I have to build that out? You mentioned people don't have to necessarily do that anymore. The trend has become on-premise. What's the impact of the customer as they hear Kubernetese and containers and the data conversation? >> You mentioned agile DevOps environment, workload portability so one of the things that customers come to us for is having that same thing, but infrastructure agnostic. They say, I don't want to be locked in. Love AWS, love Azure, but I don't want to be locked into those platforms. I want to have an abstraction layer for my Kubernetese layer that sits on top of those infrastructure platforms. As I bring my workloads, one-by-one, custom DevOps from a lift and shift of legacy apps onto that substrate, I want to have it be independent, private cloud or public cloud and, time permitting, we'll go into more details about what we've seen happening in the private cloud with analytics as well, which is effectively what brought us here today. The pattern that we've discovered with a lot of our large customers who are saying, hey, we're running OpenStack, they're large institutions that for lots of reasons they store a lot of their data on-premises saying, we want to use the utility compute model that OpenStack gives us as well as the shared data context that Ceph gives us. We want to use that same thing for our analytics workload. So effectively some of our large customers taught us this program. >> So they're building infrastructure for analytics essentially. >> That's what it is. >> One of the challenges with that is the data is everywhere. It's all in silos, it's locked in some server somewhere. First of all, am I overstating that problem and how are you seeing customers deal with that? What are some of the challenges that they're having and how are you guys helping? >> Perfect lead in, in fact, one of our large government customers, they recently sent us an unsolicited email after they deployed the first 10 petabytes in a deca petabyte solution. It's OpenStack based as well as Ceph based. Three taglines in their email. The first was releasing the lock on data. The second was releasing the lock on compute. And the third was releasing the lock on innovation. Now, that sounds a bit buzzword-y, but when it comes from a customer to you. >> That came from a customer? Sounds like a marketing department wrote that. >> In the details, as you know, traditional HDFS clusters, traditional Hadoop clusters, sparklers or whatever, HDFS is not shared between clusters. One of our large customers has 50 plus analytics clusters. Their data platforms team employ a maze of scripts to copy data from one cluster to the other. And if you are a scientist or an engineer, you'd say, I'm trying to obtain these types of answers, but I need access to data sets A, B, C, and D, but data sets A and B are only on this cluster. I've got to go contact the data platforms team and have them copy it over and ensure that it's up-to-date and in sync so it's messy. >> It's a nightmare. >> Messy. So that's why the one customer said releasing the lock on data because now it's in a shared. Similar paradigm as AWS with EMR. The data's in a shared context, an S3. You spin up your analytics workloads on AC2. Same paradigm discussion as with OpenStack. Your spinning up your analytics workloads via OpenStack virtualization and their sourcing is shared data context inside of Ceph, S3 compatible Ceph so same architecture. I love his last bit, the one that sounds the most buzzword-y which was releasing lock on innovation. And this individual, English was not this person's first language so love the word. He said, our developers no longer fear experimentation because it's so easy. In minutes they can spin up an analytics cluster with a shared data context, they get the wrong mix of things they shut it down and spin it up again. >> In previous example you used HDFS clusters. There's so many trip wires, right. You can break something. >> It's fragile. >> It's like scripts. You don't want to tinker with that. Developers don't want to get their hand slapped. >> The other thing is also the recognition that innovation comes from data. That's what my takeaway is. The customer saying, okay, now we can innovate because we have access to the data, we can apply intelligence to that data whether it's machine intelligence or analytics, et cetera. >> This the trend in infrastructure. You mentioned the shared context. What other observations and learnings have you guys come to as Red Hat starts to get more customer interactions around analytical infrastructure. Is it an IT problem? You mentioned abstracting the way different infrastructures, and that means multi-cloud's probably setup for you guys in a big way. But what does that mean for a customer? If you had to explain infrastructure analytics, what needs to get done, what does the customer need to do? How do you describe that? >> I love the term that industry uses of multi-tenant workload isolation with shared data context. That's such a concise term to describe what we talk to our customers about. And most of them, that's what they're looking for. They've got their data scientist teams that don't want their workloads mixed in with the long running batch workloads. They say, listen, I'm on deadline here. I've got an hour to get these answers. They're working with Impala. They're working with Presto. They iterate, they don't know exactly the pattern they're looking for. So having to take a long time because their jobs are mixed in with these long MapReduce jobs. They need to be able to spin up infrastructure, workload isolation meaning they have their own space, shared context, they don't want to be placing calls over to the platform team saying, I need data sets C, D, and E. Could you please send them over? I'm on deadline here. That phrase, I think, captures so nicely what customers are really looking to do with their analytics infrastructure. Analytics tools, they'll still do their thing, but the infrastructure underneath analytics delivering this new type of agility is giving that multi-tenant workload isolation with shared data context. >> You know what's funny is we were talking at the kickoff. We were looking back nine years. We've been at this event for nine years now. We made prediction there will be no Red Hat of big data. John, years ago said, unless it's Red Hat. You guys got dragged into this by your customers really is how it came about. >> Customers and partners, of course with your recent guest from Hortonworks, the announcement that Red Hat, Hortonworks, and IBM had on Monday of this week. Dialing up even further taking the agility, okay, OpenStack is great for agility, private cloud, utility based computing and storage with OpenStack and Ceph, great. OpenShift dials up that agility another notch. Of course, we heard from the CEO of Hortonworks how much they love the agility that a Kubernetes based substrate provides their analytics customers. >> That's essentially how you're creating that sort of same-same experience between on-prem and multi-cloud, is that right? >> Yeah, OpenShift is deployed pervasively on AWS, on-premises, on Azure, on GCE. >> It's a multi-cloud world, we see that for sure. Again, the validation was at VMworld. AWS CEO, Andy Jassy announced RDS which is their product on VMware on-premises which they've never done. Amazon's never done any product on-premises. We were speculating it would be a hardware device. We missed that one, but it's a software. But this is the validation, seamless cloud operations on-premise in the cloud really is what people want. They want one standard operating model and they want to abstract away the infrastructure, as you were saying, as the big trend. The question that we have is, okay, go to the next level. From a developer standpoint, what is this modern developer using for tools in the infrastructure? How can they get that agility and spinning up isolated, multi-tenant infrastructure concept all the time? This is the demand we're seeing, that's an evolution. Question for Red Hat is, how does that change your partnership strategy because you mentioned Rob Bearden. They've been hardcore enterprise and you guys are hardcore enterprise. You kind of know the little things that customers want that might not be obvious to people: compliance, certification, a decade of support. How is Red Hat's partnership model changing with this changing landscape, if you will? You mentioned IBM and Hortonworks release this week, but what in general, how does the partnership strategy look for you? >> The more it changes, the more it looks the same. When you go back 20 years ago, what Red Hat has always stood for is any application on any infrastructure. But back in the day it was we had n-thousand of applications that were certified on Red Hat Linux and we ran on anybody's server. >> Box. >> Running on a box, exactly. It's a similar play, just in 2018 in the world of hybrid, multi-cloud architectures. >> Well, you guys have done some serious heavy lifting. Don't hate me for saying this, but you're kind of like the mules of the industry. You do a lot of stuff that nobody either wants to do or knows how to do and it's really paid off. You just look at the ascendancy of the company, it's been amazing. >> Well, multi-cloud is hard. Look at what it takes to do multi-cloud in DevOps. It's not easy and a lot of pretenders will fall out of the way, you guys have done well. What's next for you guys? What's on the horizon? What's happening for you guys this next couple months for Red Hat and technology? Any new announcements coming? What's the vision, what's happening? >> One of the announcements that you saw last week, was Red Hat, Cloudera, and Eurotech as analytics in the data center is great. Increasingly, the world's businesses run on data-driven decisions. That's great, but analytics at the edge for more realtime industrial automation, et cetera. Per the announcements we did with Cloudera and Eurotech about the use of, we haven't even talked about Red Hat's middleware platforms, such as AMQ Streams now based on Kafka, a Kafka distribution, Fuze, an integration master effectively bringing Red Hat technology to the edge of analytics so that you have the ability to do some processing in realtime before back calling all the way back to the data center. That's an area that you'll also see is pushing some analytics to the edge through our partnerships such as announced with Cloudera and Eurotech. >> You guys got the Red Hat Summit coming up next year. theCUBE will be there, as usual. It's great to cover Red Hat. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, Brent. Appreciate it, thanks for spending the time. We're here in New York City live. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vallante, stay with us. All day coverage today and tomorrow in New York City. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> The sun has come out, but we're still talking about a lot of the cloud here at the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program the 2018 Super User Award winner, George Mihaiescu, who's the senior cloud architect with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research or OICR. First of all, congratulations. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And thank you so much for joining us. So cancer research, obviously is, one of the things we talk about is how can technology really help us at a global standpoint, help people. So, tell us a little about the organization first, before we get into the tech of it? >> So OICR is the largest cancer research institution in Canada, and is funded by government of Ontario. Located in Toronto, we support about 1,700 researchers, trainees and clinician staff. It's focused entirely on cancer research, it's located in a hub of cancer research in downtown Toronto, with Princess Margaret Hospital, Sick Kids Hospital, Mount Sinai, very, very powerful research centers, and OICR basically interconnects all these research centers and tries to bring together and to advance cancer research in the province, in Canada and globally. >> That's fantastic George. So with that, sketch out for us a little bit your role, kind of the purview that you have, the scope of what you cover. >> So I was hired four years ago by OICR to build and design cloud environment, based on a research grant that was awarded to a number of principal investigators in Canada to build this cloud computing infrastructure that can be used by cancer researchers to do large-scale analysis. What happens with cancer, because the variety of limitations happening in cancer patients, researchers found that they cannot just analyze a few samples and draw a conclusion, because the conclusion wouldn't be actually valid. So they needed to do large-scale research, and the ICGC, which is International Cancer Genome Consortium, an organization that's made of 17 countries that are donating, collecting and analyzing data from cancer patients, okay, they decided to put together all this data and to align it uniformly using the same algorithm and then analyze it using the same workflows, in order to actually draw conclusion that's valid across multiple data sets. They are focusing on the 50 most common types of cancer that affect most people in this world, and for each type of cancer, at least two countries provide and collect data. So for brain cancer, let's say we have data sets from two countries, for melanoma, for skin, and this basically gives you better confidence that the conclusion you draw is valid, and then the more pieces of the puzzle you throw on the table, the easier to see the big picture that's this cancer. >> You know George, I mean, I'm a former academic, and you know, the more data you get right, the more infrastructure you're going to have to have. I'm just reading off the announcement, 2,600 cores, 18 terabytes of RAM, 7.3 petabytes of storage, right, that's a lot of data, and it's a lot of... accessed by a lot of different researchers. When you came in, was the decision to use OpenStack already made, or did you make that decision, and how was the cloud architected in that way? >> The decision was basically made to use open source. We wanted basically to spend the money on capacity, on hardware, on research and not on licensing and support. >> John: Good use of everybody's tax dollars. >> Exactly, so you cannot do that if you have to spend money for paying licensing, then you probably have only half of the capacity that you could. So that means less large analysis, and longer it takes, and more costly. So Ceph for storing the data sets and OpenStack for infrastructure as a service offering was a no-brainer. My specialty was in OpenStack and Ceph, I started OpenStack seven years ago, so I was hired to design and build, and I had a chance to actually do alignment, and invitation calling for some of the data sets, so I was able to monitor the kind of stress that this workflows put on the system, so when I design it, I knew what is important, and what to focus on. So it's a cloud environment, it's customized for cancer research. We have very good ratio of RAM per CPU, we have very large local discs for the VM, for the virtual machines to be able to download very large data sets. We built it so if one compute node fails, you only impact a few workflows running there, you don't impact single small points of failures. Another tuning that we applied to the system