>>from the Cube Studios in >>Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi. I'm stupid, man. And welcome to a cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guest on the program. Francis Mattis. He is the vice president of engineering at Pensando. Francis. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Good to be here. All >>right. So, Frances, you and I actually overlapped. Ah, you know, some of the companies who work with, you know, if anybody familiar with Pensando, you have worked with some of the mpls team over the years through some of those spin ins, but for our audience, give us a little bit about your background. You know, what brought you to help and be part of the team that you started pensando? >>Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I started my career with Advanced Micro Devices in the mid nineties, got out of school, really wanted to build micro processors. And so, Andy, being in Austin, Texas, and be going to ls you for undergrad was perfect sort of alignment. And so I got to say M. D and Austin built K five worked on that team or kind of team with K seven. And, uh, when I came out to California to help with K, and that brought me to California. And then we got into the dot com era and and being a A and B fighting intel, so to speak, seemed like a hard battle. And so, with the dot com era coming, I just saw this perfect opportunity to jump into the Internet. And so that's how we got into building Internet and data communications equipment, went to the show on systems. We talked a little bit about that earlier, and that got me into storage. From there, I got into a company called on GMO, which was building fibre channel sand equipment. So built chips there, and I got to know the Mpls team there. I always say they hired me off the street. And from that point on, while we've been together since Jews 1001 So 19 years, yeah. Yeah, and I've been building silicon with them and systems for almost 20 years now. So we had quite a journey. Yeah, it's been fun. Great >>stuff. Yeah, you know it's going back, you know, niche on talking about ice scuzzy. You know, in the networking world, you know, it's a little bit of a dark arts in general for most people, you know, understanding the networking protocols and all the various pieces and three and four letter acronyms aren't something that most people are familiar with. Pensando, I'm curious. You know what? You know, networking In general, you're like, I work on Internet stuff and we're the tubes that, you know, Things go around. So when when you describe pensando, you know how to explain that to the people that maybe aren't deep into East, west, south, over on under underlay protocols? >>Yeah, absolutely. So for me, pensando was kind of the sort of the culmination of all the things I've done in my career processing, you know, being able to build compute engines that have programmable, starting with microprocessors, being able to do storage and storage networking with Andy on no, we build a computer with druva and the virtualization layers around the Ethernet interfaces in the adapter with what was really our first smart nick, Um, in 6 4007 timeframe and then with STN in CNI, all of these elements kind of came together. These multiple different layers in the infrastructure stack, if you will, and so pensando for me. What was interesting was the explosion of scale in both space and time with the advent of, let's say, 25 gig 50 gig 100 gig to the server, the notion of very dense computing on in each rack and the need for very high scale After doing all of these technologies and seeing where silicon kind of started to fall in place, I was 16 centimeter. It seemed that bringing this kind of technology to the edge very low power with sort of an end to end security architecture and to end policy engine architecture, distributed services as we're doing all seem to naturally fit into place. And the cloud was already proving this morning when I say the cloud, I mean, the hyper scaler is like Amazon and Microsoft. We are already building these platforms. And so yeah, it dawned on me that, uh I didn't think this was possible unless you built the entire platform. We built the entire system. If you build any one piece, the market transition would take a lot longer. And I think this is true. In technology, history tends to repeat itself, starting with mainframes. When IBM built an entire computer and that built the entire computer, HP built these people. So these kinds of things, um, are important if you want to really push a market transition. And so pensando became this opportunity to take all of these things that I've done in my past life and bring them together in a way that would give a complete stack for the purposes of what I call the new computer, which is basically the data center. And so, um, you know, when my mom asks me, you know, what is it that you're doing? I said, Well, it's just imagine the computer you have right now and multiplying by thousands and thousands stacking in Iraq, and anyone can use it at any one time. And we provide the infrastructure and the mechanisms to be able to Teoh, orchestrate and control that very, very high speed layers. So I don't know if that was a long answer. >>No, no, no. It's fascinating stuff, and you know, when I look at the industry, you know cloud. Of course. Is that just make a wave? That changed the way a lot of people look at this. The way we architect things, there was this belief for a number of years. Well, you know, I'm going to go from this complicated mess that I had in my own data centers and cloud was going to be, you know, inexpensive and easy. And I don't think anybody thinks about inexpensive and easy when they look at cloud computing these days, then add edge into these environments. So I guess what I'm asking is, you know, today's environment, you know, we know I t always is additive. So I have various pieces that I need to put together. You talked about building platforms, and how can it be a complete stack? So companies like Oracle, you know, for many years said we can do everything from the silicon all the way up through your application. Amazon in many ways does the same thing they can. You can build everything on Amazon, but they built out their ecosystem. So how does Pensando fit into this? You know, multi cloud, multi dimensional multi vendor. >>So yeah, so that's a good question. so So one of the things we wanted to do is to be able to bring a systematic management layer two header Genius, beauty. And what I mean by that is in any enterprise data center, modern data center, you're gonna have multiple types of computing. You're gonna have virtual machines, you're gonna have their metal, and you're gonna have containers, or at least in the last, say, three or four years. Chances are you'll have some containers and moving there. And so what we wanted to do was be able to Brighton Infrastructure a management mechanism where all of these head Virginia's types of computing could be managed the same way with respect to policy. What I mean by policy is sort of this declarative or intent based model of I have declared what I'd like to see, whether