(intro music) >> "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> We're not going to- >> Hey everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Dave Nicholson, day four of MWC23. I mean, it's Dave, it's, it's still really busy. And you walking the floors, you got to stop and start. >> It's surprising. >> People are cheering. They must be winding down, giving out the awards. Really excited. Pier, look at you and Elias here. He's the vice president of Engineering Technology for Edge Computing Offers Strategy and Execution at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Dan Cummins, who's a fellow and vice president of, in the Edge Business Unit at Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I love when I see the term fellow. You know, you don't, they don't just give those away. What do you got to do to be a fellow at Dell? >> Well, you know, fellows are senior technical leaders within Dell. And they're usually tasked to help Dell solve you know, a very large business challenge to get to a fellow. There's only, I think, 17 of them inside of Dell. So it is a small crowd. You know, previously, really what got me to fellow, is my continued contribution to transform Dell's mid-range business, you know, VNX two, and then Unity, and then Power Store, you know, and then before, and then after that, you know, they asked me to come and, and help, you know, drive the technology vision for how Dell wins at the Edge. >> Nice. Congratulations. Now, Pierluca, I'm looking at this kind of cool chart here which is Edge, Edge platform by Dell Technologies, kind of this cube, like cubes course, you know. >> AK project from here. >> Yeah. So, so tell us about the Edge platform. What, what's your point of view on all that at Dell? >> Yeah, absolutely. So basically in a, when we create the Edge, and before even then was bringing aboard, to create this vision of the platform, and now building the platform when we announced project from here, was to create solution for the Edge. Dell has been at the edge for 30 years. We sold a lot of compute. But the reality was people want outcome. And so, and the Edge is a new market, very exciting, but very siloed. And so people at the Edge have different personas. So quickly realize that we need to bring in Dell, people with expertise, quickly realize as well that doing all these solution was not enough. There was a lot of problem to solve because the Edge is outside of the data center. So you are outside of the wall of the data center. And what is going to happen is obviously you are in the land of no one. And so you have million of device, thousand of million of device. All of us at home, we have all connected thing. And so we understand that the, the capability of Dell was to bring in technology to secure, manage, deploy, with zero touch, zero trust, the Edge. And all the edge the we're speaking about right now, we are focused on everything that is outside of a normal data center. So, how we married the computer that we have for many years, the new gateways that we create, so having the best portfolio, number one, having the best solution, but now, transforming the way that people deploy the Edge, and secure the Edge through a software platform that we create. >> You mentioned Project Frontier. I like that Dell started to do these sort of project, Project Alpine was sort of the multi-cloud storage. I call it "The Super Cloud." The Project Frontier. It's almost like you develop, it's like mission based. Like, "Okay, that's our North Star." People hear Project Frontier, they know, you know, internally what you're talking about. Maybe use it for external communications too, but what have you learned since launching Project Frontier? What's different about the Edge? I mean you're talking about harsh environments, you're talking about new models of connectivity. So, what have you learned from Project Frontier? What, I'd love to hear the fellow perspective as well, and what you guys are are learning so far. >> Yeah, I mean start and then I left to them, but we learn a lot. The first thing we learn that we are on the right path. So that's good, because every conversation we have, there is nobody say to us, you know, "You are crazy. "This is not needed." Any conversation we have this week, start with the telco thing. But after five minutes it goes to, okay, how I can solve the Edge, how I can bring the compute near where the data are created, and how I can do that secure at scale, and with the right price. And then can speak about how we're doing that. >> Yeah, yeah. But before that, we have to really back up and understand what Dell is doing with Project Frontier, which is an Edge operations platform, to simplify your Edge use cases. Now, Pierluca and his team have a number of verticalized applications. You want to be able to securely deploy those, you know, at the Edge. But you need a software platform that's going to simplify both the life cycle management, and the security at the Edge, with the ability to be able to construct and deploy distributed applications. Customers are looking to derive value near the point of generation of data. We see a massive explosion of data. But in particular, what's different about the Edge, is the different computing locations, and the constraints that are on those locations. You know, for example, you know, in a far Edge environment, the people that service that equipment are not trained in the IT, or train, trained in it. And they're also trained in the safety and security protocols of that environment. So you necessarily can't apply the same IT techniques when you're managing infrastructure and deploying applications, or servicing in those locations. So Frontier was designed to solve for those constraints. You know, often we see competitors that are doing similar things, that are starting from an IT mindset, and trying to shift down to cover Edge use cases. What we've done with Frontier, is actually first understood the constraints that they have at the Edge. Both the operational constraints and technology constraints, the service constraints, and then came up with a, an architecture and technology platform that allows them to start from the Edge, and bleed into the- >> So I'm laughing because you guys made the same mistake. And you, I think you learned from that mistake, right? You used to take X86 boxes and throw 'em over the fence. Now, you're building purpose-built systems, right? Project Frontier I think is an example of the learnings. You know, you guys an IT company, right? Come on. But you're learning fast, and that's what I'm impressed about. >> Well Glenn, of course we're here at MWC, so it's all telecom, telecom, telecom, but really, that's a subset of Edge. >> Yes. >> Fair to say? >> Yes. >> Can you give us an example of something that is, that is, orthogonal to, to telecom, you know, maybe off to the side, that maybe overlaps a little bit, but give us an, give us an example of Edge, that isn't specifically telecom focused. >> Well, you got the, the Edge verticals. and Pierluca could probably speak very well to this. You know, you got manufacturing, you got retail, you got automotive, you got oil and gas. Every single one of them are going to make different choices in the software that they're going to use, the hyperscaler investments that they're going to use, and then write some sort of automation, you know, to deploy that, right? And the Edge is highly fragmented across all of these. So we certainly could deploy a private wireless 5G solution, orchestrate that deployment through Frontier. We can also orchestrate other use cases like connected worker, or overall equipment effectiveness in manufacturing. But Pierluca you have a, you have a number. >> Well, but from your, so, but just to be clear, from your perspective, the whole idea of, for example, private 5g, it's a feature- >> Yes. >> That might be included. It happened, it's a network topology, a network function that might be a feature of an Edge environment. >> Yes. But it's not the center of the discussion. >> So, it enables the outcome. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> So this, this week is a clear example where we confirm and establish this. The use case, as I said, right? They, you say correctly, we learned very fast, right? We brought people in that they came from industry that was not IT industry. We brought people in with the things, and we, we are Dell. So we have the luxury to be able to interview hundreds of customers, that just now they try to connect the OT with the IT together. And so what we learn, is really, at the Edge is different personas. They person that decide what to do at the Edge, is not the normal IT administrator, is not the normal telco. >> Who is it? Is it an engineer, or is it... >> It's, for example, the store manager. >> Yeah. >> It's, for example, the, the person that is responsible for the manufacturing process. Those people are not technology people by any means. But they have a business goal in mind. Their goal is, "I want to raise my productivity by 30%," hence, I need to have a preventive maintenance solution. How we prescribe this preventive maintenance solution? He doesn't prescribe the preventive maintenance solution. He goes out, he has to, a consult or himself, to deploy that solution, and he choose different fee. Now, the example that I was doing from the houses, all of us, we have connected device. The fact that in my house, I have a solar system that produce energy, the only things I care that I can read, how much energy I produce on my phone, and how much energy I send to get paid back. That's the only thing. The fact that inside there is a compute that is called Dell or other things is not important to me. Same persona. Now, if I can solve the security challenge that the SI, or the user need to implement this technology because it goes everywhere. And I can manage this in extensively, and I can put the supply chain of Dell on top of that. And I can go every part in the world, no matter if I have in Papua New Guinea, or I have an oil ring in Texas, that's the winning strategy. That's why people, they are very interested to the, including Telco, the B2B business in telco is looking very, very hard to how they recoup the investment in 5g. One of the way, is to reach out with solution. And if I can control and deploy things, more than just SD one or other things, or private mobility, that's the key. >> So, so you have, so you said manufacturing, retail, automotive, oil and gas, you have solutions for each of those, or you're building those, or... >> Right now we have solution for manufacturing, with for example, PTC. That is the biggest company. It's actually based in Boston. >> Yeah. Yeah, it is. There's a company that the market's just coming right to them. >> We have a, very interesting. Another solution with Litmus, that is a startup that, that also does manufacturing aggregation. We have retail with Deep North. So we can do detecting in the store, how many people they pass, how many people they doing, all of that. And all theses solution that will be, when we will have Frontier in the market, will be also in Frontier. We are also expanding to energy, and we going vertical by vertical. But what is they really learn, right? You said, you know you are an IT company. What, to me, the Edge is a pre virtualization area. It's like when we had, you know, I'm, I've been in the company for 24 years coming from EMC. The reality was before there was virtualization, everybody was starting his silo. Nobody thought about, "Okay, I can run this thing together "with security and everything, "but I need to do it." Because otherwise in a manufacturing, or in a shop, I can end up with thousand of devices, just because someone tell to me, I'm a, I'm a store manager, I don't know better. I take this video surveillance application, I take these things, I take a, you know, smart building solution, suddenly I have five, six, seven different infrastructure to run this thing because someone say so. So we are here to democratize the Edge, to secure the Edge, and to expand. That's the idea. >> So, the Frontier platform is really the horizontal platform. And you'll build specific solutions for verticals. On top of that, you'll, then I, then the beauty is ISV's come in. >> Yes. >> 'Cause it's open, and the developers. >> We have a self certification program already for our solution, as well, for the current solution, but also for Frontier. >> What does that involve? Self-certification. You go through you, you go through some- >> It's basically a, a ISV can come. We have a access to a lab, they can test the thing. If they pass the first screen, then they can become part of our ecosystem very easily. >> Ah. >> So they don't need to spend days or months with us to try to architect the thing. >> So they get the premature of being certified. >> They get the Dell brand associated with it. Maybe there's some go-to-market benefits- >> Yes. >> As well. Cool. What else do we need to know? >> So, one thing I, well one thing I just want to stress, you know, when we say horizontal platform, really, the Edge is really a, a distributed edge computing problem, right? And you need to almost create a mesh of different computing locations. So for example, even though Dell has Edge optimized infrastructure, that we're going to deploy and lifecycle manage, customers may also have compute solutions, existing compute solutions in their data center, or at a co-location facility that are compute destinations. Project Frontier will connect to those private cloud stacks. They'll also collect to, connect to multiple public cloud stacks. And then, what they can do, is the solutions that we talked about, they construct that using an open based, you know, protocol, template, that describes that distributed application that produces that outcome. And then through orchestration, we can then orchestrate across all of these locations to produce that outcome. That's what the platform's doing. >> So it's a compute mesh, is what you just described? >> Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a software orchestration mesh. >> Okay. >> Right. And allows customers to take advantage of their existing investments. Also allows them to, to construct solutions based on the ISV of their choice. We're offering solutions like Pierluca had talked about, you know, in manufacturing with Litmus and PTC, but they could put another use case that's together based on another ISV. >> Is there a data mesh analog here? >> The