(techno music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick with theCUBE. We're having CUBE conversations in the Palo Alto studio. We're getting to the end of the conference season, so it's nice to take a break and do some interviews from the studio instead of from the road. We're excited to have our next guest. He's David Green, he's the CEO of Zero Stack. David, welcome. >> Thank you very much. >> Absolutely, great to have you here. So for folks who aren't familiar with Zero Stack, why don't you give them kind of the quick overview. >> Great, so Zero Stack's focus on building a new generation of private cloud infrastructure where IT can simplify their operations through automation, and at the same time, retain control of the environment. We're really trying to deliver that public cloudlike experience to users while giving IT the type of control they want to have. >> But you, just so I understand, so that, right, a lot of pressure, lot of benefits to public cloud, and everybody wants it in a private cloud, right? There's a lot of issues with public cloud that, you know, there's some data that can't be there, this or that, but there's a lot of attributes of public cloud that people just love, so how are you kind of squaring that circle? >> It's interesting, right? In the last 10 years that I've been working on cloud, this has been one of the recurring themes. It's one of the things that I think is so exciting about Zero Stack, right? You talk to a customer, you talk to an IT customer, and they're like, "I love the convenience of the public cloud idea, it's going to be so simple to operate, right? "But, I need to know where my data is. "I'm accountable for security, I'm accountable for cost. "I need to have control of the environment. "Why can't I have these two things together?" And that's what we've tried to merge together. So from an IT standpoint, it's still going to look and feel like that on-premises IT-managed infrastructure they're comfortable with. From a user perspective though, it's going to have that same sort of self service, on demand that they're used to getting from a public cloud. Think of going to a web application that looks and feels like Amazon, being able to pick the resources you want, but have those resources be coming from resources running within your data center. >> Right, right. >> And then be able to add to those resources the tools that you need to be productive in the environment, really very value added for the developer, again, in that infrastructure that's living in your environment. >> And to be clear, you're not replacing that existing infrastructure that's in my environment, you're really offering, I don't know, kind of a cloud virtualization overlay or ... >> The goal is to-- >> Restructures the UI? >> Yes. You use the servers you've got, the storage ya got, the networking you've got, pull those together into a pooled resource, again, back to the idea of a private cloud, pull those resources into a single set of resources that can be accessed for a variety of use cases to support different applications in the environment. >> So what's the impact, cause obviously, if there wasn't a benefit to doing it that way, people wouldn't be doing shadow IT and whipping out the credit card with Amazon. So, when you do this in an enterprise, what are some of the benefits they see? >> I mean, I think there's a couple. One is the radical simplification of operations. From an IT standpoint, running a private cloud is hard. You know, if you hook up your build of the online environments, which is kind of the most typical frame of reference that we see, it's expensive to set up. It's expensive to operate. It's complicated, it's hard to hire the people. We're trying to get away from the burden. That's the first driver we see for people. From a user standpoint, it's really about that speed. How does IT keep up with the demands of its users and move at that same pace, right? So trying to pull together those two sets of benefits into one is really the package that seems to drive our business. >> And that's really hard, right for IT cause IT's just be keeping their lights on, keeping everything running. Now it's a core piece, if not the really strategic piece, of the business. We talked a little bit before they turned the cameras on-- >> Right, right. >> About banking, right, all banking interfaces these days are electronic. There's nobody goes in to talk to the teller and giving them a check. >> Wait a sec, so go back up here. So, remember that IT today was fundamentally built around the back office. It was fundamentally built around stability. Remember the days when a change request was a physical piece of paper with 20 signatures on it, and you ran around the office, right? >> Every now then, not very often. (laughing) >> You were supposed to right? That was the mindset, right? I think in a traditional back-office set of applications, that worked great. But the problem is today, when the business is presenting itself to customers through software and trying to move at the speed of its customers, those old IT mechanisms built around stability just can't keep up. >> Right. >> So that's the gap that we're really trying to bridge with the Zero Stack solution. Preserve that knowledge set, preserve that control, preserve that data sovereignty that IT can bring, that on-premises infrastructures can bring, but at the same time, still operate at a pace and a speed that more dev ops organization is looking for. >> Right, because the pressure on IT >> It's only getting bigger. >> It's only getting more ... >> It's only getting more. >> If you're not using software to find automation, you're falling behind. So, I would imagine there's some second order impacts that have to come out of using a tool like Zero Stack in terms of utilization and those types of things that are probably some great opportunities. >> Essentially, we really want to be the heart. While the solution looks and feels more like they've got interfaces and management, the heart of the solution, in our mind really, is our machine learning capabilities. It's ability to take a set of information from the application layer, from the operations layer, from the infrastructure and from that start to make educated judgements as to how the infrastructure can best be utilized to support the business and to support the applications. So where should work loads be placed? How are we going to plan for capacity? What needs to happen next in the environment? How should we take corrective action? These are all the sorts of things that we can start to do. And again, what we're really trying to do is we're trying to automate some of the mundane tasks that held back IT and slowed down IT operations, and instead, let them focus on the areas where they can be of more value consulting with the business, helping to move things forward, helping to address higher order questions. >> Right, because really