that the network policy or and and security with data in motion and be able to plot apply it in a distributed manner. Across these different types of hetero genius elements, the cloud has the advantage that it's homogenous for the most part. I mean, they own the entire infrastructure and they can control everything on their now our systems will obviously manage the marginal systems as well, and in many ways that's easier. But bringing together these this notion of heterogeneity these types of computing with one management plane one type of interface for the operator, specifically the networking services operator, was fundamental. That and then the second thing is being able to bring the scale and speed to the edge. So a top of rack switch or something in the in the middle of the network is obviously very dense in terms of this Iot capability. So the silicon area that you spend building a high speed switch is really spent for the most part on the Iot, unless typically, 30 to 40% of the area will be Iot and the rest will be very much hardwired control protocols. We know that as we go to STN services and we want, uh, let's say software defined mechanisms in terms of what the policy looks like, what the protocols look like. The ability to change over time in the lifespan of the computer, which is 3 to 5 years, are you want that to be programmable, very difficult to apply a very dense scale in the core of the network. And so it was an obvious move to bring that to the edge where we could plug it into the server effectively, just like we did. Really? In the UCS system. Uh, no system. >>Yeah, some some really tough engineering challenges. You know, for the longest time, it was very predictable in the networking world, You know, you go from one gig to 10 gig. You know, there was a little discussion how we went the next step, whether, you know, 25 50 40 and 100 gig now. But you talk about containerized architectures. You talk about distributed systems with edge. Things change at a much smaller granular level and change much more frequently. So what are some of the design principles and challenges that you make sure that you're ready for what's happening today but also knowing that, you know, technology changes there always coming, and you need to be able to handle, You know, that next thing. Yeah, >>that's right. Yes. So, uh, I think part of the biggest challenges we have are around power with respect to design power. And then what is the usefulness of each transistor? So, um, when you you have sort of a scale of flexibility. See, views are the most flexible, obviously, but have probably the least performance in them. PG A's are pretty useful in terms of its flexibility, but not very dense in terms of its logic capability. And then you have hardwired a six, which are extremely dense, very much purpose built logic, but completely inflexible. And so the design challenge it was put in front of us is how do we find that sweet spot of extremely programmable, extremely flexible, but still having a cost profile that didn't look like an F PGA And God knows the benefits of the CPU. And and that's where this sort of this notion of domain specific processing came in, which is okay, well, if we're going to solve a few problems, we're going to solve them well. And those few problems are going to be we're gonna bring PC services. We're going to bring networking services. We're going to bring stories, services. We're gonna bring security services around the edge of the computer so that we can offload or let's say, partition correctly the computing problem in a data center. And to do that, we knew a core of sea views wasn't going to do a job that's basically borrowing from this guy to pay this other guy. Right? So what we wanted to do was bring this notion of domain specific processing, and that's where our design challenges came in, which is okay, So now we build around this language called P four, What is the most optimal way to pack? The most amount of threads are processing elements into the silicon while managing the memory bandwidth, which is obviously, you know, packet processing is it has been said to be embarrassingly parallel, which is true. However, the memory bandwidth is insane. And so how do we build a system that insurance that memory is not the bottleneck? Obviously, we're producing a lot of data or, uh, computing a lot of data. And so So these were some of our design challenges. All of that within a power envelope where this part of this device could sit at the edge inside of a computer within a typical power profiling by PC, a attached card in a modern computer. So that was a huge design challenge for us. >>Yeah, I'd love to hear, you know, it was a multi year journey toe solution. And I think of the old World. It was very much a hardware centric 18 to 24 months for design and all the tape out you need to do on this. Sounds like obviously there is still hardware, but it is more software driven. Then it would have been, you know, 10 years ago. So give us some of the ups and downs in that journey. Love to hear any. Any stories that you can share their Well, yeah, I >>think you know, good question. It's always there's always ups and downs in anything you do, especially in the start up. And I think one of the biggest challenges we we've faced is, uh, the exact hardware software boundary. So what is it that you want in hardware? What is it that you want in software And, uh, you know, one of the greatest assets and our company depends on who are the people. We have amazing software and hardware architects who work extremely well together because most of us have been together for so long. So, um, so that always helps when you start to partition the problem. We spent the first year of Pensando, which was basically 2017. The company was founded really thinking through this problem, would it for for all the problems, we wanted to solve the goals that were given to us and and security. Okay, so I want to be able to terminate TCP and initiate TLS connections. What's the right architecture for that? I want to be able to do storage off load and be able to provide encryption of data at rest data in motion. I want to be able to do compression these kinds of things. What's the right part of our software boundary for that? What do we what do we hardwire in silicon versus what we make it programmable and silicon, obviously, but still through a computing engine. And so we spent the first year of the company really thinking through those different partitioning problems, and that was definitely a challenge. And we spent a lot of time and and, uh, you helped me conference rooms and white boards figuring that out. And then 2018. The challenge there was now taking this architecture, this sort of technology substrate, if you will that we built and then executing on it, making sure that it was actually going to yield what we hope that would that we would be able to provide the services. When we talk about El four firewall at line rate, that's completely programmable. Uh, we achieved that. Can we do load balancing? And we do all of it with this before processing engine and the innovations we brought before satisfy