data mesh analog would run on top of that. We don't offer that as part of Frontier today, but we do have teams working inside of Dell that are working on this technology. But again, if there's other data mesh technology or packages, that they want to deploy as a solution, if you will, on top of Frontier, Frontier's extensible in that way as well. >> The open nature of Frontier is there's a, doesn't, doesn't care. It's just a note on the mesh. >> Yeah. >> Right. Now, of course you'd rather, you'd ideally want it to be Dell technology, and you'll make the business case as to why it should be. >> They get additional benefits if it's Dell. Pierluca talked a lot about, you know, deploying infrastructure outside the walls of an IT data center. You know, this stuff can be tampered with. Somebody can move it to another room, somebody can open up. In the supply chain with, you know, resellers that are adding additional people, can open these devices up. We're actually deploying using an Edge technology called Secure Device Onboarding. And it solves a number of things for us. We, as a manufacturer can initialize the roots of trust in the Dell hardware, such that we can validate, you know, tamper detection throughout the supply chain, and securely transfer ownership. And that's different. That is not an IT technique. That's an edge technique. And that's just one example. >> That's interesting. I've talked to other people in IT about how they're using that technique. So it's, it's trickling over to that side of the business. >> I'm almost curious about the friction that you, that you encounter because the, you know, you paint a picture of a, of a brave new world, a brave new future. Ideally, in a healthy organization, they have, there's a CTO, or at least maybe a CIO, with a CTO mindset. They're seeking to leverage technology in the service of whatever the mission of the organization is. But they've got responsibilities to keep the lights on, as well as innovate. In that mix, what are you seeing as the inhibitors? What's, what's the push back against Frontier that you're seeing in most cases? Is it, what, what is it? >> Inside of Dell? >> No, not, I'm saying out, I'm saying with- >> Market friction. >> Market, market, market friction. What is the push back? >> I think, you know, as I explained, do yourself is one of the things that probably is the most inhibitor, because some people, they think that they are better already. They invest a lot in this, and they have the content. But those are again, silo solutions. So, if you go into some of the huge things that they already established, thousand of store and stuff like that, there is an opportunity there, because also they want to have a refresh cycle. So when we speak about softer, softer, softer, when you are at the Edge, the software needs to run on something that is there. So the combination that we offer about controlling the security of the hardware, plus the operating system, and provide an end-to-end platform, allow them to solve a lot of problems that today they doing by themselves. Now, I met a lot of customers, some of them, one actually here in Spain, I will not make the name, but it's a large automotive. They have the same challenge. They try to build, but the problem is this is just for them. And they want to use something that is a backup and provide with the Dell service, Dell capability of supply chain in all the world, and the diversity of the portfolio we have. These guys right now, they need to go out and find different types of compute, or try to adjust thing, or they need to have 20 people there to just prepare the device. We will take out all of this. So I think the, the majority of the pushback is about people that they already established infrastructure, and they want to use that. But really, there is an opportunity here. Because the, as I said, the IT/OT came together now, it's a reality. Three years ago when we had our initiative, they've pointed out, sarcastically. We, we- >> Just trying to be honest. (laughing) >> I can't let you get away with that. >> And we, we failed because it was too early. And we were too focused on, on the fact to going. Push ourself to the boundary of the IOT. This platform is open. You want to run EdgeX, you run EdgeX, you want OpenVINO, you want Microsoft IOT, you run Microsoft IOT. We not prescribe the top. We are locking down the bottom. >> What you described is the inertia of, of sunk dollars, or sunk euro into an infrastructure, and now they're hanging onto that. >> Yeah. >> But, I mean, you know, I, when we say horizontal, we think scale, we think low cost, at volume. That will, that will win every time. >> There is a simplicity at scale, right? There is a, all the thing. >> And the, and the economics just overwhelm that siloed solution. >> And >> That's inevitable. >> You know, if you want to apply security across the entire thing, if you don't have a best practice, and a click that you can do that, or bring down an application that you need, you need to touch each one of these silos. So, they don't know yet, but we going to be there helping them. So there is no pushback. Actually, this particular example I did, this guy said you know, there are a lot of people that come here. Nobody really described the things we went through. So we are on the right track. >> Guys, great conversation. We really appreciate you coming on "theCUBE." >> Thank you. >> Pleasure to have you both. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're live at the Fira. We're winding up day four. Keep it right there. Go to siliconangle.com. John Furrier's got all the news on "theCUBE.net." We'll be right back right after this break. "theCUBE," at MWC 23. (outro music)

>> And I'm here at Dell's Presence at MWC with vice president of marketing for telecom and Edge Computing, Aaron Chaisson. Aaron, how's it going? >> Doing great. How's it going today, Dave? >> It's going pretty well. Pretty excited about what you've got going here and I'm looking forward to getting the tour. You ready to take a closer look? >> Ready to do it. Let's go take a look! For us in the telecom ecosystem, it's really all about how we bring together the different players that are innovating across the industry to drive value for our CSP customers. So, it starts really, for us, at the ecosystem layer, bringing partners, bringing telecommunication providers, bringing (stutters) a bunch of different technologies together to innovate together to drive new value. So Paul, take us a little bit through what we're doing to- to develop and bring in these partnerships and develop our ecosystem. >> Uh, sure. Thank you Aaron. Uh, you know, one of the things that we've been focusing on, you know, Dell is really working with many players in the open telecom ecosystem. Network equipment providers, independent software vendors, and the communication service providers. And, you know, through our lines of business or open telecom ecosystem labs, what we want to do is bring 'em together into a community with the goal of really being able to accelerate open innovation and, uh, open solutions into the market. And that's what this community is really about, is being able to, you know, have those communications, develop those collaborations whether it's through, you know, sharing information online, having webinars dedicated to sharing Dell information, whether it's our next generation hardware portfolio we announced here at the show, our use case directory, our- how we're dealing with new service opportunities, but as well as the community to share, too, which I think is an exciting way for us to be able to, you know- what is the knowledge thing? As well as activities at other events that we have coming up. So really the key thing I think about, the- the open telecom ecosystem community, it's collaboration and accelerating the open industry forward. >> So- So Aaron, if I'm hearing this correctly you're saying that you can't just say, "Hey, we're open", and throw a bunch of parts in a box and have it work? >> No, we've got to work together to integrate these pieces to be able to deliver value, and, you know, we opened up a- (stutters) in our open ecosystem labs, we started a- a self-certification process a couple of months back. We've already had 13 partners go through that, we've got 16 more in the pipeline. Everything you see in this entire booth has been innovated and worked with partnerships from Intel to Microsoft to, uh, to (stutters) Wind River and Red Hat and others. You go all the way around the booth, everything here has partnerships at its core. And why don't we go to the next section here where we're going to be showing how we're pulling that all together in our open ecosystems labs to drive that innovation? >> So Aaron, you talked about the kinds of validation and testing that goes on, so that you can prove out an open stack to deliver the same kinds of reliability and performance and availability that we expect from a wireless network. But in the opens- in the open world, uh, what are we looking at here? >> Yeah absolutely. So one of the- one of the challenges to a very big, broad open ecosystem is the complexity of integrating, deploying, and managing these, especially at telecom scale. You're not talking about thousands of servers in one site, you're talking about one server in thousands of sites. So how do you deploy that predictable stack and then also manage that at scale? I'm going to show you two places where we're talkin' about that. So, this is actually representing an area that we've been innovating in recently around creating an integrated infrastructure and virtualization stack for the telecom industry. We've been doing this for years in IT with VxBlocks and VxRails and others. Here what you see is we got, uh, Dell hardware infrastructure, we've got, uh, an open platform for virtualization providers, in this case we've created an infrastructure block for Red Hat to be able to supply an infrastructure for core operations and Packet Cores for telecoms. On the other side of this, you can actually see what we're doing with Wind River to drive innovation around RAN and being able to simplify RAN- vRAN and O-RAN deployments. >> What does that virtualization look like? Are we talking about, uh, traditional virtual machines with OSs, or is this containerized cloud native? What does it look like? >> Yeah, it's actually both, so it can support, uh, virtual, uh-uh, software as well as containerized software, so we leverage the (indistinct) distributions for these to be able to deploy, you know, cloud native applications, be able to modernize how they're deploying these applications across the telecom network. So in this case with Red Hat, uh, (stutters) leveraging OpenShift in order to support containerized apps in your Packet Core environments. >> So what are- what are some of the kinds of things that you can do once you have infrastructure like this deployed? >> Yeah, I mean by- by partnering broadly across the ecosystem with VMware, with Red Hat, uh, with- with Wind River and with others, it gives them the ability to be able to deploy the right virtualization software in their network for the types of applications they're deploying. They might want to use Red Hat in their core, they may want to use Wind River in their RAM, they may want to use, uh, Microsoft or VMware for their- for their Edge workloads, and we allow them to be able to deploy all those, but centrally manage those with a common user interface and a common set of APIs. >> Okay, well I'm dying to understand the link between this and the Lego city that the viewers can't see, yet, but it's behind me. Let's take a look. >> So let's take a look at the Lego city that shows how we not deploy just one of these, but dozens or hundreds of these at scale across a cityscape. >> So Aaron, I know we're not in Copenhagen. What's all the Lego about? >> Yeah, so the Lego city here is to show- and, uh, really there's multiple points of Presence across an entire Metro area that we want to be able to manage if we're a telecom provider. We just talked about one infrastructure block. What if I wanted to deploy dozens of these across the city to be able to manage my network, to be able to manage, uh, uh- to be able to deploy private mobility potentially out into a customer enterprise environment, and be able to manage all of these, uh, very simply and easily from a common interface? >> So it's interesting. Now I think I understand why you are VP of marketing for both telecom and Edge. Just heard- just heard a lot about Edge and I can imagine a lot of internet of things, things, hooked up at that Edge. >> Yeah, so why don't we actually go over to another area? We're actually going to show you how one small microbrewery (stutters) in one of our cities nearby, uh, (stutters) my hometown in Massachusetts is actually using this technology to go from more of an analyzed- analog world to digitizing their business to be able to brew better beer. >> So Aaron, you bring me to a brewery. What do we have- what do we have going on here? >> Yeah, so, actually (stutters) about- about a year ago or so, I- I was able to get my team to come together finally after COVID to be able to meet each other and have a nice team event. One of those nights, we went out to dinner at a- at a brewery called "Exhibit 'A'" in Massachusetts, and they actually gave us a tour of their facilities and showed us how they actually go through the process of brewing beer. What we saw as we were going through it, interestingly, was that everything was analog. They literally had people with pen and paper walking around checking time and temperature and the process of brewing the beer, and they weren't asking for help, but we actually saw an opportunity where what we're doing to help businesses digitize what they're doing in their manufacturing floor can actually help them optimize how they build whatever product they're building, in this case it was beer. >> Hey Warren, good to meet you! What do we have goin' on? >> Yeah, it's all right. So yeah, basically what we did is we took some of their assets in the, uh, brewery that were completely manually monitored. People were literally walking around the floor with clipboards, writing down values. And we censorized the asset, in this case fermentation tanks and we measured the, uh, pressure and the temperature, which in fermentation are very key to monitor those, because if they get out of range the entire batch of beer can go bad or you don't get the consistency from batch