too. >> George, can walk us through a little bit of the stack? What do you use, do you build your own OpenStack, or do you get it from someone? >> So basically, we use community hardware, we just high-density chassis, currently from Super Micro, Ubuntu for the operating system, no licensing there, OpenStack from the VM packages. We focus more on stability, scalability and support costs, internal support costs, because it's just myself and I have a colleague Gerard Baker, who's a cloud engineer, and you have to support all this environment, so we try to focus on the features that are most useful to our users, as well as less strain on our time and support resources. >> I mean that's, let's talk about the scalability right? You said the team is you and a colleague. >> George: Yes. >> But mostly, right. And you know, in the olden days, right, you would be taking care of maybe a handful of machines, and maybe some disk arrays in the lab. Now you're basically servicing an entire infrastructure for all of Canada, right? At how many universities? >> Well basically, it's global, so we have 40 research projects from four continents. So we have from Australia, from Israel, from China, from Europe, US, Canada. So approved cancer researchers that can access the data open up an account with us, and they get a quota, and they start their virtual machines, they download the data sets from the extra API of Ceph to their VMS, and they do analysis and we charge them for the time used, and because the use, everything is open source, and we don't pay any licensing fees, we are able to, and we don't run for profit, we charge them just what it costs us to be able to replenish the hardware when it fails. >> Nice, nice. And these are actually the very large machines, right? Because you have to have huge, thick data sets, you've got big data sets you have to compare all at once. >> Yeah, an average bandwidth of a file that has the normal DNA of the patient, and they need also the tumor DNA from the biopsy, an average whole genome sequence is about 150 gigabytes. So they need at least 300 gigabytes, and depending on the analysis, if they find mutations, then the output is usually five, 10 gigabytes, so much smaller. For other workflows, you have to actually align the data, so you input 150 gigabytes and the output is 150 or a bit more with metadata. And so nevertheless, you need very large storage for the virtual machines, and these are virtual machines that run very hard, in terms of you cannot do CPU over subscription, you cannot do memory over subscription, when you have a workflow that runs for four days, hundred percent CPU. So is different than other web scale environments, where you have website was running at 10%, or you can do 10 to one subscription, and then you go much cheaper or different solutions. Here you have to only provide what you have physically. >> John: That's great. >> George, you've said you participated in the OpenStack community for about seven years now. >> George: Yes. >> What kind of, do you actually contribute code, what pieces are you active in the community? >> Yeah, so I'm not a developer. My background is in networking, system administration and security, but I was involved in OpenStack since the beginning, before it was a foundation. I went to the first OpenStack public conference in Boston seven years ago, at the International Intercontinental Hotel and over time I was involved in discussions from the RAC channel, mailing list support, reporting backs. Even recently we had very interesting packet affected as well. The cloud package that is supposed to resize the disk of the VM as it boots, it was not using more than two terabytes because it was a bug, okay. So we reported this, and Scott Moffat, who's the maintainer of the cloud utils package, worked on the bug, and two days later, we had a fix, and they built a package, it's in the latest cloud Ubuntu image, and that happen, everybody else is going to use the same virtual Ubuntu package, so somebody who now has larger than two terabytes VMs, when they boot, they'll be able to resize and use the entire disk. And that's just an example of how with open source we can achieve things that would take much longer in commercial distribution, where even if you pay, doesn't necessarily mean that the response... >> Sure. Also George, any lessons learned? You've been with us a long time, right, and like Ceph. One thing we noticed today in the keynote, is actually a lot of the storage networking and compute wasn't really talked, those projects were maybe down focused a bit, as they talked about all the connectivity to everything else. So, I mean any lessons, so you... My point is, the infrastructure is stable of OpenStack, but any lessons learned along the journey? >> I think the lessons are that you can definitely build very affordable and useful and scalable infrastructure, but you have to get your expectations right. We only use from the open standard project that we consider are stable enough, so we can support them confidently without spending, like if a project adds 5% value to your offering, but eats 80% of your time debugging and trying to get it working, and doesn't have packages and missing documentation and so on, that's maybe not a good fit for your environment if you don't have the manpower to. And if it's not absolutely needed. Another very important lesson is that you have to really stay up to date, like go to the conferences, read the emails from the mailing list, be active in the community, because the OpenStack meetups in Toronto for 2018, we present there, we talk to other members. In these seven years I read tens of thousands of emails, so I learn from other users experiences, I try to help where I can. You have to be involved with the developers, I know the Ceph core developers, Sage and other people. So, you can't do this just by staying on the side and looking, you have to be involved. >> Good, George what are you looking for next from this community? You talked about the stability, are there pieces that you're hoping reach that maturity threshold for yourselves, or new functionalities that you're looking for down the road? >> I think what we want to provide to our researchers, 'cause they don't run web scale applications, so their needs are a little bit different. We want to add Magnum to our environment, to allow them deploy Kubernetes cluster easily. We want to add Octavia to expose the services, even though they don't run many web services, but you have to find a way to expose them when they run them. Maybe, Trove, database as a service, we'll see if we can deploy it safely and if it's stable enough. Anything that OpenStack comes up with, we basically look, is it useful, is it stable, can you do it, and we try it. >> George, last thing. Your group is the Super User of the Year. Can you just walk us through that journey, what led to the nomination, what does it mean to your team to win? >> I think we are a bit surprised, because we are a very small team, and our scale is not as big as T-Mobile or the other members, but I think it shows that again, for a big company to be able to deploy OpenStack at scale and make it work, it's maybe not very surprising 'cause yes, they have the resources, they have a lot of manpower and a lot of... But for a small institution or organization, or small company to be able to do it, without involving a vendor, without involving extra costs, I think that's the thing that was appreciated by the community and by the OpenStack Foundation, and yeah, we are pretty excited to have won it. >> All right, George, let me give you the final word, as somebody that's been involved with the community for a while. What would you say to people if they're, you know, still maybe looking from the outside or played with it a little bit. What tips would you give? >> I think we are living proof that it can be done, and if you wait until things are perfect, then they will never be, okay. Even Google has services in beta, Amazon has services in beta. You have to install OpenStack, it's much more performant and stable than when I started with OpenStack, where there was just a few projects, but definitely they will get help from the community, and the documentation's much better. Just go and do it, you won't regret it. >> George, as we know, software will eventually work, hardware will eventually fail. >> Absolutely. >> So, George Mihaiescu, congratulations to OICR on the Super User of the Year award, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, we're getting towards the end of day one of three days of wall to wall coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018, brought to you by Red Hat, The OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia. It's Victoria Day, but we're working. So for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to welcome back to the program, we've got Tim Burke who's the Vice President of Infrastructure and Cloud Engineering with Red Hat, and fresh off the keynote stage we have Mark McLoughlin who's the Senior Director of Engineering for OpenStack, also with Red Hat. Gentleman, thank you so much for joining us. >> Our pleasure, thank you. >> Thank you. All right, so Mark, I'll start with you. Keynote stage, you had a good discussion about, we were talking about open source, talking about community, is the themes that we heard at Red Hat Summit last weekend and again here at OpenStack. It's a nice couple of years in a row we've had the back-to-back of those two shows, so give us a little bit encapsulation of that message. >> Sure, I mean the key message of the keynote, really, was talking about the overlapping missions between the OpenStack and Kubernetes and really kind of showing how they come together for our customers and for users generally in terms of tackling that kind of broad, open infrastructure challenge of trying to give businesses the opportunity to be free from the infrastructure providers in terms of being able to switch between infrastructure providers and also OpenStack in terms of its role offering kind of on-premise infrastructure as an alternative to the public cloud. >> Yeah, Tim, I want to get your viewpoint on some things. It's interesting, we talk about we're at the OpenStack show but we're talking about containers, we're talking about edge computing. I think about one of the other foundations, The Linux Foundation does way more than Linux these days. They're doing all the cloud native things. Reminds me a lot of Red Hat themselves, broad spectrum of products. Sometimes it can almost get a little bit overwhelming for most people to say, "Oh my god, "there's so many projects, there's so many products. "How do you help me get to where I need to go "and where I need to go tomorrow?" What are you hearing from customers? How do you manage that? >> I think a lot of this mirrors Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and back when we started it was the day of the Unix wars, right? And in the early days of Linux it was this big challenge of getting your graphics drivers and putting all these pieces together, right? And now today it's more about broader infrastructure orchestration. And you see Mark Collier, for example, from The OpenStack Foundation started today showing a list of 30 different components that you have to piece together. And really, I think that that's what Red Hat focuses on, is two things. It's one, is where do we want to take the technology tomorrow through our open source fund, ranging from Linux to OpenStack and Ceph Filesystems, for example. But it's not just that. It's how do you get these pieces to work together? And I think that that's something that hasn't traditionally been the strength of the open source community because they may stick into these silos of operation. And I think that Red Hat's focus and strength right now is to do what we did for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the OpenStack space by pulling all of these pieces together in a consumable and supported manner. >> Yeah, it's funny you mention getting graphics cards in. Come on, with the Queen's announcement we now have the virtual GPU support, so it feels like, but you know what, we've come so far yet. We're doing some of the same things over again. What are you hearing that's just massively different about kind of the state of open source today? And we just had one of your customers on talking about their digital transformation. >> I think what's really changed over the years in open source is I think it started out, honestly, as a clone. It was like can we compete with the likes of Solaris, right? And so it was, I'd call it catch up for innovation. Now you look at open source. It's not catching up, it's leading all the innovation today whether it's all the major public clouds are based on open source technologies. When we started open source was unproven and many customers were skeptical of consuming it. Now you're seeing customers, governments, all sorts of different businesses demanding open source because they want choice, they don't want to be locked into any one vendor, and they want to be able to work collaboratively to harness the power. And I think that collective collaborative model has really pretty proven its effectiveness. >> Mark, I wanted to talk a little bit about OpenStack itself. I think last year at OpenStack Summit there was a lot of talk. People seemed to be a little bit confused or at least there was a lot of interesting architectural conversations, containers on top, containers on the bottom, what sits on the bare metal. This year both at Red Hat Summit and here and even in the industry at large I think a lot of that conversation has clarified. There's the (laughs) application layer and there's an infrastructure layer which does very hard things that the application layer does not have to worry about. How are you looking at OpenStack as a citizen of the industry and of the Stack connections with other open source and taking care of that infrastructure piece in 2018, right, which is, we're pretty far from where we started. >> No, great points. To highlight those architectural discussions and really trying to figure out the kind of layering there obviously kind of approach OpenStack as kind of the best tool for managing your infrastructure, getting your infrastructure under control, making it scalable, making it automatable, and then building an application platform on top of that. I may have confused the architectural discussion a little bit this morning with the keynote because what we actually showed in the keynote was on the rack on stage we had an OpenStack cloud running on bare metal and then we would end deploying Kubernetes. Our open shift distribution, we were deploying that also on bare metal alongside OpenStack. Whereas I think often people would assume if you're going to do Kubernetes on OpenStack you're going to do it in virtual machines that are managed by OpenStack. But we were actually showing how you can use OpenStack to manage the bare metal, that you're actually running Kubernetes directly on the bare metal but that there's still integration between Kubernetes and OpenStack when they're side by side. So maybe confused the architectural discussion a little bit more but I think it's really trying to highlight that that assumption of running Kubernetes inside virtual machines isn't necessary. >> You used one of my favorite tools in your keynote. You used