hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here or the cube conversation and the SiliconANGLE cubes Palo Alto studio a little bit of a break and the crazy conference season so here to kind of fix the gear and take things up and sit down and in the context of a conversation outside of a show to really get the update and we're really excited to be joined here by two guests who are announcing a pretty exciting deal that's happening today is who you shoot a CTO of Hitachi Data scissors welcome again to you and jack mazzoni vice president storage networking at brocade welcome thank you so let's just jump right into it tell everybody what happened today and why this is big news yeah sure I'm gonna start it and so what we're announcing today is broke aids developed its its next-gen called gen-6 fibre channel switches and it's a whole portfolio and we're very excited that hitachi who resells the OEM are our product to to their customer base is launching on the state as well so we're very excited about that and it's big news right and so you'll be able to buy this product today from hitachi for all the great customers that we have out there today and that's the big announcement excellent and why is this important to your customers well this is just the next evolution in fibre channel I mean 32 gigabit per second don't you know we were just on 16 now not long ago and so it's going to open up a lot of bandwidth open up you know more workload being processed provide new opportunities for new applications as well so it's funny a lot a lot of talk on you know already it in the end of Moore's law we're going to be able to squeak out more compute power outage micro processors and stuff but it sounds like you guys are squeezing out a lot more performance on the network yeah I know absolutely and one thing that you know Hugh mentioned earlier which I thought was great is you know when you get performance like this in the network and you just get performance in general enables consolidation enables efficiencies right and when flash is able to go and allow you to do let's say the same or more amount of workloads with less course that's a good thing right and and the networks then got to be able to handle that and it's that kind of efficiencies that when we can jointly bring to our customers that allows them to then spend the time and think about how they transform their IT operations right into this digital transformation era into into enabling IT to be the strategic foundation to go drive the enterprise right and I know sometimes it's hard to to make that connection all the way from Genesis fibre channel to that that's how that connection goes so so it's it's been a proven winner to drive performance it saves money it saves it enables innovation and I think the commitment that brocade and Hitachi have had to to quality to the highest levels of reliability and customer service over the years has really been a cornerstone of our success it's been a great partnership I know our CEO likes to say we partner better than anybody in the industry and that's absolutely true and Hitachi has just been one of those fantastic partners for us for over a decade now so let's unpack that a little bit why is partnership so important and not only just specifically between the two companies here but you know we go to a ton of shows and every show now even if it's a specific vendor like the pentaho show is a whole ecosystem right nobody can do it alone anymore and there's a really kind of renewed focus around the ecosystem and and everyone kind of coming together at the end of the day provide solutions to customers that are going to solve problems so it's a very important piece of it yeah and I think you've a great example that is if it really is a requirement if you think about private cloud infrastructures and converge infrastructures you're bringing so many elements together to deliver a total solution and Hitachi UCP is a great example where you have you know great technologies from hitachi in there we've been able to participate some of our fibre channel as well as our IP storage switches we were able to participate with that and so really I think if you want to participate in a cloud type of architecture whether it's public private hybrid you're going to have to partner you're going to have to particles you may not have all the technologies you may not have all the specialties and customers could require that on at some some levels that's kind of my take on it yes I mean you know we could have tried to develop our own fibre channel switches but you know that would have taken a lot more effort and time and distraction from what our core competencies are you know I mean brocade has a conference season networking both IP and fibre channel networking so it doesn't make any sense for us to try to do that which is better to partner with that right so and the future is going to be all about partnering and and more toward open source to right and the other thing that we find over and over again is really the changing expectations of the way software performs and we hear it all the time you know that why doesn't the software at my work perform like the software on my phone and why isn't it faster and why isn't it more integrated with other sources of information so the demand for better faster stronger applications is only going to increase right nobody wants less data though he wants less performance buddy wats less latency and especially in kind of an API world where all these applications are now not just siloed stacks of applications but they're pulling data from all sorts of places the speed and latency really becomes critical yeah I know I absolutely right and that's why I think this announcement and the construct of the you know the all-flash data center and all the advancements happening with flash is so important it's that linkage and then what the applications can do once they take advantage that you know I always tell people it's like remember the first time your laptop went to a all flash disk