to batch if you don't tightly monitor those. So we censorized the fermentation tank, brought that into an industrial I/O network, and then brought that into a Dell gateway which is connected 5G up to the cloud, which then that data comes to a tablet or a phone, which they, rather than being out on the floor and monitor it, can look at this data remotely at any time. >> So I'm not sure the exact date, the first time we have evidence of beer being brewed by humanity... >> Yep. >> But I know it's thousands of years ago. So it's taken that long to get to the point where someone had to come along, namely Dell, to actually digitally transform the beer business. Is this sort of proof that if you can digitally transform this, you can digitally transform anything? >> Absolutely. You name it, anything that's being manufactured, sold, uh, uh, taken care of, (stutters) any business out there that's looking to be able to be modernize and deliver better service to their customers can benefit from technologies like this. >> So we've taken a look at the ecosystem, the way that you validate architectures, we've seen an example of that kind of open architecture. Now we've seen a real world use case. Do you want to take a look a little deeper under the covers and see what's powering all of this? >> We just this week announced a new line of servers that power Edge and RAN use cases, and I want to introduce Mike to kind of take us through what we've been working on and really what the power of what this providing. >> Hey Mike, welcome to theCube. >> Oh, glad- glad to be here. So, what I'd really like to talk about are the three new XR series servers that we just announced last week and we're showing here at Mobile World Congress. They are all short depth, ruggedized, uh, very environmentally tolerant, and able to withstand, you know, high temperatures, high humidities, and really be deployed to places where traditional data center servers just can't handle, you know, due to one fact or another, whether it's depth or the temperature. And so, the first one I'd like to show you is the XR7620. This is, uh, 450 millimeters deep, it's designed for, uh, high levels of acceleration so it can support up to 2-300 watt, uh, GPUs. But what I really want to show you over here, especially for Mobile World Congress, is our new XR8000. The XR8000 is based on Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids technology, and this is- happens to be one of the first, uh, EE boost processors that is out, and basically what it is (stutters) an embedded accelerator that makes, uh, the- the processing of vRAN loads very, uh, very efficient. And so they're actually projecting a, uh, 3x improvement, uh, of processing per watt over the previous generation of processors. This particular unit is also sledded. It's very much like, uh, today's traditional baseband unit, so it's something that is designed for low TCO and easy maintenance in the field. This is the frew. When anything fails, you'll pull one out, you pop a new one in, it comes back into service, and the- the, uh, you know, your radio is- is, uh, minimally disrupted. >> Yeah, would you describe this as quantitative and qualitative in terms of the kinds of performance gains that these underlying units are delivering to us? I mean, this really kind of changes the game, doesn't it? It's not just about more, is it about different also in terms of what we can do? >> Well we are (stutters) to his point, we are able to bring in new accelerator technologies. Not only are we doing it with the Intel, uh, uh, uh, of the vRAN boost technologies, but also (stutters) we can bring it, too, but there's another booth here where we're actually working with our own accelerator cards and other accelerator cards from our partners across the industry to be able to deliver the price and performance capabilities required by a vRAN or an O-RAN deployment in the network. So it's not- it's not just the chip technology, it's the integration and the innovation we're doing with others, as well as, of course, the unique power cooling capabilities that Dell provides in our servers that really makes these the most efficient way of being able to power a network. >> Any final thoughts recapping the whole picture here? >> Yeah, I mean I would just say if anybody's, uh, i- is still here in Mobile World Congress, wants to come and learn what we're doing, I only showed you a small section of the demos we've got here. We've got 13 demos across on 8th floor here. Uh, for those of you who want to talk to us (stutters) and have meetings with us, we've got 13 meeting rooms back there, over 500 costumer partner meetings this week, we've got some whisper suites for those of you who want to come and talk to us but we're innovating on going forward. So, you know, there's a lot that we're doing, we're really excited, there's a ton of passion at this event, and, uh, we're really excited about where the industry is going and our role in it. >> 'Preciate the tour, Aaron. Thanks Mike. >> Mike: Thank you! >> Well, for theCube... Again, Dave Nicholson here. Thanks for joining us on this tour of Dell's Presence here at MWC 2023.

>> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Paul Gillin. Rob Belson is here as the Developer Relations Lead at Verizon. Robbie great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Verizon and developer relations. Talk about your role there. Really interesting. >> Absolutely. If you think about our mobile edge computing portfolio in Verizon 5G Edge, suddenly the developer is a more important persona than ever for actually adopting the cloud itself and adopting the mobile edge. So the question then quickly became how do we go after developers and how do we tell stories that ultimately resonate with them? And so my role has been spearheading our developer relations and experience efforts, which is all about meeting developers in the channels where they actually are, building content that resonates with them. Building out architectures that showcase how do you actually use the technology in the wild? And then ultimately creating automation assets that make their lives easier in deploying to the mobile edge. >> So, you know, telcos get a bad rap, when you're thinking it's amazing what you guys do. You put out all this capital infrastructure, big outlays. You know, we use our phones to drop a call. People like, "Ah, freaking Verizon." But it's amazing what we can actually do too. You think about the pandemic, the shift that the telcos had to go through to landlines to support home, never missed a beat. And yet at the same time you're providing all this infrastructure for people to come over the top, the cost forbid is going down, right? Your cost are going up and yet now we're doing this big 5G buildup. So I feel like there's a renaissance about to occur in edge computing that the telcos are going to lead new forms of monetization new value that you're going to be able to add, new services, new applications. The future's got to be exciting for you guys and it's going to be developer-led, isn't it? >> Absolutely. I mean it's been such an exciting time to be a part of our mobile edge computing portfolio. If you think back to late 2019 we were really asking the question with the advent of high speed 5G mobile networks, how can you drive more immersive experiences from the cloud in a cloud native way without compromising on the tools you know and love? And that's ultimately what caused us to really work with the likes of AWS and others to think about what does a mobile edge computing portfolio look like? So we started with 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength. So taking the compute and storage services you know and love in AWS and bringing it to the edge of our 4G and 5G networks. But then we start to think, well, wait a minute. Why stop at public networks? Let's think about private networks. How can we bring the cloud and private networks together? So you turn back to late 2021 we announced Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Outposts but we didn't even stop there. We said, "Well, interest's cool, but what about network APIs? We've been talking about the ability and the programmability of the 5G network but what does that actually look like to the developers? And one great example is our Edge Discovery Service. So you think about the proliferation of the edge 17 Wavelength Zones today in the US. Well, what edge is the right edge? You think about maybe the airline industry if the closest exit might be behind you absolutely applies to service discovery. So we've built an API that helps answer that seemingly basic question but is the fundamental building block for everything to workload orchestration, workload distribution. A basic network building block has become so important to some of these new sources of revenue streams, as we mentioned, but also the ability to disintermediate that purpose built hardware. You think about the future of autonomous mobile robots either ground and aerial robotics. Well, you want to make those devices as cheap as possible but you don't want to compromise on performance. And that mobile edge layer is going to become so critical for that connectivity, but also the compute itself. >> So I just kind of gave my little narrative up front about telco, but that purpose built hardware that you're talking about is exceedingly reliable. I mean, it's hardened, it's fossilized and so now as you just disaggregate that and go to a more programmable infrastructure, how are you able to and what gives you confidence that you're going to be able to maintain that reliability that I joke about? Oh, but it's so reliable. The network has amazing reliability. How are you able to maintain that? Is that just the pace of technology is now caught up, I wonder if you can explain that? >> I think it's really cool as I see reliability and sort of geo distribution as inextricably linked. So in a world where to get that best in class latency you needed to go to one place and one place only. Well, now you're creating some form of single source of failure whether it's the power, whether it's the compute itself, whether it's the networking, but with a more geo distributed footprint, particularly in the mobile edge more choices for where to deliver that immersive experience you're naturally driving an increase in reliability. But again, infra alone it's not going to do the job. You need the network APIs. So it's the convergence of the cloud and network and infra and the automation behind it that's been incredibly powerful. And as a great example, the work we've been doing in hybrid MEC the ability to converge within one single architecture, the private network, the public network, the AWS Outposts, the AWS Wavelength all in one has been such a fantastic journey and Red Hat has been a really important part in that journey. >> From the perspective of the developer when they're building a full cloud to edge application, where does Verizon pick up? Where do they start working primarily with you versus with their cloud provider? >> Absolutely. And I think you touched on a really important point. I think when you often think about the edge it's thought of as an either, or. Is it the edge? Is it the cloud? Is it both? It's an and I can't emphasize that enough. What we've seen from the customers greenfield or otherwise it's about extending an application or services that were never intended to live at the edge, to the edge itself, to deliver a more performant experience. And for certain control plane operations, metadata, backend operations analytics that can absolutely stay in the cloud itself. And so our role is to be a trusted partner in some of our enterprise customers' journeys. Of course, they can lean on the cloud provider in select cases, but we're an absolutely critical mode of support as you think about what are those architectures? How do you integrate the network APIs? And through our developer relations efforts, we've put a major role in helping to shape what those patterns really look like in the wild. >> When they're developing for 5G I mean, the availability of 5G of particularly you know, the high bandwidth 5G is pretty spotty right now. Mostly urban areas. How should they be thinking in the future developing an application roll out two years from now about where 5G will be at that point? >> Absolutely. I think one of the most important things in this case is the interoperability of our edge computing portfolio with both 4G and 5G. Whenever somebody asks me about the performance of 5G they ask how fast? Or for edge computing. It's always about benchmark. It's not an absolute value. It's always about benchmarking the performance to that next best alternative. What were you going to get if you didn't have edge computing in your back pocket? And so along that line of thought having the option to go either through 4G or 5G, having a mobile edge computing portfolio that works for both modes of connectivity even CAN-AM IoT is incredibly powerful. >> So it sounds like 4G is going to be with us for quite a while still? >> And I think it's an important part of the architecture. >> Yeah. >> Robert, tell us about the developer that's building these applications. Where does that individual come from? What's their persona? >> Oh, boy I think there's a number of different personas and flavors. I've seen everything from the startup in the back of a garage working hard to try to figure out what could I do for a next generation media and entertainment experience but also large enterprises. And I think a great area where we saw this was our 5G Edge Computing Challenge that we hosted last year. Believe it or not 100 submissions from over 22 countries, all building on Verizon 5G Edge. It was so exciting to see because so many different use cases across public safety, healthcare, media and entertainment. And what we found was that education is so important. A lot of developers have great ideas but if you don't understand the fundamentals of the infrastructure you get bogged down in networking and setting up your environment. And that's why we think that developer education is so important. We want to make it easy and in fact, the 5G Edge portfolio was designed in such a way that we'll abstract the complexities of the network away so you can focus on building your application and that's such a central theme and focus for how we approach the development. >> So what kind of services are you exposing via APIs? >> Absolutely, so first and foremost, as