that's another huge opportunity for cost savings or efficiency for the customer, right? Because the traditional methods were not very efficient, and you had, since they weren't efficient, you had to have a lot of overhead, and you had to, you know, pre-order stuff, and you couldn't flex, so you're now, with your automation and machine learning, helping to better utilize those resources on just the pure infrastructure spending, right? >> Exactly, exactly. And that gives you part of the cost benefit that we see with the Zero Stack solution. By getting better utilization of the infrastructure that you have, we'll able to have a more economical solution going forward. We have customers who are getting a 10X return on their investment by using the Zero Stack solution over other cloud solutions they've looked at, just by getting better intelligence and better automation and better operation clarity about what they're doing. >> So then do you partner then with HP and a lot of the infrastructure providers who talk a lot about hybrid cloud cause clearly, they're invested in keeping a big piece of the cloud inside their walls. >> So in our model, we view ourselves as a software company. So we're going to add that Zero Stack software solution on top of your infrastructure of choice. And so, that could be Dell, that could be HP, that could be Lenovo, ya know, all the kind of leading hardware vendors have been certified to work with our product. We're going to add our software on top to create their cloud infrastructure. Then we're going to add our maturing applications, our user self-service applications on top of that, and that's going to give you the top-to-bottom full stack solution. And that full stack's really important because if you want to be able to take automated actions, you want to be able to optimize infrastructure, you've got to be able to not only interface with the users and meet their demands, but also translate those demands down to actions you're taking on the infrastructure. So we're going to be able to do that full stack top to bottom. >> So just a little bit more background on the company. How big are you, how long you been around, how many people, funding? >> Well, we're a start-up here based in Silica Valley, Mountain View, California. We're a Series B company. We're proud to have our first set of customers working with us right now, actively exercising the products, fantastic big enterprise projects. I'm looking forward to coming back and telling you about it as those finish up. But really, all from the theme of people who are unsatisfied with the solutions they've had available to them in the past and trying to figure out how they're going to move forward with a better, more flexible, easier to operate cloud solution. >> All right, well, David, we look forward to watching the progress and getting an update in a few months. >> Look forward to it. >> All right, David, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I'm Jeff Frick, he's David Greene. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

okay we're back live here at the OpenStack summit in Portland Oregon I'm John furry the founder SiliconANGLE comment rose mykos Dave a latte from Wikibon org this is silicon angles the cube our flagship program we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise and certainly here OpenStack there's not a lot of noise but a lot of signal a lot of developers a lot of use cases really really the Alpha geeks the practitioner is really putting new technology into place to power this modern era of computing cloud mobile and social David Floria we're here with Demetri stilly at us from nudge networks and mountain view welcome to the cube thank you David I want to get your take on this before we set up this interview because honestly we've heard from right scale there in the management side just previous we've had Rackspace on earlier there on the Omni on the provider side we had big switch-on software-defined networking and now Dimitri's company the software is eating the world what's your take on the SDN market right now relative to OpenStack relative to open saying well what you're clearly wanting to do in every part of it is separate out all of the different layers and you ought to be able to separate out the physical and the the logical and the the software is the way that that's going to be done so instead of having to have a switch which is a piece of hardware and the software you want to separate the two out so that you have the logical function and the physical function from from the two pieces so that's very important to be able to contribute to every layer take new technologies along with you and then define the software element of that as the piece that you keep constant as technologies themselves adjust so durable code we walk manageable and build on and we clean can take advantage of new technologies as they come along and obviously I coming back to you what are you contributing what I think needs to be contributing was the white space in that area that you're going after right so see when people started thinking about the cloud and OpenStack and to always kind of think they they quickly realize that the network is a fundamental piece right you have to start with the network you have to interconnect your components and so on the angle that we are taking is yes it's good with in your data center within your cloud you have to create this network services interconnect applications and so on but much more importantly you need to be able to dynamically connect these applications with your existing network services right so you have a large amount of enterprise VPN services you have hybrid clouds coming out so you need to be able the moment you activate a network service in the data center to be able to seamlessly interconnect this now with your enterprise side with other network services in other data centers in other clouds and so on right so the network is always a network of networks and we have to bring everything together we cannot just restrict ourselves with is the confinements of a single administrative model so that's that's a fundamental part of what we are trying to to bring here together okay and so how are you fitting in with the the network layer right so our view is say that first of all we need to talk both both languages if you don't think of it as a as a translation thing right so we need to understand the language of the cloud we need to understand the language of the application developers in the cloud they want to use some abstract mechanism to define their network services and install them if you want in the hypervisors and OpenStack quantum seems to be the prevalent way to do that so that's language number one but then we have all these thousands of networks out there where their language is bgp so what we are doing is we are marrying the two we allow you to codon define services in OpenStack and we allow you to define