>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live, 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. >> Welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Orlando, Florida for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Stu Miniman is my co-host. Three days, we're in our third day. Our next guest, Lee Howard, Chief Technologist Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Welcome to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Oh, absolutely love any chance I get to hang out with you two, so. >> Love the technologist angle because I gotta ask you first questions. Cisco really kinda put the hard stake in the ground in their opening keynote. Old way, an architecture slide. Everyone's like "Oh yeah, a slide, yeah, firewall." New way, circle, cloud, a lot of services. They recognize the world's changed. Network's not going away, you guys are in the storage business, that's not going but it's changing. What's the key change that your customers and your Cisco, the customers, should know about going on right now that they should pay attention to? >> Yeah, I think from NetApp's perspective, the big focal area we have is turning the corner that we're no longer an infrastructure or a hardware provider. We're data management, we're software driven. And I think that story, if you've been watching us on Wall Street, has resonated very well, very positively received, but it's not just more architecture We're really rearranging ourselves, putting our money where our mouth is, and the focal point going forward is you know, how do we change from a mean time between failure as the measuring stick to mean time to resolution? How do we do it more intuitive, you know? The messaging here at Cisco Live has been absolutely around that, of how do we do policy-driven automation? How do we do so in an intuitive fashion? And then have the adaptability to where it's not a three or five year refresh cycle, but how are we continually developing and delivering insights and helping improve environments on a daily basis? >> One of the things that's pretty consistent we're seeing is obviously, as the market understands what you guys are doing you guys have been doing this for a while. We've been following NetApp. You were doing cloud very early on with AWS. Certainly, you're very customer-driven as well. But you're seeing some change happen because of the scale aspect with the cloud, change is constant. So really having managing the change with the tech is critical. And that's more software science. Can you just share your vision on that? Because to have evolutionary change from a scale standpoint, meaning not the same as it was yesterday, more data growing, what is the core tenets of the architecture? What should customers be thinking about? Because if change is the constant, the tech can't be a one size fits all, what's going on? What makes this model work for you guys? >> We have more key constituents out there than what we did five years ago. And so, in that comes more concerns, more factors on how we need to do our development cycles going forward. And so instead of this, you know, every three years there's a refresh and that's our big update push, we're on a six month cadence. And if you look from, you know, ONTAP moving from 8.x to 9.1 we're seeing, at times, 40% improvement. That customer has purchased nothing, that environment has changed zero. But we're continuing to develop a better product on a software-based developmental scale rather than, you know, having to wait for the hardware to get swapped out. And I think that's where we're seeing a lot of success. >> One follow up question, so before, I know Stu's got a question, I'll get in there, but how has that changed your relationship to the customers? What has changed, 'cause we know the old way, what's the new engagement model with the customers? >> There were absolutely growing pains because, you know, there was perceptions out there whenever George first took us down this road that you guys are old guard, you know, you're a filer company and that's it. And it took a while to gain the credibility to be able to enter into these newer conversations and really be up-leveled, higher up in the org chart to be able to say, you know, this no longer just an execution partner. We're a strategic partner to really be able to go to market with and build that out. And it's that data pipeline from edge to core to cloud with an application pipeline on top of it. I view it like a utility grid within a city. You know, if you walk into any room in that city, you flip on a light switch, you expect for that light to turn on and illuminate the room like the top of my head is in this environment right now. But, you know, it's understanding that you have to have that data availability regardless of who your constituency is out there. And from, you know, our sensor endpoint, be that a person, be it a device, to where that is consumed, that entire continuum, we're the only people out there that are going to be able to deliver that in as efficient way and as seamlessly as we do. >> Yeah, Lee, and I love the vision that you talk about there. We're talking about multi-cloud, IoT, it's not the network appliance that I knew of 20 years ago. Help connect the dots for us. Because when I look at the Cisco NetApp partnership, the biggest piece of that is FlexPod, and many people will be like, "oh Flexpod has been around for eight years, "I take filers, I take networking, I take servers, "I wrap 'em all up together, put together a solution." It's simple, but, you know, maybe not, you know, it's not multi-cloud, it doesn't fit into some of these new paradigms. Where's the modern applications? Where is the multi-cloud? How does the software message and, you know, this convergent infrastructure solution fit together? >> We've got kind of three real key constituents that you have to be able to deliver a solution to nowadays. You've got the traditional IT curators and stewards, you've got the software devs, and you have operations. And if you can go through and find ways for them to collaborate and speak the same language, it comes down to a dialect. And if you can be that Rosetta Stone, to be the translation layer between those, that's how businesses can start planning and taking you going forward. So, yeah, we're gonna have those traditional pieces of the stack that are gonna be in there. Those are necessities. But it's layering in the, you know, app dynamics from Cisco and giving folks a way to say, here is what our growth plan needs to be to start migrating to the cloud. You have our partnerships that we've set up with AWS, Amazon, Google Cloud. You have Cisco's partnerships that they've set up there to where, you know, they're choosing to run NFS on us. You know, we're getting pulled into deals on that. >> Yeah, no, I love that. One of the patterns we've been seeing from customers is step one is you have to modernize the platform and that has to have a lot of the same pieces of what I'm doing if I'm in public cloud. And then I can modernize the applications on top of it. >> And the refactoring of those applications as you're evaluating that, is I don't wanna just bolt on a capability. I want to extend my existing presence out into this new realm. And I think that's been the delineating factor whatever you're looking at, it's not a heavy lift from adding proficiencies. You're just changing the location where you're executing your applications. >> Lee, I wanna get your thoughts on the tech, now you mentioned before that you guys are changing your relationships, certainly you have a technology advantage, there's some good tech there, hardware and software, even though you're emphasizing more software, but there's also now business impact. You're now becoming a business partner. And there's, I won't say business technology, but there's the outcomes are driving everything if it's the system holistically with cloud. So, in the successful models today, open source has proven through generations that co-development has become a very big part of today's collaboration where you don't have to have the other guy to lose to win. >> Yes. >> And, so collaboration and co-creation is a big part of why DevNet's successful. >> Absolutely. >> A big why cloud is successful, open source is successful, you guys are kind of alliance program that requires integration. You have that kind of a posture there. What's the secret sauce for you guys going forward? How do you see the trajectory of the alliances, the partners? 