(upbeat music) >> For decades the technology industry had marched the cadence of Moore's law. It was a familiar pattern. System OEMs would design in the next generation of Intel microprocessors, every couple of years or so maybe bump up the memory ranges periodically and the supporting hardware would kind of go along for the ride, upgrading its performance and bandwidth. System designers then they might beef up the cache, maybe throwing some more spinning disc spindles at the equation to create a balanced environment. And this was pretty predictable and consistent in the pattern and was reasonably straightforward compared to is challenges. This has all changed. The confluence of cloud, distributed global networks, the diversity of applications, AI, machine learning and the massive growth of data outside of the data center requires new architectures to keep up. As we've reported the traditional Moore's Law curve is flattening. And along with that we've seen new packages with alternative processors like GPUs, NPUs, accelerators and the like and the rising importance of supporting hardware to offload tasks like storage and security. And it's created a massive challenge to connect all these components together, the storage, the memories and all of the enabling hardware and do so securely at very low latency at scale and of course, cost effectively. This is the topic of today's segment. The shift from a world that is CPU centric to one where the connectivity of the various hardware components is where much of the innovation is occurring. And to talk about that, there is no company who knows more about out this topic than Broadcom. And with us today is Jas Tremblay, who is general manager, data center solutions group at Broadcom. Jas, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, you bet. Now Broadcom is a company that a lot of people might not know about. I mean, but the vast majority of the internet traffic flows through Broadcom products. (chuckles) Like pretty much all of it. It's a company with trailing 12 month revenues of nearly 29 billion and a 240 billion market cap. Jas, what else should people know about Broadcom? >> Well, Dave, 99% of the internet traffic goes through Broadcom silicon or devices. And I think what people are not often aware of is how breadth it is. It starts with the devices, phones and tablets that use our Wi-Fi technology or RF filters. And then those connect to access points either at home, at work or public access points using our Wi-Fi technology. And if you're working from home, you're using a residential or broadband gateway and that uses Broadcom technology also. From there you go to access networks, core networks and eventually you'll work your way into the data center, all connected by Broadcom. So really we're at the heart of enabling this connectivity ecosystem and we're at the core of it, we're a technology company. We invest about 5 billion a year in R&D. And as you were saying our last year we achieved 27.5 billion of revenue. And our mission is really to connect the ecosystem to enable what you said, this transformation around the data-centric world. >> So talk about your scope of responsibility. What's your role generally and specifically with storage? >> So I've been with the company for 16 years and I head up the data center solutions group which includes three product franchises PCA fabric, storage connectivity and Broadcom ethernet nics. So my charter, my team's charter is really server connectivity inside the data center. >> And what specifically is Broadcom doing in storage, Jas? >> So it's been quite a journey. Over the past eight years we've made a series of acquisition and built up a pretty impressive storage portfolio. This first started with LSI and that's where I came from. And the team here came from LSI that had two product franchises around storage. The first one was server connectivity, HBA raid, expanders for SSDs and HDDs. The second product group was actually chips that go inside the hard drives. So SOCs and pre amps. So that was an acquisition that we made and actually that's how I came into the Broadcom group through LSI. The next acquisition we made was PLX, the industry's leader in PCIe fabrics. They'd been doing PCIe switches for about 15 years. We acquired the company and really saw an acceleration in the requirements for NVMe attached and AI ML fabrics, very specialized, low latency fabrics. After that, we acquired a large system and software company, Brocade, and Dave if you recall, Brocade they're the market leader in fiber channel switching, this is where if you're financial or government institution you want to build a mission critical, ultra secure really best in class storage network. Following Brocade acquisition we acquired Emulex that is now the number one provider of fiber channel adapters inside servers. And the last acquisition for this puzzle was actually Broadcom where Avago acquired Broadcom and took on the Broadcom name. And there we acquired ethernet switching capabilities and ethernet adapters that go into storage servers or external storage systems. So with all this it's been quite the journey to build up this portfolio. We're number one in each of these storage product categories. And we now have four divisions that are focused on storage connectivity. >> That's quite remarkable when you think about it. I mean, I know all these companies that you were talking about and they were very quality companies but they were kind of bespoke in the fact that you had the vision to kind of connect the dots and now take responsibility for that integration. We're going to talk about what that means in terms of competitive advantage, but I wonder if we could zoom out and maybe you could talk about the key storage challenges and elaborate a little bit on why connectivity is now so important. Like what are the trends that are driving that shift that we talked about earlier from a CPU centric world to one that's connectivity centric? >> I think at Broadcom, we recognize the importance of storage and storage connectivity. And if you look at data centers whether it be private, public cloud or hybrid data centers, they're getting inundated with data. If you look at the digital universe it's growing at about 23% a day. So over a course of four to five years you're doubling the amount of new information and that poses really two key challenges for the infrastructure. The first one is you have to take all this data and for a good chunk of it, you have to