Venn diagrams because it is not a thing over here and a thing over here. There's overlap and there's decisions that you'll make, and lots of customers want a platform that will guide them down that path. And they also, oh wait, but I have this custom thing that I need to do. What's the biggest problem we have in IT, is it's not standardized and nothing ever gets thrown away. It's like I want to run my docker image on a z/VM in a mainframe. Oh, Walmart does that, but they also have an OpenStack deployment. So (laughs) you hear all of these discussions out there where it's like wait, is this, you know, (laughs) is this the main thing? Is this modified? What sits on what and where? So it's and, it seems to be, and there's a lot of choices. >> Absolutely, and I think one of the really, you know, one of the really interesting things when you're working in this space is you realize that customers are making really long-term strategic decisions appear. The example I used today was BBVA, and they realized that they needed to kind of keep up with a fast-changing market and they needed an internal platform to allow them to do that. And this is about them making a long-term decision about how they were going to build that platform into the, it's a really kind of long-term and basing their business on that and its future. So that's, it's kind of humbling in terms of having that responsibility of making that work. >> Yeah, Tim, maybe we can get your comments on the ecosystem. We sure have watched three years ago when we were here HP had a big army coming in here as to they doing their distribution. Well, HP's a hardware, HPE, I should say as they are now (laughs) is a hardware partner. Red Hat works across all of the traditional infrastructure companies. This ecosystem changed. Red Hat has a broad ecosystem. What are you seeing out there? What do you get from the partners that they're asking, and how does that play? >> Yeah, I think this really, again, mirrors our approach to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. And so if you look at all the different dimensions of compute, network, and storage, we have ecosystem partners in all of those. So we have the likes for storage, we have NetApp, EMC, IBM, many others. We have backup vendors like Trilio in on that. On the network front we have Cisco, Juniper, many others. We have ecosystem partners of all the major hardware OEMs. We have ecosystem partners in Innovee and Telco, all those spaces. So I think what really is the main driver of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the ecosystem. It's not really the kernel anymore. It's like how do you run a consistent platform across multiple footprints? And that's what Red Hat is trying to provide because today I see there is a risk of vendor lock, and just like back in the day it was mainframe, right? Try to get everything from the lowest layer to the top layer on one platform. Many of the public cloud vendors are trying to be that one-stop shop, almost analogous to the mainframe. And what we're trying to do just like we did before for his ecosystem is to provide through leveraging the power of open source a platform that people can run, a hybrid platform that they can accelerate their business not only on all the different public clouds but also on-premise as well. >> It's interesting, last week of course big announcement with Red Hat is Microsoft's up on stage. It was like cats and dogs living together. Year before, Amazon you had a big announcement with. With Kubernetes and so many of these different tools, yes, there's that vertical integration but most of the companies understand that they're going to be in a customer environment and other people are. There's no longer, it's oh, IBM of 50 years ago where I'm going to be full in on that chop. >> Right, and I see Kubernetes is also, it's a huge open source project. So this is the difference between upstream and productization. It's what Red Hat does, is we do our maintenance, our support, our hardening, creation of this ecosystem, long life cycle support. The same thing's going to happen in Kubernetes where it's you don't just grab it upstream and run with whatever happens to be in it. And I think that there's a lot of companies that are claiming that just that Kubernetes is ubiquitous. And it's like the community innovation is ubiquitous and we're all in for advancing that. But it's really, if you're going to bet your business you want something that's productized and hardened by a contributor that you can trust. >> Well Tim, I want to connect that back with some of the other stuff that we've talked about on stage today. RHEL, super solid, history of engineering. The lower levels of your Stack need to be solid because you depend (laughs) on them. We talked a little bit about, on stage, about upgrades and things like that and how people are moving forward, the release schedule. I don't know, Mark, how are you approaching both upgrades and automation with Ansible? But other, OpenStack has other components too. How are you approaching that in the OpenStack day two to day 1000 scenario? >> Well absolutely, great question because today we've just announced our upcoming Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 release, and that's our long life cycle release. So our last long life cycle release was version 10, and we've had a couple of shorter life versions in between. But when it comes to the upstream community what's supported in terms of upgrade is between those individual versions. When we came out with version 13, with this long life version, we have to support seamless upgrades between 10 and 13 in place without disrupting workloads that are running in your environment and make it completely smooth and seamless. And we're doing that with a feature called fast forward upgrades which is completely automated with Ansible. So that's been a big part of our focus with our engineering investment for open-- >> Ansible came up a couple of times on stage both with Zuul and also with the fast forward upgrades and it might have slipped in there a couple more times. It seems like Ansible is a big part of even this community. >> No, we're very happy with Ansible and it's a really powerful tool when it comes to automation. Got an amazing community around us. Kind of real, it's been a kind of an organic growth and we've been really happy with the team since they've joined Red Hat. It's a great foundation for everything we're doing. >> And Ansible's not just a foundation with an OpenStack. It's, for example, we have Ceph integration in with Ansible. We have OpenShift is how we deploy it using Ansible. It's how we're using NREL to what we call System Roles to be able to make it easier to upgrade from one to the other. So by combining a single technology it's making it easier for us to put together an integrated portfolio. >> Great, Tim, when people leave this show what are some of the key messages you want to make sure that they've heard from Red Hat as part of this community? >> I would say that it's Red Hat is bringing an integrated portfolio Stack because it's not just about components. It's really about how can you build, develop, and deploy applications rapidly and what's the most enterprise-ready dynamic environment that enables you to do that, and that's what we think that the power of Red Hat through its credibility in the open source community to bring all of those pieces of the Stack together from top to bottom. >> Stu: All right, and Mark, we'll give you the final word. >> Yeah, I'd actually reach for what we're reinforcing a lot on this summit. We're talking about innovate, empower, and accelerate, and that's really about these businesses that are our customers who are dealing with the challenge of trying to keep up with a rapidly changing market. And they need to innovate more. They need to move faster, need to accelerate. But they also need to empower their own application developers to do that innovation, to really kind of keep pace with the market. >> All right, well Tim Burke, Mark McLoughlin, thanks so much for all of the updates here. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with much more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music) (slow tones playing)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE covering Open Source Summit, North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation, and the Red Hat. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. Live here in Los Angeles, is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit, North America. I'm John Furrier, your host, with my cohost, Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Our next guest is Ross Turk, Director of Evangelism at Red Hat. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> So, evangelizing is now going to be super more important as Open Source Summit, formerly called The Linux Con, Linux kernel. So, Linux is really now the foundation. So, now all these new products are emerging, hence the new name Open Source Summit. You guys are in the middle of it. >> Ross: Mm-hmm. >> What's the themes that you guys are pumping out there right now from an evangelist standpoint? Give me the order of operations in terms of priorities. >> Well, gosh, we're trying to tell stories about how people operate infrastructure in today's modern world, right, which is a lot about making sure that, you know, dealing with ephemeral infrastructure, dealing with containerized applications, and that sort of thing. It gives a lot more flexibility to people who are doing modern operations. It's about applications that spill over across multiple machines and doing so in a way that doesn't require a lot of heavy lifting or wiring things up by hand. So, there's this whole modern operations experience thing we talk about, but we also talk about a modern developer experience. What does it mean to build applications today? And, of course, you combine those together it turns into Dev Ops, right. But, the large companies still work in these two separate worlds. But, people are building technology differently than they ever did in the past, and they're deploying it differently than they did in the past. So, there's lots of stories that can come out of that. >> Well, let's start with the story that we love. Stu and I were talking about the server list at the beginning because you have the Dev Ops movement certainly is going mainstream. You're seeing a lot of enterprises looking at that as viable. Now, they're operationalizing it, and they need to have that industrial strength Red Hat, Linux. But, now Kubernetes and Servalist, the younger developers, they just want an infrastructure as code. >> That seems to be a very hot story here, and Kubernetes server list is kind of in the hallway conversations. How do you guys bring that to bear? >> Well, I think that what Red Hat does is we give an operating environment that can sit underneath all of it with Rail and everything else we build that is stable and secure and reliable. And, you need that in order to have all of this chaos happening above it with developers deploying microservices and moving things around, and demands changing and all these other things, you need to have something really stable and reliable underneath that, something that you know can be if the applications and virtual machines and containers aren't long running, what sits underneath of them is long running, and it still needs to be stable and reliable. So, a lot of the work we've been doing for the past 20 years around Linux Engineering, I think, contributes to making this stable environment for a modern developer. >> Yeah, Ross, one of the challenges in scaling is usually I've got to worry things like storage. You know, state is there, you know data gravity is something we need to be concerned about. It's great to say ephemeral and I want everything anywhere, and, I can put it in this cloud or use it in that application, but at the end of the day it's tough to build some of these pieces. How's Red Hat helping there as containerization and scale, how does that fit into kind of this storage discussion moving on? >> It's a real struggle right, because you can talk to people and they say oh, every single one of the microservices held over and they scale out, and all this, and they talk about this really elaborate infrastructure like well, where is all your data being stored? Oh, it's sitting in Oracle, you know, so you find this sort of like dissonance between how data is managed and how applications are managed. At Red Hat, we believe that storage should be another microservice alongside all the other microservices make up and application. So, that's why we put a lot of engineering effort into making things like Ceph and Red Hat Gluster Storage work well alongside Open Shift so that a developer can provision storage as needed without having to go to an ops person, and that when that storage gets provisioned it's in containers alongside other containers that are providing the other things that your application needs. >> Software defined storage was the answer, it's the Holy Grail. We've heard software defined data center. We've been covering this also in the VM world, heard an awful lot about that. But, that still is a key part of the software, and now you have hardware stacks, so IOT and Cloud are opening up these new use cases for enterprises where whoa, we actually kind of didn't test that hardware with that software, so it's kind of interesting dynamic because software defined is still super important. What's your view on software defined storage, in particular, is that an answer, is it stable, what's your thoughts? >> Well, I think it's an answer, but it depends on what the question is, just to be kind of-- >> What is software defined storage? Let's start with that one. >> Well, so, what is software defined storage? Software defined storage is, okay, so I'll say it in more like what it isn't. >> The traditional storage, traditional storage solutions get deployed as appliances, which are vertically integrated hardware and software solutions that are built to do one thing, and to do that one thing well. And, that one thing is to store data. They're kind of like big refrigerator-sized things that you bring into your data center with a forklift and it's a big oepration, and then they provide storage for any number of applications. What software defined storage does is it implements those same services and those same capabilities, but it does it entirely in software. So, instead of being this vertically integrated software, hardware solution, you end up with software that lets you build it on any hardware, and that hardware can be physical hardware so you can build a storage cluster made up of 1,000 bare metal servers, or you could build that same cluster on a thousand VMs inside of a public cloud. So, in making storage no longer a hardware problem, like it used to be, I mean fundamentally it's a hardware problem, you get down bits are stored somewhere, but, the management of storage is no longer a hardware concern, it's a software concern, now, and that means it's a little bit more flexible. You can containerize it. You can deploy it in the public cloud. You can deploy it in VMs. You can deploy it on bare metal. So, that's what software defined storage is doing is it's changing things around, but it requires different skills. >> Come on Ross, I want a storageless environment, can