you think about 5G Edge with say AWS Wavelength, the infra there are APIs that are exposed by AWS to launch your infra, to patch your infrastructure, to automate your infrastructure. Specifically that Verizon has developed that's our network APIs. And a great example is our Edge Discovery Service. So think of this as like a service registry you've launched an application in all 17 edge zones. You would take that information, you would send it via API to the Edge Discovery Service so that for any mobile client say, you wake up one morning in Boston, you can ask the API or query, "Hey, what's the closest edge zone?" DNS isn't going to be able to figure it out. You need knowledge of the actual topology of the mobile network itself. So the API will answer. Let's say you take a little road trip 1,000 miles south to say Miami, Florida you ask that question again. It could change. So that's the workflow and how you would use the network API today. >> How'd you get into this? You're an engineer it's obvious how'd you stumble into this role? >> Well, yeah, I have a background in networks and distributed systems so I always knew I wanted to stay in the cloud somewhere. And there was a really unique opportunity at Verizon as the portfolio was being developed to really think about what this developer community looked like. And we built this all from scratch. If you look at say our Verizon 5G Edge Blog we launched it just along the timing of the actual GA of Wavelength. You look at our developer newsletter also around the time of the launch of Wavelength. So we've done a lot in such a short period and it's all been sort of organic, interacting with developers, working backwards from the customer. And so it's been a fairly new, but incredibly exciting journey. >> How will your data, architecture, data flow what will that look like in the future? How will that be different than it is sort of historically? >> When I think about customer workloads real time data architecture is an incredibly difficult thing to do. When you overlay the edge, admittedly, it gets more complicated. More places that produce the data, more places that consume data. How do you reconcile all of these environments? Maintain consistency? This is absolutely something we've been working on with the ecosystem at large. We're not going to solve this alone. We've looked at architecture patterns that we think are successful. And some of the things that we found that we believe are pretty cool this idea of taking that embedded mobile database, virtualizing it to the edge, even making it multi-tenant. And then you're producing data to one single source and simplifying how you organize and share data because all of the data being produced to that one location will be relevant to that topology. So Boston, as an example, Boston data being produced to that edge zone will only service Boston clients. So having a geo distributed footprint really does help data architectures, but at the core of all of this database, architectures, you need a compute environment that actually makes sense. That's performant, that's reliable. That's easy to use that you understand how to manage and that the edge doesn't make it any more difficult to manage. >> So are you building that? >> That's exactly what we're doing. So here at Red Hat Summit we've had the unique opportunity to continue to collaborate with our partners at Red Hat to think about how you actually use OpenShift in the context of hybrid MEC. So what have done is we've used OpenShift as is to extend what already exists to some of these new edge zones without adding in an additional layer of complexity that was unmanageable. >> So you use OpenShift so you don't have to cobble this together on your own as a full development environment and that's the role really that OpenShift plays here? >> That's exactly right. And we presented pieces of this at our re:Invent this past year and what we basically did is we said the edge needs to be inextricably linked with the cloud. And you want to be able to manage it from some seamless central pane of glass and using that OpenShift console is a great way. So what we did is we wanted to show a really geo-distributed footprint in action. We started with a Wavelength zone in Boston, the region in Northern Virginia, an outpost in the Texas area. We cobbled it all together in one cluster. So you had a whole compute mesh separated by thousands of miles all within a single cluster, single pane of glass. We take that and are starting to expand on the complexity of these architectures to overlay the network APIs we mentioned, to overlay multi-region support. So when we say you can use all 17 zones at once you actually can. >> So you've been talking about Wavelength and Outposts which are AWS products, but Microsoft and Google both have their distributed architectures as well. Where do you stand with those? Will you support those? Are you working with them? >> That's a great question. We have made announcements with Microsoft and Google but today I focus a lot on the work we do with AWS Wavelength and Outposts and continuing to work backwards from the customer and ultimately meet their needs. >> Yeah I mean, you got to start with an environment that the developers know that obviously a great developer community, you know, you see it at re:Invent. What was the reaction at re:Invent when you showed this from a developer community? >> Absolutely. Developers are excited and I think the best part is we're not the only ones talking about Wavelength not even AWS are the only ones talking about Wavelength. And to me from a developer ecosystem perspective that's when you know it's working. When you're not the one telling the best stories when others are evangelizing the power of your technology on your behalf that's when the ecosystem's starting to pick up. >> Speaking of making a bet on Outposts you know, it's somewhat limited today. I'll say it it's limited today in terms of we think it supports RDS and there's a few storage players. Is it your expectation that Outposts is going to be this essentially the cloud environment on your premises is that? >> That's a great question. I see it more as we want to expand customer choice more than ever and ultimately let the developers and architects decide. That's why I'm so bullish on this idea of hybrid MEC. Let's provide all of the options the most complicated geo distributed hybrid deployment you can imagine and automate it, make it easy. That way if you want to take away components of this architecture all you're doing is simplifying something that's already automated and fairly simple to begin with. So start with the largest problem to solve and then provide customers choice for what exactly meets their requirements their SLAs, their footprint, their network and work backwards from the customer. >> Exciting times ahead. Rob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Appreciate it, thanks for your time. >> Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. We're live at Red Hat Summit 2022 from the Seaport in Boston. We'll be right back.

>> the CUBE presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, welcome back to the CUBE'S coverage day one, Dell Technologies World 2022 live from The Venetian in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, with Dave Vellante. We've been here the last couple of hours. You can hear probably the buzz behind me. Lots of folks here, we're think around seven to eight thousand folks in this solution expo, the vibe is awesome. We've got two guests helping to round out our day one coverage. Ryan Fournier joins us, senior director of product management Edge Solutions at Dell Technologies. And MuneyB Minttazuddin vice president of Edge Computing at VMware. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Oh, glad to be here. >> Yeah. >> Isn't it great to be here in person? >> Oh man, yes. >> The vibe, the vibe of day one is awesome. >> Yes. >> Oh yeah. >> I think it's fantastic. >> Like people give energy off to each other, right? >> Absolutely. So lots of some good news coming out today so far on day one. Let's talk about, Ryan let's start with you. With Edge, it's not new. We've been talking about it for a while, but what are some of the things that are new? What are some of the key trends that you are seeing that are driving changes at the Edge? >> Great, good question. We've been talking to a lot of customers. Okay, a lot of the customers you know, the different verticals really find that is a common theme happening around a massive digital transformation and really based on the pandemic, okay. Which caused some acceleration in some, but also not, but many are kind of laggers left behind. And one primary reason is the culture of the OT, IT, you know, lack of barriers or something like that. The OT is obviously the business outcomes, okay. Focused where the IT is more enabling the function and it'll take retail. For example, that's accelerated a significant usage of an in-store frictionless experience, okay. As well as supply chain automation, warehousing logistics, connected inventory, a lot of the new use cases in this new normal post that pandemic. It's really that new retail operating landscape. >> Consumers we are so demanding, we want the same experience that we have online and we want that in the store and that's really driving a lot of this out of consumer demand. >> Oh yeah, no. I think, you know, retail you know, the way you shop for milk and bread change during the pandemic, right? There was pre-pandemic. The online shopping in the United States was only 5%, but during the pandemic and afterwards that's going to caught up to 25, 30%. That's huge. How do you bring new processes in? How do you create omnichannel consumer experiences where online well as physical are blended together? Becomes a massive challenge for the retailers. So yes, Edge has been there for a long time. Innovation hasn't happened, but a simple credit card swipe When you used to pre-pandemic, just to go do your checkout now has become into a curbside pickup. Integration with like, it's just simple payment card processing is not complicated like, you know, crazy. So people are forced to go in a way and that's happening in manufacturing because they're supply chain issues, could be not. So a lot of that has accelerated this investment and what's kind of driving Edge Computing is if everything ran out of the cloud, then you almost need infinite bandwidth. So suddenly people are realizing that everything runs out of cloud. I can't process my video analytics in a store. That's a lot of video, right? >> So we often ask ourselves, okay, who's going to win the edge? You know, we have that conversation. The cloud guys? VMware? You know, Dell? How are they going to go at it? And so to your point, you're not going to do a round trip to the cloud too expensive, too slow. Now cloud guys will try to bring their cloud basically on prem or out to the edge. You're kind of bringing it from the data center. So how do you see that evolution? >> No, great question. As the edge market happens, right? So there's market data now which says enterprise edge workloads in the next five years are going to be the fastest growing workloads. But then you have different communities coming to solve that problem. Like you just said, John is, you know, hyperscalers are going, Hey, all of the new workloads were built on us, let's bring them to the edge. Data center workloads move to the edge. >> Now important community here are, you know, Telcos and Service Providers because they have assets that are highly distributed at the edge. However, they're networking assets like cell towers and stuff like that. There's opportunity to convert them into computer and storage assets. So you can provide edge computing POPs. So you're seeing a convergence of lot of industry segments, traditional IT, hyperscalers, telcos, and then OT like Ryan pointed out is naturally transforming itself. There's almost this confluence of this pot where all these different technologies need to come together. From VMware and Dell perspective, our mission is a multi-cloud edge. We want to be able to support multi-cloud services because you've heard this multiple times, is at the edge consumers and customers will require services from all the hyperscalers. They don't want buy a one hyperscaler suit to suit solution. They want to mix and match. So not bound. We want be multi-cloud south bound to support IT and OT environments. So that becomes our value proposition in the middle. >> Yep. >> So Ryan, you were talking about that IT, OT schism. And we talk about that a lot. I wonder if you could help us parse that a little bit, because you were using, for instance retail, as an example. Sometimes I think about in the industrial. >> And I think the OT people are kind of like having an engineering mindset. Don't touch my stuff. Kind of like the IT guys too, but different, you know. So there's so much opportunity at the edge. I wonder how you guys think about that? How you segment it? How you prioritize it? Obviously retail telco are big enough. >> Yep. >> That you can get your hands around them, but then there's to your point about all this data that's going to going to compute. It's going to come in pockets. And I wonder how you guys think about that schism and the other opportunity. >> Yeah, out there. It's also a great question, you know, in manufacturing. There's the true OT persona. >> Yeah. >> Okay, and that really is focused on the business outcomes. Things like predictive maintenance use cases, operational equipment effectiveness, like that's really around bottleneck analysis, and the process that go through that. If the plant goes down, they're fine, okay. They can still work on their own systems, but they're not needing that high availability solution. But they're also the decision makers and where to buy the Edge Computing, okay. So we need to talk more to the OT persona from a Dell perspective, okay. And to add on to Ryan, right. So industrial is an interesting challenge, right? So one of the things we did, and this is VMware and Dell working together at vMware it was virtual. We announced something called edge compute stack. And for the first time in 23 years of vMware history, we made the hypervisor layer real-time. >> Yep. >> What that means is in order to capture some of these OT workloads, you need to get in and operate it between the industrial PC and the program of logical controllers at a sub millisecond performance level, because