store it, be able to access it and protect it. The second challenge is you actually have to go and analyze and process this data and doing this at scale that's the key challenge and what we're seeing these data centers getting a tsunami of data. And historically they've been CPU centric architectures. And what that means is the CPU's at the heart of the data center. And a lot of the workloads are processed by software running on the CPU. We believe that we're currently transforming the architecture from CPU centric to connectivity centric. And what we mean by connectivity centric is you architect your data center thinking about the connectivity first. And the goal of the connectivity is to use all the components inside the data center, the memory, the spinning media, the flash storage, the networking, the specialized accelerators, the FPGA all these elements and use them for what they're best at to process all this data. And the goal Dave is really to drive down power and deliver the performance so that we can achieve all the innovation we want inside the data centers. So it's really a shift from CPU centric to bringing in more specialized components and architecting the connectivity inside the data center to help. We think that's a really important part. >> So you have this need for connectivity at scale, you mentioned, and you're dealing with massive, massive amounts of data. I mean, we're going to look back to the last decade and say, oh, you've seen nothing compared to when we get to 2030, but at the same time you have to control costs. So what are the technical challenges to achieving that vision? >> So it's really challenging. It's not that complex to build up faster, bigger solution, if you have no cost or power budget. And really the key challenges that our team is facing working with customers is first, I'd say it's architectural challenges. So we would all like to have one fabric that aim to connect all the devices and bring us all the characteristics that we need. But the reality is, we can't do that. So you need distinct fabrics inside the data center and you need them to work together. You'll need an ethernet backbone. In some cases, you'll need a fiber channel network. In some cases, you'll need a small fabric for thousands or hundreds of thousands of HDDs. You will need PCIe fabrics for AI ML servers. And one of the key architectural challenges is which fabric do you use when and how do you develop these fabrics to meet their purpose built needs. That's one thing. The second architectural challenge, Dave is what I challenge my team with is example, how do I double bandwidth while reducing net power, double bandwidth, reducing net power? How do I take a storage controller and increase the IOPS by 10X and will allocate only 50% more power budget? So that equation requires tremendous innovation. And that's really what we focus on and power is becoming more and more important in that equation. So you've got decisions from an architecture perspective as to which fabric to use. You've got this architectural challenge around we need to innovate and do things smarter, better, to drive down power while delivering more performance. Then if you take those things together the problem statement becomes more complex. So you've had these silicon devices with complex firmware on them that need to inter-operate with multiple devices. They're getting more and more complex. So there's execution challenges and what we need to do. And what we're we're investing to do is shift left quality. So to do these complex devices that they come out time to market with high quality. And one of the key things Dave that we've invested in is emulation of the environment before you tape out your silicon. So effectively taking the application software, running it on an emulation environment, making sure that works, running your tests before you tape out and that ensures quality silicon. So it's challenging, but the team loves challenges. And that's kind of what we're facing, on one hand architectural challenges, on the other hand a new level of execution challenges. >> So you're compressing the time to final tape out versus maybe traditional techniques. And then, you mentioned architecture, am I right Jas that you're essentially from an architectural standpoint trying to minimize the... 'cause your latency's so important you're trying to minimize the amount of data that you have to move around and actually bringing compute to the data. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Well, I think that there's multiple parts of the problem. One of them is you need to do more data transactions, example data protection with rate algorithms. We need to do millions of transactions per second. And the only way to achieve this with the minimal power impact is to hardware accelerate these. That's one piece of investment. The other investment is, you're absolutely right, Dave. So it's shuffling the data around the data center. So in the data center in some cases you need to have multiple pieces of the puzzle, multiple ingredients processing the same data at the same time and you need advanced methodologies to share the data and avoid moving it all over the data center. So that's another big piece of investment that we're focused on. >> So let's stay on that because I see this as disruptive. You talk about spending $5 billion a year in R&D and talk a little bit more about the disruptive technologies or the supportive technologies that you're introducing specifically to support this vision. >> So let's break it down in a couple big industry problems that our team is focused on. So the first one is I'll take an enterprise workload database. If you want the fastest running database you want to utilize local storage and NVMe based drives and you need to protect that data. And raid is the mechanism of choice to protect your data in local environments. And there what we need to do is really just do the transactions a lot faster. Historically the storage has been a bit of a bottleneck in these types of applications. So example our newest generation product. We're doubling the bandwidth, increasing IOPS by four X, but more importantly we're accelerating raid rebuilds by 50X. And that's an important Dave, if you are using a database in some cases, you limit the size of that database based on how fast you can do those rebuilds. So this 50X acceleration in rebuilds is something we're getting a lot of good feedback on for customers. The last metric we're really