'Cause at the end of the day, integration becomes critical. >> Absolutely. >> The cloud, what's your vision on this direction? >> So we had to take a step back and really get to know who we were at the time. And there was a mentality of make the world NetApp. And we wanted to be disruptive as much as possible, and you can't have the monarchies of IT anymore. It has to be a democracy. You have to have a coalition of folks that are bringing best of breed to bear and especially in the open source model out there, you're getting new titles, new ways of being able to innovate that are being posted daily and curated daily. So if we can be that common broker between these, it's no longer a layer one through four conversation. It's not layer one through seven. It's that layer eight, speaking the dialect of the end user, and if you can articulate those eight layers and be able to do so in a way saying that, you know, we're great at what we do, we also need you to be great as well and put that best foot forward and be that willing partner. You find that if you can be at the central junction point of that, that, you know, the rest of the business, the rest of the org starts going and then that message really starts resonating. >> So the next question I wanna ask you is obviously enabling technology is kind of what you're getting at, let's have that enablement where people can do development whatever that is, solution and/or code or whatever it could be. What should people know about NetApp? What's the one thing or few things that makes NetApp an enabling capability for this new world order that's happening around this new development environment? >> Well, I think it's the focus that's out there that, you know, we're not trying to push a box or a skew. We are a portfolio company with a lot of different ways to be able to consume, and the focus has always been on the end user. How do you want to interface with your data on a day-to-day basis? And then collecting the feedback loops. I think that's something a lot of companies out there want to pontificate and force solutions out there. Ours are how can we co-opt together? You know, we're taking a lesson. >> So the data is the key? >> The data is the key. And if you can rally around that and pool the right resources together, I think you end up with a solution that everybody's able to get ahead with. >> Lee, one of the areas where that's critically important is IoT. >> Yes. >> Most customers we talked to, they're early in the discussions, some of them are rolling out, a lot of listening, a lot of figuring out, lot of diversity in what people are doing. Where are the customers at and how is NetApp engaging? >> Well, you're finding that you're not, you know, ten years ago, you would go very deep into one specific vertical and that's how solutions were set up. That's completely fell on its side to where we're seeing machine learning IoT as a data pipeline that's going horizontal and going across all customers out there, and those that it's either you are above the line and you're taking advantage of this or you're gonna be fledgling in two to three years. And so, where we're really wanting to go with this is articulating from that end point, you can get into ONTAP, and you're able to carry this and go regardless of where you need to execute those applications. And we've got co-opt with Jasper, we have co-opt with Kinetic from Cisco to help securely onboard that data at the edge, at the fog, depending on what the use case is. And then being able to normalize it and be able to move it, sort it, curate it, and move, because data, right now, I mean, that's the new oil. And so if you can combine that and turn it into information which is adding understanding to that data, you've got a recipe to really start delivering as I said in the keynote out there, it's changing the I in IT from information to innovation. It's innovation technology. >> What's the data-driven story? Obviously, data-driven has been around, it's been one of those things that's kind of in, like, digital transformation. It's been kicked around as a, you know, management practice and also a technical architecture concept. You talked about data-driven in your talk here at Cisco Live. What did you talk about in your session? >> Yeah, the big focal point out there was that there are new IT imperatives that require us to change the way that we approach defining problems. And if you can change the way that you define a problem, it's gonna set you on the road to come up with a more intuitive solution. And so going through, we've got use cases of hospitals that are out there where readmission rates are being dropped. Sepsis mortality rates are being dropped. Because we're no longer having a bifunctional area or bidepartmental silo in environments. We're trying to go through and shatter silos out there so that we have a good standard platform for information sharing. You know, consumer or patient, regardless of where you're at, that value chain of how they're able to get data from source to innovation has been the primary focal point of what we've been driving towards. >> Lee, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate your insight. Very candid, very direct and articulate on that app. I gotta ask you the question around the show, for the people that couldn't make Orlando this year, what's the big story coming out of Cisco Live? You know, if you step back and look down at the show, what's the big story? >> I mean, we're coming off of five back-to-back quarters of double-digit growth according to IDC, and so, you know, there's a trajectory, but we're wanting to get to that next gear and ramp up. So you've heard some of the other of my party come on here and speak of managed private cloud, talk about, you know, the industry focus and I think what you're gonna see out of us is continuing to be that data authority, but doing so in an easy to consume fashion so that, you know, the layperson out there is gonna be able to garner the same insights the way that, you know, any large industry player would be able to as well. It's the democratization of data. >> Democratization of data. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist in theCUBE breaking it down for you. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, more coverage, stay with us as we are going into the end of day three coming up. Stay with us. We'll be back with more after this short break. (upbeat music)

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

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live. We were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier your host with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg. Welcome to theCUBE. You are the Director of Product Management Converged Infrastructure Group at NetApp. >> Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. >> One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean I've wrote stories back when Tom Georges was the CEO when Amazon just came on the scene. NetApp has been really into the cloud and from the customer's standpoint but now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now startin' to be mindful. >> Absolutely. >> Of how to maximize the scale and with All Flash kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? >> So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp, is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco and in that we have got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for Healthcare which is in FlexPod we've been doing horizontal application so far which are like the data bases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical our application, the first one we're looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for Healthcare. That's the first piece that we are addressing. >> What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod's been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it