all of these requirements we put for us. And so 2018 was really about execution. And there you always have. The challenge is in execution. In terms of, you know, things are going to go wrong. It's not. It's not. If it's when and then how do you deal with it? And so again, um, I would say the biggest challenge and execution is, uh, containing the changes. You know, it's so easy for things to change, especially when you're trying to really build a software platform right, because it's always easy to sort of kick the can and say we'll deal with that later and software. But we know that given what we're trying to do, which is build a system that is highly performance, um, you can't get that. Can you have to deal with it when it comes in. So we spend a lot of time doing performance analysis, making sure that all these applications we were building we're going t yield the right performance. And so that was quite a challenge. And then 2019 was kind of the year of shaping the product. Really lots of product design. Okay, now that we have this technology and it does these, he says that we wanted to do these pieces meaning services. What are all the different ways we can shake this product after talking to customers for, you know, months and months and months. You know, Sony is very much custom, customer driven customer centric. So we we were fortunate enough that we got to spend a lot of time with customers and then that brings us out of challenges, right? Because every customer has a unique problems and so I don't know how to reform this product around a solution that solves quite a bit of problems that really brings value. And so that was the those are the challenges in 2019 which we overcame. Now, obviously we have several releases that we've come out with already. We've got a six and the chips and the It's all there now. So now, 2020. Unfortunately, covitz here, But this is this is a year of growth. This is the year that we really bring it out into the world with our partners and our customers and show how this technology has been developed and benefit will benefit customers over over the next years. Two years. >>Frances really appreciate the insight there. Yeah, that that discussion of the hardware versus software brings back memories for May. Lots of heated debates. A CIO What? One of lines you know we've used on the Cube many times is you know, you know, software will eventually work. Hardware will eventually break. So those trade rto >>taught me something over time ago. He said that uh huh, hardware is hard to change. Software is hard to stop changing. So >>that that's a great one to All right, So you gave us through the last three years journey. Give us a little bit. Look, you know, on the next three years and where you expect pensando to be going >>Sure. Where I see pensando in the next three years as we go through this market transition is uh, both a market leader in a thought leader in terms of the next wave of data center edge computing, whether the, uh in the service provider space, whether it be in the enterprise space or whether it be in the cloud space, the hyper hyper scale of space. As I was mentioning in the beginning, we had when we were talking about, uh, the journey. Market transitions of this major really require understanding the entire stack. If you provide a piece and someone else provides a piece, you will eventually get there. But it's a matter of when, and by the time you get there, there's probably something new. So, you know, uh, time in and of itself is an innovation in this area, especially when you're dealing with the market transition like this. And so we've been fortunate enough that we're building the entire system when we go from the transistors to the rest of the FBI's way, have the entire staff. And so where I see us in three years is not only being a market leader in this space, but also being a thought leader in terms of what does domain specific processing look like at the edge. Um, you know, what are the tools? What are the techniques for? Really a z save? Democratizing the cloud bringing, bringing this technology to everyone. >>Excellent. Well, hey, Frances, That has been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the journey so far and I can't wait to see you. How? Thanks for going >>forward. Yeah, we're excited, and I appreciate it. Thank you for your time to. All >>right, check out the cube dot net. We've got lots of back catalogue with pensando. Also, I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Q. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Narrator: From Austin, Texas. It's the CUBE, covering DockerCon 2017. Brought to you by Docker, and support from it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, with my co-host, James Kobielus, who's been digging into all the application development angles. Happy to welcome back to the program, here at DockerCon, Yaron Haviv, who is the co-founder and CTO of iguazio. Yaron, great to see you. >> Thanks. >> How have you been? >> Great, great, been busy traveling a lot. >> We talked about how some of us celebrated Passover recently, I had brisket at home. We had Franklin's Barbecue brisket here. Anthony Bourdain said the only two people that know how to do brisket well, are Franklin's and the Jews. (all laugh) >> So we had Passover, a lot of good food, but also a lot of traveling. I was also in a Kubernetes conference in Europe and here. Prior to that, big data show, so it's a lot of traveling. >> Kubernetes, Docker, Ecosystem. You've been watching this, your company is involved in it. What's your take on the state of the ecosystem, and what do you think of the announcements this week? >> You know, I have also been to the Kubernetes conference, and you see those are still small, relatively small shows. And it's mostly developer focused. What we see is that Kubernetes is taking a lot of share from the others, because most of the guys that adopt are not enterprises yet. It's people that have a large enough infrastructure that they want to use it internally, and Kubernetes is a little more flexible. And on the other end, you see Docker trying to create a greenware-like, shrink wrapped, version of container infrastructure. So we see those two, and there's obviously the Public Cloud with their fully integrated stack. Now, what I notice here in the show, and also when, a couple of weeks ago, in the Kubernetes conference, think about the stack. It has, let's say, 20 components. So someone like Amazon brings the entire 20 components, and it's fully integrated and secure and networking and storage and data services and everything. And here, what you'll see, is a lot of vendors, this guy has those four components, the other guys have those five components, in some cases they actually overlap. So this guy will have three unique components, and two other components, et cetera. And it's very hard to assemble a full blown solution. So as a buyer, how do you decide which components am I going to choose? That's part of the challenge, and also helps serve the cloud guys. >> I remember when I first joined at Wikibon, we talked about, the hyperscale model was you take your team of PhDs, you