>> Announcer: "theCUBE" presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage. This is Day 2, Dave Vellante with John Furrier. Sheila Rohra is here. She's the Senior Vice President and GM of the Data Infrastructure Business at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and of course, the storage division. And Omer Asad. Welcome back to "theCUBE", Omer. Senior Vice President and General Manager for Cloud Data Services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise storage. Guys, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >> Thank you. Always a pleasure, man. >> Thank you. >> So Sheila, I'll start with you. Explain the difference. The Data Infrastructure Business and then Omer's Cloud Data Services. You first. >> Okay. So Data Infrastructure Business. So I'm responsible for the primary secondary storage. Basically, what you physically store, the data in a box, I actually own that. So I'm going to have Omer explain his business because he can explain it better than me. (laughing) Go ahead. >> So 100% right. So first, data infrastructure platforms, primary secondary storage. And then what I do from a cloud perspective is wrap up those things into offerings, block storage offerings, data protection offerings, and then put them on top of the GreenLake platform, which is the platform that Antonio and Fidelma talked about on main Keynote stage yesterday. That includes multi-tenancy, customer subscription management, sign on management, and then on top of that we build services. Services are cloud-like services, storage services or block service, data protection service, disaster recovery services. Those services are then launched on top of the platform. Some services like data protection services are software only. Some services are software plus hardware. And the hardware on the platform comes along from the primary storage business and we run the control plane for that block service on the GreenLake platform and that's the cloud service. >> So, I just want to clarify. So what we maybe used to know as 3PAR and Nimble and StoreOnce. Those are the products that you're responsible for? >> That is the primary storage part, right? And just to kind of show that, he and I, we do indeed work together. Right. So if you think about the 3PAR, the primary... Sorry, the Primera, the Alletras, the Nimble, right? All that, right? That's the technology that, you know, my team builds. And what Omer does with his magic is that he turns it into HPE GreenLake for storage, right? And to deliver as a service, right? And basically to create a self-service agility for the customer and also to get a very Cloud operational experience for them. >> So if I'm a customer, just so I get this right, if I'm a customer and I want Hybrid, that's what you're delivering as a Cloud service? >> Yes. >> And I don't care where the data is on-premises, in storage, or on Cloud. >> 100%. >> Is that right? >> So the way that would work is, as a customer, you would come along with the partner, because we're 100% partner-led. You'll come to the GreenLake Console. On the GreenLake Console, you will pick one of our services. Could be a data protection service, could be the block storage service. All services are hybrid in nature. Public Cloud is 100% participant in the ecosystem. You'll choose a service. Once you choose a service, you like the rate card for that service. That rate card is just like a hyperscaler rate card. IOPS, Commitment, MINCOMMIT's, whatever. Once you procure that at the price that you like with a partner, you buy the subscription. Then you go to console.greenLake.com, activate your subscription. Once the subscription is activated, if it's a service like block storage, which we talked about yesterday, service will be activated, and our supply chain will send you our platform gear, and that will get activated in your site. Two things, network cable, power cable, dial into the cloud, service gets activated, and you have a cloud control plane. The key difference to remember is that it is cloud-consumption model and cloud-operation model built in together. It is not your traditional as a service, which is just like hardware leasing. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> That's a thing of the past. >> But this answers a question that I had, is how do you transfer or transform from a company that is, you know, selling boxes, of course, most of you are engineers are software engineers, I get that, to one that is selling services. And it sounds like the answer is you've organized, I know it's inside baseball here, but you organize so that you still have, you can build best of breed products and then you can package them into services. >> Omer: 100%. 100%. >> It's separate but complementary organization. >> So the simplest way to look at it would be, we have a platform side at the house that builds the persistence layers, the innovation, the file systems, the speeds and feeds, and then building on top of that, really, really resilient storage services. Then how the customer consumes those storage services, we've got tremendous feedback from our customers, is that the cloud-operational model has won. It's just a very, very simple way to operate it, right? So from a customer's perspective, we have completely abstracted away out hardware, which is in the back. It could be at their own data center, it could be at an MSP, or they could be using a public cloud region. But from an operational perspective, the customer gets a single pane of glass through our service console, whether they're operating stuff on-prem, or they're operating stuff in the public cloud. >> So they get storage no matter what? They want it in the cloud, they got it that way, and if they want it as a service, it just gets shipped. >> 100%. >> They plug it in and it auto configures. >> Omer: It's ready to go. >> That's right. And the key thing is simplicity. We want to take the headache away from our customers, we want our customers to focus on their business outcomes, and their projects, and we're simplifying it through analytics and through this unified cloud platform, right? On like how their data is managed, how they're stored, how they're secured, that's all taken care of in this operational model. >> Okay, so I have a question. So just now the edge, like take me through this. Say I'm a customer, okay I got the data saved on-premise action, cloud, love that. Great, sir. That's a value proposition. Come to HPE because we provide this easily. Yeah. But now at the edge, I want to deploy it out to some edge node. Could be a tower with Telecom, 5G or whatever, I want to box this out there, I want storage. What happens there? Just ship it out there and connects up? Does it work the same way? >> 100%. So from our infrastructure team, you'll consume one or two platforms. You'll consume either the Hyperconverged form factor, SimpliVity, or you might convert, the Converged form factor, which is proliant servers powered by Alletras. Alletra 6Ks. Either of those... But it's very different the way you would procure it. What you would procure from us is an edge service. That edge service will come configured with certain amount of compute, certain amount of storage, and a certain amount of data protection. Once you buy that on a dollars per gig per month basis, whichever rate card you prefer, storage rate card or a VMware rate card, that's all you buy. From that point on, the platform team automatically configures the back-end hardware from that attribute-based ordering and that is shipped out to your edge. Dial in the network cable, dial in the power cable, GreenLake cloud discovers it, and then you start running the- >> Self-service, configure it, it just shows up, plug it in, done. >> Omer: Self-service but partner-led. >> Yeah. >> Because we have preferred pricing for our partners. Our partners would come in, they will configure the subscriptions, and then we activate those customers, and then send out the hardware. So it's like a hyperscaler on-prem at-scale kind of a model. >> Yeah, I like it a lot. >> So you guys are in the data business. You run the data portion of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. I used to call it storage, even if we still call it storage but really, it's evolving into data. So what's your vision for the data business and your customer's data vision, if you will? How are you supporting that? >> Well, I want to kick it off, and then I'm going to have my friend, Omer, chime in. But the key thing is that what the first step is is that we have to create a unified platform, and in this case we're creating a unified cloud platform, right? Where there's a single pane of glass to manage all that data, right? And also leveraging lots of analytics and telemetry data that actually comes from our infosite, right? We use all that, we make it easy for the customer, and all they have to say, and they're basically given the answers to the test. "Hey, you know, you may want to increase your capacity. You may want to tweak your performance here." And all the customers are like, "Yes. No. Yes, no." Basically it, right? Accept and not accept, right? That's actually the easiest way. And again, as I said earlier, this frees up the bandwidth for the IT teams so then they actually focus more on the business side of the house, rather than figuring out how to actually manage every single step of the way of the data. >> Got it. >> So it's exactly what Sheila described, right? The way this strategy manifests itself across an operational roadmap for us is the ability to change from a storage vendor to a data services vendor, right? >> Sheila: Right. >> And then once we start monetizing these data services to our customers through the GreenLake platform, which gives us cloud consumption model and a cloud operational model, and then certain data services come with the platform layer, certain data services are software only. But all the services, all the data services that we provide are hybrid in nature, where we say, when you provision storage, you could provision it on-prem, or you can provision it in a hyperscaler environment. The challenge that most of our customers have come back and told us, is like, data center control planes are getting fragmented. On-premises, I mean there's no secrecy about it, right? VMware is the predominant hypervisor, and as a result of that, vCenter is the predominant configuration layer. Then there is the public cloud side, which is through either