the mekinese between interconnect the service is automatically with all the other networks that are out there right so I call it sometimes we are just translating between languages all right a language translator live from an application point of view they want to consume resources and previously networks and the computers were the main things they consumed but it seems now that sorry computing and storage with the main things they consumed but it now it seems that networks themselves have to pay a much bigger role in providing a quality of service to those places Rick you've got a quality of service down in the nano seconds when you get to the server level and used to have milliseconds for the for the storage side it's now coming down to micro second what are you doing to make sure that that quality of service no it is not just the bandwidth but it's also the latency are you planning to marry that see the weight datacenter networks of all these people are quickly realizing that the same if you want principles that we used in order to build the Internet itself can be used inside the data center so if you think about the internet right in the internet there is voice services that is video services there is all these other services running and they are actually running by assuming you have a well-engineered IP network and then you run the service is at the edges if you want all that you push all the intelligence at the edges it's the same thing where the network on the data center is going the data center network becomes a very scalable IP fabric it it is very well managed if you want very well traffic engineer and you push the edges at the hypervisors you push essentially the services at the hypervisors where traffic is differentiated so if you see for example a tenant misbehaving you are going to block him at the hypervisor layer if you're going to provide us or map different tenants to different classes of traffic it's happening at the hypervisor so the center of the network behaves like a scalable IP fabric and all the intelligence it's pushed around the edges and the reason you want to do that is because this allows you the ultimate scalability right the network or doesn't need to know about every flow that goes into the through through the corner of the network there right you don't need to know the IP addresses of virtual machines you don't need to know what individual virtual machines no need to know I want to do there you just need to worry about aggregates so you can engineer and scale the core make it very cheap and because you make it very tip you can increase the capacity at the core and you can say distribute all the intelligence at the edges of the network right but so you said that you can do the hypervisor and that's obviously on the compute side that side of it but what about the data network isn't that a don't you need to regulate the priorities and flex all the data through and isn't that today that's that's a very big part of it yes but it is still happening at the hypervisor right the the first touch of it enough an application with a network it is not anymore the top of rack sheets let's say on the data center but it does it is actually the hypervisor virtual sheets right that's the first time that you see a packet when a packet comes out of a virtual machine the first time you see it is at the hypervisor itself and at this layer when the first time you see the bucket of the hypervisor itself is where you apply all your policies right in other words the edge of the network is not the hardware is not the switch on the top of rack the edge of the network is inside the server now ok yeah ok excellent so I want to ask you we have a couple minutes left here I wanted we have two minutes less I want to get your perspective on the state of the business around OpenStack what is your view ok because your chief architects you're looking at the tech yes and you but you have to intersect the business objectives what are you seeing as the core business drivers that are that are causing you to make your technology in a certain way right so it's clear that what people want to do is they they want to provide this ability to their end users to consume services rapidly right that is what is driving this call OpenStack development and more important the community came together in order to unify view on the core engine and the core AP is in order to make this consumption of services very easy and in order to allow the application developers to move from one cloud to the other and so on right what we do is what we try to do is in addition is expanding view on this model amazing the network as consumable as the storage and compute facilities right and I'm not talking just about the network in the data center I'm talking about also the network in the way that the service in the data center of a cloud provider will interconnect with the enterprise read if you see then the next if you want Holy Grail that everybody is talking about is the hybrid cloud the hybrid cloud is only possible if you can connect the network and the services in the service provider cloud with a network and services in the in the in the enterprise itself right so they what links the two together is the network so we have to make this network to be consumable final question for you is actually DevOps is a mindset we heard from right scale that that adoption is in mainstream enterprises and service providers but the word infrastructure as code is becoming more popular outside of the the geeks and the album the architects the coders what in your mind how would you describe infrastructure as code to the folks out there give it a try it's okay no right answer it's a moving target that's what it is realities it's that the applications and code is a living organization it's constantly changing and you cannot assume at any point it's static right it's not there it's not the good old days if you want and that's what it really means right it's a living organism it it will constantly adapt to the new to the new requirements out there like switches in the old days you knew exactly ports and you you knew i was going now it's all kinds of weird stuff happening right it's all stuff you you have to be you you have to accept change if you want right so it's the actually there is a there is an okay Isaac Asimov code right there another the author of the science fiction yes that's the only constant is change yeah we should be no project just on the network genome here Software Defined Networking Dmitry stylianos thanks for jumping inside the cube again you're here like with a lot of the chief architects making things happen congratulations thanks for joining us thank you we'll be right back with more analysis from David's lawyer after the at break on a breakdown day 1 and day chu here in more depth from the analysts here at opens Dec 2 SiliconANGLE Gibbons exclusive coverage of OpenStack summit be right back