focused on is write latency. So how fast can the CPU send the write to the storage connectivity subsystem and committed to drives? And we're improving that by 60X generation over generation. So we're talking fully loaded latency, 10 microseconds. So from an enterprise workload it's about data protection, much, much faster using NVMe drives. That's one big problem. The other one is if you look at Dave YouTube, Facebook, TikTok the amount of user generated content specifically video content that they're producing on an hour by hour basis is mind boggling. And the hyperscale customers are really counting on us to help them scale the connectivity of hundreds of thousands of hard drive to store and access all that data in a very reliable way. So there we're leading the industry in the transition to 24 gig SaaS and multi actuator drives. Third big problem is around AI ML servers. So these are some of the highest performance servers, that they basically need super low latency connectivity between GPGPUs, networking, NVMe drives, CPUs and orchestrate that all together. And the fabric of choice for that is PCIe fabric. So here, we're talking about 115 nanosecond latency in a PCIe fabric, fully nonblocking, very reliable. And here we're helping the industry transition from PCA gen four to PCIe gen five. And the last piece is okay, I've got a AI ML server, I have a storage system with hard drives or a storage server in the enterprise space. All these devices, systems need to be connected to the ethernet backbone. And my team is heavily investing in ethernet mix transitioning to 100 gig, 200 gig, 400 gig and putting capabilities optimized for storage workloads. So those are kind of the four big things that we're focused on at the industry level, from a connectivity perspective, Dave. >> And that makes a lot of sense and really resonates particularly as we have that shift from a CPU centric to a connectivity centric. And the other thing you said, I mean, you're talking about 50X rate rebuild times, a couple of things you know in storage is if you ask the question, what happens when something goes wrong? 'Cause it's all about recovery, you can't lose data. And the other thing you mentioned is write latency, which has always been the problem. Okay, reads, I can read out cache but ultimately you've got to get it to where it's persisted. So some real technical challenges there that you guys are dealing with. >> Absolutely, Dave. And these are the type of problems that gets the engineers excited. Give them really tough technical problems to go solve. >> I wonder if we could take a couple of examples or an example of scaling with a large customer, for instance obviously hyperscalers or take a company like Dell. I mean they're big company, big customer. Take us through that. >> So we use the word scale a lot at Broadcom. We work with some of the industry leaders and data centers and OEMs and scale means different things to them. So example, if I'm working with a hyperscaler that is getting inundated with data and they need half a million storage controllers to store all that data, well their scale problem is, can you deliver? And Dave, you know how much of a hot topic that is these days. So they need a partner that can scale from a delivery perspective. But if I take a company like example Dell that's very focused on storage, from storage servers, their acquisition of EMC. They have a very broad portfolio of data center storage offerings and scale to them from a connected by Broadcom perspective means that you need to have the investment scale to meet their end to end requirements. All the way from a low end storage connectivity solution for booting a server all the way up to a very high end all flash array or high density HDD system. So they want a company a partner that can invest and has a scale to invest to meet their end to end requirements. Second thing is their different products are unique and have different requirements and you need to adapt your collaboration model. So example, some products within Dell portfolio might say, I just want a storage adaptor, plug it in, the operating system will automatically recognize it. I need this turnkey. I want to do minimal investment, is not an area of high differentiation for me. At the other end of the spectrum they may have applications where they want deep integration with their management and our silicon tools so that they can deliver the highest quality, highest performance to their customers. So they need a partner that can scale from an R&D investment perspective from silicon software and hardware perspective but they also need a company that can scale from support and business model perspective and give them the flexibility that their end customers need. So Dell is a great company to work with. We have a long lasting relationship with them and the relationship is very deep in some areas, example server storage, and is also quite broad. They are adopters of the vast majority of our storage connectivity products. >> Well, and I imagine it was. Well I want to talk about the uniqueness of Broadcom again, I'm in awe of the fact that somebody had the vision, you guys, your team obviously your CEO was one of the visionaries of the industry, had the sense to look out and say, okay, we can put these pieces together. So I would imagine a company like Dell, they're able to consolidate their vendor their supplier base and push you for integration and innovation. How unique is the Broadcom model? What's compelling to your customer about that model? >> So I think what's unique from a storage perspective is the breadth of the portfolio and also the scale at which we can invest. So if you look at some of the things we talked about from a scale perspective how data centers throughout the world are getting inundated with data, Dave, they need help. And we need to equip them with cutting edge technology to increase performance, drive down power, improve reliability. So they need partners that in each of the product categories that you partner with them on, we can invest with scale. So that's, I think one of the first things. The second thing is, if you look at this connectivity centric data center you need multiple types of fabric. And whether it be cloud customers or large OEMs they are organizing themselves to be able to look at things holistically. They're no longer product company, they're very data center architecture companies. And so it's good for them to have a partner that can look across product