we get on that? >> A storageless environment? Sure, I guess. Storage has become somebody else's problem at that point. >> Absolutely, how about, how is containers changing that whole discussion? You know, it took us like a decade to kind of get storage working in a virtualized environment, networking seems to be really tackling the container piece, storage seems a little further behind, you know, what're you seeing some of the big challenges there and how are we looking to solve that? >> Well, here there's when you look at containers and storage, there are really two things to consider. The first is how do you make storage such that a containerized environment can consume it easily, right. This is what at Red Hat we call container ready. So, we call a storage solution container ready, what it means that your container platform knows how to consume it. Most storage is container ready, all it takes is a Kubernetes volume driver to be container ready, and that's one half of it, and that's really, really important. It's the same kind of thing we had to do with virtualization, making sure every hypervisor could talk to every storage system. Now, we're making sure every container platform can talk to every storage system. That's important, but it's only half the puzzle, 'cause the other half is now that you have storage as a software thing, a distributed software thing, you can actually deploy that storage inside the same containers that you're using, that are driving the demand for that storage. So, it's this kind of weird, you know, snake eating it's own tail thing where you as a developer, let's say I'm deploying an application, I need a database, I need a web server, blah, blah, and a bunch of other things, and I need a scale out storage system, I can deploy that in containers just alongside everything else, and it uses the local storage of each of the container hosts to build that shared storage that then is used to provide services to other containerized applications. So, it's the ability to have storage in containers Which is really strange. We call that container native storage. >> It's interesting the markets going pretty crazy, so if you kind of take the Dev Ops and say assume for a minute infrastructure is programmable. >> Mm-hmm. >> But, then you look at the developer action right now on the App side, we've seen all kinds of new stuff Apple has their announcement today with the new iPhone 8. We've been covering that on siliconangle.com. Forbes has got great stories as well. New AR kit, so augmented reality is a huge deal, virtual reality obviously still hyped up, is still promised, those are going to require new chips. That's going to require consumer behavior change, so, the developers are staring at a different market than worrying about provisioning storage, right. So, but, these are now new pressures. New hardware, new opportunities, as a developer, advocate, and evangelist, and an industry participant, and user, how do you look at that, and how is that impacting the developer market because Androids got good stuff coming down, too, not just Apple, Samsung? >> Ross: Yeah. >> It's all multimedia, I mean. >> Well, what's interesting about AR kit is that if you go just back five years that same capability required a very, very particular type of phone, you know, like the project Tango stuff required all these depth cameras and like connect style stuff to do the AR kit, and Apple was able to solve a lot of that in software just using two cameras, right, and in software. And, I think that's really-- >> John: On a phone? >> On a phone, on a phone no less, and I think what's amazing about that is all of the capabilities that we walk around with in our pocket now were really hard to get a long time ago. >> Well, this is interesting, your point, let's stay on this because this really illustrates the point. AR kit, for example is proving that the iPhone now is smart enough and with software, enough horsepower to do that kind of thing, but that's replicable across all devices now as an IOT device. The Internet of Things is going to be a freight train coming down the tracks, security, endpoint security, whether it's, I mean all kinds of coolness, but yet threats are there. So, software has to do all this, right. So, how's that going to impact the cloud game, your business, you guys you have to move faster on hardening things, be more organic on the innovation side, not business-wise, but technical strategy. >> Well, I think a lot of it is enabling developers to work more quickly and build features more quickly, also, educating developers on the security and privacy ramifications of the things that they build because it's really easy to just go out in front and advance and innovate and forget about all of that stuff. So, it's about changing developer culture so that you consider security and privacy first, as opposed to later. And, also, maybe you want to consider storage as well if you're talking about machine learning or IOT and all of these types of things, you're -- >> Videos, I mean this is video, software rendering. That's a storage nightmare. >> It's all got to live somewhere, and once you put it in that place where it lives, it's really hard to move it. So, this is a thing you want to plan from the very beginning. >> And, I think that's what's cool about AI, too, and self-driving cars it's a consumer, you know, flashy, coolness that can say hey, this is happening. I mean how fast is happening, but the developer is now bringing it to the businesses and say, okay, we don't have an AR virtual reality strategy for our retail, for instance, you potentially could be out of business. So, these are the kind of thoughts that are going at the C-level that now are going into what used to be IT, but all of IT, how do you handle this? This is an architectural question, so your thoughts on that, because that seems to be a conversation we see a lot. Architectural that's going to solve problems today, not foreclose future opportunities. >> Well, it's cultural, too, inside of the company, like everywhere inside of a company there used to be Internet teams in companies, remember. We used to be like oh, go talk to the Internet team because something's wrong with the Web or whatever, now, there's no Internet team, everybody's the Internet team, Every single team in an organization is thinking about how to leverage the Internet to make their job more effective. The same is going to be true for everything that we're talking about, you know. Security, interestingly enough, so many people always thought security was somebody else's problem. but just this week, we were reminded that it's everybody's problem, hundreds of millions of people's problem, security. So, I think that as these things kind of advance-- >> John: Security first, and privacy first is critical. >> It is absolutely critical, and there used to be, I mean, I think at some point maybe there won't be a security team inside of a company because everybody's going to be the security team, but it's like everybody's the Internet team now, and I always felt the same way about open source communities. I thought there would never, you know, always everybody-- >> Well, people are ruling their own security now. You have these LifeLock or whatever they call them, these services for a password protection because you can't trust even all these databases that are out there. You have block chain with immutability, yeah, certainly the wallets are not yet, but I mean certainly this is where it might be a future scenario. >> Yeah, and I think for all of these things agility is going to be key. The ability to go down a path a certain distance and realize whoa I've run into a privacy problem, back up a little bit, continue down another path. I think that the faster we can make the development process, I think the less risky we make going into all these new frontiers. >> Yeah, Ross, one of the things we've really liked watching the last kind of five years or so is storage turning into a discussion of data and how can we leverage that data, real-time data, you know, decisions at the edge, analytics, what's exciting you the most about kind of the storage world these days? >> Oh boy. Well, you know, I just spent about five years in the storage infrastructure world, so a lot of what kind of kept me going day and night was saving people money, making things faster, making things easier, but also, giving storage platforms that were elastic enough to handle all of this really interesting stuff that happens on top of them. So, there's all kinds of new big data stacks that I find particularly interesting, a lot of the real time analysis stuff like Apache Spark and things like that. There's so much going into visualization right now, as well, how you handle large amounts of time series data and that sort of thing. There's been a lot of advancements in exactly that. Personally, I'm really excited lately in all the data of this stuff, all the ways you can extract meaning from all this data, you know, the ways that you can give it a business context that allows you to make better decisions with it. >> Not a lot of data conversations here at this conference as is open source software, but I mean data I mean I've said and I wrote a blog post in 2008 Dave always, Dave Olantho always jokes with me because I always reference it, I said data is the new development kit, meaning data is going to be part of the software development model, and it actually is with big data, but, you're not hearing a lot of it here because most people are talking about their communities, their projects, but the role of data is fundamental at the edge. >> Ross: Absolutely. >> And, so, how is that going to change some of these conversations and can data be developed on, and is data now part of the software development life cycle that's coming to fruition in the new way. >> Interesting, I think that's an interesting observation that as we see sort of Dev and Ops coming together, right, the world of the operator and the world of the developer coming together, I think we'll probably, at some point, see the world of the developer come together with the world of the data scientist because as I kind of wrack my brain I'm thinking okay, what type of future developer wouldn't have to be dealing with large amounts of data wouldn't have to have that kind of skill to be able to deal with it. So, I think we're going to start to see more software developers getting more involved in big data, machine learning, data analytics, and things like that for sure. >> Well, either way, this open source growth that's coming is going to be exponential. Data is already there. I mean we have a joke in our office software is eating the world as Mark Andreasen would say years ago, but, data is eating software. So, in terms of how you look at it someone's eating somebody, but, this becomes interesting for the IOT developer, or the industrial developer. Those systems were never connected to IT in the past. It was like they ran their own stuff from their own terminals. >> And, there's this idea that everybody's heard that data has gravity, right. And, I actually was talking to somebody about this and they said, well, actually the data has inertia, and I'm like, no, that's not really it 'cause once it's moving it's not hard to stop it. The idea that data has gravity means that let's say I'm putting together this new IOT application, or whatever, I'm gathering data from a bunch of sensors or whatever, and I've got the data in that place. Now, having all that data in that place is more meaningful to me than most of the software that I wrote. You know, it's like that is the value, the kernel of the data is there, and data having gravity means that it's hard to move once it's in a certain place, but, it also means that it attracts workloads to it, right. So, it used to be that software was king, and software created data and managed data, and now data is king, and it brings software to it, I think. >> I totally agree with you, and I think they might even call this the open data summit soon, but it's beyond open source. Now, this is going to be great. They work hand in hand. Software and data are going to be great. Stu what's your thoughts on the role that data's not being talked much here? >> Yeah, John at Amazon weighed in last year. When we talked to Andy Jassy it was the customers were the flywheel, and I think data's going to be that next flywheel of really feeding into that data gravity discussion that you were having, Ross. You know, when Hadoop came out it was like oh, we're going to bring the code to the data. Well, we know if I'm going to have more data I'm going to have my data sources, I'm going to have third party data sources that I want to be able to work and interact with those, so, data absolutely huge opportunities there, and the companies that can leverage that and get more value out of it is going to be a-- >> Well, we already see it's a competitive advantage, no doubt, but it's the privacy issue still the big debate like we know in our immediate businesses. Look at Facebook, I've got a free App I get to see all my friends' photos, their vacations, everyone's living a great life on Facebook, but, then all of a sudden I give my data away for free for the privilege to use that App, but all the sudden they start injecting fake news at me. I don't want that anymore, and you're still making money off of my data, so that's interesting. Facebook makes money off of my data. >> Yeah, that's-- >> That's my contract with them. >> Yeah, If you ask what their asset is, one person might think it's traffic, you know, or eyeballs, but, I think it's data. >> So, they're using data, I might not like it, so that might be an opportunity for somebody else so your point Stu, so if you start thinking about it differently, data decisions are going to be an architectural challenge. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think enterprise architecture thinking, even today, you're seeing enterprise architects thinking more and more and more about data than they have in the past. >> Ross, what do you think about the show, final word in the segment, what's going on Open Source Summit, share with the folks that are watching? >> The vibe here, it's now a new name, but it's still the same game, multiple events come together. >> Yeah, multiple events together. I like Open Source Summit as a name. I think it's a good name. It's properly named for what's going on here. It's been an interesting experience for me because I've been in this community for a really long time. So, I come here and I run into all kinds of old friends, the hallway track's always a good track for me. The content is fantastic, but the hallway track is always really good, and I can't think of anywhere else where you can go and get this selection of people, right. You have people who're working on all layers of the problem, and they can all come together and talk. So, I don't know-- >> It's really a cross-fertilization, cross-pollination, whatever word you want to use. I think this event's going to be in the 30,000 pretty quickly. I mean this is going to be. Well, if you look at the growth, the numbers, you know, presented on stage, Jim Zemlon, was pointing out the growth, by 2026, 400 million libraries. I mean people still think that's underestimated. >> Yeah. >> So, that's a lot of growth. >> I think it could get there, and I think these folks organize great shows, so I look forward to seeing them scale up to 30,000. >> Ross, thanks for your commentary, appreciate the perspective, and the insight here on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for joining us. This is theCUBE live coverage from Open Source Summit, North America. I'm John, for Stu Miniman, back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Boston, Massachusetts It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, RedHat, and additional ecosystem support. (upbeat techno music fades out) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by John Troyer, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live broadcast of OpenStack 2017 here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Actually, the clouds have been breaking up, a little bit of sunshine here, and it's our third day of broadcasts. We have really a lot of our editorial segment today. Going to be talking to more community members, talking to one of the Superuser winners, a number of startups, and happy to start the day, Lisa-Marie Namphy who is the US OpenStack ambassador. CUBE alum, been on a number of times. Lisa, tell us what's new in your world. >> Thank you Stu, and thanks John and what a pleasure to be here with you folks, and hello, Boston and world, good morning. What's new, well the OpenStack ambassador program is expanding all the time, we just had a great session that Sonia did to kick off the day today to really talk about, you know, how to get involved in OpenStack, even if you're not necessarily a technical person. It's really important to acknowledge how everybody in our community can contribute, and that's one of the things the ambassador program does really well. So we just had a session on that. One of the things that I've done with our user group that is new and super exciting is I've morphed it into a little bit of the OpenStack in Containers user group. So I've been focusing a lot on containers, done 12 or 13 meetups on Kubernetes and or Docker since last summer, and I just had the pleasure of speaking in the CNCF communities track, communities day track yesterday, and that was so much fun, out there in the grand ballroom, so that's kind of some new and fun things we're doing. >> It's great, this is our fifth year doing theCUBE at this show, always a robust community, really. When we started coming, it was the people building it, Now we have a lot of the users, there's different sub-segments, can you speak a little bit to the kind of maturity of the community, and, you know how do people get involved in the ambassador program, how many are there geographically, number wise, diversity, those kind of things. >> Oh gosh, yeah so it's geo, or it's a worldwide program and it's been going a lot, and you're right, you know years ago, here it was the Design Summit, and we sat around and talked about, you know the next six months of the project, and then it morphed into more users, adoption, customers, operators are a really big one too. And now those things are all so big, we have operators, Midcycles, and all and the Design Summit has been, you know sequestered off into, separated out so that we can really focus here on the customers, the community, users, and those type of contributors as well. So things have changed a lot in the seven years since we've been doing OpenStack. The ambassador program is fantastic. The foundation has done a really good job in the last couple of years of acknowledging the contributions of the user community, and so not necessarily the code contributors only, but the people who are also spending as much time contributing in really significant ways to our community, and growing our commnity. Open source doesn't work without a community. So we know that, and we're doing a much better job of acknowledging who those people are and rewarding them. >> John: How many ambassadors worldwide? >> There's about twenty of us. I'm the only one in the US right now, but we're about to change that. I believe my friend Sheila is going to join and cover the East Coast, and I'll be able to do everything west of the Mississippi, but most countries only have one, and... >> And the role of an ambassador, do you do a lot of meetups? Do you go speak? You're there as a, for people to contact as well, right? >> Yeah, we generally recruit or ask people to be ambassadors if they are already doing those things, if they're already running a local user group, if they already have a brand in OpenStack, and they speak, and they kind of already know how to reach out to people, and how to inspire people, or people see them on stage, and that's why the foundation approached me to do it. I had been running the San Francisco Bay area meetup for three years, and speaking, I don't know this is probably my eighth, ninth, maybe tenth OpenStack Summit that I've been speaking at, and OpenStack days and all of that. And so, you kind of see who's already doing it. The cool thing about community is nobody is asked to do it, like you do it because you have a passion for it, because you love it, because it's the right thing to do, because it's helpful to push the technology forward because you have a passion for the technology, because you love people, all these reasons is why people get into it. So you find all over the world people who are doing this. They're already doing it and they're not being paid to do it they're doing it, those are the people you grab, because you know, there is a burnout level to it but those are the people who have enough passion about it and commitment, and believe in community that they're going to be successful at it. >> Can you talk a little bit about the Bay Area OpenStack user group? It's one of the largest OpenStack user groups, and one of the themes we've seen this week is a lot of talk about containers, a lot of talk about, well, Kubernetes, but containers in general, kind of demystifying the sometimes confusing story about where's OpenStack good for, where's the container layer good for, it turns out it's good for a couple different places, you can containerize OpenStack, you can also... A lot of talk about the app layer on top, but you actually, what you just said, you've actually expanded the conversation, you don't just sit there and say "this month we're talking about Neutron," you talk about a lot of different topics, and you bring people to the table. >> Yeah, San Francisco area, you are correct, it is the world's largest OpenStack user group, we have over 6,000 members. Not all of them are located in the Bay Area, I think people like to join the user group because we provide a lot of really good content, and we live stream our meetups, we have Google Hangouts, I record them all, they're all on our calendar, if you go to meetup.com/openstack, you get to us because we were the first one. So we do get a lot of people from around the world, and I write newsletters with lots of interesting information but it is a local community and we do encourage people to participate, so the meetups are super important and the only way to make sure that you keep your community strong and keep people coming back is to have phenomenal content in your meetups. So I work really hard to make sure that the content is interesting, that it's relevant, and the most exciting, most relevant conversation since last summer has been containers. The year before that it was networking, and it still kind of is and always will be. So we do a lot of meetups on networking, too, but containers has been what people want to talk about. They're trying to figure this out. OpenStack has reached a maturity level where people, you know, they're not necessarily learning or if they are they can take an OpenStack 101 course and those exist all over the place. So we've gone to the next level, and whether it was Cloud Foundry or now Containers we do like to talk about what else you can do with this fabulous technology, and how you should do it. So we've had meetups where we've presented OpenStack on communities, communities on OpenStack, where I personally came in and did a whole meetup on Kubernetes as the underlay, and Rob Starmer came in and did a whole workshop and hands-on about how to run OpenStack on containers. Yesterday our panel, you heard Dan Berg talk about just simplifying it, run everything in a container, but keep it as simple as possible, so what pieces do you need? So these are the conversations that we like to have in our user group, and people keep coming back because it's an exciting conversation. >> Yeah, expanding on that, you talked about just people are always coming, new people to the community that don't know it, people that are changing jobs all the time, new technologies, I mean, we all know community building is a constant, you know, reinvention in something, you keep needing to work How do the ambassadors, how do stay energized on it, how do you keep the momentum and the energy of the community going? >> Yeah, well the cool thing about an open source community is no matter where you're working, you're still part of the community. So I've worked with so many other people here, I don't even know where they are sometimes. I mean we don't tend to talk about what company we're actually working for, or who's paying your paycheck, and especially in the early days of the project that was definitely true, and so some of my good friends have been at four different companies in the time that we've been doing this OpenStack thing, but we're all still working on OpenStack, and I suspect Kubernetes will be very similar, or Docker. You know, how many people are working on Docker? But there's only 200 people that work for Docker, right? So these technologies kind of take on these lives of their own, and people do switch jobs a lot, but people come to meetups because it's a constant thing, and it's also a good place to keep networking and keep looking for work, so we got a lot of that. The beginning of every meetup, I ask for a show of hands of who's hiring. If I ask for who's looking, not everybody raises their hand but if you ask who's hiring, there's a lot of people hiring all the time, and so then the people can look around and say "okay I'm going to go talk to those people," so yeah, the networking is an important part. >> On that point, are you seeing any trends as to what are the roles that they're hiring for, or you know, companies or industries that definitely have changing skillsets, you know John spent a lot of time helping all those virtualization people moving to that next thing, what are you seeing? >> Engineering is the big one, and people are still looking for OpenStack engineers. I mean people ping me all the time, saying "do you know any OpenStack engineers?" So that's usually the number one thing, developers to help build out these things, and then also the companies that, you know, that aren't OpenStack companies, you know companies like GE that are trying to hire what, 20,000 developers in the next couple years, and Mercedes and Tesla, and you see all these companies that are trying to build out their software developer programs. So another role that is interesting that people are hiring for is these developer, DevRel, Developer IVC community roles to try to figure out, you know how are we going to build our developer community within our company? If these are really large companies, or you know, companies like IBM which have interest in things like the Apache Spark community, or you know, you find these pockets in these large companies as well. Or there's a lot of startups, you know unlike, probably not like Docker as much, but Kubernetes is going to have this ecosystem of partners that build around it, and these companies are popping up out of the woodwork and they're growing like crazy, and there's like 30 of them in the Bay Area, right? So they're really trying to expand as well. >> I wanted to ask about the general mood of the summit. My first summit... You know, it happens every six months. I've been impressed by how grounded people are, I see a lot of first time attendees, people starting new OpenStack installations in 2017 right now, here to learn... I'm just kind of curious, over the last couple summits is there anything different you see about here in Boston, anything you're looking forward to going to in the next one, in terms of kind of mood and how people are, are people feeling good, are people, you know, are people still puzzling out this container issue, or are people still talking about public versus private, or what are kind of the mood and conversations you hear from other community members? >> I think people are talking about public versus private again, not still right? I mean is it, that was kind of an interesting one, and I think Johnathan brought it up on main stage on the first day about that kind of readoption of private cloud, and that you know, we knew that was a sweet spot for OpenStack particularly in the US. You know, lots of public clouds running on other parts of the world, but that's a fun conversation, and it's containers of course, but not just containers. I think it was maybe Lauren Sell who put the slide up of all of those other technologies that are, you know affiliate now, and... >> Another ecosystem of open source projects >> Lisa: Yeah, yeah >> that can all interoperate with openstack. >> With Cloud Foundry, and Ansible was up there, and Ceph, and you had a slide full of technologies, OpenDaylight, that are all playing a role here and that the conversation has been about, and I just encouraged in the ambassador session and in the meetup sessions to do that with your meetup. Our meetup has been really successful and the people have loved it because we started bringing in this other technology. People want to talk about IoT, they want to talk about AI, they want to talk about machine learning, so there's those, they want to talk about, you know what are the best use cases for OpenStack so we showcased to GoDaddy what they built with Docker on top of OpenStack. So there's a lot of fun conversations to be had right now, and I think there's a buzz around here, you know that, what, day one when Johnathan put the slide up saying, you know, people have predicted the end of OpenStack and that was like four years ago or whatever, that was an awesome slide, right? I'm sure talked to him about it. >> Yeah, I absolutely traded notes, and caught opinion about it, too. Lisa, you live in The Valley, I'm curious about perception in The Valley, you know, OpenStacks now been around seven years, it's kind of, you know, it's matured, it's moved on, some called it boring because we fixed some of the main issues, you know We mentioned all the OpenStack days with you know Cloud Foundry, Kubernetes, all these software pieces on top, what do you hear in The Valley when people talk about OpenStack, any misperceptions you'd want to clarify? >> Yeah, yeah it's not boring. It's funny when you say to a California girl "you live in The Valley," I'd be like, "let's just say The Silicon Valley." Not the, not the other Valley. >> Stu: Not the Valley girl >> Don't make me start talking like that, right? >> Stu: Oh my god! (laughs) >> Right, so, no. It's never boring, it's never... It hasn't been boring from day one, and there's been times where I felt like okay we've been talking about infrastructure for years now, let's talk about some other things, but I love the way at this conference they're talking