Ajour, or GCP, or AWS, being one of the largest ones out there. But when the customer is dealing with data assets, the persistence layer could be anywhere, it could be in AWS region, it could be your own data center, or it could be your MSP. But what this does is it creates an immense amount of fragmentation in the context in which the customers understand the data. Essentially, John, the customers are just trying to answer three questions: What is it that I store? How much of it do I store? Should I even be storing it in the first place? And surprisingly, those three questions just haven't been answered. And we've gotten more and more fragmented. So what we are trying to produce for our customers, is a context to ware data view, which allows the customer to understand structured and unstructured data, and the lineage of how it is stored in the organization. And essentially, the vision is around simplification and context to ware data management. One of the key things that makes that possible, is again, the age old infosite capability that we have continued to hone and develop over time, which is now up to the stage of like 12 trillion data points that are coming into the system that are not corroborated to give that back. >> And of course cost-optimizing it as well. We're up against the clock, but take us through the announcements, what's new from when we sort of last talked? I guess it was in September. >> Omer: Right. >> Right. What's new that's being announced here and, or, you know, GA? >> Right. So three major announcements that came out, because to keep on establishing the context when we were with you last time. So last time we announced GreenLake backup and recovery service. >> John: Right. >> That was VMware backup and recovery as a complete cloud, sort of SaaS control plane. No backup target management, no BDS server management, no catalog management, it's completely a SaaS service. Provide your vCenter address, boom, off you go. We do the backups, agentless, 100% dedup enabled. We have extended that into the public cloud domain. So now, we can back up AWS, EC2, and EBS instances within the same constructs. So a single catalog, single backup policy, single protection framework that protects you both in the cloud and on-prem, no fragmentation, no multiple solutions to deploy. And the second one is we've extended our Hyperconverged service to now be what we call the Hybrid Cloud On-Demand. So basically, you go to GreenLake Console control plane, and from there, you basically just start configuring virtual machines. It supports VMware and AWS at the same time. So you can provision a virtual machine on-prem, or you can provision a virtual machine in the public cloud. >> Got it. >> And, it's the same framework, the same catalog, the same inventory management system across the board. And then, lastly, we extended our block storage service to also become hybrid in nature. >> Got it. >> So you can manage on-prem and AWS, EBS assets as well. >> And Sheila, do you still make product announcements, or does Antonio not allow that? (Omer laughing) >> Well, we make product announcements, and you're going to see our product announcements actually done through the HPE GreenLake for block storage. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> So our announcements will be coming through that, because we do want to make it as a service. Again, we want to take all of that headache of "What configuration should I buy? How do I actually deploy it? How do I...?" We really want to take that headache away. So you're going to see more feature announcements that's going to come through this. >> So feature acceleration through GreenLake will be exposed? >> Absolutely. >> This is some cool stuff going on behind the scenes. >> Oh, there's a lot good stuff. >> Hardware still matters, you know. >> Hardware still matters. >> Does it still matter? Does hardware matter? >> Hardware still matters, but what matters more is the experience, and that's actually what we want to bring to the customer. (laughing) >> John: That's good. >> Good answer. >> Omer: 100%. (laughing) >> Guys, thanks so much- >> John: Hardware matters. >> For coming on "theCUBE". Good to see you again. >> John: We got it. >> Thanks. >> And hope the experience was good for you Sheila. >> I know, I know. Thank you. >> Omer: Pleasure as always. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Vellante and John Furrier will be back from HPE Discover 2022. You're watching "theCUBE". (soft music)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Cloud next nineteen Rodeo by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. And we hear it. Mosconi Center, Google Cloud. Next twenty nineteen. Hashtag Google. Next nineteen. I'm Dave, along with my co host student, Amanda's Day two for us. Anthony Lives here. Senior vice president, general manager of the Cloud Data Services Business Unit That net app Cuba Lawman Louis Versi. Who's senior cloud engineer at Cloud Health. Gentlemen. Welcome, Cardinal. Help that I got cloud in the brain. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thank you much for coming on, Luis. Let's start with you. Uh, a little bit about Cardinal Health. What you guys air are all about. Tell us about the business. Sure. >> Uh, Cardinal Health is a global supply chain medical products services company. We service hospitals, pharmacies throughout the world. We're drivers are delivering cost effective solutions to our two patients right throughout the world. >> Awesome. We're gonna get into that, Anthony, you've been in the Cube a couple times here almost a year since we were last at this show. it's grown quite a bit. Good thing Mosconi is new and improved. He's got all these new customers here. Give us the update. On what? Look back a year, What's transpired? One of the highlights for you. >> Open it up. You know, we've achieved a tremendous amount. I mean, you know, we were a Google partner of the year, which was quite nice. Wasn't even award for the hard work? You know, we have a very special relationship with Google. We actually engineer directly into the Google console, our services that their products that are sold by Google, which gives us a very unique value proposition. We just keep adding, you know, we have more services and we had more regions on. We continue to sort of differentiate the basic services that that customers are now using for secondary workloads and increasingly very large primary work. Look all >> right, we're going to get into it and learn more about the partnership. But but thinking about what's going on, a cardinal health question for you, Lewis is one of the drivers in your business that are affecting your technology strategy and how you're dealing with those. >> Sure, there's a few things on. I'm sure this is the same in many industries, right? We're facing cost pressures. We need to deliver solutions at a lower cost than we have been in the past. We need to move faster. We need to have agility to be able to respond to changes in the market place. So on Prem doesn't didn't give us a lot of that flexibility to turn those lovers in any of those three areas that those three things have really driven our push into the cloud. All >> right, Louis, let let's dig into that a little bit. You could kind of Do you still have on Prem as part of your solution way? Still have >> some eso We've been working over the past two years to my great work loads out of our data center into the cloud. We're about eighty percent of the way there. There's gonna be some workloads. I Siri's doesn't run in the cloud. Very well. You know, we've got Cem >> Way. Were just joking about that earlier today. Yes, yes, yes. Lots of things. But in the back corner somewhere, I've got that icier running or the day working on that Anthony way. >> Blessed with blessed. You know, this is a customer of ours, and way enabled him to run some, you know, pretty heavy on Prem workloads that required NFS can now run, you know, production on Google clouds. So >> yeah, and you're basically trying to make that experience Seamus Wright A cz muchas. You can wait. Talk about that. That partnership with Google, What are the challenges that you guys are tryingto tackle? I'm just going to refer to your >> question. I mean, you know, what we see is that there's a sort of a pivot with the clouds that traditional i t people thought horizontally and they try and sort of you had a storage team and you had a security team and you had a networking team in the cloud. It's sort of pivots ninety degrees, and you have people who don't work clothes on the workload. People are experts in every single thing, and so they go to the cloud, assuming that the cloud itself will take care of a lot of that problem for So we worked with Google and we built a service. We didn't We didn't build it for a storage guy tow, configure. And you know it undo the bolts and nuts way built it like dial tone. That there is. The NFS is always on in Google Cloud and you come and provisioned an end point and you just tell us how much capacity you want and how much performance. And that's it. It takes about eight seconds to establish a volume in Ghoul Cloud that may take through, you know, trouble tickets, and I t capital purchases about six months to do. >> Yeah, Anthony. Actually, one of my favorite interviews last year is I talked to Dave Hits at your event, and he talked about when we first started building it. We build something that storage people would love, and you shot him down and said, No, no, no, This needs to be a cloud first Clouds absolution. Louis, I want to poke at you. You actually said Price is a main driver for cloud agility. Absolutely. But bring this inside a little bit. I know you're speaking at the show a year. You know, people always say, it's like, Hey, you know, cloud isn't easy. Is it cheap? Well, you know, Devil's in the details there. So would love to hear your experience there. And you know how you know less expensive translates in your world? Sure. >> So when we were looking for something, we tried to get away from Nasim. We're moving to the cloud and we just can't do it right There's way have a lot of cots, applications, a lot of processes that you just have to have known as right and we're looking for something Is Anthony described that with a click of a button are developers Khun spin up their own storage. The price point was lower than then. Frankly, you could get just provisioning the type of disk that you need in the