groups across divisions says, okay this is the innovation we need to bring to market. These are the problems we need to go solve and they really appreciate that. And I think the last thing is a flexible business model. Within example, my division, we offer different business models, different engagement and collaboration models with technology. But there's another division that if you want to innovate at the silicon level and build custom silicon for you like many of the hyperscalers or other companies are doing that division is just focus on that. So I feel like Broadcom is unique from a storage perspective it's ability to innovate, breadth of portfolio and the flexibility in the collaboration model to help our customers solve their customers problems. >> So you're saying you can deal with merchant products slash open products or you can do high customization. Where does software differentiation fit into this model? >> So it's actually one of the most important elements. I think a lot of our customers take it for granted that will take care of the silicon will anticipate the requirements and deliver the performance that they need, but from a software, firmware, driver, utilities that is where a lot of differentiation lies. Some cases we'll offer an SDK model where customers can build their entire applications on top of that. In some cases they want to complete turnkey solution where you take technology, integrate it into server and the operating system recognizes it and you have outer box drivers from Broadcom. So we need to offer them that flexibility because their needs are quite broad there. >> So last question, what's the future of the business look like to Jas Tremblay? Give us your point of view on that. >> Well, it's fun. I got to tell you, Dave, we're having a great time. I've got a great team, they're the world's experts on storage connectivity and working with them is a pleasure. And we've got a rich, great set of customers that are giving us cool problems to go solve and we're excited about it. So I think this is really, with the acceleration of all this digital transformation that we're seeing, we're excited, we're having fun. And I think there's a lot of problems to be solved. And we also have a responsibility. I think the ecosystem and the industry is counting on our team to deliver the innovation from a storage connectivity perspective. And I'll tell you, Dave, we're having fun. It's great but we take that responsibility pretty seriously. >> Jas, great stuff. I really appreciate you laying all that out. Very important role you guys are playing. You have a really unique perspective. Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.

(exciting, upbeat music) >> (Announcer) Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. This is theCube and we're here at ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Stanley Toh is here, he's the Global IT Director at semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. Stanley, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Nice to be here. >> So, semiconductor, hot space right now. Things are going crazy and it's a good market, booming. That's good, it's always good to be in a hot space. But we're here at Knowledge. Maybe talk a little bit about your role, and then we'll get into what you're doing with ServiceNow. >> Sure. You're right. Semiconductor is booming. But we don't do anything sexy. Everything is components that go into your iPhones and stuff like that. They do the sexy stuff. We do the thing that make it work. So, I'm the what we call the Enterprise and User Services Director, so basically anything that touches the end user, from the help desk to collaboration to your PC support desk, everything is under. Basically anything that touches the end user, even onboarding, and then, now with the latest, we actually moved our old customer support portal to even ServiceNow CSM. >> Okay, so what led you to ServiceNow? Maybe take us back, and take us through the before and the after. >> Okay. Broadcom Limited, before we changed our name to Broadcom, we were Avago Technologies. We are very cloud centric. Anything that we can move to the cloud, we moved to the cloud. So we were the first multi-billion dollar company to move to Google, back in 2007. That was 10 years ago. And then we never stopped since. We have Opta, we have Workday. And if you look at it, all this cloud technology works so well with ServiceNow. And ServiceNow is a platform that has all the API and connectors to all these other cloud platforms. So, when we were looking and evaluating, first as just the ITSM replacement, we selected ServiceNow because of the ease of integration. But as we get into ServiceNow, and as we learn ServiceNow, we found that it's not just an ITSM platform. You can use it for HR, for finance, for legal, for facilities. Recently, probably about six months ago, we launched the HR module. And then three weeks ago, we went live with a CSM portal for the external customer. >> When you say you go back to 2007 with Google, you're talking about what, Google Docs? >> Everything. >> Dave: Everything. >> Email, calendar, docs, sites, Drive, but it was unknown. >> Dave: All the productivity stuff. >> Everything. >> Dave: Outsourced stuff. >> They were unknown then, >> Jeff: Right, right, right. >> And it's a risk. >> So what was the conversation to take that risk? Because obviously there was a lot of concern at the enterprise level on some of these cloud services beyond test/dev in the early days. Obviously you made the right bet, it worked out pretty well. (Stanley laughing) But I'm curious, what were the conversations and why did you ultimately decide to make that bet? >> Okay. So 2007 was just after the downturn. >> Jeff: Right. >> So everyone was looking at cost, at supportability. But at the same time, the mobile phone, the smart phone is just exploding in the market. So we want something that is very flexible, very scalable, and very easy to integrate, plus also give you mobility. So that's why we went with Google as the first cloud platform, but then we started adding. So right now, we can basically do everything on your smart phone. We have Opta as our single sign-on. From one portal, I go everywhere. >> Dave: Okay, so that's good. So you talked about some of the criteria for the platform. How has that affected how you do business, how you do IT business? >> See, IT has always been looked upon as a cost center. And we are always slow, legacy system, hard to use, we