just architect your application and software. You're the enterprise though, you don't have that talent. So you will spend money to buy that packaged solution. I want to buy it as a service, I want to buy it easy. Where do you see the maturity of this market, and how that fits for, and what can the enterprise consume, how do they do it? Or do they just go to platforms? >> So this is why our positioning was, it was a platform. We are not a component. We are a fully integrated system. We have multi-tendency, we have security, we have data lifecycle management. We integrate with applications, we have our own UI. But it's focused more on the data services. So if you take a dozen Amazon data services, you need to send Dynamo, and others, and object and file. We basically pack all of them, because data is the biggest challenge, as you know. High volubility, versioning, reliability, security. The biggest and toughest challenge is the data. And once you solve that one, the applications, they all become stateless, and that's much easier. There still needs to be a bigger ecosystem around it, which is why we are doing a lot more work with CNCF. And trying to create standards for the different interactions between those components. So when a buyer goes and buys a certain component from one vendor, it doesn't necessarily lock in to that. They can just go and modify it in the future. I think once you solve the data problem, of the persistency, which is sort of the toughest challenge in this environment, the rest of it becomes simpler. >> One of the questions James has been asking this week, is where analytics fits in? I look at your real-time continuous analytics piece, not an application that I heard talked about too much, maybe we can get your viewpoint on it? >> And the relevance is, of course, much of the application development that is going on, the hot stuff, is related to artificial intelligence, on streaming analytics, clearly continuous. >> Which is where we focus on. Some of the things that I try, to work with different communities, it's explained, that right now we have bifurcation, we have the Apache ecosystem, and we have the Docker ecosystem, totally separate ecosystems, and by the way, you know that cloud is where most analytics happen. >> James: Yes. >> So basically, analytics and cloud technology have to converge. This is what we have been trying to pitch, is why do you use YARN, as a scheduler, where I can use Kubernetes, and it's more generic. Because I can schedule any type of work. So this is something that we are trying to push, and all this notion of continuous integration, when we say continuous analytics, it's not just about the real-time aspect, it's also about the continuous development and integration. >> James: Yes. >> So you actually want this notion of server-less function, which is one of the things I like. Also, just immutable code and infrastructure, you want to adopt those notions, so analytics is going to go into real-time, more and more. So that means, unless I have my connected car pipeline that I get streams, and I process it, and I generate insights. What happens if I find a bug in my application, or I just want to enhance it, and create another feature? So I want to be able to just push a new version, of my analytics code into some platforms, hopefully ours. >> You also want to train that new algorithm as well, to make sure it's fit for whatever specific... >> Yeah, but you have to have this notion of continuity, which means all the integrations we did, have to be different, it has to be a lot more atomic. >> Yeah. >> It has to be check-pointed. All those things that I can basically knock down my analytic process, and relaunch it, and it goes seamlessly and continues. And that's not the Apache model, to play around at bootcamp enough, it's a lot more Legacy kind of approach, which I don't connect to too much. >> Yaron, maybe complete out the stack that you're building, how does serverless fit into this also? >> Okay, so basically, we are building all the data engines, we are doing streaming, we are doing objects, files, NoSQL, SQL, for us it's all integrated into the same very high performance engine. We also have built in analytics, so we can build things like joints and aggregations, and all of the computations on the data as it injects, and it could basically present itself as many different things. Now one of the things we get asked from customers, and we demonstrated that in Strata, let's assume I'm throwing an image into this thing, I want to be able to immediately analyze the image, and say if there is a face, if there is something suspicious about the picture, or maybe even simple things, like extract meta-data information, like geolocation of the picture, so I can do something with it. So we had to develop internally, an event driven process, we didn't call it serverless internally, where you throw data, and it immediately launches and triggers a process, which is a Docker container based process. It has high speed message bust integration into our data platform, that immediately invokes and processes that in a very elastic fashion. So if you throw thousands of objects, it elastically generates multiple workers to work on that, and that's also how we design things like DR, and backup internally in our platform to be very flexible, so we can build DR to S3. How do we do it? We basically have serverless functions that know how to convert the updates into a continuous stream of updates, and then they just go and there is a small code that says "Go right to S3". And that allows me a lot flexibility to develop new features. So this is all this notion of data lifecycle management, with every advance in our product, is actually based on serverless functions, we just didn't call it serverless. One of the things that we're working on with the community, is trying to detach that portion from our product, and contribute it as an open-source projects, because it's much faster and much more optimized than what you'll see, including IBM Whisk or Amazon Lambda implementation of that. >> Are you working with the Apache... Are you working in the context of the Apache framework to expose, for example, machine learning pipeline functions as serverless functions? >> So again, Apache is not the right necessarily place to do that. >> You can do them in Spark. >> I do them in Spark and all that, but we do want the Kubernetes environment to deal with all the constriction requirements for that thing. The way that we do, for example, tensorflow integration is we may expose file into tensor float, on one end, to be able to look at the image, and the same time the metadata updates, so what the image contains is exposed to tensorflow as sort of a key value store, or document store. It just updates attributes on the same image. So the way that we work now with healthcare, an MRI image lands and something looks at the MRI image, and senses cancer. Basically, you can mainly attack the same image, with records, which fields say contains cancer by this guy, take picture of this guy. And then, when you want to run a query, and say, you know what, give me all the MRIs pictures