because Cisco's CEO was onstage today talking about Cisco's value proposition, about the old ways now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool, new things going on with FlexPod. >> Correct, so the All Flash FAS, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year as customers keep wanting to improve their infrastructure with better latencies and better performance the All Flash FAS has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double-digit growth over the last five quarters consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about, the managed private cloud on FlexPod. >> Yeah, Arun, I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So I think back to when Cisco launched UCS it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. NetApp with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins is talking about onstage, how do I modernize, how do I get you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from you know, a good virtualized platform to this is, I think you said managed private cloud, FlexPod in Cisco. >> Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on I need a VM, small, medium, large, and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket, then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure, then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure's working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some DSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized and therefore these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as a managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds, a cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. >> Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live you guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? >> So we, all these solutions we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that what we do is there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies agree. >> So it's tightly integrated. >> It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned, the marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team. That's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer he knows that both Cisco and NetApp teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it all. >> Yeah, over in one of the other areas that's been talked about this show we talk about modernization. You talk about things like microservices. >> Yes. >> Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? >> Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads, the cloud-native workloads or the type two native. Type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with a Cisco cloud center platform, which is the quicker acquisition. And we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we are dealing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team the ACI fabric is very important to them. So that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on Healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco, as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. >> Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So say you've got a customer, obviously you guys have a lot of customers together with Cisco, they're doing some complex things with the technology, but for the customer out there that has not yet kinda went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? 'Cause a lot of storage guys are lookin' at All Flash, so check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they gotta integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and say the competition? >> So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos, but the advantage of taking a converged infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore is reduces their deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. >> So they got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. >> Yes. >> Okay, great, now I'm gonna ask you another question. This comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. >> Yes. >> So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are custom to verticals. But with cloud one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that, because these verticals, they gotta get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? >> Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep their data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions. And the security of their data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second pieces are analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insight you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability all in their control so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for health care what it does is when you have All Flash FAS it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. [Interviewer] - Yeah. >> Plus the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up so I can give an example on that too. >> Well before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big megatrend. It's not really kinda talked much about but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPs, the performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. >> Correct. >> So it's just you've gotta have table stakes of great, fast storage. >> Yes. >> But it's gotta be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? >> Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One I can name the customer. So they'll come at our booth tomorrow, in a minute here. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with they need a hospital, fast. And they decided on FlexPod because within three months with the wire one's architecture and application they could scale their whole IT data center for health care. So that has helped them tremendously to get it up and running. Second is with the All Flash FAS they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. >> Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job. In following NetApps recent success lately, as always, NetApp's always goin' the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show? So I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ah-ha? >> So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level within 10 base networking, its data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing, where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution we can provide the subscription base through the managed private cloud through our managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we have come up with this solution which matches both these trends of Cisco as well as NetApp. >> And the number of connected devices going up every day. >> Yes. >> More network connections, more geo domains, it's complicated. >> It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. >> Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp at Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partnership. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando, Florida. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest David Arnette, who's a technical marketing engineer with NetApp. He's living in the heart of the show, which of course is The Knock. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu, it's good to be here. >> All right, so Dave, first before we get into it, give us a little bit about your background, where were you based and what your role is. >> Well, I'm based in Research Triangle Park, which is NetApp's East Coast headquarters, were basically right across from Cisco's East Coast headquarters. >> So we all know the RTP, those of us that work in tech. >> Right, so my role, I'm a technical marketing engineer on the FlexPod solutions team, so I build systems in the lab and then validate them, and then document them, and publish them for our customers to use to build similar systems for themselves. >> Okay, if we go with all the TLAs, or the TME from RTP or any in the NOC. (laughs) >> That's correct. >> All right, so you are not responsible for the network here, so we're not >> That's correct. >> gonna ask you why the network went down for a few minutes, (laughs) and people are troubleshooting everything with that. >> Thanks, I appreciate that. >> Why don't you explain NetApp and your role at The Knock. >> Well, NetApp is a big sponsor of this conference and one of the ways we do that is that we supply storage systems for the Network Operations Data Center. There's a lot of systems that have to run in addition to the actual network in order to make everything run, and those systems require data center resources, so we bring servers and storage to run all of the services necessary. >> Okay, and luckily I'm sure, everything's running really smoothly, there's never any challenges, and that's why it's just this great glass thing that we look at as we walk by. >> It just magically appears like that, right? >> All right, so give us a little bit of insight. You've done this at a few shows. What kind of things do you run in? What are the stresses and strains? And how does the architecture hold up? >> Well, we started Wednesday of last week putting The Knock together, and of course the room here was completely empty. There's nothing here, the rigging is laying all over the floor, and we end up with delays just because things are in the way. We can't put our equipment where it needs to be, then the power gets pulled in. We had the racks in place and then waited an hour or two for power to come in, and then another couple hours for the network drop to arrive before we could get connected to the outside world. So, it's always kind of a challenging, there's a lot of moving parts in order to get this thing off the ground. >> It reminds me so much of you talk about customer environments. All right, how does day zero go? Well, things like we interviewed one of your colleagues talking about FlexPod, FlexPod conversion, hyper-converged infrastructures help simplify that initial rollout, and then it should also help once you're up and running. So once you've got The Knock up and running, what's your team working on? Are there knobs you've gotta adjust? Are there outside stresses that need to concern you? >> Well, I'm happy to say that the storage and the data center infrastructure is one of the most reliable parts of The Knock, right? Once we get it up and running, it's more about monitoring and management than anything else. I'm personally monitoring to make sure that we're not running out of storage capacity, to make sure that everything is still online, and make sure that basically everything is running as smoothly as it can be. >> Okay, are you doing any analytics on this? Do you have hero numbers that come out after the show? >> We do, we participate in the session on Thursday, The Knock round table session, and so we're collecting all of the, all of the numbers, how much capacity we're actually using, kinda what the performance envelope of the system is and so on. >> It's interesting, when we talk about customers and their deployment one of the biggest challenges is "Okay, I'm gonna deploy this. "How long am I gonna have it, "and when am I gonna run out of storage? "When am I gonna need to grow?" It's kind of a unique beast when we're here at a show like this cause you've got some ideas, but what if something's really popular or stresses and strains? How do you plan for that, and has anything ever come up that you have to worry about? >> Well, we've never actually hit the wall yet. We try to be very careful. We've actually provisioned a considerable amount more capacity than we need, and the system that we've deployed is an all-flash FAS, so it's got performance to spare. So we really try and avoid any of those problems up front. We have seen in the past issues where the cameras and recording and such generated more data than we expected, but it was not more than we could handle. We had planned ahead and made sure we have plenty of extra capacity. >> Oh trust me, this is our ninth year doing theCUBE. In some of the early days we were scrambling. Luckily we actually work with a lot of storage companies, (laughs) so sometimes there's spare drives or things that we can grab because, yeah, it's more and more data, the devices get larger megapixels, higher resolution. It's challenging to deal with things like video. >> Yeah, it is pretty challenging and of course every time we do this, there are and more cameras, not just the data they produce, but the actual items that are producing it, so things really can grow very quickly. >> Yeah Dave, there any interest, are they playing with IoT here that brings data back? >> Not so much, I mean the video recording is more just for general monitoring and security purposes. There is, there's not a whole lot of deeper level analysis going on like on the video or anything like that. As far as the rest of the systems, everything is constantly being monitored, and for pretty much every system that we run, at the end of the week we'll kinda produce some metrics around what we saw and where the challenges were. >> Okay, you said at the end of the show there's a round table to talk about it. What are the users looking for? What kind of things do they learn going to a session like that? >> Well, they're really interested in how it's possible to bring such a huge scale network into existence, especially in such a short period of time, right? So we talk a lot about the deployment, and how the wireless access points get spread all over, and how all the applications come up and come online, and then take advantage of the networks that we put in place. They're really interested in the deployment details, because they're doing the same things in their own shops, and they're looking for guidance on how the experts do it. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I remember I read a book once, they're like you can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a conference, but there are some interesting lessons (laughs) that we learn going through some of these deployments. Any interesting points over your time working with The Knock? >> Well, we built this system to be really highly reliable. That's key for the operation of the show, right? We just can't take any chances that it goes down. We've had some incidents where the wrong circuit breaker gets switched, and so we're left with a failed over situation, but because the system was designed to withstand those kind of failures, it's really nothing but a thing. We flip the power back on and make sure the other half comes back alive, and we're back in action. >> All right, yeah, definitely I'm sure people's running around a little bit trying to fix those-- >> Oh yeah, as soon as lights go dark, man, there's chickens in the hen house. >> All right, and it's something we people can walk by, and is there tours of it? Is it a big plexiglass thing? (mumbles) >> Yeah, there's a, The Knock is actually all of our data center equipment is out on the floor for everybody to see. Rotalis supplied an enclosure and the cooling equipment, so we can run it right there in the middle of the floor and still keep it at proper data center temperatures. It's there all the time for everybody to come look at, but then there are tours daily, starting at noon I think, every hour on the hour. There's a tour related to more specific technologies like the wireless, and the routing and switching, and then of course the data center. >> And the stuff you're not using, you're doing Bitcoin mining on that now? >> That's correct. (laughs) No actually, we do run some, we do run some, oh, I can't even think of the name of the application now. It's one of, it's like not SETI, but something similar, folding at home or something like that to really just kind of drive the systems a little harder, and run them at an operational pace, more like what a customer would see. We actually, in terms of the entire infrastructure, we are way over-provisioned in terms of compute capacity and stuff. So we have some room to do that, and that's always an interesting number at the end to produce how many projects we closed in a folding at home scenario. >> Okay, so you've got half a week to set it up. How much time do they give you to tear the whole thing down? >> About 24 hours. (laughs) Yeah, it goes down really quickly, it's remarkable. >> Yeah, it is something. If you've ever, people, if you've been involved in these events, it