cloud fur, and that was acceptable for most of our workloads. The the the ability to tear right. There's through three classes of storage and in the cloud volume services. Most of our workloads are running on the standard tear, but we've got some workloads where they've got higher performance and we provisioned them right on the standard. And when that you're doing, they're testing like, hey, we need a little bit more with a click of a button there at a higher tier of storage. No downtime, no restarting, no moving storage. It's I just worked. So the cost, the agility were getting all of that out of the solution to >> manage those laces, that sort of, ah, sort of automated way or you sort of monitoring things. And what's the process for for managing, which slays the slaves on the different tiers of storage. If >> we provide him, Yeah, we're not. We're not money for s. >> So it's all automated. >> Run it. And we stand by guarantees throughput guarantees on we take the pain away. You know, I always like to say, you know, what people want to do in the public cloud is innovate, not administrator. And generally, you know. So when when people say clouds cheaper, it's because I think they've decided that they're better use of the dollar is in application development, data science, and then they can retire people and put application developers into the business. So what ghoul does, I think incredibly well as it has infrastructure to remove the sort of the legacy barrier and the traditional stuff. And then it has this wonderful new innovation that, you know, maybe a few companies in the world could decide could use it. But most people couldn't afford to put TP use or GP use in their data center, so they know he was really two very strong Valley proposition. >> And maybe what they're saying is when they say the cloud is cheaper, maybe is better are why I'm spending money elsewhere. That's give me a better return. >> I do things that make you different. Not the same, right, >> right, right. So storage strategy. I mean, I'm sure there should be such a thing anymore. Work illustrated back in the day when used to work A DMC was II by AMC for Block Net out for file Things have changed in terms of how you run a strategy. Think about your business. So what is your strategy when you think about infrastructure and storage and workloads? >> So we really don't want to have to focus on an infrastructure strategy, right? Right now we're mostly running traditional workloads in the cloud running on PM's. We're working towards getting a lot of work loads into geeky, using that service and in Google Cloud platform, >> so can you just step back for a second? How do you end up on Google? Why'd you choose them versus some of the alternative out there. >> So we started our cloud journey a couple of years ago. Started out with really the main cloud player in town, like most people have. Um, and about a year in, not all of our needs were being met. You know, they that company entered decided to enter our business segment. S O, you know, starts asking some questions. People start asking some questions there. So that prompted us to do an r f p to try to see technologically really, were we on the right cloud cloud platform? And we compared the top three cloud providers and ended up on GP from a technological decision, not just a business decision. It gave us the ability to have a top level organization where we could provisioned projects to application teams. They could work autonomously within those projects, but we still had a shared VPC, a shared network where we could put Enterprise Guard rails in place to protect the company. >> Dominic Price was on earlier with Google and he was saying some nice things about net happened. I'd like to hear your perspective is why Ned App What's unique about Nana. What's so special about net app in the cloud. Sure, a few of the >> things that Anthony talked about were really differentiators for us. We didn't have to go sign a Pio with another company, and we didn't need to commit to a certain amount of storage. We didn't need to build our own infrastructure. Even in the cloud, the service was just there. You do a little bit of up front, set up to connect your networking and weaken prevision storage whenever we want. We can change the speed the through. Put that we're getting on that storage at any point in time. We congrats. That storage with no downtime. Those are all things that were really different and other solutions that were out there. >> I mean, it's interesting infrastructure. Tio was really still even in a cloud. It's kind of like a bunch of Lego blocks on what we always said it was. You know, people want to buy the pirate ship, you know, they don't want to, like, have to dig in all these bins. And so we sort of said, Let's build storage, Kind of like a pirate ship that you just know that the end result is a pirate ship and I don't have to understand how to pick a ll Those pieces. Someone's done that for me. So, you know, we're really trying, Teo. I was I'd say we like to create easy buns. You know, people just hit the easy button and go. Someone else is going to make sure it's there. Someone else is going to make sure it performs. I am just a consumer off it, >> Anthony Wave talkto you and Ned app. You play across all the major cloud providers out there and you've got opinion when it comes to Kerber Netease, Help! Help! Help! Give us the you know where what you think about what you've heard this weekend. Google. You know, I think how they differentiate themselves in the market. >> You know, I think it's great, you know, that Google, I think open source community. So I think that was a ninja stry changing event. And, you know, I think community's really starts to redefine application development. I think portability is obviously a big thing with it, But But for an application, developer of the V. M. Was something that somebody added afterwards, and it was sort of like, Oh, no way overboard infrastructure. So now we'Ll virtual eyes it But the cost of virtual izing things was so expensive, you know, you put a no s in a V m and communities was, was built and was sort of attracted to the developer. And so the developers are coding and re factoring, and I just You just look around now and you just see the ground swell on Cuban cnc f is here, and the contributions that were being made to communities are astonishing. It's it's reached a scale way bigger than Lennox. The amount of innovation that's going into cos I think is unstoppable. Now it's it's going to be the standard if it isn't already >> Well, Louis, I'd love you to expand. You said it sounded like you moved to the cloud first, but now you're going down that application modernization, you know, how does Cooper Netease fit into that? And what what other pieces? Because it's changing the applications and get me the long pole in the tent and modernization. So >> cardinal took the approach of we need to get everything into the cloud. And then we can begin modernizing our applications because if we tried to modernize everything up front, would take us ten to fifteen years to get to the cloud, and we couldn't afford to do that. So lifting and shifting machines was about seventy eighty percent of our migration to the cloud. What we're looking at now is modern, modernizing some of her applications R E commerce solution will be will be running on Cooper. Nettie is very shortly on DH will be taking other workloads there in the future. That's definitely the next step. The next evolution >> Okuda Cloud or multi Cloud? That is the question way >> are multi cloud. There are, you know, certain needs that can only be met in certain clouds, right? So Google Cloud is our primary cloud provider. But we're also also using Amazon for specific >> workloads and used net up across those clouds erect. Okay, so is that What's that like? Is that nap experience across clouds so still coming together? Is it sort of highly similar? What's experience like? >> So it's it's using that app in both solutions is the same. I think there's some stuff that we're looking forward to, that where where things will be tied together a little bit more and >> that brings me to the road map Question. That's Please get your best people working on that. >> Oh, yeah. No, no. I mean, I So, look, I think storages that sort of wonderful business because, you know, data is heavy, it's hard, it doesn't like to be moved, and it needs to be managed. It's It's the primary asset of your business these days. So So we have we have, you know, we released continuously new features onto the service. So, you know, we've got full S and B nfs support routing an FSB four support routing a backup service. We're integrating NFS into communities, which is a very frequently asked response. A lot of companies developers want to build ST collapse and Block has a real problem when the container failed. NFS doesn't So we're almost seeing a renaissance with communities and NFS So So you know, we just we subscribe to that constant innovation and we'll just continue to build out mohr and more services that that allow I think cloud customers to, as I said, to sort of spend their time innovating while we take care of the administration for them >> two thousand six to floor. And I wrote a manifesto on storage is a service. Yeah, I didn't know it. Take this long, but I'm glad you got there. Last question, Lewis. Cool stuff. You working on fun projects? What's floating your boat these days? >> My time these days is, uh, the cloud. As I said, we went to the cloud for cost for cost savings. You can spend more money than you anticipate in the cloud. I know it's a shocker. So that's one of the things that I'm focusing our efforts on right now is making sure that way. Keep those costs under control. Still deliver the speed and agility. But keep an eye on those things >> that they put a bow on. Google next twenty nineteen. Partner of the year. That's awesome. Congratulations. Thank >> you. Uh, you know, I would say, you know, to put in a bone it's great to see Thomas again. You know, I went to Thomas that Oracle for about six and a half years. He's an incredibly bright man on DH. I think he's going to do a lot of really good things for Google. As you know, I work for his twin brother, George on DH. They are insanely bright people and really fun to work with. So for me, it was great to come up here and see Thomas and I shook hands when we won the award, and it was kind of too really was like, you know, we're both in a Google event. >> Yeah, it was fun. I'm gonna make an observation. I was saying the studio in the Kino today. They were both Patriots fans. So Bill Bala check. He has progeny. Coaches leave. They try to be him. It just doesn't work. Thomas Curie is not trying to be Larry. I'm sure they, you know, share a lot of the same technical philosophies and cellphone. But he's got his own way of doing things in his own style. So I really it's >> a great Haifa. Google great >> really is. Hey, guys, Thanks so much for coming to the cure. Thank you. Keep right, everybody Day Volante with student meant John Furry is also in the house. We're here. Google Next twenty nineteen, Google Cloud next week Right back. Right after this short break