that contain query, it now flips and acts like a database, and you just pull all those images. It's a different approach to how to do those things. >> Yaron talked about Docker containers, Kubernetes, serverless, how do virtual machines fit into the environment? >> I had some interesting conversations at Kubernetes with some friends that are high ranked in this industry, without disclosing, do you really need openstack in between bare metal and containers? Because the traditional approach is, Okay, we have bare metal, we need to put virtualization layer for isolation, and then we need to put Kubernetes or Docker. And we figure out that very little amount of risk, actually, in putting, especially with the new security, things around containers and image signing, and what we do, which is authenticating the container, not the infrastructure on data access, network isolation, all those things that eventually can collapse and eliminate virtualization, but not for every application. Some applications which are more traditional Legacy, the application may still require VMs, because it's quite a different philosophy to develop microservices and develop VMs. Apart of what I see here in the show is not everyone internalizes that. People still think in the notion of Here's my lightweight VM, that happen to be called Docker container, and I'm going to give it the volume, and I'm going to create snapshots on that volume, and all that stuff. But if you think about it, what is really microservices? It's about allowing this elasticity, so the same workload can spawn multiple workers, it's the ability to go and create update versions, it's the ability to knock down this container anytime I want, and just kill it and launch it in a different place. You know how Google works, or Amazon or Ebay, or all those guys. You're basically killing containers on purpose, to basically test their system. All this notion that my configuration and my logs and all that stuff, sits inside the container, is not cloud native, and it doesn't allow this elasticity that you want if you're building a Netflix or an Ebay, or a modern enterprise infrastructure. So I think we need to put those two things aside. You have Legacy applications, keep them in the VMs. You have new workloads, you need to think of data, and data integration, and microservices differently on something which is entirely stateless. The image of the container builds from the get. OK? And create a Docker image. And if you want to go to a different image, you just go and recreate, from source, the same image. The data for that image needs to be stored in a data facility like a database or an object or something like that. >> Yaron, final question I have for you is, talk a little about the customers you're interacting with, talk about the people that are here, as you said, there's a spectrum of how far along they are in the thinking. You're pretty advanced in some of your architectural thoughts and opinionated as to where you're going. Where are the customers today, how many of them are ready for the future versus sticking to what they have got? >> So what you mentioned before, part of the key challenge for enterprises is they all want to move into the digital transformation, they all want to be competitive, because some have existential threats, think about even banks, today, where Apple comes with Apple Pay, it kills a lot of the margins they are making from all those small transactions. And now, no one really cares how many branches you have in the bank, because all the Y Generation just goes to their mobile app. Someone like a bank, have to immediately transition and be able to offer premium services, offer better experiences for the mobile application, be able to analyze user behavior, some things that are more strategic. The traditional things that IT deals with like exchange server management, SAP, all those Legacy things will move to the cloud, because there's no real value there. And what you see is more and more enterprises thinking about how do we generate the differentiation, which is more about analyzing data, and being able to provide better service to the customers, and the biggest challenge is they don't know how to do it. Because what the industry tells them, Go to Apache, and take a dozen of projects, and now integrate those and figure out the security problem, and you know what, you want to add Kubernetes, that's from a different story, but let's try and glue this together, and that's extremely complicated. So what we are trying to do is go to those customers, say you know what, we're building a full blown solution, fully integrated, security is baked in, all the different data services, it integrates with things like Kubernetes natively, we actually do the extra mile, we actually build Spark and tensorflow, and the images that contain everything, including support for us, that you can just launch Spark and it connects and works. We want to make life easier for those enterprises to solve those key challenges that they are working on. And this is working extremely well for us, actually the challenge we have, we only have, I think, two sales guys and we have a huge pipeline, and we can't really deliver for most of those projects. >> Good challenges to have sometimes, talk about scaling, which has been one of the themes of the week here. Yaron Haviv, great to catch up with you as always. We'll be back with two days of our coverage here, at DockerCon 2017. You're watching the CUBE. (electronic music)

live from the sands convention center las vegas nevada extracting a signal from the noise it's the cube covering HP discover 2015 brought to you by HP and now your host dave vellante welcome back to HP discover everybody this is dave vellante check out HP discovered on social for all the social streams the video the content the special access patrick osborne is here from HP cube alum and he's joined by Bill Walker of 20th Century Fox gents welcome to the cube good thank you yeah thanks for having us discovering another discover a little different this year Patrick we got Meg talking about business outcomes and absolutely uber and their yeah all the kinds of some shit models are very different I mean obviously you come out here every year for the past number of years and you know it's all about the technology i'm always wowed by the broad you know portfolio that we have but really at the end of the day I think some of the messaging to the customers is you know we're here to help you solve your problems and parts of that is technology part of its services so this hot sort of new high-level messaging around transformation and helping people achieve these business outcomes I think it's a good fresh start yes so bill your business going through some interesting transformations yes today to talk about the high level the drivers in your business the yet new competitors you got you got huge opportunities to go into this digital transformation you've sort of early on in that so maybe talk about some of the drivers in your business sure absolutely I think for us you know you really hit the nail on the head in the sense that it's really been about the physical