about, they're calling it the "open infrastructure conference." You know, this is what OpenStack has become, and that just opens the conversation. You know, I love that shift. There's always something exciting to talk about, and I don't mean the little inside baseball things, like should we have done Big Ten, should Stackalytics go away, I mean, you know people like to talk about that stuff, but I don't find that customers or the people at the meetups are talking about that stuff. People at the meetups are talking about you know, how should we run this with Kubernetes? How do these technologies fit together? You know, lots of different things, you know where does Docker play into it? Networking is still a conversation and a problem to still be solved, and how are we going to do this? We had OpenContrail do a meetup with us a couple of weeks ago. There's still a lot of interest in figuring out the networking piece of it, and how to do that better. So we're never going to run out of things to talk about. >> Alright, so how do more people get involved, how do they find their meetups, where do they find resources? >> Most of, openstack.org has a list of all the communities, but most of the communities use meetup.com, almost globally, so if you go to meetup.com, and you put in your geo, you'll find one. You can contact your local ambassador. If you want to get involved, I say just go to a meetup. I mean you can't start leading communities until you participate in communities. There is no way to phone this in. You have to, it's hands-on, roll up your sleeves, let's get to work and participate, and have some fun. So go to a local meetup, and meet your meetup organizers, volunteer, help, and it's so rewarding. Some of my best friends that I have, I've met through OpenStack or open source projects. It creates many opportunities for jobs. So just start going to meetups and get involved, and if you want to be an ambassador, there's a list on the website of how to figure that out. Tom Fifield runs the whole program with Sonia's help out of Australia, but regionally we're always looking for help. There's no shortage of roles that people can play if people really want to. >> Definitely a vibrant community here, doing well, Lisa-Marie Namphy, always a pleasure to catch up with you, and we have a full day of programming coming, so stay tuned and thank you for watching the cube. >> Lisa: Thanks Stu, thanks John. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost this week, John Troyer. Hi and welcome to the program, a first time guest, Professor at Boston University, and lead of the Massachusetts Open Cloud, Orran Krieger. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Ah, my pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, so, we're here in Boston, the center of culture, the revolution, a lot of universities. Tell us a little about you, just click on yourself, your role at BU, and then we'll get into the MOC stuff in a little bit too. >> Sure, I mean, I sort of came back from industry after 15 years in industry, to this incredible opportunity we had, to create this entity. I mean, there's no other place like this, if you take the universities in this city, it's equivalent to all the universities on the Pacific West Coast. Right, the concentration of high-tech is unbelievable here. >> I want to remind you, my wife was actually involved when Partners Healthcare first got launched here in Boston, was an early technology and collaboration here in Boston. Sounds similar, what you are, what you're doing with some of the universities in Cloud. Maybe you talk, you came from the vendor side. Just real quick, your background, you worked at a company that John and I know quite well. Maybe just give a quick background? >> Sure. I left academia, I don't know how many years ago. Ended up going to IBM research, and was there for about 10 years. And then I joined this little start-up called VMWare. And started up and then worked as sort of one of the lead architects for vCloud Director and the whole vCloud Initiative. >> Alright, great. Let's speak today, you also have, you're the lead in Massachusetts Open Cloud. We actually had a couple of guests on from Red Hat that talked a little bit about it. But tell us about the project, the scope of it, how many people involved, how many users you reach with this. >> Sure. The future is in the Cloud. I mean, you look at sort of the fact that users can use what they need, when they need it. Producers can get massive economies of scale. You know, the future of computing is in the cloud. And when I was on the industry side, what really concerned me, what was going on, is that these clouds were really closed. You couldn't see what was going on inside them. Innovation was sort of gated by this single provider, that operated and controlled each of these clouds. So, the question that I was struggling with back then, is how can we create a cloud that's open? That multiple technology companies can participate. And certainly when I came back to academia, a cloud where I could do innovation in. Where not just me, but many many different researchers. You look at how much research has fundamentally impacted our field. It's dramatic. Even in just sort of the very area we're talking about. From what Mendall and team did with VMWare, and then Zen coming out of Cambridge. I mean, Ceph coming out of, just like technology after technologies come out of academia. But now clouds are these closed boxes you can't get into. So we had this incredible opportunity. There'd be this data center, the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Data Center, MGHPCC. 15 megawatts. That's more than half the size of one of Google's 16 data centers. That had been built, right next to Hydro Dam, one third the power costs of what it is in Boston. By five big institutions: MIT, Harvard, BU, Northeastern, UMass. And we thought, wow, couldn't we create a cloud there? Couldn't we create a cloud with some 157,000 potential students as well as the broader ecosystem? So we started discussing that idea. All the universities kind of signed up behind it. The model of the cloud is not to create another single provider cloud. It's not going to be my cloud. The idea is to have many vendors participate. Stand up different services, and create an open cloud, where there's not just multiple tenants but there's also multiple landlords with the cloud. >> Great. Could you talk to us a little about how do some of those pieces get chosen? How does OpenStack fit into it? And if you can talk about some of the underlining pieces it'd be good to understand how you sort that out too. >> Sure. So in doing that we, it's actually been sort of this cool, you know you have to kind of build different levels simultaneously. When we started the project, you know our first thing was, oh you know we'll be able to just stand up a cloud. It wasn't that easy. OpenStack is actually a complicated learning curve to get up. Now it's matured tremendously. We've been in production for about ten months, with no significant failures. I'm almost thinking that we need to kind of bring it down for a couple hours. Just so the people start realizing this is not intended to be a place where you run it like you would a production data center facility. That we don't guarantee it as so, 'cause people are starting to assume we do. (laughing) But, we started off and we sort of solved OpenStack, got it up and running. Took us a while to get it to the production layer. Started hosting courses, and users, and stuff like that. And some tastes that with sort of two other tracks. One is I'm developing some of the base technologies to enable a cloud to be multi-vendor. So mix-and-match fetterations serve our core of that. Which is this new capability that we've, after like five iterations on the right way to do this to allow multiple different clouds with their own keystone, mix different administrators say from MIT or Harvard, or from companies that might want to participate and set up a service. So, to have a capability of fettering between those things. Allowing you, for example, to use storage from one and compute from another. We started off with OpenStack because OpenStack already had the right architecture. It was designed as a series of different services. Each one which could be scaled independently. Each one that had it's own well defined API. And it seemed natural, jeez, we should be able to compose them together. Have, you know, one stand up, Nova compute. Another one stand up, Swift storage. Another one stand up, Cinder Storage. Turned out not to be that easy. There was assumptions that all these services were stood up by the same administrative entity. After three iterations of trying to figure out with the community how to make it, we finally have a capability of doing that now. That we're putting into production in the MOC itself. >> You talked about the different projects inside OpenStack, that's been one of the discussions here this week at the Summit. Different projects, the core, which are important and also the whole ecosystem of other cloud native and open source projects that have grown-up around OpenStack over the last six or seven years. Any commentary on how, which kind of projects you're finding are the most useful and the UC as kind of the core of OpenStack going on? And also, which projects from other ecosystems do you think are natural fits into working on an OpenStack base platform? >> Sure. So in our environment, we serve all the core services you think of, obviously Nova and Cinder and Swift. We're using Ceph in most of our environments. Sahara, Heat. We've actually expanded beyond in a couple of different dimensions. I guess that, one thing is we've been using extensively Ceph, that's been very valuable for us. And we've also been modifying it actually, substantially. It's actually kind of exciting cause we have graduate students that are making changes that are now going upstream in the Ceph community as a result of their experiences in doing things within our environment. But, there's other projects that sort of tied in sort of two different levels. One is we're working very closely with Red Hat, today around OpenShift. And we're making the first deployment of that available in the very near future. And the other thing is very important for our environment, we have I think three different talks related to this to have data sets in the cloud. To have data sets shared between communities of people. Data sets that are discoverable. Data sets where you can actually, that are citable. So we've been working very closely with Harvard and the OpenSource dataverse community and we've together created the cloud dataverse. Which is now actually in the MOC. So researchers from all these institutions can actually publish their data sets. As well as researchers from around the world. So there's over 15,000 data sets today in the Harvard dataverse for example. >> Curious if you can give us any commentary on how open source fits into education these days? Talk about the pipeline and the next generation of workers. Do your students get, you talked about upstream contributions, how do they get involved? How early are they getting involved? >> Well, actually, that's sort of a bit of a passion of mine. So multiple different levels, I guess. One of them I think is this is a great way for a student to sort of get exposed to a broad community of people to interact with. I think it's, rather than going in to serve one company, and getting locked down doing one thing, I think it's just enormously valuable. There's sort of two different dimensions I guess, educationally and from a research prospective. And both of them were very tied to open source. So from an education perspective, we have a course, for example, one of my frustrations of having come back from industry was students had done a lot of great, learned how to program, often as individuals they really didn't learn how to do agile, they didn't learn how to work with teams of people, so we have a large course that's served by multiple institutions today that's sort of tied to the MOC where we actually have industry mentors, we teach them agile methods, we teach them a lot of the sort of fundamentals of cloud, but we also have industry mentors come in and mentor teams of five students to create a product. There's actually three different lightning talks by different students that have taken this course, that are here in the OpenStack forum today. So it's kind of exciting to see. We've had several hundred students that have learned that and at least, in my experience, learning how to deal with open source communities, mentorship is a great way of doing that. First year we started teaching this course we had sort of struggled finding mentors, now we're about twice as many mentors applying to mentor teams as we can accommodate in it. So that's been kind of exciting. >> That's great. That's super important and learning right and not just learning how to program but how to operate as a engineer and a team. >> So in the MOC itself, a lot of it's stood up by students. We have like 20 to 30 students. We have a very small core development in our operations team and most of it is actually students doing all the real work. It's been amazing how much they can accomplish in that environment. >> You mentioned OpenShift. So another conversation that's been somewhat confusing in the broader industry is the talking about containers versus VMs and virtualization and OpenStack. Here this week, I thought it's been a fairly clear message that there's some you can be containerizing the stack itself and then there's also a role for containers on top. Obviously been involved in virtualization for a long time, how are you seeing the evolution of both containerization as a technology, but also container based platforms versus kind of the infrastructure and provisioning of the cloud part? >> I mean, there's three levels that all have its role. There's actually people that want to control all the way down to the operating system and want to do, customize things who want to use SRLV and want to use accelerators that haven't. So there's people that actually want hardware as a service and we provide a capability for doing that that's got its limitations today. There's people that want to use virtual machines and there's people that actually want to use containers. And the ability to orchestrate setting up a complex multitiered environment on that and doing fine-grain sharing in a containerized environment is huge. I think that actually all three are going to have a continued role going forward. And certainly containerized approach is an awesome way to deploy a cloud environment and scale the cloud environment even the IAS environment. So we're certainly doing that. >> Love the idea of the collaboration you have both intermittently with all the universities. Are you getting reached out by outside of Massachusetts? How do you interact with the broader community and share ideas back and forth? >> So of course there is multiple streams of that one of them is our industry partners are very broad. Second, we've participated in sort of the OpenStack Summits and all those kind of things. The other thing is that the model that we are doing, I think has a lot of excitement and interest from very many different segments. I don't think people want to see the public cloud be dominated, or could see always be dominated by a very small number of vendors. So the idea of actually creating an open mall of cloud. Lots of other academic institutions have talked with us both about setting up sister organizations, fettering between clouds and replicating the model. We're still at an early stage. This model still has to be proven out. We're excited that we have users that are using us now to get their work done. Rather than just courses and things like that. But it's still at a very early stage So I think as we scale up we'll start looking at replicating that model more broadly. >> Is there any public information about what you're doing? And I'm curious, will this tie into like mooc delivery, things like that? >> Oh, absolutely yeah. It's all on our webpage info.massopencloud.org. So everything is done in the open, I guess. So all the projects, they're all, everything is on the websites and you can discover all about it. And we welcome participation from a broad community. And are excited about that. >> Orran Krieger. Really appreciate you sharing with our community everything there. Congratulations. Local, we'd love to stop by some time to check out even more. John and I will be back with lots more coverage here from openStack Summit 2017, Boston, Massachusetts. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. And if I'm sitting on this side of the table with the long hallways behind me, it means we're here for the wrap of the second day. John Troyer's here, day two of three days, theCUBE here at OpenStack Summit. John, I feel like you're building energy as the show goes on, kind of like the show itself. >> Yeah, yeah, getting my footing here. Again, my first summit. It was a good second day, Stu, I think we made it through. We had some fascinating stuff. >> Yeah, fascinating stuff. Before we jump into some of the analysis here, I do want to say you know, first and foremost, big thanks to the foundation. Foundations themselves tend to get, they get beat up some, they get loved some, without the OpenStack Foundation, we would not be here. Their support for a number of years, our fifth year here at the show, as well as the ecosystem here, really interesting and diverse and ever-changing ecosystem, and that fits into our sponsors too. So Red Hat's our headline sponsor here. We had Red Hat Summit last week and two weeks, lots of Red Haters, and now lots of Stackers here. Additional support brought to us by Cisco, by Netronome, and by Canonical. By the way, no secret, we try to be transparent as to how we make our money. If it's a sponsored segment, it lists "sponsored by" that guest here, and otherwise it is editorial. Day three actually has a lot of editorial, it means we have a lot of endusers on the program. We do have vendors, cool startups, interesting people, people like Brian Stevens from Google. When I can get access to them, love to have it here. So big shout out as always. Content, we put it out there, the community, try to have it. Back to the wrap. John, you know we've kind of looked at some of the pieces here, the maturity, you know where it fits in the hybrid and multi cloud world. What jumped out at you as you've been chewing on day two? >> Well, my favorite thing from today, and we talked about it a couple times just in passing it keep coming up, is OpenStack on the edge. So the concept of, that the economics works today, that you can have a device, a box, maybe it's in your closet somewhere, maybe it's bolted to a lamppost or something, but in the old days it would have run on some sort of proprietary chip, maybe an embedded Linux. You can put a whole OpenStack distribution on there, and when you do that, it becomes controllable, it becomes a service layer, you can upgrade it, you can launch more services from there, all from a central location. That kind of blew my mind. So that's my favorite thing from today. I finally got my arms around that I think. >> Okay, great, and we saw Beth Cohen from Verizon was in the day one keynote. We're actually going to have her on our program for the third day. And right, teasing out that edge, most of it, telecommunications is a big discussion point here. I understand why. Telcos spend a lot of money, they are at large scale, and that NFV use case has driven a lot of adoption. So Deutsche Telekom is a headline sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation, did a big keynote this morning. AT&T's up on the main stage, Verizon's up on the main stage, you know Red Hat and Canonical all talk about their customers that are using it. You know, we just talked to Netronome about telecommunications. Everybody here, if you're doing OpenStack, you probably have a telco place because that's where the early money is and it tends to be, there's the network edge, then there's the IoT edge, and some of the devices there. So it was was one of the buzzy things going in and definitely is one of the big takeaways from the show so far. >> Well, Stu, I also think it's a major prove point for OpenStack, right. Bandwidth needs are not going down, that's pretty clear, with all the things you mentioned. Throughput is going to have to go up, services are going to have to be more powerful, and so all these different connected devices and qualities of service and streaming video to your car. So if OpenStack can build a back plan, a data plan for OpenStack that can do that, which it looks like they are doing, right, that's a huge prove point downstream from the needs of a telco, so I think that's super important for OpenStack that it's usable enough and robust enough to do that and that's one of the reasons I think it gets talked about so much. The nice thing is this year compared to my comparisons of previous years of OpenStack Summit, telco is not the only game in town, right. Enterprise also got a lot of play and there's a lot of use cases there too. >> And just to close out on that edge piece, really enjoyed the conversation we had with John and Kendall who had worked on the container space. Talking about the maturation of where Cinder had gone, how we went from virtualized environments to containerized environments. And even we teased out a little bit that edge use case. I can have a really small OpenStack deployment to put it at that edge. Maybe that's where some of the serverless stuff fits in. I know I've been, I tell my team, every time I get a good quote on serverless, let's make a gem out of that, put it out there, 'cause it's early days, but that is one of those deployments where I need at the edge environments, I need something lightweight, I need something that's going to be less expensive, can do some task processing, and both containers and potentially serverless can be interesting there. >> Yeah, I mean, even in our Canonical discussion with the product manager for their OpenStack distribution, right, containers are all over that, right, containers are just a way of packaging, there are some really interesting development pipelines that are now very popular and being talked about and built on in the container space. But containerization actually can come into play multiple points in the stack. Like you said, the Canonical distribution gets containerized and pushed out, it's a great way of compartmentalizing and upgrading, that's what the demo on stage today was about. Also, just with a couple of very short scripts, containerizing and pulling down components. So I think again, my second favorite thing after the edge today was just showing that actually containers and OpenStack mix pretty well. They're really not two separate things. >> Right, and I think containerization is one of those things that enables that multi cloud world. We talked in a number of segments today, everything from Kubernetes with Brian Stevens as to how that enables that. Reminds me at Red Hat Summit last week we talked a lot about OpenShift. OpenShift's that layer on top of OpenStack and sits at that application level layer to allow be to be able to span between public or private clouds and we need that kind of you know that to be able to enable some real multi or hybrid cloud environments. >> Yeah I mean, containers and in fact that Kubernetes layer may end up being the thing that drives more OpenStack adoption. >> Yeah, and the other thing that's been interesting, just hallway conversations, bumping into people we know, you know trying to walk around the show a little bit, as to people that are finally getting their arms around, okay, OpenStack from a technology standpoint has matured and you know they either need it to clean up what was their internal cloud or building something out, so real deployments. We talked about it yesterday in the close though. They're real customers doing real deployments. It's heartening to hear. >> Yeah I mean, one of those conversations, I ran into somebody at a hyperscale company, a friend of mine, and you know they are building out, internal OpenStack clouds to use for real stuff, right. >> But wait, hyperscale, come on, John, we can give away. Is this something we have on our phone or something we, I'll buy and use? >> One of those big folks. >> There's a large Chinese company that anybody in tech knows that's supposed to be doing a lot with OpenStack. We heard definitely Asia, very broad use of OpenStack. Been a theme of the whole show, right, is that outside the US where we tend to talk a lot about the public cloud, OpenStack's being used. An undertone I've heard is certain companies that start here in the United States, it's sometimes challenging for a foreign company to say I'm going to buy and use that, absolutely that is a headwind against a company like Amazon. Ties back to we had a keynote this morning with Edward Snowden and some of those things. What is the relationship between government and global companies that have a headquarters in the US and beyond. >> Yeah I think it's too soon to say where the pendulum, how the far the pendulum is going to swing. I'll be very interested in the commentary for next year to see have we moved away from more of the centralized services dominating the entire marketplace and workload into more distributed, more private, more customizable. For all those reasons, there's a lot of dynamics that might be pushing the pendulum in that direction. >> And one of the things I've liked hearing is infrastructure needs to be more agile, it needs to be more distributed, more modularized, especially as the applications are changing. So I feel like more than previous summits I've been at, we're at least talking about how those things fit together. With everything that's happening with the OpenStack Days, the Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, Ceph, other open source projects, how those all fit together. It feels like a more robust, full position as opposed to , we were just building a software version of what we were doing in the data center before. >> My impression was the conversation at times had been a little more internally focused, right, it's a world unto its own. Here at this summit, they're definitely acknowledging there's an ecosystem, there's a landscape, it all has to interoperate. Usability's a part of that, and then interoperability and componentization is a part of that as well. >> The changing world of applications. We understand the whole reason we have infrastructure is to run those applications, so if we're not getting ready for that, what are we doing? >> I don't want to put words in their mouth, but I think the OpenStack community as a whole, one of their goals, you know, OpenStack needs to be as easy to run as a public cloud. The infrastructure needs to be boring. We heard the word boring a lot actually today. >> Yeah and what we say is, first of all, the public cloud is the bar that you were measured against. Whether it is easier or cheaper, your mileage may vary, because public cloud was supposed to be simple. They're adding like a thousand new features every year, and it seems to get more complicated over time. It's wonderful if we could architect everything and make it simple. Unfortunately, you know, that's why we have technology. I know every time I go home and have some interaction with a financial institution or a healthcare institution, boy, you wish we could make everything simpler, but the world's a complicated place and that's why we need really smart people like we've gotten to interview here at the show. So any final comments, John? >> No, I think that sums it up. Those are my favorite things for today. I'm looking forward to talking to a lot of customers tomorrow. >> Yeah, I'm really excited about that. John, appreciate your help here. So there's a big party here at the show. They're taking everyone to Fenway Park for the Stacker party. Last year it was an epic party in Austin. Boston's fun, Fenway's a great venue. Looks like the rain's going to hold off, which is good, but it'll be a little chillier than normal, but we will be back here with a third day of programming as John and I talked about. Got a lot of users on the program. Really great lineup, two days in the bag. Check out all the videos, go to SiliconANGLE.tv to check it all out. Big shout out to the rest of the team that's at the Dell EMC World and ServiceNOW shows, be able to check those out and all our upcoming shows. And thank you, everyone, for watching theCUBE. (technical beat)