don't listen to you. (Jeff laughing) >> Dave: What do those guys do? >> You know, why are we paying those guys, right? And then you look at all the consumer stuff. They are sexy, they are mobile, they have pretty pictures. Now all your internal users want the same experience. So, the experience has changed. The old UNIX command key doesn't work anymore. They want something touch, GUI, mobile. They want the feel, the color, you know. >> That might be the best description (Stanley laughing) of the consumerization of IT, Dave, that we've ever had on theCUBE. >> It's really honest. Coming from an IT person, it is, it is honest. And now you've driven ServiceNow into other areas beyond IT. >> Stanley: Yes. >> You mentioned HR. >> HR. We went live six months ago. >> Okay. And these other areas, are you thinking about it, looking at it, or? >> So we are also looking with legal, because they have a lot of legal documents and NDAs and stuff like that. And ServiceNow have a very nice integration to DocuSign and Vox. So we are looking at that. But the latest one, we went live three weeks ago, is the CSM, the customer support management portal. And that one actually replaced one of our legacy system that has a stack of sixteen application running. And we collapsed that, and went live on ServiceNow CSM three weeks ago. >> And what has been, two impacts - the business impact, and, I'm curious, is it the culture impact. You sort of set it up as the attitude. We had fun with it, but it's true. What's the business impact? And what has the cultural impact been? >> The last few years, we have been doing a lot of acquisition. So we have been bringing in a lot of new BU's. Business units. And they want things to move fast, and we want to integrate them into one brand. So speed and agility is key when you do acquisitions. So that's why we are moving into a platform where we can integrate all these new companies easily. We found that in ServiceNow and we can integrate them. So for example, when we acquired Broadcom Corporation, they have 18,000 employees. We onboarded them on day one, and usually when you do an acquisition, they don't give you the employee information until the last minute. Two days, all I need, is to bring them all on, onboarded into my collaboration suite. I only need two days of the information, and on day one, Turn it on, they are live. Their information is in, they have an email account. All their information is in ServiceNow. They call one help desk, they call our help desk, they get all the help and services. So it's fully integrated on day one itself. >> And you guys also own LSI now, right? >> Yes, LSI. >> Emulex? >> Emulex, PLX. >> PLX. >> The latest acquisition is Brocade, which we will close in the summer. And then, the rumored Toshiba NAND business. So, yeah, we are doing a lot of acquisitions. >> Yeah, quite a roll-up there. >> Correct. So as you can see, they are all very different companies. So when they come in, they have different culture. They have different workflow, they have different processes. But if you integrate them into a platform that we are very familiar right now, it's the consumerized look and feel, it's very easy to bring them in. >> And that is the cultural change that has occurred. >> Yes, it's a huge, >> So do people love IT now? >> They still hate IT. (Jeff and Dave laughing) They still say iT is a cost center. But right now, they are coming around. They see that we are bringing value to them. So right now, IT is just not to provide you the basic. IT is to enable the business to be better and more competitive. >> A true partner for the business. >> Yes, correct. >> Stanley, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to hear your story, we appreciate it. >> Stanley: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge '17. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

San Francisco extracting the signal from the noise it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by VM world and its ecosystem sponsors now your host Stu miniman and Brian Grace Lee welcome back this is the cube SiliconANGLE TVs live production of vmworld 2015 here in moscone north san francisco happy to have back on this segment we're actually gonna dig into some of the networking pieces Brian Grace Lee and myself here hosting it Sean Walsh repeat cube guest you know in a new role though so Sean welcome back here now the general manager of the ethernet business at qlogic thanks for joining us thank you thanks for having me alright so I mean Sean you know we're joking before we start here I mean you and I go back about 15 years I do you know those that know the adapter business I mean you know Jay and I've LJ core business on you've worked for qlogic before you did a stint in ml accent and you're now back to qlogic so why don't we start off with that you know what brought you back to qlogic what do you see is the opportunity there sure um I'll tell you more than anything else what brought me back was this 25 gig transition it's very rare and I call it the Holy trifecta of opportunity so you've got a market transition you actually have a chip ready for the market at the right time and the number one incumbent which is Intel doesn't have a product I mean not that they're late they just don't have a product and that's the type of stuff that great companies are built out of are those unique opportunities in the market and you know more than anything else that's when brought me back to qlogic alright so before we dig into some of the ethernet and hyperscale piece you know what what's the state of fibre channel Sean you know what we said is in those fiber channel the walking dead is it a cash cow that you know qlogic be a bit of milk and brocade and the others in the fibre channel business for a number years you know what's your real impression of fibre channel did that yeah so you know look fibre channel is mature there's no question about it is that the walking dead no not by any stretch and if it is the walking dead man it produces a lot of cash so I'll take that any day of the year right The Walking Dead's a real popular show so fibre channel you know it's still it's still gonna be used in a lot of environments but you know jokingly the way that I describe it to people is I look at fibre channel now is the Swiss bank of networks so a lot of web giant's by our fiber channel cards and people will look at me and go why do they do that because for all the hype of open compute and all the hype of the front