now you're controlling robotic arms that you cannot miss a beat. So we actually created this real time functionality. With that functionality in the last six months, we've been able to virtualize PLCs, IPCs. So what I'm getting at is we're opening up an entire wide space of operational technology workloads, which we was not accessible to our market for the last 20 plus years. >> Now we're talking. >> Yeah. And that allows us that control plane infrastructure to edge compute. There's purpose built for edge allows us to pivot and do other solutions like analytics with the adoption of AI Analytics with our recent announcement of Deep North, okay. That provides that in store video analytics functionality. And then we also partner with PTC based on a manufacturing solution, working with that same edge compute stack. Think of that as that control plane, where again, like I said, you can pivot off a different solutions. Okay, so we leverage PTCs thing works. >> So, okay, great. So I wanted to go to that. So real-time's really interesting. >> 'Cause most of much of AI today is modeling done in the cloud. >> Yes. >> The real opportunity is real time inferencing at the edge. >> You got it. >> Okay, now this is why this gets so interesting. And I wonder if Project Monterey fits into this at all. because I feel like so why did Intel win? Intel won, it crushed all the Unix systems out there because it had PC volumes. And the edge volume's going to dwarf anything we've ever seen before. >> Yeah. >> So I feel like there's this new cocktail, you guys describe this convergence and this mixture and it's unknown. What's going to happen? That's why Project Monterey is so interesting. >> Of course. >> Yeah. >> Right? Because you're bringing together kind of hedging a lot of bets and serving a lot of different use cases. Maybe you could talk about where that might fit here. >> Oh absolutely. So the edge compute stack is made up of vSphere, Tanzu, which is vSphere's you know, VM container and Tanzu's our container technology and vSphere contains Monterey in it, right. And we've added vSAN a for storage at the edge. And connectivity is SD-WAN because a lot of the times it's far location. So you're not having a large footprint, you have one or two hoses, it's more wide area, narrow area. So the edge compute stack supports real-time, non-real-time time workloads. VMs and containers, CPU GPU, right. >> NPU, accelerators, >> NPU, DPU all of them, right. Because what you're dealing with here is that inferencing real time, because to Ryan's point, when you're doing predictive maintenance, you got to pick these signals up in like milliseconds. >> Yes. >> So we've gone our stack down to microseconds and we pick up and inform because if I can save this predictive maintenance in two seconds, I save millions of dollars in you know, wastage of product, right? >> And you may not even persist that data, right? You might just let it go, I mean, how much data does Tesla save? Right? I mean. >> You're absolutely right. A lot of the times, all you're doing is this volume of data coming at you. You're matching it to an inferencing pattern. If it doesn't match, you just drop, right. It's not persistent, but the moment you hit a trigger, immediately everything lights go off, you're login, you're applying outcome. So like super interesting at the edge. >> And the compute is going to go through the roof. So yeah, my premise is that, you know, general purpose x86 running SAP is not going to be the architecture for the edge. >> You're absolutely right. >> Going to be low cost, low power, super performance. 'Cause when you combine the CPU, GPU, NPU, you're going to blow away the performance that we've ever seen on the curves. >> There's also a new application pattern. I've called out something called edge-native applications. We went through this client-server architecture era. We built all this, you know, a very clear in architecture. We went through cloud native where everything was hyperscaled in the cloud. Both of the times we optimize our own compute. >> Yeah. >> At the edge, we got to optimize our owns data because it's not ephemeral compute that you have in hyperscale compute space, you have ephemeral data you got to deal with. So a new nature of application workloads are emerging. We call it edge-native apps. >> Yep. >> And those have very different characteristics, you know, to client server apps or you know, cloud native apps, which is amazing. It's driven by data analysts like developers, not like dot net Java developers. It's actually data analysts who are trying to mine this with fast patents and come out with outcomes, right? >> Yeah, I love that edge-native apps Lisa, that's a new term for me. >> Right, just trademark it on me. I made made it up. (panel laughing) >> Can you guys talk about a joint customer that you've really helped to dramatically transform in the last six months? >> You want to shout or I can go-- >> I think my industry is fine. >> Yeah, yeah. So, you know, at VMworld we talked about Oshkosh, which is again, like in the manufacturing space, we have retailers and manufacturers and we also brought in, you know, Proctor and Gamble and et cetera, et cetera, right? So the customers look at us jointly because you know edge doesn't happen in its own silo. It's a continuum from the data center to the cloud, to the edge, right. There's the continuum exists. So if only edge was in its own silo, you would do things. But the key thing about all of this, there's no right place, it's about that workload placement. Where do I place the workload for the most optimal business outcome? Now for real-time applications, it's at the edge. For non-real-time stuff it could be in the data center, it could be in a cloud. It doesn't really matter, where VMware and Dell strengths comes in with Oshkosh or all of those folks. We have the end-to-end. From you want place it in the data center, You want to place it in your charge to public cloud, You want to derive some of these applications. You want to place it at the far edge, which is a customer prem or a near edge, which is a telco. We've done joint announcements with telcos, like South Dakota Telecom, where we've taken their cell towers and converted them into compute and storage. So they can actually store it at the near edge, right. So this is 5G solutions. I also own the 5G part of the vMware business, but doesn't matter. Compute network storage, we got to find the right mix for placing the workload at the right place. >> You call that the near edge. I think of it as the far edge, but that's what you mean, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Way out there in the (mumbles), okay. >> It's all about just optimizing operations, reducing cost, increasing profitability for the customer. >> So you said edge, not its own silo. And I agree. >> it's not a silo. Is mobile a valid sort of example or a little test case because when we developed mobile apps, it drove a lot of things in the data center and in the cloud. Is that a way to think of about it as opposed to like PCs work under their own silo? Yeah, we connect to the internet, but is mobile a reasonable proxy or no? >> Mobile is an interesting proxy. When you think about the application again, you know, you got a platform by the way, you'll get excited by this. We've got mobile developers, mobile device manufacturers. You can count them in your fingers. They want to now have these devices sitting in factory floors because now these devices are so smart. They have sensors, temperature controls. They can act like these multisensory device at the edge, but the app landscape is quite interesting. I think John, where you were going was they have a very thin shim app layer that can be pushed from anywhere. The, the notion of these edge-native applications could be virtual machines, could be containers, could be, you know, this new thing called Web Assembly Wasm, which is a new type of technology, very thin shim layer which is mobile like app layer. But you know, all of these are combination of how these applications may get expressed. The target platforms could be anywhere from mobile devices to IOT gateways, to IOT devices, to servers, to, you know, massive data centers. So what's amazing is this thing can just go everywhere. And our goal is consistent infrastructure, consistent operations across the board. That's where VMware and Dell win together. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, excellent. And I was just talking to a customer today, a major airline manufacturer, okay. About their airport and the future with the mobile device just being frictionless, okay, no one wants to touch anything anymore. You can use your mobile device to do your check-in and you've got to you avoid kiosks, okay. So they're trying to figure out how to get rid of the kiosk. Now you need a kiosk for like checking baggage, okay. You can't get in the way of that, but at least that frictionless experience, for that airport in the future, but it brings in some other issues. >> It does, but I like the sound of that. Last question guys, where can customers go to learn more information about the joint solutions? >> So you can go to like our public websites obviously search on edge. And if you hear at the show, there's a lot of hands on labs, okay. There's a booth over there. A lot of Edge Solutions that we offer. >> Yeah, no, this is I guess as Ryan pointed our websites have these. We've had a lot of partnership in announcements together because you know, one of the things as we've expressed, manufacturing, retail, you know, when you get in the use cases, they involve ISPs, right? So they you know, they bring the value of you know, not just having a horizontal AI platform. We like opinionated models of fraud detection. So we're actually working with ecosystem of partners to make this real. >> So we may even hear more. >> The rich vertical solution, I call it the ISVs. They enrich our vertical solutions. >> Right. >> Oh, WeMo is going to be revolutionary. >> All right, can't wait. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me today and talking about what Dell and vMware are doing together and helping retailers manufacturers really convert the edge to incredible success. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you very much. Thanks Lisa, thanks John for having us. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the CUBE. We are wrapping up day one of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. We'll be back tomorrow, John Farrer and Dave Nicholson will join us. We'll see you then. (soft music)

>>Yeah, >>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back, everybody. This is Dave Vellante of the Cube, and you're watching our continuous coverage of the IBM think Digital 2020 experience. And we're really pleased to have Rob High here. He's not only an IBM fellow bodies. He runs the vice president CTO of the IBM Edge Computing Initiative. Rob, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Good to see you. Which we're face to face, but yeah, that time to be safe and healthy, I guess. And did so edge obviously hot topic. Everybody has this sort of point of view would be interested in how IBM looks at edge. You define it and what your thoughts are on. It's evolution. >>Yeah, well, you know, there's ah really kind of two fairly distinct ways of thinking about the edge of the telcos. Our, ah, you know, they're creating edge capabilities in their own network facilities. We call that the network edge on the other side of the edge they that I think matters a lot to our enterprise businesses is there's remote on premise locations where they actually perform the work that they do, where the majority of people are, where the data that actually gets created is first formed and where the actions that they need to operate on are being taken. That is a lot of interest, because if we can move work workloads, Iot workloads to where that data is being created, where those actions are being taken Uh, not only can we dramatically reduce the late and see to those decisions, uh, but we can also ensure continuous operations and the failed in the presence of perhaps network failures. We can manage the growth of increasing demand for network bandwidth as Maura born data gets created and we can optimize the efficiency of both the business operations as well as the I t operations before that. So for us edge computing at the end of the day is about movie work where the data and the actions are being taken >>well, so this work from home, you know, gives a result of this pandemic is kind of creating a new stresses on networks and people are putting, you know, pouring money actually into beefing up that infrastructure is sort of an extension of what we used to think about edge. But I wonder if you could talk about some of the industries and the use cases that you guys we are seeing and notwithstanding, though assay that >>work from home pivot. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, look, we have seen ah, the need for placing workloads close to where it is being created and where actions have been picking in virtually every industry, the ones that are probably easier for us to think about and more common in terms of our mindset. Our is manufacturing. If you think about all the things that go on in a factory floor that need to be able to perform analytic in, uh, in the equipment and the processes that are performing in the affection for, If you think, for example, production quality. Uh, you know, if you've got a machine that's putting out parts and maybe it's welding seams on metal boxes, uh, you know, you want to be able to look at the quality of that seem at the moment that is being performed, so that if there are any problems, you can remediate that immediately rather than having that box move on down the line and find that you know the quality issues they were created earlier on now have exacerbated in other ways. Um, you know, so quality, productive quality. Ah, inspection production optimization in our world of Covic Cover 19 and worker safety and getting workers back to work and ensuring that you know people wearing the masks and are exercising social distancing. This is on the factory floor. Worker Insight is another major use case that we're seeing surface of lake with a lot of interest in using whether that's infrared cameras or Bluetooth beacons or infrared cameras. Any variety of devices that could be employed in the work area to help ensure that factories are operating efficiently, that workers are safe. Ah, and whether that's in a factor situation or even in an office situation or e a r in a warehouse or distribution center. And all these scenarios the the utility, the edge computing to bring to those use cases is tremendous. >>And a lot of these devices are unattended or infrequently attended. I always use the windmill example. Um, you know, you don't want to have to do a truck roll to figure out you know what the dynamics are going on, that at the windmill s, so I can instrument that. But what about the management of those devices you know from an autonomous standpoint? And and are you? What are you doing? Or are you doing anything in the autonomous managed space? >>Yeah. In fact, that's really kind of key here, because when you think about the scale, the diversity and the dynamic dynamism of equipment in these environments And as you point out, Dave, you know the lack of I t resource lack of skills on the factory floor, or even in the retail store or hotel or distribution center or any of these environments. The situation is very similar. You can't simply manage getting the right workloads to the right place at the right time. In sort of the traditional approach is, you have to really think about another autonomous approach to management and, you know, let the system the side for you. What software needs to be placed out there? Which software to put their If it's an analytic algorithm, what models to be associated with that software and getting to the right place at the right place at the right Time is a key Part of what we do in this thing that we call IBM Edge application manager is that product that we're really kind of bringing to market right now in the context of edge computing that facilitates this idea of autonomous management. >>You know, I wonder if you could comment Robb on just sort of the approach that you're taking with regard to providing products and services. I mean, we've seen a lot of, uh, situations where people are just essentially packing, packaging traditional, you know, compute and storage devices and sort of throwing it over the fence at the edge. Uh, and saying, Hey, here's our edge computing solution and another saying there's not a place for that. Maybe that will help flatten the network and, you know, provide Ah, gateway for storing on maybe processing information. But it seems to us that that that a bottoms up approach is going to be more appropriate. In other words, you've got engineers, you know who really understand operations, technology, people, maybe a new breed of developers emerging. How do you see the evolution you know of products and services and architectures at >>the edge? Yeah, so First of all, let me say IBM is taking a really pretty broad approach to edge computing we have. What I just described is IBM Edge Application Manager, which is the if you will the platform or the infrastructure on which we can manage the appointment of workloads out to the edge. But then add to that we do have a whole variety of edge and Nevil enabled applications that are being created are global service of practices and our AI applications business all are creating, um, variations of their product specific to address and exploit edge computing and to bring that advantage to the business. And of course, then we also have global services Consulting, which is a set of skilled resource, is who know we understand the transformations that business need to go through when they went, take advantage of edge computing and how to think about that in the context of both their journey to the cloud as well as now in this case, the edge. But also then how to go about implementing and delivering that, uh and then firmly further managing that now you know, coupled out then with at the end of the day you're also going to need the equipment, the devices, whether that is an intelligent automobile or other vehicle, whether that is an appellate, a robot or a camera, Um, or if those things are not intelligent. But you want to bring intelligence to them that how you augment that with servers and other forms of cluster computing that resides resident with the device. All of those are going to require participation from a very broad ecosystem. So we've been working with partners of whether that is vendors who create hardware and enabling that hardware in certifying that hardware to work with our management infrastructure or whether those are people who bring higher order services to the table that provide support for, let's, say, data cashing and facilitating the creation of applications, or whether those are device manufacturers that are embedding compute in their device equipment. All of that is part of our partnership ecosystem, Um, and then finally, you know, I need to emphasize that, you know, the world that we operate in is so vast and so large. There are so many edge devices in the marketplace, and that's growing so rapidly, and so many participants in that likewise There are a lot of other contributors to this ecosystem that we call edge computing. And so for all of those reasons, we have grounded IBM education manager on open source. We created an open source project called Open Rise, and we've been developing that, actually now, for about 4.5 years just recently, the Linux Foundation has adopted Stage one adoption of Open arising as part of its Lennox Foundation edge LF edge, uh, Reg X Foundry project. And so we think this is key to building out, Um, a ecosystem of partners who want to both contribute as well consumed value and create ecosystems around this common idea of how we manage the edge. >>Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the ecosystem, and it's too big for any one company toe to go it alone. But I want to tap your brain on just sort of architectures. And there's so many diverse use cases, you know, we don't necessarily see one uber architecture emerging, but there are some characteristics that we think are important at the edge you mentioned sort of real time or near real time. In many cases, it has to be real time you think about autonomous vehicles? Um, yeah. A lot of the data today is analog, and maybe it doesn't have to be digitized, but much of it will be, um, it's not all gonna be sent back to the cloud. It may not all have to be persisted. So we've envisioned this sort of purpose built, you know, architecture for certain use cases that can support real time. That maybe have, you know, arm based processors. Ah, or other alternative processors there that can do real time analytics at the edge and maybe sending portions of the data back. How do you see the architectures evolving from a technologist? >>Well, so certainly one of the things that we see at the edge is a tremendous premium being placed on things like energy consumption. So architectures they're able to operate efficiently with less power is ah is certainly an advantage to any of those architectures that are being brought aboard. Um, clearly, you know x 86 is a dominant architecture in any information technology endeavor. More specifically at the edge. We're seeing the emergence of lot of arm based architecture chips out there. In fact, I would guess that the majority of the edge devices today are not being created with, um, arm architectures, but it's the you know, but some of this is about the underlying architecture of the compute. But also then the augmentation of that compute the the compute Thea the CP use with other types of processing units. Whether those GPS, of course, we're seeing, you know, a number of deep use being created that are designed to be low power consuming, um, and have a tremendous amount of utility at the edge. There are alternate processing units, architectures that have been designed specifically for AI model based analytics. Uh, things like TP use and infuse and and, uh, and set around, which are very purpose built for certain kinds of intellect. And we think that those are starting to surface and become increasingly important. And then on the flip side of this is both the memory storage in network architectures which are sort of exotically different. But at least in terms of capacity, um have quite variability. Specifically, five G, though, is emerging and five g. While it's not necessarily the same computing, there is a lot of symbolism between edge and five G and the kinds of use cases that five G envisions are very similar to those that we've been talking about in the edge world as well. >>Rob, I want to ask you about sort of this notion of program ability at the edge. I mean, we've seen the success of infrastructure as code. Um, how do you see program ability occurring at the edge in terms of fostering innovation and maybe new developer bottles or maybe existing developer models at the edge? Yeah, >>we found a lot of utility in sort of leveraging what we now think of as cloud computing or cloud computing models. Uh, you know, the idea of continue ization extends itself very easily into the edge. Whether that is running a container in a docker runtime, let's say on an edge device which is, you know, resource constrained and purpose built and needs to focus on sort of a very small footprint or even edge clusters edge servers where we might be running a cluster of containers using our kubernetes platform called open shift. Um, you know the course of practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery. What we write a Otherwise think of his Dev ops. Ah, and, of course, the benefits they continue. Realization brings to the idea of component architectures. Three. Idea of loose coupling. The separation of concerns, the ability to mix and match different service implementations to be opposed. Your application are all ideas that were matured in the cloud world but have a lot of utility in the edge world. Now we actually call it edge native programming. But you can think of that as being mostly cloud native programming, with a further extension that there are certain things you have to be aware of what you're building for the edge. You have to recognize that resource is air limited. Unlike the cloud where we have this notion of infinite resource, you don't have that at the edge. Find and constrained resources. Be worried about, you know, Layton sees and the fact that there is a network that separates the different services and that network can be and reliable. It can introduce his own forms of Layton sees it, maybe bandwidth constrained and those air issues that you now have to factor into your thinking as you build out the logic of your application components. But I think by building on the cloud native programming about me paradigm. You know, we get to exercise sort of all of the skills that have been developing and maturing in the cloud world. Now, for the edge >>that makes sense. My last question is around security. I mean, I've often sort of tongue in cheek said, you know, building a moat around the castle doesn't work anymore. The queen i e. The data has left the castle. She's everywhere. So what about the security model? I mean, I feel like the edge is moving so fast you feel confident or what gives you confidence >>that we can secure the edge. You know, the edges does introduce some very interesting and challenging concerns with respect to security because, frankly, the compute is out there in the wild. You know, you've got computers in the store you've got, you know, people walking around the kiosks you have in the manufacturing site, you know, workers that are, you know, in the midst of all of this compute capability and so the attack surface is substantially bigger. And that's been a big focus for us, is how to the only way validate in 30 of the software that was But it also takes advantage of one of the key characters with edge computing to bring to the table, which is, if you think about it. You know, when you've got personal and private information being entered into quote system, the more often you move that personal private data around, and certainly the more that you move it to a central location and aggregate that with other data, the more of a target becomes more vulnerable, exposed that data becomes and by using edge computing, which moves the workloads out to the edge where that did has been created in some sense, you can process on it there and then move it back. They need central location, you don't have to aggregate it. And that actually in itself is a counterbalance of all of the other issues that we also describe about security by essentially not moving the personal privacy and in protecting by keeping it exactly where it began. >>You know, Rob, this is an exciting topic. Is a huge opportunity for IBM and Ginny in and talk about the trillion dollar opportunity and hybrid cloud and the Edge is a multi $1,000,000,000 opportunity for IBM and, uh So you just got to go get her done. But I really appreciate you coming on the Cube and sharing your insights. That awesome topic in the best interest of the David. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the thank you. Stay safe and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. This is our coverage of IBM. Think 2020 the digital. Think >>we'll be right back after this short break? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost for the week, John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Ildiko Vancsa, coming off the edge keynote presentation this morning. She is the ecosystem technical lead with the Edge Computing Group as part of the OpenStack Foundation. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Coming into this show, edge is one of those things that it was actually pretty exciting to talk about because edge is not only super hot, but when I thought back to previous shows, this is the sixth year we've had theCUBE here and my fifth year doing it, it's like, wait, I've been talking to all the Telcos for years here. NFV was one of those use cases, and when you connect the dots, it's like oh, edge, of course. I said this conference is actually hipster when it comes to edge. We were totally covering it well before we called it that. So, explain to us your role in the foundation and what led to the formation of this track. >> Yeah, so I'm the ecosystem technical lead within the foundation, which is basically a role that belongs under the business development team. So, I'm basically building connections with our ecosystem members. I'm trying to help them succeed with OpenStack, both as software package and as a community. We are embracing open source, of course, so I'm also trying to advocate for involvement in open source because I think that's a key. Like, you know, picking up an open source software component and use it, that's a great start, but if you really want to be successful with it and you want to be able to successfully build it into your business model, then getting involved in the community, both enhancing the software and maintaining of the software, that's really key. So, my role is also onboarding companies as well to be active members of the community, and my focus is shifting toward edge computing. The history of edge computing in OpenStack basically started last May when Beth Cohen from Verizon described their use case, which is OpenStack in a tiny box in production cycle, wow. So that was also a little bit of an eye-opener for us as well, that yes, it's telecom. It's 5G, but this is the thing that's called edge, and maybe this is something that we should also look deeper into. So, we went to San Francisco last September, OpenDev, 200 people, architects, software developers trying to figure out what edge computing is. I think we had the question at every single session, someone asked that, okay, yeah so, what did you mean exactly when you said edge? Because from the nature of the architecture, like, you have the central cloud and then the sides on the different-- >> John: There are several edges depending on how far you want to go. >> Exactly. >> For you and OpenStack, what does edge mean, or all the above? >> With OpenStack, so after OpenDev when we realized that it's not really a well-defined term, we wrote up a white paper. It's at OpenStack the role/edge. It's a short one, really to just set the ground for what edge computing is. And what we came up with is, so don't imagine like a two-sentence definition for edge computing because I still strongly believe that doesn't exist, and anyone who claims it, that's not true. What we did with the white paper is basically we set characteristics and criteria that defines cloud edge computing per se, like what people are talking about when you're moving out the compute and then working closer to the edge. Like what that means from the bandwidth perspective, from how you will manage it, what that means for security, and all these sort of things. And you can basically characterize what edge means. So we rather described these layers and how far we go, and as far as like, you know, the very end edge device and like the IOT sensors, that's not a target of OpenStack. So, OpenStack itself is infrastructure as a service, so our Edge Computing Group is still staying on that layer. The Edge Computing Group itself is focusing on the angles, what edge brings onto the table, all these requirements, you know, collecting the use cases and trying to figure out what's missing, what we need to implement. >> If can repeat and maybe I'll get it right or wrong. The idea is at a cell tower or at a remote office or branch office or some closet somewhere, there is a full set of OpenStack running, maybe a minimal set of OpenStack, but it's live, it's updatable. You can update services on it. You can update the actual OpenStack itself, and it doesn't need the spoke hardware necessarily, but it's now updatable and part of a bigger multi-cloud infrastructure from some sort of service entity or enterprise. >> Yeah. >> Is that fair? >> I think that's fair. So, there's OpenStack itself that people know very well, a lot of projects. So when we talk about edge, obviously we don't want to say that, okay, pick the whole thing and install all the 60 projects because that's really not suitable for edge. So what, for example, the group is looking into, that which OpenStack components are essential for edge. And also the group is defining small edge, medium edge, what that means from hardware footprint perspectives, so just to figure out what the opportunities are there, what will fit, what will not fit. OpenStack itself is very modular by today, so you can pick up the services that you need. So what we discussed, for example, this week is Keystone, identity, you need it of course. So how much that fits into the edge scenarios. And I think the main conclusion of the forum session yesterday was that, yeah, Keystone supports Federation. We talked through the cases, and it seems like that it's kind of there. So, we now need a few people who will sit down, put together the environment, and start testing it because that's when it comes out that, you know, almost there, but there a few things to tweak. But basically the idea is what you described, pick up the component, put it there, and work with it. We also have another project called Cyborg, which is fairly new. That's for hardware acceleration, so it is providing a framework to plug in GPUs, FPJs, and these sort of, a bit more specialized hardware which will be really useful for edge use cases to OpenStack. So that's for example something that China Mobile and the OPNFV Edge Cloud Group is looking into to use, so I really hope that we will get there this year to test it in the OPNFV Pharos Labs in action. So we also have pretty great cross-community collaboration on trying to figure this whole thing out. >> Yeah, it often helps if we have examples to talk about to really explain this. Beth Cohen, we spoke with her last year and absolutely caught our attention. Got a lot of feedback from the community on it. Had Contron on earlier this week talking about, John was saying, here's some small device there with a little blade and is running pieces of OpenStack there to be able to run. Anything from the keynote or, boy, I think there's 40 sessions that you've got here. If you can, give us a couple of examples of some of the use cases that we're seeing to kind of bring this edge to reality. >> Example use cases is, we just heard this morning, for example, someone from the textile industry like how to detect issues with the fabric. So this is like one new manufacturing use case. I also heard another one, which is not checking the fabric itself, but basically the company who manufactures those machines that they are using to create the fabric, so they would like to have a central cloud and have it connected to the factories. So, being able to monitor how the machines are doing, how they can improve those machines, and also within the factory to monitor all the circumstances. Because for all the chemical processes, it's really important that the temperature and everything else is just, you know, clicks because otherwise all your fabrics will have to go to trash. So, that's manufacturing. A lot of telecom 5G, obviously that is really, really heavy because that's the part of the industry which is there today, so with 5G, all those strict requirements. This is really what we are mainly focusing on today. We are not specializing anything for telecom and in 5G use cases, but we want to make sure that all our components fit into that environment as well. In the white paper, for example, you also could see the retail use case. I'm not sure whether that will be exactly on stage this week, but that is also a great example on like Walmart with the lot of stores around, so how you manage those stores because they're also not wanting to do everything centrally. So, they would like to move the functionality out. What if the network connectivity is cut? They still have to be able to operate the store as nothing happened. So, there are a lot of segments of the industry who already have kind of really well-defined use cases. And what we see is that there's many overlapping between the requirements from the different segments that we're going to address. >> Are we seeing things like AI and ML coming up in these conversations also? >> Yes, like I think it was the manufacturing use case when I heard that they are planning to use that, and it's popping up. I think as far as our group is concerned, we are more looking into, I don't know, let's say lower-level requirements like how you maintain and operate the hundreds and thousands of edge sites, what happens with security, what happens with monitoring, what happens with all these sort of things. Like we have a new project rolling in under the foundation umbrella called Airship, which is basically deployment and lifecycle management, which is supposed to address one of the aspect that you were talking about on, okay, so how you manage this, how you upgrade this. And upgrade is, again, a really interesting question because I think I talked to someone yesterday who was like, yes, the Contron guys, they were saying that yeah, upgrade, it's really ambitious. So let say that maybe 18, 24 month or something like some kind of tech operator will decide to upgrade something out in the edge because it's out there, it's working, let's not touch this. So when we talk about upgrade, even that, I think, will depend on the bits of the industry that, what pace they will decide to take. >> Are there any particular surprises or learnings that you've had this year after talking with this community for a week now? You said, well, last year, I was very impressed last year when they got up on stage and talked about that. That kind of expanded my mind a little bit. You've been working with this now for a year, this whole track and forum sessions. Anything you're excited about taking to the future or learnings or surprises that, oh, this is really going to work or anything like that? Any parts of it that are really interesting? You talked about security upgrades. We've talked about a lot of the technical components, but it seems like it's working. >> I think at this point, at least on my end, I think I'm over the surprise phase. So what surprises me the most is how many groups there are out there who are trying to figure out what this whole edge thing is. And what we need to really focus on among the technical requirements is that how we are working together with all these groups just to make sure that the integration between the different things that we are all developing and working on is smooth. So like, we've been working together with the OPNFV community for a while now. It's a really fruitful relationship between us. Like seeing OpenStack being deployed in a full-stack environment and being tested, that's really priceless. And we are planning to do the same thing with edge as well, and we are also looking into ONAP, Aquino, Et-see-mac, so looking into the open source groups, looking into the standardization and really just trying to ensure that when we talk about open infrastructure, that that really is designed and developed in a way that integrates well with the other components. It's synchronized with the standardization activities because I think especially in case of edge, when we say interoperability, that's a level higher than what we call the interoperability on the telecom level I think. Like when you just imagine one operator network and applications from other providers popping up in that network, and components that just realizing the network popping up from different vendors. And this whole thing has to work together. So, I think OpenStack and open infrastructure has a really big advantage there compared to any proprietary solution because we have to address this, I think, really big challenge, and it's also a really important challenge. >> Ildiko, really appreciate you giving us all the updates here on the edge track, the keynote, definitely one of the areas that is capturing our attention and lots of people out there. So, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. Thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack foundation, and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost John Troyer and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 here in Vancouver. Happy to welcome first-time guest Roland Cabana who is a DevOps Manager at Vault Systems out of Australia, but you come from a little bit more local. Thanks for joining us Roland. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. Yes, I'm actually born and raised in Vancouver, I moved to Australia a couple years ago. I realized the potential in Australian cloud providers, and I've been there ever since. >> Alright, so one of the big things we talk about here at OpenStack of course is, you know, do people really build clouds with this stuff, where does it fit, how is it doing, so a nice lead-in to what does Vault Systems do for the people who aren't aware. >> Definitely, so yes, we do build cloud, a cloud, or many clouds, actually. And Vault Systems provides cloud services infrastructure service to Australian Government. We do that because we are a certified cloud. We are certified to handle unclassified DLM data, and protected data. And what that means is the sensitive information that is gathered for the Australian citizens, and anything to do with big user-space data is actually secured with certain controls set up by the Australian Government. The Australian Government body around this is called ASD, the Australian Signals Directorate, and they release a document called the ISM. And this document actually outlines 1,088 plus controls that dictate how a cloud should operate, how data should be handled inside of Australia. >> Just to step back for a second, I took a quick look at your website, it's not like you're listed as the government OpenStack cloud there. (Roland laughs) Could you give us, where does OpenStack fit into the overall discussion of the identity of the company, what your ultimate end-users think about how they're doing, help us kind of understand where this fits. >> Yeah, for sure, and I mean the journey started long ago when we, actually our CEO, Rupert Taylor-Price, set out to handle a lot of government information, and tried to find this cloud provider that could handle it in the prescribed way that the Australian Signals Directorate needed to handle. So, he went to different vendors, different cloud platforms, and found out that you couldn't actually meet all the controls in this document using a proprietary cloud or using a proprietary platform to plot out your bare-metal hardware. So, eventually he found OpenStack and saw that there was a great opportunity to massage the code and change it, so that it would comply 100% to the Australian Signals Directorate. >> Alright, so the keynote this morning were talking about people that build, people that operate, you've got DevOps in your title, tell us a little about your role in working with OpenStack, specifically, in broader scope of your-- >> For sure, for sure, so in Vault Systems