>> Man: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. (energetic music) >> Bryan, good to see you again. >> Bryan: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. I said, "Good to see you again." We thought we had you on before, but maybe not. But anyway-- >> Bryan: I have lots of Rackers. >> We feel like Rackspace is one of ours, with theCUBE alone. Red Hat Summit, obviously a big show for the industry. Big show for Rackspace. But your focus is on OpenStack, you're the general manager of the OpenStack business. You guys started OpenStack, I mean, you and some others. But it was really the seed and the vision of Rackspace. So bring us up to date as to where you are now. >> Yeah, I see your point. It kind of goes back to 2010, where Rackspace and NASA essentially co-invented OpenStack and opened it up as a community project, and made it open source. Again, the intent was, how do you help leverage the innovation of a community to help build cloud infrastructure? At that time, it was really focused on public and private cloud. Rackspace over the years, certainly, our public cloud was built on OpenStack and we continue to do a lot of that focus in upstream innovation and contributing in, how do you make this platform scale very massively? Over the last several years, where we've seen great adoption of OpenStack specifically, though, is in private cloud solutions. We have built a practice over the last several years building, deploying, and operating private clouds for customers in our data centers, in their data centers, third party data centers. And that's where we've seen a lot of growth in that. >> Bryan, I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little bit. I know you and I are going to be back here in Boston down the road at the Hynes for OpenStack Summit next week. But when you hear the general discussion, OpenStack has changed a lot in the last few years. So there are people that throw stones and are like, "Oh, well, it's done, it's over." Sounds like you've got a good, robust business. Tell us where are people using it, how are they using it, what is it replacing, or helping them grow their business? >> OpenStack itself, if you think of this arc of an open source project in the rapid innovation, how quickly it's matured, over the last couple years OpenStack itself has really become a solid platform. Infrastructure as a service. In fact, I think I heard a comment as of the Barcelona summit where an analyst or media or somebody said, "OpenStack is now boring." Because a lot of the drama or rapid change has really come out of it, many of the core projects have very much matured. You do hear, "Is OpenStack dead? "Are people going straight to containers on bare metal? "Is this the end of the space?" In practice, we are seeing it is still, how am I consuming or building cloud-native apps? I'm consuming cloud services, and certainly in a private cloud context I'm looking for that power and agility that I see from a public cloud, but delivered in a private cloud form factor. We're still seeing huge adoption for OpenStack in that use case. >> Well, there's a lot of misconceptions about OpenStack over the years, and part of it is it was just sort of put out there and said, "Okay, let's see what happens." But I remember when it went public, John Furrier, other co-host of theCUBE, called it a Hail Mary against Amazon. >> Bryan: Yeah. >> Okay, well, in a way, people needed some kind of alternative. And it's really emerged as the only, correct me if I'm wrong, really the only open platform to build private clouds on. >> Bryan: Yeah. >> And when you say you hear, "Oh, is OpenStack it?", you hear that from a lot of the legacy enterprise companies who are sort of doing their own proprietary private cloud. To your point, it's become a platform with momentum. Further thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I think to your point that those that are really saying it's dead and they're doing their own proprietary cloud, that's really just virtualization at scale. They're not really consuming cloud services in the same framework that OpenStack delivers it. It is still a vibrant and growing platform. We're seeing it as the platform of choice for not just, how do I move virtualized workloads, but even for containers and other orchestrated solutions on top of that as well. It really is this underpinning technology that people are consuming for private and hybrid types of scenarios. >> Red Hat would argue, I wonder if you could weigh in on this, that in order for you to build a true hybrid cloud, we use the term true private cloud, we can extend that to true hybrid cloud, you've got to have a sort of modern infrastructure that's open on-prem. Or else you're going to be just force-fitting square pegs in round holes. >> I think there's a lot of validity to that. Especially when you think about the concept of portability or leveraging moving applications between different platforms. If I have a truly siloed infrastructure, I don't have that capability. Whereas if you look at leveraging these open platforms of OpenStack and the tooling that I could use on top of that, cloud forms and ether services, and certainly as I move into paths and containers, I now have much more portability on where I can deploy and operate these different technologies. >> Bryan, congratulations. You guys are an Innovation Award winner. Can you talk a little bit about the solutions and what you guys are working closely with Red Hat to give to your customers? >> It's really exciting. We were awarded one of their Innovator of the Year awards for cloud infrastructure. The way this came about is, Rackspace and Red Hat have a mutual customer that really came to us where they were looking for a private cloud delivered as a service. They're looking for the operational expertise that Rackspace brings in operating these technologies at scale, but were looking for a fully certified Red Hat stack. At that time, we didn't have an offering around the Red Hat OpenStack platform. We obviously have a long-standing relationship with Red Hat, and support a number of Red Hat technologies across our businesses, but in the OpenStack space we had not productized or brought to market a main service around the Red Hat OSP Platform. And so we partnered very closely with them to bring this solution to market. But it's not as simple as just saying, "Voilà, now we have our Red Hat offering." Our focus is really to bring the operators' perspective to it. So we spent eighteen months in total, if you think about from when we really kicked off this effort with them, deploying and operating and scaling and testing, and going through all the stages of patching, and upgrading and running different workload profiles and really, scalability testing. And feeding back a lot of innovation into the Red Hat team. It led to a number of enhancements that have come in later releases of RHEL OSP, which allowed us to really get to a platform that we could stand behind, provide as a main service and deliver a four nines availability SLA around it. This is the offering that we brought together. We're being recognized for some of those innovations that we fed back into it. We consume their Distributed Continuous Integration environment, so through the DCI platform we execute over 1500 tests on a daily basis, which allows us to deliver the latest release of RHEL OSP to our customers within two weeks of a given major release. We made a number of networking plainly-needed enhancements in how can we break out the bouncing from the control plane? Things that allow us to deploy and operate these solutions at a much larger scale. >> Maybe if you could speak to one of the challenges we've heard for OpenStack for years is, it's kind of complicated, and how do we do this? And I have to think, the Red Hat service and support model partnered with the fanatical support from Rackspace should be able to address some of those concerns for customers. >> That's honestly where I think we've found the most success with customers is, OpenStack itself is a very powerful tool. But it is complex. It's not something that you're just going to download and run on a VM in your laptop to gain experience with it. >> Stu: Built by rocket scientists! What do you expect? >> Literally, quite literally! So the complexity does continue to be a barrier to adoption for many enterprises. That's where our focus of being the operators and delivering it as a service has been so key for many customers. And then, given that fully compliant or certified stack from Red Hat, the software assurance that comes with that has been a great fit to a lot of customers who really grow. >> You mentioned platform as a service. Stu, earlier, you made the comment of The Platform Formerly Known As PaaS. There's a lot of discussion about PaaS, well, it's really not here anymore. Can you guys, at least start with Bryan, maybe Stu, you can chime in, what's happening with PaaS? Is it getting subsumed? I often say infrastructure's a service plus, or a SaaS minus. What's happening with PaaS? 'Cause when you talk to companies like Oracle, it's like, "Oh, our PaaS business is rockin'!" So what's really happening out there? >> I'm sure you have thoughts on this, too. I believe that PaaS is still a very strong plane. That's where many organizations, now they're embracing cloud and cloud-native development, are looking to move up the step and leverage more fabric-like services. Things that a PaaS can provide them, that integrated development environment. How do I make it easy to consume different data services? Removing the coarse-grained building blocks that I would otherwise have to orchestrate or manage myself. So we do see a lot of adoption for that. It's kind of that progression, as I'm moving up, I'm moving into cloud-native designs and architectures. Now I'm looking to really empower and enable my developers to consume these fabric services. Moving up the stack. >> Comment I'll make on it is, if you look at what's happening with the container space, you heard about what Red Hat talked, is how they take that piece. I want to be able to take my application, have how I built that and have some flexibility as to where that lives. And that was one of the core values of what PaaS was going to offer because, if I want to do Red Hat as the AMP with OpenShift, I want to do it on-premises, I want to do it in AWS, I want to do it with Google, I have that flexibility. Maybe we're just not calling it PaaS anymore. >> Yeah, I think that's good. I think if you look at the move to containerization, there are still those other components or services that I need to consume. How am I solving for identity and networking and storage and all these other components that go into it? This is where some of the PaaS frameworks can help that. >> Just one piece. Rackspace has a really interesting portfolio of services. You're partnering with all the big cloud guys. You've got private cloud. What do your customers think when you say hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, how does that fit in to where they are today and where they're making their strategy for cloud going forward? >> Again, Rackspace does represent a very large portfolio. We are the managed cloud company. I obviously am very focused on our private cloud and OpenStack, but we have as practices, we help enable customers to either migrate to, deploy or operate on Amazon web services. Certainly, the Azure platform, and recently we announced Google Compute, providing support for that. We have customers that are coming to us looking for help in architecting or moving to these. But the reality is almost all customers, and they touched on that during the keynote here, we live in a multi-vendor strategy or multi-cloud strategy. Certain clouds, either geographically or feature-set-wise are better suited for certain applications or workloads. Many of our customers are living in that hybrid cloud world, where I'm leveraging multiple different platforms depending on workload placement or other rules to that. Where Rackspace has really stepped it is providing that cloud expertise and helping them leverage that, providing tooling to help them deploy and operate in these different environments. In some cases where it's portability, move the same application around, but oftentimes it's really workload placement and how do I more effectively use it. >> We were talking in our open about the bromide from Marc Andreessen in Software's Eating The World, and the implication, tying that into Benioff's statement that there'll be more SaaS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies. You're seeing some big SaaS tech companies like Workday and Salesforce, and Infor's always been there, moving to the Amazon cloud. And others who are maybe saying, "Well, I'm not sure I want to move to the Amazon Cloud." So my specific question is, relative to SaaS takeup on things like OpenStack, what are you seeing there? >> Ironically, certainly in private cloud, that's probably one of our biggest areas of growth is companies that are launching SaaS platforms for all the same reasons that they would be using an AWS to back that, right? They have the agility and rapid growth and elasticity that they can build into it, but they're running their platform, and depending on HR, you mentioned Workday, we have another great example. Ultimate software. They run their platform. Again, it's HR management and other services they want to run in a private cloud context, but deploying that framework where they can leverage cloud-native deployment. OpenStack has been a great fit for that, and helped them grow and scale. >> What's next for you guys in your world of OpenStack? Can you give us a little road map, and what we should expect going forward? >> For us, very specifically, if you focus on the IaaS layer, we continue to be very focused on operational efficiencies. How are we helping customers get the right unit economics out of a private cloud? Getting to greater densities, higher performance, more optimal usage of their cloud as we bring more visibility to actual capacity planning and capacity management, and make sure they're really leveraging or growing their cloud as they can. And then certainly from a feature set where we continue to move up and adopt these other services. I know we touched on earlier on the PaaS. This is an area where we're starting to get a lot of customer demand saying, "Can you help us in this area? "Are there things that you could be doing?" Going straight to native Kubernetes or looking at the different PaaS frameworks like OpenShift or Cloud Foundry. These are areas that we're starting to work more and more to potentially bring services to help customers really leverage these platforms. >> Paul Cormier was talking about how, you know, early days of the Cloud everybody thought everything was going to Amazon and so forth. But everything is going to the Cloud. Whether it's a private cloud or a public cloud, I know somebody told me the other day they're running an application in VMS. Okay, so some stuff never dies. But generally, the world will be cloud. Maybe we'll stop using the words like cloud and digital. Look at a camera! It's not a digital camera. Your thoughts on that? You buy that? >> No, I think you're spot-on. There's a long tale, there's still a lot of AS/400 out there. Although with OpenPOWER, maybe you could make the argument it's coming to OpenStack anyway. It is. If you think about any greenfield development, it's all being done in cloud-native ways. If you look at folks coming out of school and new application development, nobody's developing in the context of bare metal or legacy client/server apps that are built in that framework. I think even as enterprises continue to replatform services, they're moving into that cloud way. So they can take the long-term benefits of agility and cost-savings they're looking for. So we'll become ubiquitous. You're right, at some point, we're going to stop calling it cloud. It's just the way you're consuming infrastructure. >> Final question I have for you. A piece that I hadn't heard enough about when it comes to OpenStack is that kind of application modernization and replatforming. How does OpenStack fit into that discussion with your customers? I'm worried we talked in the keynote this morning about, it's like, oh, okay. We're going to do new stuff, but we might move the old stuff. We're not just moving the old stuff and leaving it, right? >> You're absolutely right. If you think of enterprises that are adopting or going all-in on OpenStack, they have, if you go back to the pets vs. cattle analogy everybody knows, they have lots of pets that they need to care for. We've looked at it and we've actually worked very hard with many customers on, how do I leverage things like Ceph to back Nova, and help bring things like live migration and other services that help OpenStack still cater to those pets and not force them in a full cloud-native model. How can I still deliver some amount of resiliency and failover in the infrastructure so the app doesn't have to be aware of it, and that way they can have one environment to run both new cloud development, but also still care for those legacy apps. >> Excellent. Bryan, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you guys. >> Enjoy the rest of the show. >> Bryan: Thank you. >> Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest at theCUBE. We're live from Red Hat Summit in Boston. Be right back. (energetic music)