>>The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid two thousands permanently changed the way we think about it at the heart of it. The cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs more than half of it, budgets were spent on people. And much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning management, recovery optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut costs, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to simplifying hybrid cloud made possible by Cisco today, we're going to explore hybrid cloud as an operating model for organizations or the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. >>No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure. And it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where it managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing the growth and diversity of applications continues. And now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIO is by enterprise technology. Research ETR indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. >>So the challenge for it managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of it. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next we're going to hear from Maneesh Agra wall and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex, which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment we'll drill into unified compute more than a decade ago. Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS unified compute system. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade, and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. >>Okay. Let's start things off. Gus is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. DD. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, >>Our pleasure here. Uh, look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but um, every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing, um, while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications. Um, and then most modern applications are, um, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, uh, uh, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering a change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across, um, all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, uh, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the bus storage team. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right. Um, back to the origins of UCS, I mean, we widen the networking company, builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So we do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the software for our, um, for our and you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. Um, but the software is called intersite and, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. Um, but then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does go into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, uh, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, uh, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, we brought a platform, I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. Uh, and so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So w tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, um, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, uh, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we took on this ball goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same is the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or on software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how they work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. Um, but it was a pretty big boat patient because, you know, um, the big change with SAS is, is you're, uh, as you're familiar today is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, um, working with, uh, our own companies, security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. Um, so again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but, uh, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compete, I of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business, and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like doing stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right. Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that your intro introducing I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, um, search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants, I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies, and then figure out how to stitch it all together. Cause it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's, that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, um, you know, infrastructure partners like, uh, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, you know, others who want their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are other SAS offerings and software vendors, um, who have now become partners. Like we do not, we did not write to Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, uh, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem, we partnered with a company called ergonomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, uh, you know, w how we have gone about this. >>And, uh, it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the inner side platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, uh, soon coming on, uh, on GC, on, uh, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site is since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage the end in, in a, in an easy to instance. So, >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. Um, so my last question is how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing has become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center. It doesn't matter if they're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades, or they're looking for a consistent operating model. What my crystal ball doesn't mean. There's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So allegations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is most as the data moving data is the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be located with the data that's on the edge. We on the air colo public cloud doesn't matter, but, um, basically you're gonna see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific, I think sovereign is going to play a huge role. Uh, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it goes to making, you know, a good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, whether it's, gonna play control, um, and then distributed cloud also on edge, um, is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way, every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workload data, um, you know, upgrading your liability concerns. That's really what, what we are trying to enable for our customers. >>Uh, you know, I think I agree with doing that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world, uh, a solid open, flexible platform, and it's flexible in terms of the technology flexible in how they want to consume it at some customers are fine with a SAS software. What if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team now that does not work so how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, our perspective sovereignty, we talked about it. So, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. Um, but the last thing I would mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage into some of those, um, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex. Um, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right, thanks DDL. It was a pleasure to have you in the queue. Great to see you. You're welcome in a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where HyperFlex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>>Okay, let's start things off Didi Dasgupta is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. Didi. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >>Yeah, our pleasure here. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution off the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications and then most modern applications are, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering the change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the, the storage team of, and now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right back of the origins of UCS. I mean, we, you know, why the networking company builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our. And you know, we've been on this journey for about four years, but the software is called intersite. And, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices, but then we've evolved it the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one, one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does goes into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that managed their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, he brought a platform. I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. And so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, you know, three or four guys getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same in the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or the cyber talk software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how their assets work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it, it was pretty big boat invasion. Cause you know, the big change with SAS is your, as you're familiar, Dave is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities. And we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, working with our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. So again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but I wanted to point out that we are in some ways eating our own dog food. Cause we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I, I of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right? Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that you're introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control multi-tenants I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies and then figure out how to stitch it all together because it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, or, you know, others who want to their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are there other SAS offerings, software vendors who have now become partners? Like we did not, we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem we partnered with a company called urbanomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, you know, w how we have gone about this. And it actually ducked a dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today, that we're announcing on the underside platform, where we're actually been announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on, on GC, on, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site, since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage VMs in, in a, in an instance. >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at know $2 or $3 depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing is become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades or liability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What Mike is the law doesn't mean? I think there's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So obligations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is data moving data is it's the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be co-located with the data that's on the edge, on the edge colo public cloud doesn't matter, but you're basically going to see more customer droughts, more industry-specific clouds. You know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific. I think sovereign is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it comes to making good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, control. And the distributor cloud is also on edge is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey that will have their choice of workloads, data, you know, uptime, reliability, concerns. That's really what, what we are returning any of our customers. >>You know, I think I agree with you that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world a solid open, flexible, and flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some customers are fine with a SAS software, but as I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. So how they want to consume it. They want to, you know, a hundred percent, no sovereignty. We, we talked about. So, you know, job for a decent structure vendor like ourselves is to give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage me to some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right. Thanks, Deedee. Always a pleasure to have you in the cube. Great to see you. >>You're >>Welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.