to digital transformation that the industry is you know kind of going through and also Fox is and you know on the infrastructure side and the IT side we're trying to support that you know as best we can and you know the name of the game lately has been speed to market right so we partnered very tightly with HP on not only the hardware but the software side in you know building out kind of a brand new digital supply chain environment in Las Vegas actually right here and one of our major data centers where we deliver all of our digital content to all of our providers so EST VOD providers like amazon and itunes as well as you know major broadcasters so you've got a facility out here that is essentially your your cloud yes yes we do that that's our primary place where we deliver everything out of its it's great we're using all HP hardware and software there so we're customers across the board in the sense that we have blades we've got three par we're using store once as well as the HP software stack like cloud system on top of that that part is part of a super nap yes yes so yeah we we're facility we're in super net we love it it's a great facility we moved there like a little over two years ago and it's it's been awesome experience that made it into the any of the movies no it must hey I know well they it's impressive on the outside and the inside right yeah was it the old member the robocop oh yeah they have that storagetek tape library way magnet yeah they were great at four days these impressive data centers look amazing so so talk a little bit more about the you called it the digital supply chain that's a powerful concept what's behind that yeah so you know we we've obviously been in the physical supply chain business for a while on the home entertainment side so thank DVDs you know blu-rays that kind of thing but as we transition from people buying physical media to digital media a lot of the workflows and you know the supply chain aspect of it is still there but now we're talking digital and not physical so one of the things we've done at Fox is we've you know we've created what we call our digital supply chain so you've got you know they not only you know things like content delivery in there but you've got you know watermarking you know all the all the hallmarks of what you would need in a in a digital environment to deliver that customer you know quality product from end to end and protect your IP yeah exactly where T is a big one so we'll talk about more about security data maybe there's a general topic and then let's go to dig deeper every good for sure I mean security is obviously one of our big drivers I mean obviously with everything that's been in the news lately we're no different in the sense that we take it very very seriously you know on the data protection front like I said we're big store wants customers we love the product we're using it heavily in our in our data center to protect our content as well as our data so how much time let's unpack that a little bit what's it what's it look like laughs so you said a bunch of different you know HP products can you can you help us to understand how much you know storage kind of servers what kind of apps paint a picture of your your infrastructure for sure so we've got you know a lot actually several racks of gear 3par like I said we're big three part customers so we have several racks a three part that we're using kind of across the board a lot on the database side you know and heiio scenarios storeonce is kind of that underpinning piece that everything funnels back to that provides you know data deduplication backup archival that kind of thing okay so can we talk more about sort of your objectives of protecting data I mean obviously don't lose it but there's you know time to recover there's data loss how are you approaching that yep so we we've got you know our primary facility at switch as well as a dr facility off-site we're using store once we r you know we've got them in both places we're doing replication both ways to ensure you know if we were to have a vent at one facility or we didn't have data available we can quickly recover from the other you know rtly is it's been a great success for us because we've moved from tape-based you know back up and i really didn't mention that but you know where we came from you know two two and a half years ago you know from our LA and chandler data centers we have very very heavy investment in tape infrastructure and one of the things we into decided when we went to this new you know environment in Las Vegas is we wanted it to be completely tapeless you know to be flexible right in that environment and you know we pick store once we went all disk-based and you know RTO wise is fantastic because you know as opposed to tape if you have an event if you happen to not have the tape on site your RT 0 is dictated you know kind of by when you can get the tape back with the exit yes yes fast as you can get here right with the store once though it's just there we can we can you know bring it back in minutes and in fact we actually had a kind of not funny but but interesting incident happened early on where you know we kind of had an hoops incident where somebody deleted a vm and you know with store once we already had it had it there we were able to recover it in minutes and have it working again which is not something we were able to do in in previous iteration so it's really RTO is your primary supposed to RP oh yeah and Patrick I'm sure you see it all over the board with with customers right i mean yeah absolutely i mean it is the whole environment is based on this digital content that it's the lifeblood of you know what they're doing as a business and what they're delivering you know to your customers so that what we're seeing in the data protection standpoint is that more apps are mission critical right they're moving from business-critical the mission-critical the RTOS and our feos are definitely more aggressive you know month by month quarter-by-quarter people are moving from days two hours to minutes and we want to have more they won't have access to more data that's near line and online for so you can basically restore that right away so we're seeing people architecting solutions for store ones where they'd want a couple weeks maybe a couple months of data stored on that from a vaca perspective now we're talking having conversations about three to five years seven years 10 years right so definitely a paradigm shift in terms of data protection and the clouds change that a lot absolutely how so talk about that I think you know because the cloud there's not really a concept of tape per se I mean I know you know some providers have a delayed you know a kind of recovery type mechanism but I think in general people are assuming you've got the data on disk or you know available somewhere and you're able to recall it right and you know almost any cloud provider I think today is structured that way and has some kind of object storage where you can back up to but it's an online situation right and I think that's kind of become the new the new standard for the expectation of you know