takes such a long time to set things up, but they usually are designed to break it down and get out of town, on to the next thing. >> Yeah, all of the, all the equipment is in racks, pre-racked. It arrives in the rack and we just connect up the patch panels between the racks, and when the time comes to go, we just power everything off and pull the cables and roll it back into the crate. >> Do you do similar things at other events? >> We don't do similar things at other events. Cisco Live is actually the only show I know of that actually runs the operations as a centerpiece of the show. It's really a remarkable thing. >> It is, the network is obviously pretty critical here. >> Yeah, the attendees expect a world-class experience right? And so, our job is really to make sure that happens. >> All right, Dave, wanna give you the final word. Key takeaways you have coming to events like this? >> Well, it's really kind of an honor and a privilege, right? NetApp is really proud to be a part of what Cisco has going on here. We've got a lot of synergies with our FlexPod program, and so it's really great to be here and be a part of this show, and really specifically to work on The Knock team where I can say I had a hand in making it a success. >> Dave Arnette, really appreciate you joining, giving us some insight into some of the inner workings that help everything going on here at the show. >> Thanks very much. >> All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage here at Cisco Live Orlando 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veem, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to the live CUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain for theCUBE's coverage of Cisco Live Europe 2018, kicking off the new year with the big event. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, cohost of theCUBE. Our next two guests, Alfred Manhart is a Senior Director Channel and System Integrators for NetApp, EMEA of Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Benjamin Laplane, EMEA Chief Sales and Solutions Officer with Outscale. You guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Hi. >> Love this partner segment. NetApp, you have a customer on, partner, and you guys have an interesting relationship. Would one of you like to talk about your relationship with Outscale, and why are you guys here? >> I think engaging not only with the typical resellers and distributors is pretty key for us. We engage with service providers and cloud providers from 2012, 2013 ongoing. It's mainly to be the foundation for the services they are going to market with, and Outscale is out of France, one of our predominant service providers we engage with on a local level. >> How has the channel changed, because as the cloud service providers, and cloud creates such great agility and speed. You can get products out faster, MVPs and those things can be very specialized. How has your go-to-market changed with the cloud, accelerated it, changed the makeup, what's NetApp- >> First of all, the market is demanding it, so some of our traditional players go the services way and some service providers go the typical, traditional way so engaging and broaden up the ecosystem was pretty critical for us. Different engagement models are needed because the customers require different kind of consumption models. >> Good leverage, sales model, always a good business. Benjamin, talk about what you guys do. I want to ask you some specific questions about your business, on how you guys are advising and implementing solutions with customers, but first, take a minute to explain your business. >> Outscale is a cloud service provider. We built the company in 2010 and we've been providing public cloud solution for worldwide, so implementing in the U.S., in Europe, and in Asia for the past five years now. The objective is to be able to provide sovereignty and reliable cloud solutions for our customers worldwide. It's based on NetApp and Cisco FlexPod architecture. >> So you guys actually have a cloud yourselves? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And you bring that to customers? >> Yeah for the past five years, what we've been doing is developing our own orchestration layer that allow us to actually use the whole FlexPod architecture to provide infrastructure as a service for our customers. What we've been doing for the past year is actually package all the technology that we've been developing for the past years into a unique solution, which is TINA On-Prem, which is a private cloud solution ready to be deployed wherever you need to. >> I'll get back to the FlexPod in a minute, but I want to drill down on this notion of serving the customers, because there's a thirst for customization and specialization, whether it's an application, or some regional challenge on the data, certainly you see that with GDPR, it's coming down like a freight train, like a ton of bricks on everybody. So there's design challenges that are now upon the customers. How are you guys bringing the customers' solutions to them? Is it rapid engagements, is it ongoing? What's your relationship with your customers? >> So if we talk specifically about GDPR, but I think it's true for most regulation that comes out, Outscale had the chance to be able to develop their software with security design first. That means that it's designed for security, but also for privacy, so that's kind of give us the edge when talking about regulation enforcement and also all the process that we put in place around infrastructure management that allows for us to provide the best services for our customer, always aligned with the regulation that comes out. >> What are the biggest challenges your customers face with the cloud? >> I think most of them, so things improved a lot for the past years, but the first thing was everyone wanted to do it because that was kind of the name, the thing that you want to go into, now it's more big data or AI. The idea behind this is a company knows that the cloud is not an option, they will go to the cloud, the question is how, and why and when and how. So we try to help all these companies to decide what's the best for public cloud or private cloud. >> Alfred and Benjamin, I want you guys both to answer this next question. We've been observing and reporting on theCUBE, and certainly Cisco's validated it, that everyone kind of has some cloud thing going on. Yeah I put an app in there, it might be low-hanging fruit, test dev, or something non-critical, but all the work and energy and money being spent is kind of getting their act together on-premise, because they got to get cloud operations going, move from the old operating model to cloud-ready on-premises, and then do some hybrid cloud. Do you guys see it the same way, and if so, what specifically are they doing on, is it DevOps, is it pure operational, what are your thoughts? Start with Benjamin. >> So from where I stand, what I can see is we've seen companies for the past year that went full public cloud, and then other company that always stay back and say, no, we won't go to the cloud and we kind of things going into a balance point where basically all companies now realize that they need to have a part of their infrastructure, such as private cloud, for security, politics, regulation sometimes. The other places to decide what's going to be the perimeter, they going to be allowed to put into the public cloud. That's why now we are more talking about hybrid between public and private cloud, and that's one of the first major design of the solution that we developed. >> Are you saying that you're seeing some customers move completely from on-premises to cloud, full migrations? >> No, I think what I've seen is people that have, so the cloud was not made for them, finally decided that maybe it could have been useful for some of their operations, so I don't think it's always like an all-in move. You need to decide where's it's going to be good, depending on the perimeter, the context, the data, the cre-dee-city of the data. >> Alfred, on-premise activity. >> Heavy on the one side. (laughing) On the other side, I think you talked about test dev. A lot of people play around with test dev, this