I'm the DevOps Manager, and so what I do, we run through a lot of tests in terms of our infrastructure. So, complying to those controls I had mentioned earlier, going through the rigmarole of making sure that all the different services that are provided on our platform comply to those specific standards, the specific use cases. So, as a DevOps Manger, I handle a lot of the pipelining in terms of where the code goes. I handle a lot of the logistics and operations. And so it actually extends beyond just operation and development, it actually extends into our policies. And so marrying all that stuff together is pretty much my role day-to-day. I have a leg in the infrastructure team with the engineering and I also have a leg in with sort of the solutions architects and how they get feedback from different customers in terms of what we need and how would we architect that so it's safe and secure for government. >> Roland, so since one of your parts of your remit is compliance, would you say that you're DevSecOps? Do you like that one or not? >> Well I guess there's a few more buzzwords, and there's a few more roles I can throw in there but yeah, I guess yes. DevSecOps there's a strong security posture that Vault holds, and we hold it to a higher standard than a lot of the other incumbents or a lot of platform providers, because we are actually very sensitive about how we handle this information for government. So, security's a big portion of it, and I think the company culture internally is actually centered around how we handle the security. A good example of this is, you know, internally we actually have controls about printing, you know, most modern companies today, they print pages, and you know it's an eco thing. It's an eco thing for us too, but at the same time there are controls around printed documents, and how sensitive those things are. And so, our position in the company is if that control exists because Australian Government decides that that's a sensitive matter, let's adopt that in our entire internal ecosystem. >> There was a lot of talk this morning at the keynote both about upgrades, and I'm blanking on the name of the new feature, but also about Zuul and about upgrading OpenStack. You guys are a full Upstream, OpenStack expert cloud provider. How do you deal with upgrades, and what do you think the state of the OpenStack community is in terms of kind of upgrades, and maintenance, and day two kind of stuff? >> Well I'll tell you the truth, the upgrade path for OpenStack is actually quite difficult. I mean, there's a lot of moving parts, a lot of components that you have to be very specific in terms of how you upgrade to the next level. If you're not keeping in step of the next releases, you may fall behind and you can't upgrade, you know, Keystone from a Liberty all the way up to Alcatel, right? You're basically stuck there. And so what we do is we try to figure out what the government needs, what are the features that are required. And, you know, it's also a conversation piece with government, because we don't have certain features in this particular release of OpenStack, it doesn't mean we're not going to support it. We're not going to move to the next version just because it's available, right? There's a lot of security involved in fusing our controls inside our distribution of OpenStack. I guess you can call it a distribution, on our build of OpenStack. But it's all based on a conversation that we start with the government. So, you know, if they need VGPUs for some reason, right, with the Queens release that's coming out, that's a conversation we're starting. And we will build into that functionality as we need it. >> So, does that mean that you have different entities with different versions, and if so, how do you manage all of that? >> Well, okay, so yes that's true. We do have different versions where we have a Liberty release, and we have an Alcatel release, which is predominant in our infrastructure. And that's only because we started with the inception of the Liberty release before our certification process. A lot of the things that we work with government for is how do they progress through this cloud maturity model. And, you know, the forklift and shift is actually a problem when you're talking about releases. But when you're talking about containerization, you're talking about Agile Methodologies and things like that, it's less of a reliance on the version because you now have the ability to respawn that same application, migrate the data, and have everything live as you progress through different cloud platforms. And so, as OpenStack matures, this whole idea of the fast forward idea of getting to the next release, because now they have an integration step, or they have a path to the next version even though you're two or three versions behind, because let's face it, most operators will not go to the latest and greatest, because there's a lot of issues you're going to face there. I mean, not that the software is bad, it's just that early adopters will come with early adopter problems. And, you know, you need that userbase. You need those forum conversations to be able to be safe and secure about, you know, whether or not you can handle those kinds of things. And there's no need for our particular users' user space to have those latest and greatest things unless there is an actual request. >> Roland, you are an IAS provider. How are you handling containers, or requests for containers from your customers? >> Yes, containers is a big topic. There's a lot of maturity happening right now with government, in terms of what a container is, for example, what is orchestration with containers, how does my Legacy application forklift and shift to a container? And so, we're handling it in stages, right, because we're working with government in their maturity. We don't do container services on the platform, but what we do is we open-source a lot of code that allows people to deploy, let's say a terraform file, that creates a Docker Host, you know, and we give them examples. A good segue into what we've just launched last week was our Vault Academy, which we are now training 3,000 government public servants on new cloud technologies. We're not talking about how does an OS work, we're talking about infrastructures, code, we're talking about Kubernetes. We're talking about all these cool, fun things, all the way up to function as a service, right? And those kinds of capabilities is what's going to propel government in Australia moving forward in the future. >> You hit on one of my hot buttons here. So functions as a service, do you have serverless deployed in your environment, or is it an education at this point? >> It's an education at this point. Right now we have customers who would like to have that available as a native service in our cloud, but what we do is we concentrate on the controls and the infrastructure as a service platform first and foremost, just to make sure that it's secure and compliant. Everyone has the ability to deploy functions as a service on their platform, or on their accounts, or on their tenancies, and have that available to them through a different set of APIs. >> Great. There's a whole bunch of open-source versions out there. Is that what they're doing? Do you any preference toward the OpenWhisk, or FN, or you know, Fission, all the different versions that are out there? >> I guess, you know, you can sort of like, you know, pick your racehorse in that regard. Because it's still early days, and I think open to us is pretty much what I've been looking at recently, and it's just a discovery stage at this point. There are more mature customers who are coming in, some partners who are championing different technologies, so the great is that we can make sure our platform is secure and they can build on top of it. >> So you brought up security again, one of the areas I wanted to poke at a little bit is your network. So, it being an IS provider, networking's critical, what are you doing from a networking standpoint is micro-segmentation part of your environment? >> Definitely. So natively to build in our cloud, the functions that we build in our cloud are all around security, obviously. Micro-segmentation's a big part of that, training people in terms of how micro-segmentation works from a forklift and shift perspective. And the network connectivity we have with the government is also a part of this whole model, right? And so, we use technologies like Mellanox, 400G fabric. We're BGP internally, so we're routing through the host, or routing to the host, and we have this... Well so in Australia there's this, there's service from the Department of Finance, they create this idea of an icon network. And what it is, is an actually direct media fiber from the department directly to us. And that means, directly to the edge of our cloud and pipes right through into their tenancy. So essentially what happens is, this is true, true hybrid cloud. I'm not talking about going through gateways and stuff, I'm talking about I speed up an instance in the Vault cloud, and I can ping it from my desktop in my agency. Low latency, submillisecond direct fiber link, up to 100g. >> Do you have certain programmability you're doing in your network? I know lots of service providers, they want to play and get in there, they're using, you know, new operating models. >> Yes, I mean, we're using the... I draw a blank. There's a lot of technologies we're using for network, and the Cumulus Networking OS is what we're using. That allows us to bring it in to our automation team, and actually use more of a DevOps tool to sort of create the deployment from a code perspective instead of having a lot of engineers hardcoding things right on the actual production systems. Which allows us to gate a lot of the changes, which is part of the security posture as well. So, we were doing a lot of network offloading on the ConnectX-5 cards in the data center, we're using cumulus networks for bridging, we're working with Neutron to make sure that we have Neutron routers and making sure that that's secure and it's code reviewed. And, you know, there's a lot of moving parts there as well, and I think from a security standpoint and from a network functionality standpoint, we've come to a happy place in terms of providing the fastest network possible, and also the most secure and safe network as possible. >> Roland, you're working directly with the Upstream OpenStack projects, and it sounds like some others as well. You're not working with a vendor who's packaging it for you or supporting it. So that's a lot of responsibility on you and your team, I'm kind of curious how you work with the OpenStack community, and how you've seen the OpenStack community develop over the years. >> Yeah, so I mean we have a lot of talented people in our company who actually OpenStack as a passion, right? This is what they do, this is what they love. They've come from different companies who worked in OpenStack and have contributed a lot actually, to the community. And actually that segues into how we operate inside culturally in our company. Because if we do work with Upstream code, and it doesn't have anything to do with the security compliance of the Australian Signals Directorate in general, we'd like to Upstream that as much as possible and contribute back the code where it seems fit. Obviously, there's vendor mixes and things we have internally, and that's with the Mellanox and Cumulus stuff, but anything else beyond that is usually contributed up. Our team's actually very supportive of each other, we have network specialists, we have storage specialists. And it's a culture of learning, so there's a lot of synchronizations, a lot of synergies inside the company. And I think that's part to do with the people who make up Vault Systems, and that whole camaraderie is actually propagated through our technology as well. >> One of the big themes of the show this year has been broadening out of what's happening. We talked a little bit about containers already, Edge Computing is a big topic here. Either Edge, or some other areas, what are you looking for next from this ecosystem, or new areas that Vault is looking at poking at? >> Well, I mean, a lot of the exciting things for me personally, I guess, I can't talk to Vault in general, but, 'cause there's a lot of engineers who have their own opinions of what they like to see, but with the Queens release with the VGPUs, something I'd like, that all's great, a long-term release cycle with the OpenStack foundation would be great, or the OpenStack platform would be great. And that's just to keep in step with the next releases to make sure that we have the continuity, even though we're missing one release, there's a jump point. >> Can you actually put a point on that, what that means for you. We talked to Mark Collier a little bit about it this morning but what you're looking and why that's important. >> Well, it comes down to user acceptance, right? So, I mean, let's say you have a new feature or a new project that's integrated through OpenStack. And, you know, some people find out that there's these new functions that are available. There's a lot of testing behind-the-scenes that has to happen before that can be vetted and exposed as part of our infrastructure as a service platform. And so, by the time that you get to the point where you have all the checks and balances, and marrying that next to the Australian controls that we have it's one year, two years, or you know, however it might be. And you know by that time we're at the night of the release and so, you know, you do all that work, you want to make sure that you're not doing that work and refactoring it for the next release when you're ready to go live. And so, having that long-term release is actually what I'm really keen about. Having that point of, that jump point to the latest and greatest. >> Well Roland, I think that's a great point. You know, it used to be we were on the 18 month cycle, OpenStack was more like a six month cycle, so I absolutely understand why this is important that I don't want to be tied to a release when I want to get a new function. >> John: That's right. >> Roland Cabana, thank you the insight into Vault Systems and congrats on all the progress you have made. So for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back here with lots more coverage from the OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver, thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)