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to The Cube. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and Cloud Native Con North America 2018. Brought to you by RedHat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay welcome back everyone we're here live in Seattle for KubeCon and Cloud Native Con. I'm John Furrier your host, Stu Miniman from Wikibon here. Next guests Anthony Lye, whose the senior vice president general manager of Cloud Data Services at NetApp, and Jonsi Stergesson, CTO and VP of Cloud Services. Great to have you guys on, great to see you again Anthony. >> As always thank you. >> So first I want to get out there we talked lots in the Kube lounge just to reset. The value parsons of NetApp have significantly been enhanced with the cloud. What is that value proposition? What have you guys seen the explosive headroom for value creation that you guys are enabling with NetApp and the cloud? >> You know what I think NetApp has done over now, probably five years, is really pushed itself to embrace the cloud. To recognize that the cloud is a very important part of everybody's IT infrastructure whether it's an extension of the existing IT infrastructure for things like DR or backup or whether it's the primary platform for legacy workloads or, as we're all here to do, to discuss the refactoring and rebuilding of applications around microservices. I think NetApp chose, unlike all of the traditional storage vendors, to see the cloud as an opportunity and I think it's helped the company and it's helped our customers to operate in what is, I think, is by default now, the end state for many companies is hybrid cloud. >> You guys also made some good moves early on with the cloud. We've documented certainly on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE early on. And then as flash comes in for performance, now you've got compute, storage and networking all being optimized in the cloud, creates app developers an environment where it's programmable infrastructure finally. I mean dev ops is happening, this is where services and notion of compute has gone from standing something up in seconds on the cloud to with functions milliseconds. This is changing the dynamic of applications but you've still got to store the data. Talk about, Jonsi, the impact of the services in piece to the developer, storage, services, provisioning, all that and it covers. >> We are taking, I mean all of our services that are running in all the hyperskills in Google and Azure and AWS and more and even on premise. Our view is our role is always to find the best home for any workload at any given time. Even though it's in public cloud or on premise. However storage has always been sort of left aside, it's always been living in this propietary chunk that is hard to move and the weight of the data is actually quite heavy. So we actually want to use Kubernetes and microservices and resistant volume claims by taking that data and making that very easily migratable replicated between locations, between hyperscalers and sort of adopt a true multi cloud strategy. With data with it not only moving those workloads or applications but the data is key, data is key. >> Sometimes, you know, you want to move the data to a compute and sometimes you want to move compute to the data. >> And that's been validated by Amazon's RDS announcement on VMware, Amazon announced outposting on premises, and the number one thing was latency, work was not yet moving. This is exactly to what you guys have been doing and implementing, today, this is like real product. >> I think the reality of the world is, you know, while there is a ton of innovation that exists in public cloud there are well documented use cases that struggle with a cloud only environment. I think NetApp has chosen to make each one of those three potential persistent stores equal to one another. So whether that's in a traditional on premise and upgrading on premise environments to get better price performance characteristics, embracing the public cloud or combining public and private cloud. >> While it's not trivial NetApp, at it's core, always was software so moving it from a hardware appliance, I mean, back in the day Network Appliance was the original name of the company to a software defined solution to being multi-cloud, you can kind of see that genesis where it can go. A lot of times the tougher part is from the customer standpoint. You know, the traditional person that bought and managed this was a storage administrator and getting them to understand cloud native applications and dev ops and all those things, those are pretty challenging moves so how much of it is education? How much of it is new buying centers inside the company or new clients, help us walk through that. >> Yeah I would make two points in maybe answering to you. So I think NetApp's history, actually 25 years ago, NetApp started off as selling into the developers who were running SUN workstations, who wanted shared everything and NetApp actually you know went around IT and put those appliances into the developers. We built a SaaN business, a very successful SaaN business, with the IT people. Now you're absolutely right, the people around here fall into the, sort of, the modern day dev ops characters. What Google calls the SREs the Site Reliability Engineers. And they're a new breed, they're young, they're doing more and more CICD. Storage is an integral part of what they do but maybe not a primary part. They expect storage to work. We are really lucky you know, a little company called Microsoft and another little company called Google sell our stuff so we get introduced into all of those cloud first, cloud only sort of use cases. Not just of refactoring of primary but building. So we're actually, in many cases now, very relevant to those people but we've been fortunate enough to leverage the big public clouds together. >> So you have a relationship with AWS, Google and Microsoft, Microsoft and Google, which you've just mentioned. You mentioned SRE, Site Reliability Engineer, this is a new persona that's clearly emerging and it has a focus around operations, now IT operations has been around for a long time, dev is changing too but this is, if they sell your stuff, their customers need to operate at scale. This is a big point, can you elaborate on the importance of this and what you guys are doing specifically to help that. >> So the Site Reliability Engineer, he is not doing operations. He is actually in charge of running the workload or the development or the application or the product that comes from development. They have to abide by specific rules that are actually set by the SRE. And to your point, because you were talking about different selling motions and not selling into the storage admin or not selling to traditional IT. This is actually what has actually been really surprising and showcases the power of Kubernetes and how widely adopted it has been, both on premise and in the public cloud because customers are actually coming to us and saying, "Hey we had no idea NetApp was actually "doing all of this in the public cloud. "We had no idea that you had your own Kubernetes services "that actually help solve one of the biggest problems "which is persistent volume claims and application of data." So it's actually coming, and you sort of see how important CNCF is, because they're actually educating the market and educating the enterprise space just as well as the new up and coming development team like I've traditionally come from. So I'm actually seeing that it's easier than I would have sort of thought in the beginning. So they're actually becoming more educated about microservices, more educated about how to run their, actually everybody almost in any company that I go into now, they have the SRE playbook somewhere in their meeting room somewhere and everybody sort of getting educated on how they need to, sort of, elevate themselves from being traditional system administrators into that SRE or dev op role. >> And it's also a cultural thing too, they have to develop, not just the playbook, but have some experience in economies of scale, managing it, and certainly it's a tail wind for you guys, storage because, again, it's also a lot of coating involved they need a pool of resources, storage being one of them. But the other thing that's interesting, those are single clouds, Amazon, Google, multi cloud is really where the action is, right? So multi cloud to me is just, to me, a modern version of multi vendor, which basically is about choice. Choice is critical, but having choice around the app, it becomes the value creator. So if you guys can scale with the app development environments that seems to be a sweet spot. How are you guys talking about that particular point because this becomes an under the covers, a new kind of operations, a new kind of scale, pushing code, not just you know stacking interacting boxes but, like, really making things, patching security things or could have been head of security things so doing things in a really really automated way. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing I'm most proud of at my time at NetApp and what the team does and what the team continues to do is we took a very, very, I think, deliberate perspective that we would deliver storage, but we would do it in a very unique way. That my background was from Saas, I spent my entire career building applications, and when you build an application, you run the application, there is nothing you give the customer and say, "Here, administer it." When you look at a lot of the infrastructure services, they make the customer do a lot of work. So what we did at NetApp was we decided that we ourselves would almost create like an always available protocol that people could just ask for it and it would be there. There was no concept of setting it up or patching it or upgrading it. And that's really I think we have set a bar now on the public clouds that, I think, even the public clouds themselves have not done, and giving those developers that I asked for a storage through an API and all I need to do is ask for capacity and throughput. Nothing else, that's something to a developer they're like, "So now I don't even have to ask "anybody with storage skills. "I can tell my application to ask for it's own storage." >> It's interesting you're living in a new world where you need the scale of a system but the functionality of like an app server. I feel like we're living in that app server days where that middle ground and app development was the key focus, you've got to have both now. You need scalable systems but really application performance. >> And then you add an additional layer because now everybody wants to be able to use the same deployment script, the same configuration management system, Terraform, whatever they're actually using to deploy it on premise or in a public cloud but it needs to be done in a unified manner. This is why it's so important to be upstream compatible and there's a lot of companies out there that are actually destroying that model and not following the true cloud concept. >> Yes give them a slap on the wrist, get in line, fix it! >> If you are going to play in this space with the CNCF and with Kubenetes, you better play by the rules and do the open standards. And so you're actually compatible no matter where your workload resides. >> We've been monitoring how storage is maturing in this whole cloud native Kubenetes ecosystem here. A year ago there were a lot of backroom arguments over what were the right architectures, a few sub projects working through here, it actually blew me away in the keynote this morning to hear that 40% of all applications that are deployed in Kubernetes are stateful. So where are we? What's working? What's good for customers? And what do we still need to work on to kind of solidify the storage data piece of this? >> I think it's interesting, 'cause I think we, sort of, ourselves now consider NetApp to be a data company. Storage is an enabler but what's interesting, everyone talks about their Saas strategy, their PaaS strategy their IaaS strategies. I always ask people, "What's your data strategy?" and that's something I think the CNCF Kubernetes, themselves, recognize that they've done a lot of really great things for compute around the microservices themselves but the storage piece has always been something of a challenge. And we said, about solving that problem, we have an open source project called Trident, that essentially enables people to make persistent volume claims and if the container dies, they can essentially start a new container and pick up the storage exactly where they left off. So we really believe that stateful is an ever increasing percentage of the overall application model. Databases are important things, people need them. >> I would agree with that and that's developing too, it's early on. All right so I want to ask you guys a question, kind of outside the box. Multi cloud certainly is part of a hybrid, what they call a hybrid today, it's really a choice, multi cloud will be a future reality, no matter what anyone says, I believe that. How is multi cloud changing IT investments? Business investments, technical investments or both, what's your guys thoughts on how multi cloud is driving and changing IT investments? >> Well I actually think it offers you the opportunity to have like placement policy algorithms that fit your workload at any given time. For example, if this particular application is latency sensitive, and I created an application that all of a sudden became really popular in Mexico, then I should be able to see which one of the hyperscalers actually has a presence in Mexico City, deploy it there. If I'm under utilizing my private cloud and I have a lot of space on it and there is no specific requirements, it gives you that flexibility to, like I said, always find the best home for your workload at any given time. >> Dynamic policy based stuff? >> Yeah, precisely. And it allows you also, I mean, you can choose to do it whether its based on workload requirements or you can start doing it in a least cost effective route, I mean least cost routing. So it actually impacts both from a technical and a business sense in my opinion. >> I think you know you cannot help but get excited every day with what one cloud delivers over another cloud, and we're seeing something not unlike the arms race, you know, Google does this, then Amazon does this, then Microsoft does this. As developers we're very keen to take advantage of all these capabilities and we want to, in many cases, let the application itself make the decision. >> So yeah Amazons got there, everyone's catching up. Competitions good. All right, final question. Predictions for multi cloud in 2019. What's going to happen? Is there going to be a loud bang? Is there going to be a crash? Is it going to be fruit on the trees? What's the state of the multi cloud predictions for 2019? >> Well I actually believe it's going to become a standard. Nobody should be locked into any region or any one provider, I don't even care if it's on premise or NetOps specific, you should be able to... I mean, I think it's just going to become standard. Everybody has to have a multi cloud strategy and you can see that, like the IDC report that 86% of Fortune 500 companies are adopting multi cloud. And I think I'm actually quite fed up of this hyper cloud stuff because, in my opinion, on premise is just the fourth or the fifth hyperscaler and should be treated as such. So if you actually have that true cloud concept, you should be able to deploy that using the same script, the same APIs to deploy it everywhere. >> As I said in theCube the data center and non print, they're just an edge, a big edge. If it's an operating mall? >> My prediction? Your prediction. >> 2019 is the year of Istio. I think we've become enamored with Kubernetes, I think what Istio brings significantly advances Kubernetes, and we barely scratched the surface, I think, with the service mesh and all of the enhancements and all the contributions that will go into that. I think, you know, that 2019 will probably see as many vendors here next year with Istio credentials and STO capabilities as we see today with Kubernetes. >> Anthony, Jonsi, thanks for coming on, great insights, smart commentary, appreciate it. We should get in the studio and dig into this a little bit deeper. Really a great example of an incumbent, large company, NetApp, really getting a tailwind from the cloud, good smart bets you guys made, programmable infrastructure, dynamic policy routing, all kinds of under the covers goodness from smart cloud deployments. This is where software drives the data. >> Yep data is the new oil, that's what they say right? If you don't have a data set you're not very competitive. >> Thanks for coming on I appreciate it. More Kube coverage here, getting all the breakdown here, the impact of cloud computing at scale, the role of data software, all happening here at the CNCF. This is the KubeCon, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. More live coverage after this short break.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of NetApp Insight 2018. From the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Jennifer Meyer, Senior Director of Cloud Product Marketing at NetApp. And welcoming to theCUBE Alok Arora, Senior Director of Cloud Data Services and the Product Owner for NetApp Cloud Advisor, which we'll talk about today. So guys, the keynote this morning, one of the things that George Kurian, your CEO, whose going to be on the program I think next with Stu and me, talked about the four pillars of digital transformation, and one of them was hybrid and multi-cloud is now the de facto architecture. Jennifer, from a cloud marketing, product marketing stand point, how is NetApp engaging with your customers, both your install base enterprise customers and engaging with new customer to help them evolve a successful multi-cloud strategy? >> Well what's funny about that is it's not really even up to us, it's up to the customer and where they're at today, meeting them there and then taking them kind of to that destination that's interesting or important for them. And what we know today is that not only are customers in the cloud because they want to be close to innovation, that's one of our big themes, inspiring innovation with the cloud, but they've got their hands in multiple clouds. And studies show that at least 80-81% of customers are doing multi-cloud with two or more public clouds, and I think that's really interesting, you know I think that in some cases it's because their end uses, or their customers, have chosen a cloud that they want to go with and so they're trying to service those needs where they exist, but also maybe they realize that they want to subscribe or consume services in one cloud versus what's available in another cloud, and so it's not our job really to tell them where to go, it's to make sure we've got a consistent seamless amount of services to give these customers to consume, wherever they may be, in whichever public cloud. >> Yeah, well I like what you said, meeting them where they are, cause I think in some ways we're giving customers a little bit of credit that this was actually planned for as to how they got to where they are, you know I'm sure if we took that 81% that say they know they're multi-cloud, if we go with the other 19%, most of them are probably multi-cloud and just don't realize it. >> Jennifer: Absolutely. >> Because just like we had an IT in the old day, I have an application, a business unit, or somebody drives something, and oh my gosh, that's how we ended up with silos, we ended up breaking those things apart. >> Or shadow IT, right? You've got a lot of developers that know exactly what tools they want. >> We had a good discussion with Anthony Lye and Ted Brockway talking about Azure and some unique functionality that NetApp's looking to drive into that partnership with Microsoft. I wonder if we could step back, if you could help us understand kind of the cloud portfolio of NetApp, people that just know NetApp as "Oh