is mainly on a local level, behind the scenes, but if it then goes to backup or a disaster recovery, it goes up the productive stack. They are more interested if it's really going well, if the data resides in their country, if all the legislations are held. We currently see getting out of the test dev, and on the other side we of course see a trend that the customers are forced by the software Windows to go to the cloud. So Microsoft is going cloud. SAP is also going cloud, so it's not only a market trend, it's also a trend from the software end that they are forced to do something, and they want to keep control of their data. That's why data's a little bit different from going to the cloud, it's computing with the apps. >> Data's a huge issue. So how are you guys using NetApp? Talk about the FlexPod, you mentioned that earlier. >> Outscale, we've been using NetApp for the past six years, something like that, which is a pretty long time compared to the lifetime of a company. The thing as far as the most important thing was to be able to provide the bridge services for our customers. Even if we abstract some of the features, some of the value of the NetApp that we buy, we just keep the value for ourself to be able to deliver more services, more value to the end customer. That's how we've been doing things. The second thing is also when you want to deploy private, on-prem solution, it's always better and it's more reassuring for the customer when you use and you partner with one of the leaders on the market, such as NetApp. >> So when I hear people use the term enterprise class architecture, what does that mean? Does that mean certain maybe arrays? Is it configuration, is it network? What is enterprise class architecture mean to you? >> For me it's two things. So the first thing you have the architecture, and you also have the hardware that you're going to use to apply to this architecture. The thing is, I was talking about reliability. I think that's one of the major things is how much maintenance is it going to require, how it's going to impact your permissions for the user or for the end customer, and when you see the architecture that we've deployed, it's everything is redundant, it's not fail-safe, it's failure-proof, which is even better because that means that you know things are going to fail at some point, and you can't even allow yourself to have a failure where you can't serve the service to your customer. >> What's the biggest thing that you've learned in doing the cloud migration, cloud service provider, with customers over the past two years? What's the big aha moment that you've had? >> I think that's when you realize that even if you have some pattern that you can recognize for a specific customer, or for a certain type of customer, you have no magic recipe. That means that you always need to take a step back, look at the problem of your customers and try to think what's the best for my customer, and how can I bring the right services to him so he can add value to his market and his business? >> Alfred, you mentioned regulation, so the question to Benjamin is how does the role of storage play in a world where data and sovereignty issues come into play? Does it change the strategy? What's goes on for the folks that are really trying to solve this problem? >> I think we see more and more movement where basically even the customer want more managed services. I think it's always important to give the customer the hands so he can do whatever he want with his data. We are here to support him, to give him the best advices, the best practices about data management, but at the end is he accountable and responsible for these data. So at the end I think it's just we need to give the right tools to our customers so they do exactly what they want to do with the data and they don't have hidden policies apply to their own data. For example, replication of your data for safety measures. Maybe they don't want it to be replicated abroad, they want it to stay on the territory, so that's kind of a thing that you need to rethink about and give the right tools to your customers. >> Alfred, what are the top use cases that you guys have seen at NetApp for cloud services providers, and just in general the partners, because they're on the front lines serving customers. They need to have low cost, high performance gear, great software, we heard reliability. What are the use cases now that you're seeing? Are they broader use cases, are they more narrow? What's your- >> So of course, when you come from a storage perspective, you mainly aim for the infrastructure and for the storage-related services, which we are not where we are stopping, because we are working with Cisco on this validated designs going up the stack, so if you are not going up the stack regarding different workloads, going after the IOT, going after the analytics, going after the application layer, we will fail. So having a fair balance of partner that can offer the services from bottom to the top, that's very important. Of course, use cases like intelligent business analytics, going after SAP, going after SAP HANA, going after Microsoft, this is obvious that the partners and the customers are going that way. >> Benjamin, talk about what it's like working with NetApp. You happy with them? Some things that they've done that you think other suppliers should adopt? What's the mode of support from NetApp, what's the overall experience like? >> I think I would describe it as a strong partnerships. They are our exclusive partner for the storage as Cisco can be on the other brinks of technology that we are using. We have a strong relationship, we have a booth on the on-stand today so that's one of the reason why we're here. We also pushing with them with the whole, we were talking about analytics, we are talking talking about big data also. We have a lot of use cases, pretty amazing use case in resales in Europe, and also we give them a lot of feedback about how we use the hardware, what could be improved, and I think that's the kind of communication that makes a strong partnerships and bring value to both sides. >> NetApp's a very engineering-oriented company, I know them very well living in Silicon Valley, so I give 'em props for that. Question for you is when you hear someone say data-driven storage, or data-driven analytics, what does that mean to you as a partner of a storage supplier? >> For us, it's another way to look at the way we're going to provide service to our customers in the years to come. I think that customers is going to expect more and more services, more and more value, from the service that we're going to provide them, whether it's going to be storage, computer network, or even security. I think that's always a good thing for us to have more tools to build new technology for tomorrow. >> Great, and NetApp's channels and partners, what's the message from NetApp these days to the partners? You're enabling them, obviously you help them make money obviously, but- >> I think the biggest challenge is that we drive the ecosystem in the right direction. If we just stick to the traditional players, we will not be successful, so we have to expand the ecosystem. Going up to different player that are currently probably not in our radar, going up to ISVs that help us to really embrace the data from a value perspective, so our biggest, let's say, message to the channel is don't stay where you currently are, develop the channel with ourself. >> And certainly the relationship with Cisco is blooming for NetApp. >> It is, it's probably since six years, we have now around 8,700 joint customers. We go up the stack, we talk about strategic engagements on a IT SP perspective, so it's going in the right direction. Very important. >> As your competitors get distracted, and do things or doing things, you guys eating their lunch? Is that, (laughs) you smiling? >> Eating their lunch is probably not the word. >> Maybe a little croissant. Breakfast, or was it dinner, what's going on? Are you eating the breakfast, lunch, or dinner of the competitors? >> Currently I would say in French, I think we are jointly engaging on a croissant perspective. (laughing) So we're heading in the right way. So these partnerships are very important. >> It's always a great, fun time. It's been fun watching the storage, been watching NetApp for many years, I remember when they went public back in the dot com A days, they still keep their roots. Great to see you having some great success. Congratulations on a great partnership. It's theCUBE live coverage, here with NetApp and their partner inside theCUBE here at Barcelona at Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (digital music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's Ecosystem Partner. >> Welcome back to theCUBE coverage here in Barcelona, Spain. We are live at Cisco Live 2018 Europe. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder SiliconANGLE. My co-host Stu Miniman, analyst at WikiBon.com. Our next two guests is Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director Data Center Solutions at Cisco and Lee Howard, Chief Technologist, Global Industry Solutions and Alliances at NetApp. Great partnership here to talk about the tech involved in the partnership. Obviously, in the industry, it's pretty well known that NetApp's doing really well with Cisco. Congratulations. You guys have been enabling great partner dynamics lately, but all the action's been on the intersection between a raise, better, faster, cheaper storage, but also enabling software defined stuff, value. What's the check involved in the partnership? Why is it going so well? Lee, can you start? >> I think offering choice out there is the best thing that we can do. You've got data fabric from a NetApp perspective is that super interconnected highway and as many on ramps as we can build for folks to get on that highway. The more successful you're going to be able to see. I mean, the IDC numbers speak for themselves, prolific, double digit growth. I think we were at 56% last quarter, listed together on there. That's how tight this partnership's been. Leveraging that combined portfolio has given us a very competitive offering out there in the industry. >> Siva, I want to get your thoughts because actually Cisco, we've been... Stu and I love talking about networking, in Cisco in particular because the old days, provision the network and good stuff happens. Apps get built. Things get done. But with the Cloud, you see the shift where you've got DevOps culture, you got cloud-native happening. The real enabling technologies have to be beyond the network, so you guys have been successful with a variety of other things. What's the key things that's making you guys key partners in the ecosystem? What are you guys truly enabling? Is it network programmability? What's the secret sauce from Cisco's standpoint? >> If you look at the way Data Center has evolved in the last decade or so, the way customers are consuming technology is much more at a platform level. They want things simplified. They want to, as you just said, the innovation that's happening in the above layer, in terms of the software's tech and use cases, is just tremendous. They really want the platform to become simple and that's what Cloud did to you anyways. That level of simplification, that level of optimization, but still a best of breed, it is what got us together. We have continued to build world class platforms that started one way, started mainly looking at virtualization in those place over time. In the last four or five years or so, the amount of innovations we have brought on top of a FlexPod, which is a joined solution together, has been right at the cutting edge of where technology is going and where applications are landing. That, in a very large way, has become the key for the success between the two of us. >> We had talked Brandon on here earlier and he validated our thesis and WikiBon actually had a report that came out last year, in the middle of the year, called "True Private Cloud." It was the only research analyst firm that actually got this one right, in my opinion, which validated by you guys is that... Certainly any (mumbles) would argue that everything is moving to the Cloud, tomorrow. Certainly there's some cloud migration and some stuff in the Public Cloud, no problem. But what WikiBon did is they looked at the true Private Cloud numbers, meaning that the action where the spend is and where the buyers are doing the most work both refreshing and retooling is on premises. Because they're actually changing the operating model on premises now as a way, as a way, as a sequence, to hybrid and then maybe full Multi-Cloud or full Public Cloud, whatever they want to do. So that being said, Lee, what does that mean? Because certainly, I understand what a Cloud operating model is, but I'm talking about storage and networking. >> Yeah. >> What does that look like? Is that a full transformation? How long is that going to take? Your thoughts? Comment on that. >> We're seeing, you saw on the key note this morning them referencing brand new titles and new personnel, new human capital that's coming in. I think that is, both you're enabling and your barring the factor to changing how you're consuming resources on site. Cloud architects as they're coming in to prominence enterprise architects. I think we're getting to a point where there's enough of a intuition to the software that's enabling those consumption trends to shift, that it's now a way for not just those that have the inside information, but it's something that's consumable for the masses. I think 2018, you guys hit on DevOps, highly versatile model going forward and I think Multi-Cloud is going to be the right answer. >> John: The roles are changing. >> Roles are changing and we have been seeking to be that technology provider that regardless of where you're at in that journey, you're able to leverage our portfolio to be able to do it. >> John: Does the product change? >> The product, the tenets behind the product, not so much but I think the way that it's being leveraged does end up changing. >> Siva, your thoughts on this. >> You know, if you start to think about the earlier generation of Cloud, it was mainly seen as a capacity argumentation, mainly on the IS. It really started people to think that everything is moving to Cloud, but if you look at the innovation that happens in the Cloud, the Cloud in itself is a massive ecosystem and people want to go do that. So there is a huge reason why the cloud is successful, but that's not necessarily just taking everything on. That's not the trend. What you really see is customers now starting to reach that level of maturity to say hey, there is a tremendous value in what I can do and on-prim, the data gravity and the latency and those things. >> So you agree with the "True Private Cloud" report, the on-prim action is where? >> We continue to see that from our customers, you see it as option and things like that. We absolutely see that is real as well. >> Let's go back to the data center for a second because some people look at it, and it's like oh, well CI's been happening now for gosh, almost a decade now. HCI has a lot of buzz out there. We want to hear what you're hearing from customers because first of all, what we see is there's still the majority of people, still building their own. They're taking the pieces. FlexPod is a little bit different than say hyper-converged from a single skew, but you've still got to build your own CI. Big partnership >> Absolutely. >> There's a huge revenue. HCI has both Cisco and NetApp have pieces there. Where are the customers today? Why is CI still a meaningful part of the discussion today? >> I think it all comes down to scale and how you want to be able to interface. What do you want your data center to be like today? How are you staffed and proficient at implementing a solution and where do you want that data center to go tomorrow? I think CI and HCI absolutely have a place together in the data center, but as we see RFPs fundamentally shift to reflect the new way that infrastructure's being consumed, a cookie cutter approach that you get with a lot of HCIs isn't always going to be the answer. You want to have that full modularity, that full flexibility. It's in the title, it's FlexPod. You want to be able to have that versatility to address not just the initial scoping