it's dumping it into an object store an able to recover from that yeah i like to say backup is one thing recoveries everything so there's a software component that that's the good that and what about tape you using I mean you must be used tape in your business right we do still have tape but I think where it makes sense we're trying to get rid of it you know we obviously there's a lot of physical nature with tape you know for us it's also manpower you have to have you know it's a lot of manpower involved in just managing tape and whatnot so where we can especially strategically in our data centers we're trying to get out out of using tape and using you know just a long-term archiving long-term retention with your digital assets obviously you would take for that we definitely have scenarios at the studio where it's still used for sure yeah but not obviously not for backup no yeah yeah I think you know with my team we're starting to think of the the notion of backup maybe in the traditional sense it's kind of going away because I think what people think of backup they think tape they think these scenarios and I think it's you know it's changing to more of a you know having having various generations on disk so you have the concept of you know okay being able to go back in time but near real-time recovery a time machine for the enterprise yeah yeah we talk when we talk to customers it's usually around the areas of application data protection or a service data protection and then long term preservation of assets as opposed to backup and archive right so there because they have a very different business processes around them and you can apply different technologies to the two of them so in some some technologies are appropriate for one some are appropriate for the others so we're you know we're seeing a lot of customers really focus on day one of how I'm going to protect that data how I'm going to make data protection an automatic part of the infrastructure so I don't have to have separate backup team and separate you know specific processes this whole area of things being sort of automatically protected as part of the infrastructure is it's definitely worth a lot but I think that's a really important point to make data protection has historically been a bolt on right uh we got to protect the data yep and so you're saying that you're finally seeing customers integrate data protection as part of the fundamental solution absolutely the two things so the two things that now I'm seeing it from a fundamental part of the initial solution bill that is data protections built in right so you're seeing the techniques of snapshot and replication being melded with you know backup techniques like policy management indexing and all that kind of stuff right and then the other sort of conversation we're having with people who put infrastructure in place is how am I going to get off this in five years five to seven years right so because the amount the size of the data sets are becoming so big that replicating data data migrations migrating your backup data are there they're difficult the difficult task so people are doing a lot more planning ahead to understand how am I going to protect this data now right from a different set of scenarios and how am I going to start do some hardware lifecycle management from an infrastructure standpoint underneath that data as I go into the future are you a data protector customer what do you use not not currently although we are you know we are looking at it for sure yeah today we're actually net back up yeah yeah okay I mean it's a lot of ways to skin that kappa yeah that's still not in your group is it nope nice meg just make it but they have a saying this for a decade the data protect there should be a part of the storage solution I mean it's anyway we work with them every day fantastic I got a tight relationship yeah yeah I'm still get paid for it do get paid for it that's good okay well that's a start yeah yeah awesome alright let's see what else uh what's going on the show this year with you Oh lots of stuff of the show so obviously you you heard about flash right yeah we've heard a lot of flashes fam yeah it's great mokin fast yeah so there's a in it's funny there's a lot of implications to flash even on data protection right so this is a big area for us obviously is huge in the market the media and the speed in what flash brings to the table allows you to do some different things from Dave protection standpoint as well right so this concept of copy data management you've heard this in terms of now i can take copies of databases copies of data sets serve them up to uat test development environment so you know your speed of development by having access to copies of that you know of that original production data set is being enabled by media like flash no flash you can do lots of random i/o you can with with modern architectures like three par for example it's multi-tenant right you have quality of service on there so now we're in the past you'd have to clone a number of data sets copy them off restore them from backups for the purposes of having a you know a test data set now you can run all that on the same infrastructure so flash is great from a performance standpoint for you know speeding up your transactions feeding of your database your workflow but there's a lot of other things that allows us to do to help the overall speed of development which is kind of cool so the copy data management things interesting I mean yeah so active feos obviously popularizing it Dell fixes another one yeah the problem is they want me to rip out or not use my might reap are snapshots and I love my three parts don't want to put in a whole new infrastructure around it so is there I mean the opportunity you got a catalog in in-store wants maybe I could use that somehow that technology so that's what we're doing right so we're taking these techniques that you've had in traditional backup for years and then things you have on primary storage right snapshots and replication but with the with the advantages of flash now you're able to do a lot more with it and bringing those two techniques together we're doing it with software we're doing it with sort of extensible protocols and SD SDKs on the infrastructure itself so we're not introducing any sort of sand virtualization techniques or you know in line fibre channel you know type of virtualization technology we're allowing you do that as a part of the infrastructure itself so you know we're combining things like three par with Recovery Manager central and store ones to provide those type of experience I think the killer app they're Jews potentially is test dev right i mean if you can take copies that are more current give it to the especially with flash give it to the developers but they're not working on you know n minus three copies absolutely yeah and they're way more productive I know what kind of discussions are you having internal how do you service the developer community are they what kind of pressures are they putting on you bill yeah it's that probably the same things you've heard I mean you know agility speed I know for us