it's, that's that filer company that I've probably "got a lot of products from." The multi-cloud has been evolving, for quite a few years now, so I want to help understand the breadth and depth of the offering. >> That's right and I think you know we always think about it almost like a four layer stack, in terms of our strategy and what we're doing to bring more of these innovative data services to our install base to your point, but also our net new buyers, folks that are coming to us through Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud, or AWS, and so it really does start with our legacy and our foundation of, in this case, cloud storage, and the data services, or the advanced data management that's built upon those storage protocols. So of course it's NFS, NSMB, but when you think about being able to offer that, and compliment what's available in the public clouds today, because that's why they've chosen to partner with NetApp. On top of that we are delivering advanced services in those public clouds that have never been available before, things like automatic snapshots, or rapid cloning, and backup, and tiering, and I think it's really important because what it does is it extends our customers' experience from On-prem into the public cloud, without having to sacrifice a thing. >> Alok, it's a tough thing that customers are trying to figure out. When I look at it and talk to customers, they've got an application portfolio. What are they modernizing? What are they starting from fresh? And then they've got all the other stuff that they have, how is NetApp helping with what they do? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think that's a great point. So you talked about the offerings that we have with multi-cloud and that creates all the options for future state architecture, I can build there, however, in order to understand how do I get there I need to understand where I am today, right? So we start looking at your current state footprint, we look at our customer's current state footprint. Understand how it is architected. How it is designed, how it is serving up the applications. Because it can be really a tedious job to get started, to get to the cloud and building the roadmap. So what Cloud Advisor does is it leverages active IQ data to get that inside for us and be leveraging data science, machine learning, to give them a guidance as to how they can get there. What should be their migration approach. How should they build a transition strategy. Because a lot of times they would call the consultants to help with the transition strategy, at the end they get a PowerPoint, which is not very actionable. We started this grounds up, we understand their detail you know, how the stuff, the bits and bites, are organized so we start giving them an actionable strategy they can execute upon. So that's really Cloud Advisor geared for accelerating that journey to the cloud that our customers should be taking to. >> How are you guys helping customers to start embracing emerging technologies, IoT devices, we had Ducati on this morning, a MotoGP bike is basically an IoT device, but in terms of, Jennifer you talked about this, and Alok you reinforced it, you are basically co-developing in partnership with your customers, it's about where they, helping them understand where they are, what they can do today. How are some of the services helping them to be able to harness the power of AI, say for example, to work with data authority to use that data for actionable business insight, and outcomes? >> Yeah it's interesting you talk about the IoT, I think NetApp saw that 20 years ago. I mean ASAP is our original IoT, that is what we get billions of data points from our customers. Controllers, millions of controllers worldwide, and we build on that mirror data, and we apply the artificial intelligence in there. We actually start looking at classifying their applications so that, if they have a strategy driven by the application, as you were saying, hey there is a director from a BU, from majority point of view, we want to take these applications in the cloud. How do you figure out what application are? Where does the data live? How does it governed? We figure that out by that IoT data, by that artificial intelligence and also making sure that these applications, no work loads are left behind because applications can be complicated they talk to each other. So when you start thinking about taking one part of the application, you also want to make sure the other parts that make that application whole also go to the cloud. And that is where we're leveraging Artificial Intelligence to cluster these applications and recommending the customer that: "Hey don't make, don't leave these workloads behind "because otherwise you're going to have a failed strategy." So we warn them upfront to make sure they're successful when they start making the executions. >> I think another piece to that too is just the fact that for many years we've had workloads just trapped On-prem. They haven't had a place to go into the public cloud without a ton of refactoring or rearchitecting, right. You'd have to rewrite them for objectory. You'd have to do a lot of manual labor and things just to make it happen. In most cases it hasn't been worth it. And so when you looked at the fact that about 80% of On-prem files where in NFS V3 protocol, there wasn't really a place in the public cloud to match that and so by even just delivering Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud and AWS or Azure NetApp Files which is the version for Azure, we're able to give customers an, a way to free up that trapped set of workloads, put those into the public hub, so that it then can be available to all of those advanced services that live on those public clouds to do things like Big Data Analytics or to do developing, you know, applications and services of their own and for their own benefit. >> You Know. >> Yeah I think that's a great point because >> He's so excited.| >> Sorry. >> Because when you start looking at building your strategy you want to have confidence in your strategy. >> Jennifer: right. >> So, with your protocols and all that discovery. We also not only give you the option that NetApp offers but show you what are the other options you have within Hyperscalers and how would your workload perform with NetApp technology. So you can move with confidence, right. So that's the good part of about Cloud Advisor to make sure you're moving with confidence not just, you know, with a blind spot with you. >> You know one of the transitions we've been watching is really the ascendancy with the developer in DevOps. And I've talked to the SolidFire team for many years, I see them at some of the shows that we've been covering. In the Keynote this morning George Kurian said that Kubernetes and Istio are the multi-Cloud control plane. Jennifer I'm wondering if you can help explain the StackPointCloud acquisition. >> Jennifer: (agrees) >> Some people that might not have the context of about what NetApp and SolidFire, even before the acquisition were doing. You know, we're being like: "Wait I don't understand, you know." >> Sure. >> Kubernetes is something That you know Google and you know, Red Hat and others are doing. >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> Why is NetApp talking about Kubernetes? >> And we even learned what the abbreviation for is was. >> Stu: K8s. >> It's like we're all hip. Absolutely. >> Absolutely, just because. >> It's all about concatenate long words together. So it, it's really interesting because when I talked about that four layer strategy, right the third layer. So it's you know cloud storage at the bottom. Then it's the advanced capabilities and data management above that. But the one that's next is orchestration and integration. And there's really a few things that live in there. You know, the, our cloud orchestration sort of technology is really what we got from our Qstack acquisition. Our teams in Iceland and what they've been able to do largely to underpin a lot of what we've seen with cloud volume service today. But certainly right in there is NetApp Kubernetes service, which as you now know, is from our StackPoint intellectual property. And so back on September 18th, when we announced this acquisition it was really to kind of give our developers and our DevOps folks a way to finally start solving for some of that data gravity that I think we've been periled by over the last few years. And what we now know is Kubernetes is the operating system of the clouds, right. It is the clear winner of container orchestration among things so it made a lot of sense to pair that kind of multi-cloud orchestration again given our strategy to be where our customers want to be with some of our cloud orchestration technology from our Qstack acquisition and make sure that with Trident and some of the ways that we're able to deliver finally persistent storage to those containers. I mean this is like a match made in heaven. Right, we're going to give people the way to make sure that they know that containers are a femoral and data is not. So let's help them do kind of all the things that they want to do in the clouds if they want to do them. >> I think I read on line that, was the StackPointCloud acquisition based on after actually NetApp used it internally. >> Jennifer: Yes. >> Tell us a little bit more about that. Because I think the NetApp on that up story is probably something that could be leverage, you're a marketer, as a differentiator when customers have so much choice. >> Well and I feel like it's a story that every vendor should be forced to tell. If you're not willing to use your own IP and technology what is that saying to your customers. >> Lisa: Yeah. >> So it is true and a lot of our developer teams, if you've hear of Jonsi Stefansson and Anthony Lye's team, that is how this sort of came about as we were looking for a way to sort of do it ourselves. And we thought man through all this investigation there's something here. There's something that we shouldn't hold to ourselves and we should share with the rest of the world. And so at one point we need to get those guys on with you as well so they can tell a little bit more about their story. >> So proof is always in the pudding. Can you give uan example of one of your favorite customer stories. We'll start with you Alok. Who have really embraced the clouds, first of all helped you develop the optimal cloud services