end processors and all the things that are happening when you click on something where there's money involved that's on back end Oracle stuff and it's recorded on fibre channel and if there's money involved it's on fibre and as long as there's money in the enterprise or in the cloud I'm reasonably certain fibre channel will be around yeah it's a funny story I remember two years ago I think we were at Amazon's reinvent show and Andy Jesse's on stage and somebody asked you know well how much of Amazon is running amazoncom is running on AWS and its most of it and we all joke that somewhere in the back corner running the financials is you know a storage area network with the traditional array you know probably atandt touched by fibre channel absolutely i mean we just did a roll out with one of the web giants and there were six different locations each of the each of the pods for the service for about 5,000 servers and you know as you would expect about 3,000 on the front access servers there's about 500 for pop cash that was about 15 maybe twelve thirteen hundred for the for the big data and content distribution and all those other things the last 500 servers look just like the enterprise dual 10 gigs dual fibre channel cards and you know I don't see that changing anytime soon all right so let's talk a bit a little bit 25 gig Ethernet had an interview yesterday with mellanox actually who you know have some strong claims about their market leadership in the you know greater than 10 gig space so where are we with kind of the standards the adoption in queue logical position and 25 gig Ethernet sure so you know obviously like everyone in this business we all know each other yeah and when you look at the post 10 gig market okay 40 gigs been the dominant technology and I will tip my hat to mellanox they've done well in that space now we're both at the same spot so we have exactly the same opportunity in front of us we're early to market on the 25 we have race to get there and what we're seeing is the 10 gig market is going to 25 pretty straightforward because I like the single cable plant versus the quad cable plant the people that are at 40 aren't going to 50 they're going to transition straight to 100 we're seeing 50 more as a blade architecture midplane sort of solution and that's where at right now and I can tell you that we have multiple design win opportunities that we're in the midst of and we are slugging it out with these guys everything and it will be an absolute knife fight between us and mellanox to see who comes out number one in this market obviously we both think we're going to win but at the end of the day I've placed my bet and I expect to win all right so Sean can you lay out for us you know where are those battles so traditionally the network adapter it was an OEM type solution right I got it into the traditional server guys yeah and then it was getting the brand recognition for the enterprise customers and pushing that through how much is that traditional kind of OEM is it changing what's having service providers and those hyperscale web giants yes so there's there's three fundamental things when you look at 25 gig you gotta deal with so first off the enterprise is going to be much later because they need the I Triple E version that has backwards auto-negotiation so you know that's definitely a 17 18 pearly transition type thing the play right now is in the cloud and the service provider market where they're rolling out specific services and they're not as concerned about the backwards compatibility so that's where we're seeing the strength of this so they're all the names that you would expect and I have to say one of the interesting things about working with these guys is there n das or even nastier than our Liam India is they do not want you talking about them but it is very much that market where it's a non traditional enterprise type of solution for the next 12-18 months and then as we roll into that next gen around the pearly architecture where we all have full auto-negotiation that's where you're going to see the enterprise start to kick in yeah what what what are the types of applications that are driving this this next bump in speed what is it is it video is it sort of east and west types of application traffic is a big data what's what's driving this next bump so a couple of things you would expect which would be the you know certainly hadoop mapreduce you know those sorts of things are going there the beginning of migration to spark where they're doing real-time analytics versus post or processing batch type stuff so there they really care about it and this is where our DMA is also becoming very very popular in it the next area that most people probably don't think of is the telco in a vspace is the volume as these guys are doing their double move and there going from a TCA type platforms running mostly one in ten they're going to leave right to 25 and for them the big thing is the ability to partition the network and do that virtualization and be able to run deep edk in one set of partitions standard storage another set of partitions in classic IP on the third among the among the few folks that you know you would expect in that are the big content distribution guys so one of the companies that I can mention is Netflix so they've already been out at their at 40 right now and you know they're not waiting for 50 they're going to make another leap that goes forward and they've been pretty public about those types of statements if you look at some of the things that they talked about at NDF or IDF and they're wanting to have nvme and direct gas connection over i serve that's driving 100 gig stuff we did a demo at a flash memory summit with Samsung where we had a little over 3 million I ops coming off of it and again it's not the wrong number that matters but it's that ability to scale and deal with that many concurrent sessions that are driving it so those are the early applications and I don't think the applications will be a surprise because they're all the ones that have moved to 40 you know the 10 wasn't enough 40 might be too much they're going to 25 and for a lot of the others and its really the pop cash side that's driving the hunter gig stuff because you know when that Super Bowl ad goes you got to be able to take all that bandwidth it once yeah so Sean you brought up nvme maybe can you discuss a little bit you know what are the you know nvm me and some of these next-generation architectures and