you know because we're we're big on the cloud journey right now in terms of delivering you know private cloud services for our customers inside Fox one of the areas where we're actively really striving for is to do you know some deeper integration with some of the dev teams where they've got you know kind of closed loop cycles you know DevOps type cycles that they're developing with you know familiar tooling which you know is in the market that out there the Jenkins etc you know my team we're definitely working on trying to integrate a lot of the automation we're doing around cloud with what they're doing on the test dev site to kind of create a nice you know cohesive whole so you know rather than delivering just a server to them we can deliver an entire in a build environment and tear it down you know build it up and tear down dynamic flames so you mentioned a store once customer talked about RTO being really on the primary metric that you're trying to optimize waiting sir patrick comes out to California you know hits the beach makes a quick sales call writes it off wait what do you want to know from him yeah okay Oh with you that the time so what kind of discussions do you have with with Patrick around where you want to where you want to go what you want out of the product when I roadmap to the club yeah I think one of the things you know we're as I said before you know we're three par and store wants customers and I think we're where we see you know things headed in the future we'd love to see even deeper integration with three par and store once and you know we're actually having a discussion my team before this and one of the things they threw out there like hey why can't we just combine them into one product you know and I know right now they're separate but sure maybe maybe in the near future you know the the notion of having this this external device it's separate from 3par that you're you know moving to you know maybe maybe some of that gets melded together and what does that do for you it minimizes the need to manage another appliance absolutely right so it simplifies your your infrastructure tighter integration yep so better reliability and yeah I mean you know we're like a lot of technology shops in the sense that well we're trying to squeeze you know as much as we can you know with the team that we have in terms of Technology and still deliver a lot of services so you know we're always looking to if we can take two and make it one or you know that kind of scenario for simplification that's what we want to do too and more with less but no so let me ask you a question when you do more with less and you've dropped money to the CFO's bottom line today they carve off the you get a lick off that cone or they say hey they'll nice job here's a little you know we'll take twenty percent of that savings and give it back yeah it's I for us it's just the you know the slap on the back the handshake that we did it what are you seeing without me from our mothers hear from our product portfolio standpoint we're simplifying right we want to have I think we're in a unique position in terms of we want to be the best storage division inside of HP Enterprise right we don't want to be the best storage division standalone right so that affords us a lot of experiences for that we can bring to the customer when you bring in you know the blades and compute and networking and storage I mean what you see up on stage with one view and all of our element managers you know it's it doesn't sound sexy at the end of the day but basically having a same look and feel the same taxonomy that you use for all of our products is like a huge simplification for customers not having to you know learn new you is and why not so we have other competitors who you know they're bringing 7 10 12 you know different architectures for a primary storage the table right we're consolidating that and providing customers that the ability to they can go in a cost optimized software to find you know deployment model you can have appliances that are tuned in high performance same look and feel same CLI same utilities same data services so we want choice but it has to be simple because too much so what do you think about that whole software-defined mean is that the future is it this Patrick sort of implying sort of the the lower-cost sort of software only model what do you guys say yeah well we're big believers in software to find you know like I said we're we're kind of in it on you know on the whole stack in the sense that we know not only a part where we have software with HP we're also doing a lot with the team around Helion OpenStack right now and you know one of the big bets we're making is we think openstax going to be big we you know I know internally when we've talked with you know a lot of the development teams the idea of API defined infrastructure that's more malleable is tremendously exciting so what are you in with OpenStack well so right now we're actually we're kind of in that you know early stage entire ya des you know trying to trying to get a feel for it cuz you know one of the things I always say you know right now with OpenStack is it's kind of a two-way street you know there's the infrastructure part of it that my team has to deliver but the the other side of it is really the developers you know getting their hands around it getting a feel for it you know maybe even doing some platform-as-a-service with Cloud Foundry you know that kind of thing and they're really developing for that platform and getting the most out of it because you know in a lot of cases you know you're coming from a traditional environment where you know you had physical servers you put virtualization on top of it everybody's kind of used to that maybe a single VM kind of scenario but when you move to something like OpenStack you kind of got to rethink how you approach application building just think all right gents we're out of time going to leave it there but Patrick last last word for you why HP why HP I think we've got some exciting times ahead of us this year right so unlocking some velocity and value for for everyone with HP Enterprise kind of like just to echo what I said before about you know we're a portfolio company that brings a lot of technology services to our customers and at the end of the day my bet is that standalone companies that focus on one thing like storage or one thing like network or specifically compute I don't see a path forward for that over time right customers are buying solutions and systems and converged art you know infrastructure how you see this you know hyper converge theme right HP is one of the few companies that can bring all those elements to our customers as part of the equation so that for me that's why I stay here and why we've got such a great technology path forward yeah the 80s and 90s are about disintegration of IT and creating those silos and now we're seeing the reintegration so Patrick a bill thanks very much for coming on the cube absolutely thank you so much to have you guys here all right all right keep it right to everybody will be back with our next guest right after this short break you