are now really achieving big business benefits with the cloud services NetApp is developing. >> Yeah so, several of the customers as we talked to you and specially for Cloud Advisor, as we were looking at their journey as they were starting to think about how much money they were spending upfront to figure out a strategy, they had a strategy driven by a data center that was, were the lease was coming up, and so they had to plan to evacuate that data center into the cloud from there they need to figure out what applications they're running there obviously the virtualization also was there, so that had to be configured in the cloud. So we started thinking about in that use case that we need to provide these triggers and strategy points to our customers. At the same time the other shift that we saw was that these guys were not just talking amongst the infrastructure teams, they had to talk to the application owners and they had to have conversations with CFO's to talk about the economics of the clouds. So we made sure that when we build this that give them the tools that enable them to talk to various stakeholders. Give them the application footprint that is running there. Give them the economics. What it is going to cost to run these applications and workloads that they have identify too when they're in the cloud. So give them the data point that they can go and talk to their CFO. So with that really it starts shaping a product that will meet their needs and meet the needs of all of our customers. >> Lisa: Jennifer, favorite customer example. >> Oh, it's easy this week because it's all about WuXi NextCODE and I don't know if you picked up on any of their story cause we've plastered it around our conference this week because we're so proud of, not only what they're doing as a mission which is very impressive in terms of genomics sequencing and the scale at which they're doing it but the fact that they've based their foundation now on NetApp Cloud Volume services is huge. And really what they came to us and said is: "Look, we are trying to sequence all of these genomes "in parallel and our benchmark is really to look at about "a hundred thousand individuals at once." When they were trying to do that on their own, using there own self-managed storage in the cloud, they could never complete it. It would either fail or they would have some sort of a problem where they just couldn't get it to work. And with NetApp Cloud Volume Service they were able to complete in about 45 minutes. And so what their finding is again with this extreme performance, with the ability to scale and most importantly the tie it back to our discussion, it's multi-cloud, they themselves are multi-cloud because of their big pharma and hospitals that they serve. They have customers in every one of those public clouds and so we are able to help them where ever they need us to be. And that's very exciting. >> It's also one of those great examples that everybody understands. Genomic sequencing related to healthcare, you know disease predictions and things like that. So it's a story that resonates well. >> Jennifer: Sure. >> But something that you just said sort of reminded me of one of the four principles that George Kurian talked about this morning. And speed is the new scale. And this sounds like a customer who's achieving that in spades. >> Well it's so fun because I think for a long time we've been really fast On-prem and I think people have just sort of come to expect a certain level of it's good enough in the public cloud and what we're showing them in droves again on AWS GCP or with Azure is that you should expect more. Particularly for high-performance computing workloads or things that you really just, if you're moving your SAP workloads to the cloud and speed is, there is no option it has to be fast. We are showing people now possibilities that they didn't ever dream of before because of this extreme performance through things like Cloud Volumes Service. >> It's really too bad you guys aren't excited about this. (laughs) >> I know how much longer do you have? >> (laughs) Jennifer, Alok, thank you so much for stopping by and having a chat with Stu and me. And talking about how customers are really helping NetApp become a data authority that they need to be to help customers become data driven. We appreciate your time. >> It's our pleasure. >> Have a great time at the rest of the show. >> Thank you. >> Thank you both. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from NetApp Insight 2018, from Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. Stick around Stu and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 2018. Brought to you by Google Cloud, and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco for coverage of Google Cloud Next 18, #GoogleCloudNext18 I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Your next guest, Anthony Lye, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Data Services Business Unit at NetApp. Yes, Business Unit at NetApp, storage in the cloud. Anthony, welcome to theCUBE, Good to see you. >> Thank you very much. nice to see you guys again. >> Great to have you on, we have been, first of all, very complimentary of NetApp over the years. We've had some critical analysis, but one thing I will say that you guys were early on cloud. I remember talking to Tom Georgans years ago, >> Yup. >> You listened to the customers, and you saw cloud, and there was some work going on. Now, you're here at Google Cloud, you're in Amazon, kind of not conventional wisdom for a storage company selling boxes to be living in a cloud where there's serverless, and, some would argue, storageless soon. >> Well, you know-- >> How did this happen? How did this business unit happen? (mumbled speech) >> Well, I think George Kurian, our CEO, probably now about five years ago, I think saw that cloud computing had just too much, I think, going for it not for us to pay attention to it. And he took the top ten engineers at NetApp, and said, you know our flagship operating system ONTAP that runs on our engineered systems, he said, port it to Amazon. And so we spent time porting the operating system over directly to Amazon and today, now, it's a real business. Fully funded, staffed, growing, and you know to your point, you know, who'd have thought NetApp would be calling the cloud. Google chose us. >> Big announcement today, in the keynote-- >> Yup. >> Right >> Oh yeah. >> I mean it's-- >> Key partner >> Turns out that enterprises need enterprise level files, whether that's NFS or SMB, and we're the best in the business to do it. >> So talk about that a little more, because a lot of people get confused, and they say, well wait a minute, why do I need NetApp on Google Cloud or AWS? Why don't I just use whatever object store the cloud provider gives me? Explain that. >> So I think there's a number of use cases, certainly if you look at legacy, there's a lot of applications, databases, that need and demand file. And customers would rather not have to do all the work to translate them over to something like object. Now, you know, object is a very descriptive storage protocol, but it's not as fast as file. So, there are distinct advantages to file that I think the cloud companies have realized they need, to win the enterprise business, whether it's the lift-and-shift business, there's a lot of applications. If you look at oil and gas, all that seismic data is in a file in a volume. You look at CAD-CAM, all of those applications demand file. Oracle database runs incredibly fast on file, so file is certainly not to be discounted, and I think it's very much now a hot topic in public cloud. >> And there's more to this story than just running in the public cloud. THere's a whole business model around the economics, >> Yup. >> the pricings, can you explain that? >> The way we think about cloud is we think that we can build a business that's just in the cloud. We basically monetize a service, a set of services that we offer to our customers to help them manage their data, protect their data, secure their data, integrate and orchestrate their data. Whether it's on one cloud or many. Whether it's a combination of onprem and cloud. And we charge very, very simply based on capacity or API call. We provide a full service. And that's what I think the cloud has done is democratized and empowered many, many people to consume technology that, prior to these big public clouds, you'd have to go to IT and wait six months and get charged a lot of money. The clouds make everything instantly available. It's wonderful. >> You guys have a great history, and again we've been, not critical but complementary of NetApp. You listen to customers, got a very loyal customer base. No matter what the trend is against you, by the pundits, you guys persevere as a company. And it's been great to watch, classic Silicon Valley success story. But you got Solify, you got Flash, you've been doing some kicking the tires early in cloud, now you created a business unit out of it. As you listen to customers, you see DevOps, you see (mumble) Infrastructures go, massive amounts of new proliferation, there's going to be a renaissance in software development, it's coming very fast. You almost see it coming very, very fast. What are the use cases for NetApp in the cloud, what are some of the things that customers are talking to you about, what are the top use cases, and where do you think they're going to be? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so people have been very ... in Google we've been in preview phase onboarding customers to test the system out, sort of flush water through the pipes. And we've been very lucky at Google, we've had really every use case that we wanted to test tested. At the low end, it can be as simple as just home directories shared across ... whether it's POSIX or Windows, people need access to those file systems and NetApp is the only company that offers that sort of dual protocol access. So we have home directories at the low end, all the way up to genome sequencing databases, big data, relational databases, data warehouses at the high end. And what's nice about our service is we have service level objectives. So we, for the first time, have actually put a performance guarantee on the volumes. And what's nice about that is the customer knows that that's something that we stand to. What's really nice is the customer can dial up or dial down, either the capacity that they want or the performance that they want. So they may say, Monday through Friday we want to run the volumes at this basic service level, and then over the weekend, through an API, we're going to crank them up and make them run at 128 MB/sec. So, we really are, I think, providing incredible value for all workload types. >> You just described what I consider chew software, defined strategy, programmable through an API, I mean that's something that is nuanced but dramatically simplified-- >> Oh, you know, I'm an application developer. >> I was going to say. >> And I can tell you the last thing application developers want to do is talk to IT. Second to last thing application developers want to do is mess around with UI's. So, you know, the cloud, where there are lots of pretty demos of Google Console, which is a very, very, I think, well written user interface. What we really want is the API. We want the code or application code to tell the cloud what to do and how to do it. And so, everything behind our cloud business is API first. >> The programmable aspect is critical. >> Yup. >> And this is where we're starting to see microservices >> Absolutely. >> Become interesting phenomenon. Because now you can have pure application developers, >> Yup. >> Never talking to anyone but other developers in collaboration space. They just collaborate, and they go play in open source communities, and they're-- >> Absolutely. >> Happy as a clam. >> We've now got NFS persisting in containers, so we've done ... we worked on a project called Trident. Which is an open source project and we contribute to that. On Google, you'll be able to mount file systems directly into containers. And persist storage now, with all the cool, new (mumble) things that Google brings. So, you know, the files are a very integral part, I think, of technology and strategy. And we seem to have, according to Google, the best one. What are the go-to-market aspects of your relationship with Google? Well that's the other thing I tell you I'm incredibly pleased with is Google sells our product. Google supports our product. Google bills the customers for our product. >> That's good. >> Google has kind of chosen us, and Google wants it to be part of Google. So, the experience is completely native to the console. We encapsulate all of the permissions, access control lists, it looks and feels exactly like any native Google service. >> And what's next now, obviously great relation with Google. You're almost embedded/operationalized with them. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> What's next, what's going on, what's the agenda for you guys? >> For us it's really increased investment in two dimensions. I think the first dimension is now the roll-out. We've got a very aggressive schedule to roll this out to all the major Google data centers to support all their major regions. And that's probably a never ending task, cause Google ups its ante and increases its data centers, so that keeps us busy, making the service available. The second thing then is sort of integrating that service with more of our own services. And integrating our service into some of the other Google services like BigQuery, or Spanner, or obviously there's a huge opportunity for people to bring file based data into Google Cloud and take advantage of AI and ML. (overlapping voices) >> That's interesting, integration into Spanner, I mean you've pointed out, Anthony, that Oracle runs really well on file. You guys, decade ago or so, made that happen. We had a conversation yesterday with a customer that basically moved from Oracle to Spanner. So that level of integration is one to really watch, from a transaction/database in the cloud standpoint. >> Our mission is to make file a first class protocol. >> It was interesting, also, about this, and George Kurian was talking about this on the scene, I haven't yet interviewed him yet, I'll do that next time on theCUBE, but I've heard him speak publicly, I've seen comments, software is critical. You're a software company, >> Yeah, exactly. >> you happen to have hardware here and there. So this is actually ... >> We don't make the hardware, you know. >> You don't bend the metal. >> Right. >> Google loves software. >> Yeah. >> So, interesting, so you have a lot of range, potentially, looking out in the future. >> I tell you, you know, George asked me to come to NetApp, and he gave me a blank canvass, and told me to paint whatever picture I wanted. And so, as an application developer, I wanted to have a rich set of services to help me manage my data, and I wanted to be able to do it in the cloud. >> And you want to do it without storage. >> Yeah, I mean at the end of the day ... >> You're a developer, you just want it to be there working. >> Exactly right. You expect it to be like dial tone. When you pick up the phone, at home, you don't ask yourself, how does it work? >> Nor do you want to ask the operator to connect it for you. >> Exactly right. >> And that's what's been unique, I've been following NetApp since they took on Auspex. Early on, we realized that this is a company who, basically, has storage services, and makes calls to those storage services as required, like a software developer would. >> Exactly. >> Not things that are locked into some piece of hardware. >> No, I tell you, I think what the other thing that I'm particularly proud of is I think that all of those loyal customers who have built their careers on NetApp and ONTAP, we've now given them the next part of their journey. >> Yeah. >> We've now made all of their skills relevant for Google. >> That's another 20 year lease. >> Well, the other thing ... >> It's a beautiful thing. >> The other thing you've done is, by integrating with the cloud, you bring scale that has always been a challenge for clustered systems that the cloud resolves. It was a barrier to the adoption of the cluster concept. >> I tell you the other thing that customers say more than anything else is, you know, NetApp really provides probably the industry's best insurance. I mean, any customer that makes an onpremise decision, of which there are still many, are choosing NetApp onpremise because NetApp is in the cloud. >> That's interesting, because you see Oracle's marketing with same/same but Oracle's storage products are deficient. So (laughs) >> Well, when are we start to see storage functions and terms like storageless? We have serverless. I mean ... (laughs) >> We have some, let me tell you, we have some pretty cool tricks up our sleeve. We're not going to show our hand just yet, but the stuff we're doing with the Google guys, you know, I wouldn't underestimate the amount of work the teams have put into this. This is a amazing collaboration at the development level. It's something that I don't think Google has ever done before. And I think Google, like NetApp, we see each other as very, very strong partners at a very, very deep level. >> So you're talking about engineering resources that you're providing. Can you help us understand that? Or quantify that in any way? >> Oh yeah, so ... >> Couple of guys and a laptop, or we talking about ... >> It's a very large team, and a growing team. You know, my team at NetApp, just building software on the cloud, is six-seven hundred people strong now, all product managers and developers. I mean, we take this business very, very seriously. >> This is the future of NetApp. This is a competitive strategy for you guys. >> I think NetApp is cloud first. Just imagine, did you ever think you'd hear NetApp say we're a cloud first company? Because that's what we are. >> We don't hear your competitors saying that, I can tell you that right now. >> This is NetApp's fifth life. Like I said, I've been following this company a long time. It started with workstations, you brought file to dot-com. Then you went hard after that, dot-com blew up. You went hard into the enterprise. Bet the farm on virtualization. Now you're betting the farm on cloud. >> You know, I tell you the one thing that I've been at NetApp, as I said, for about 18 months. And the company has passion and conviction and belief. And what it does so amazingly well is it leans into the things that people think are going to kill it. >> Yeah. And there ... >> And you've met Dave, right? He's a wonderful guy. He founded the company, he's still involved in the company. He's here, he's learning cloud, and he loves it. >> We saw him last night, he's a great entrepreneur. And again, that's the kind of leadership, when the founders stay around, companies succeed. I've always said that, I wrote about it. And it statistically is proven. Lean in to anything you think will probably kill you, you'll probably come out stronger. And that's really an entrepreneurial lesson. >> I tell you, the other thing that I would say, more than anything else, and it was really the biggest part of my decision to join NetApp, is a technical CEO. >> Yeah. >> You have to have a technical CEO. No disrespect to sales guys that become CEO's, or finance guys that become CEO's, they're just not as good as the technical ones. And George is an engineer. >> Yup. And he gets it. He's very passionate and committed about the product. And that, that to me, I think-- >> More than ever now in a changing tide where technology decisions, the bets can be company killing or company making, about little things, how you deal with service meshes, >> Exactly right. >> How you deal with provisioning storage through software now, these are new things. >> You know, this stuff doesn't happen overnight, right. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Software engineering, you know, is something that takes time. >> Well Anthony we really appreciate you taking the time to come on theCUBE. We love covering NetApp, we've been following your journey again, we see you at all the events, you guys are part of theCUBE community. We really appreciate that. And more than ever, we want to follow what you guys are doing in the cloud. We think it's competitive advantage vis-a-vis the competition. And want to see how it turns out. So... >> We're having so much fun. >> Let's keep in touch. >> So much fun. Thanks guys very much. >> Storageless is a big trend coming, trust me you heard it here first on theCUBE. I don't think they use that term yet, Dave. We'll be back with more live coverage, Day Two is coming to a close. Couple more segments, stay with us, for our three days of coverage of Google Cloud Google Next 2018. Be right back. (techno music)