what's the importance to the user sure so nvme is basically a connection capability that used to run for hard drives then as intel moved into SSDs they added this so you had very very high performance low latency pci express like performance what a number of us in this business are starting to do is then say hey look instead of using SAS which is kind of running out of gas at 12 gig let's move to nvme and make it a fabric and encapsulate it so there's three dynamics that help that one is the advent of 25 50 100 the second is the use of RDMA to get the latency that you want and then the third is encapsulation I sir or the ice cozy with RDMA together and it's sort of that trifecta of things that are giving very very high performance scale out on the back end and again this is for the absolute fastest applications where they want the lowest latency there was an interesting survey that was done by a university of arizona on latency and it said that if two people are talking and if you pause for more than a quarter of a second that's when people change their body language they lean forward they tilt their head they do whatever and that's kind of the tolerance factor for latency on these things and again one of the one of the statements that that Facebook made publicly at their recent forum was that they will spend a hundred million dollars to save a millisecond because that's the type of investment that drives their revenue screen the faster they get clicks the faster they generate revenue so when you think of high frequency trading when you think of all those things that are time-sensitive the human factor and that are going to drive this all right so storage the interaction with networking is you know critically important especially to show like this at vmworld I mean John you and I talked for years is it wasn't necessarily you know fibre channel versus the ethernet now it's changing operational models if I go use Salesforce I don't think about my network anymore I felt sort of happen to used Ethernet it's I don't really care um hyper convergence um when somebody buys hyper convergence you know they just kind of the network comes with it when I buy a lot of these solutions my networking decision is made for me and I haven't thought about it so you know what's that trend that you're seeing so the for us the biggest trend is that it's a shifting customer base so people like new tonics and these guys are becoming the drivers of what we do and the OEMs are becoming much more distribution vehicles for these sorts of things than they are the creators of this content so when we look at how we write and how we build these things there's far more multi-threading in terms of them there's far more partitions in terms of the environment because we never know when we get plugged into it what that is going to be so incorporating our l2 and our RDMA into one set of engine so that you always have that hyper for it's on tap on demand and you know without getting down into the minutia of the implementation it is a fundamental shift in how we look at our driver architectures you know looking at arm based solutions and micro servers versus just x86 as you roll the film forward and it also means that as we look at our architectures they have to become much smaller and much lighter so some of the things that we traditionally would have done in an offload environment we may do more in firmware on the side and I think the other big trend that is going to drive that is this move towards FPGAs and some of the other things that are out there essentially acting as coprocessors from you you mentioned earlier Open Compute open compute platform those those foundations and what's going on what is what what's really going on there i think a lot of us see the headlines sometimes you think about it you go okay this is an opportunity for lots of engineering to contribute to things but what's the reality that you're dealing with the web scale folks sure if they seem like the first immediate types of companies that would buy into this or use it what's the reality of what's going on with that space well obviously inside the the i will say the web scale cloud giant space you know i think right now if you look at it you've got sort of the big 10 baidu Tencent obama at amazon web as your microsoft being those guys and then you know they are definitely building and designing their own stuff there's another tier below that where you have the ebays the Twitter's the the other sorts of folks that are in there and you know they're just now starting that migration if you look at the enterprise not a big surprise the financial guys are leading this we've seen public statements from JPM and other folks that have been at these events so you know I view it very much like the blade server migration I think it's going to be twenty twenty-five percent of the overall market whether we whether people like to admit it or not good old rack and stack is going to be around for a very long time and you know they're there are applications where it makes a lot of sense when you're deploying prop private cloud in the managed service provider market we're starting to see a move into that but you know if you say you know what's the ten year life cycle of an architect sure i would say that in the cloud were probably four or five years into it and the enterprise were maybe one or two years into it all right so what about the whole sdn discussion Sean you know how much does qlogic play into that what are you seeing in general and you know we're at vmworld so what about nsx you know is that part of the conversation and what do you hear in the marketplace today yeah it really is part of the conversation and the interesting part is that I think sdn is getting a lot of play because of the capabilities that people want and again you know when you look at the managed service providers wanting to have large scale lower costs that's going to definitely drive it but much like OpenStack and Linux and some of these other things it's not going to be you know the guys going to go download it off the web and put it in production at AT&T you know it's going to be a prepackaged solution it's going to be embedded as part of it if you look at what Red Hat is doing with their OpenStack release we look what mirantis is doing with their OpenStack release again from an enterprise perspective and from a production in the MSP and second tier cloud that's what you're going to see more of so for us Sdn is critical because