project but with Flash and able data centers, assets are staying on the books longer and longer. Those depreciation schedules are getting stretched out. Having the versatility, not just to live in today's operating environment, but the operating environment of tomorrow, I think is what's really driving that main stay of CI. >> Siva, we heard in the key notes this morning a lot of discussion about Multi-Cloud and management. Talk about Cisco and NetApp. How do you view those together? Where do you go to market together, co-engineer, things like that? >> Absolutely. If you guys look at what we did in the FlexPod, we created what we would fundamentally call or say code platform for data center. That was the biggest success. We had a lot of work loads and news cases. But in the last two to three years, what we have both done, because individually we have portfolio products that allow a Cloud journey. Cisco is a big proponent of Multi-Cloud and the journey to Cloud and proving customer the right platform so they can pick and choose when to go to Cloud and how to go to Cloud. There are similar assets from NetApp. What we have done is we have built FlexPod solutions that builds on top of on that leverage, is the Cloud Center products, NetApp's data fabric, some of their technology that's call location within the equinox and so on and so forth. What that has allowed is FlexPod as a platform has blossomed as the Cloud has grown because we now offer the choice. That also brought more customers to realize while these guys really provide me the journey to Cloud model. That is more new solution that we are building that continues to drive that mindset from both companies. >> Stu: Lee, you want to build on that? >> Yeah, providing that operational excellence to where you're able to come in and leverage these assets, not just day zero but through the entire lifespan of that asset and that's the... Quality of life improvements is a big thing from NetApp and Cisco's perspective as we're coming together and we're planning what the future state is going to look like. It's not just hey, this is the specific drive capacity you're putting in, that's yesterday's infrastructure. Tomorrow is all about what quality of life, how much time can we give back to those end users out there? >> So I have a question for you guys both. Lee, we'll start with you. You got the storage compute and switching cause you're leaders in those areas, what's next? What's driving the partnership? You talk about how you present the partnership with Cisco to customers. What's in it for me? What's new? What's fresh? What's the deal? >> The conversation we have out there a lot of times there's perception issues that we are the old guard of technology. FlexPod's been around seven going on eight years and they say what's fresh out there? Well, we're so much more than just the infrastructure piece. It's a combined portfolio. Cisco recently announced their partnership with Google Cloud. We have our NFS Native on Azure going forward. Leveraging those better together stories and each other's Rolodex to be able to come in and truly engineer next generation solutions, that's what's getting people excited. How are you going to set me up for success tomorrow, not just how are we going to be successful today on today's technology? >> Siva, how are you guys successful with that? How do you talk about the relationship because they have a unique capabilities, been around the block for awhile in the storage business? Look at the history of NetApp. Very interesting, very engineering oriented, very customer focused. >> Lee: 25 years. >> What's your position in this? >> I think you have two companies who have a tremendous technology focus in building, but what keeps this partnership going together is easily our customers. We are not young anymore in the partnership. We have over $10 billion of install based customers. We have over 8,000 customers. Just keeping up with those customers and providing them the journey however they want to go, it absolutely becomes our, it's our prerogative to make these customers successful in wherever they want to go next. That's a big driver for how we look at innovation. We continue to provide the capabilities that allows our customers to continue their journey and at the same time, we bring our innovation to make this platform successful. >> So I'm going to put you on the spot here, both of you guys. I know Stu's got a question. I got a couple minutes left. Kubernetes has put a line in the sand and separates the two worlds of developers. App developers, really just looking as a fabric of resource, they're creative, doing cool things. Then you've got the network storage software engineering going on under the hood, it's like a car. You're now an engine. You got to work together. What are you guys doing specifically to make that work, make the engine really powerful? >> In the context of Kubernetes, we are-- >> Under the hood. What's under the hood? Kubernetes is the line there, but you got to sit with that app. You got to make the engine powerful. You guys are working together. What's the sound like for the customers? Why NetApp and Cisco together? >> If you look back at our containerization, micro services that journey, we certainly again, same logic, same model. We are building an ecosystem there. We are developing joint solution that optimizes how Kubernetes and Cisco and Google have made several announcements on how we are bringing innovation and infrastructure automation level, network scale level, that allows a massively scalable container environment of Kubernetes environment to be deployed on top of a Cisco infrastructure. NetApp's innovation around Kubernetes, around building the plug-ins for how the plug-ins interact with the storage subsystem that allows us to say if you are deploying a Kubernetes environment, if you are deploying the best of breed, you certainly need the platform that understands and scales with that. >> All right, Lee. Your differentiation for that power engine under the hood with Cisco. >> It's infrastructure is code. That's what we are together and I don't think that across the competitive landscape that they are, everybody else is really embracing it in such a fashion. It's speaking the language that these developers are wanting to do and we're marrying that up with the core tenets that made us an IT powerhouse together. >> It was the developer angle John- >> All right. (laughs) >> We've been doing so many of these together. Absolutely where we wanted to go. >> Stu and I get the-- Infrastructure is code. The great shows. We do the cloud-native, got Kubernetes, we do under the hood. This is a big journey for customers. There's a lot of fud out there and they want to know one thing. Who's going to be around in the future? Having the partnerships is really key. You guys have been very successful. I'll give you guys the final word. Each of you share what customers should expect from the relationship. Siva, we'll start with you. >> I think continued greatness, continued commitment to making customers successful with the innovation that keeps them worry much more about the above the layer, the application, the business critical elements and make the infrastructure as simple and as versatile as possible is absolutely our commitment. >> I'd boil it down to the human capital out there, the human element and that is bringing conviction to your decisions. We've both been here multiple decades together in our partnership. FlexPod's coming up on a decade. It's conviction and knowing that you can rely on the lifeblood of your business being secure with us together. >> Well, congratulations. Certainly, the developers are going to be testing the hardware under the hood and we got a DevOps culture developing all on-prim and in the Cloud hybrid. It's going to be an interesting couple years. Interesting times we live in. Lee Howard, Chief Technologist with NetApp and Siva Sivakumar, Senior Director Data Center Solutions. Here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Stu Miniman. Live from Barcelona. Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. More live coverage from theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)