remember that experience like via the old spinning disk you're booting up well go to windows right and then you with all flash it was like that emotional experience or how great it was right you take that level at an enterprise level right where you have thousands and thousands of thousands of disks running thousands of applications and now you bring in flash and then around the corner you ring in nvme it's amazing to think about what's going to be coming down the future right and we're very excited about our position it really being it that the the central point of if you will where all this information flow has to go through the network and you know whether it's fibre channel whether it's IP you know we're going to keep to our core values which is you know the highest levels of qualities resiliency bringing in the analytics and partner partner with the top quality companies in the world such as itachi and what was interesting about this release is you added a lot more than a tease a lot more manageability lot more reporting a lot more visibility you know one of the big themes obviously in big data is to move from you know reactive to predictive too prescriptive right and so to have the management layer to have kind of the extra amount of information that you can take advantage of because you've got excess capacity and the pipes if you will and better connectivity to the infrastructure enables a whole different layer of management is which is if you've talked about you and prior interviews you people have to manage a lot more right they're not managing individual boxes anymore now whole different scale man need to be able to automate that those management tools helps us to automate that the infrastructure management also the security part is very important you know the security that brocade brings them into their right into the switch itself right and the security is an interesting point right because that's again a consistent theme everywhere we go it's the old moat just doesn't work anymore the mode and the castle walls now you really have to have security baked in all over the place and the data layer the networking layer all over the place it was the interesting thing is if you think about fiber channel all right let's just offer five channels of technology it is fundamentally right more secure than Ethernet oh we love you know really a great IP portfolio and everything but if you think about Ethernet or excuse me fibre channel when you plug in it it's off by default well first it's a separate network all together right so that's that's one layer secure but it's an off by default meaning that just get you plug in doesn't mean you have access to anything you know you got to go through one man here go there's only going to go through some other stuff but some people say its complexity but but you're at least now actively saying how are the communication is going to happen thin within the this network or either that's really the opposite right because the benefit ethering you plug it in and hey everybody's connected right that's what you want but but when it comes to enterprise let's say storage applications that needs a really but is that the behavior you want that anything that just plugs into it all of a sudden now can connect and and that's one thing that gets kind of lost sometimes than the discussions and the monitor data centers and here I'm really glad that you brought it up and you dropped out of to Jeff it's it's we realize that we're adding more things into it right we're adding more capabilities for in-flight encryption you mentioned forward error correction so the other capabilities were built in it so we take security very seriously and and inherently I think that's another reason that the viability of fibre channel has remained for as long as it has been yeah and it just own it one more time you know kind of what are some of the specific benefits that came out of you two working together for this launch how are you really kind of taking advantage of each other's strengths to really provide a better solution today that people can go out and get well one of the things is they offer backward compelled compatibility we're with two generations right right and that enables us we have a lot of legacy things that we've got to bring forward they don't just rip everything out and put in all these stuff turn the data center off for the weekend is my bonus so you know it gives us that easy transition migration into these higher higher technology levels big one yeah a big one yeah and I think when when the in the porn part two is when we deliver our systems to itachi they test it with their latest and greatest storage they do this full you know systems total solution test so when a customer that brings it into the environment it's it's been fully tested completely NM by brocade and hitachi and then to Hugh's point it's it also then works its backward compatible with everything in the environment nothing's going to you know that nothing will ever break but you know so much time and effort is put into making sure everything runs to seamless as possible because again you have to think about the environments that we're in all right those from mission-critical big environments they got to solve some serious problems they're not up for science projects they're not for risk right yes they have to advance the technology but it's got it done be done in a way that a mitigator essence done a responsible way and that's where I think when you bring their storage and our network together as well as their servers right we have our technology part of their server solutions as well you get some very compelling solutions all right well congratulations to both of you and also to the team's I'm sure there was a lot of work that went up into this day and it's always a relief to get here so thanks for stopping by and sharing the story thank you absolutely right with you and Jack I'm chef Rick you're watching the Q's the cube conversation from Palo Alto thanks for watching we'll see you next time