it allows us to then start to do things that we want to do for high-performance storage it allows us to change the value proposition in terms of if you look at Hadoop one of these we want to be able to do is take the storage engine module and run that on our card with our embedded V switch and our next gen ship so that we can do zero stack copies between nodes to improve latency so it's not just having RDMA is having a smart stack that goes with it and having the SDN capability to go out tell the controller pay no attention this little traffic that's going on over here you know these are not the droids you're looking for and then everything goes along pretty well so it's it's very fundamental and strategic but it's it's a game it's a market in which we're going to participate but it's not one we're going to try and write or do a distribution for okay any other VMware related activities q logics doing announcements this week that you want to share this week I would have to say no you know I think the one other thing that we're strategically working on them on with that you would expect is RDMA capabilities across vMotion visa and those sorts of things we've been one of the leaders in terms of doing genevieve which is the follow-on to VX land for hybrid cloud and that sort of thing and we see that as a key fundamental partnership technology with VMware going forward all right so let's turn back to qlogic for a second so the CEO recently left he DNA that there's a search going on so give us the company update if you will well actually there isn't a search so Jean who is gonna is going to run the ship forward as CEO we've brought in chris king who was on our board as executive chair in person chris has a lot of experience in the chip market and she understands that intimate tie that we have to that intel tick-tock model and really how you run an efficient ship driven organization you know whether we play in the systems in between level you know we're not quite the system but we're not quite the chip and understanding that market is part of what she does and the board has given us the green light to continue to go forward develop what we need to do in terms of the other pieces jean has a strong financial background she was acting CEO for a year between HK and simon aires me after Simon left so she's got the depth she knows the business and for us you know you know it's kind of a non op where everything else is continuing on as you would expect yeah okay last question I have for you Sean I mean the dynamics change for years you know what there was kind of the duopoly Xin the market I mean it was in tellin broadcom oh yeah on the ethernet side it was Emulex and amp qlogic it's a different conversation today I mean you mentioned Intel we talked about mellanox don't you logic you know your old friend I don't lie back on a vago bought broadcom and now they're called broadcom I think so yeah so you know layout for us you know kind of you know where you see that the horses on the track and you know what excites you yeah so again you know if you look at the the 10 gig side of the business clearly intel has the leadership position now we're number two in the market if you look at the shared data that's come out you know the the the Emulex part of a vago has been struggling in losing chair then we have this 25 gig transition that came in the market and that was driven by broadcom and you know for those of us who have followed this business they I think everyone can appreciate the irony of avago of avago buying Emulex and then for all the years we tried to keep him separate bringing them back together was but we-we've chuckled over a few beers on that one but then you've got this 25 gig transition and you know the other thing is that if you look at so let me step back and say the other thing on the 10 gig market is was a very very clear dividing line the enterprise was owned by the broadcom / qlogic emulex side the cloud the channel the the the appliance business was owned by Intel mellanox okay now as we go into this next generation you've got us mellanox and the the original broadcom team coming in with 25 game we've all done something that gets us through this consortium approach we're all going to have a night Ripley approach from there and Intel isn't there you know we haven't seen any announcements or anything specific from Emulex that they've said publicly in that space so right now we kind of view it as a two-horse race we think from a software perspective that our friends at at broadcom com whatever we want to call them or bravado I think is how r CT / first tool that I don't think they have a software depth to run this playbook right now and then we have to do is take our enterprise strength and move those things like load balancing and failover and the SDN tools and end par and all the virtualization capabilities we have we got to move those rapidly into the into the cloud space and go after it for us it means we have to be more open source driven than we have been in the past it means that we have a different street fight for every one of these it represents a change in some of the sales model and how we go to market so you know not to say that we're you know we we've got all of everything wrapped up and perfect in this market but again right time right place and this will be the transition for another you know we think three to five years and there's there's still a lot of interesting things that are happening ironically one of the most interesting things I think it's got to happen in 25 is this use of the of the new little profile connectors I think that will do more to help the adoption of 25 gig in Hunter gig where you can use the RCX or r XC connector there's our cxr see I forgot the acronym but it kind of looks like the firewire HDMI connectors that you have on your laptop's now and now imagine that you can have a car that has that connector in a form factor that's you know maybe a half inch square and now you've got incredible port density and you can dynamically change between 25 50 and 100 on the fly well let Sean Sean you know we've always talked there's a lot of complexity that goes in under the covers and it's the interest who's got a good job of making that simple and consumable right and help tried those new textures go forward all right Sean thank you so much for joining us we'll be right back with lots more coverage including some more networking in-depth conversation thank you for watching thanks for having me