>>from around >>the globe. It's >>the cube presenting future >>Cloud one >>event. A >>world of opportunities >>brought to you by Cisco. >>Okay. We're here with costume. Does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product management for Cloud, compute at Cisco. KTV J Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave >>to be here. >>Katie. Let's talk about cloud. You. And I, last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud. And I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no, that's that's that's a perfect question to start with Dave. So yes, so the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um there's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift, in fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well how do I in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on devops and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest, more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud. And that platform uh is inter site, we've been investing in Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today. There were clothes of today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud, Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of, that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course, we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any any version of that, Whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi, cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to uh to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently. And then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners, their suite of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective and it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. It's just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those, but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets. And then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh, we'll talk about some more of those days. >>Great. Thank you. Katie VJ Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCII corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment, smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? >>Mhm. Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and compute group right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers >>and applications >>team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh as you rightly said, harsher Carp is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with Harsher Card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed. I see to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations and we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russia Carbonara. >>Yeah, telephone gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there, the inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud Native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend. What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud Native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now. Cloud native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for a. Ks and this just gave a little over one month ago now, what interstate Kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supportive target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered, as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and cognitive to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we have today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager. The Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to I K s are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking. Right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently, how it is managed, how it is deployed, it needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we have done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud. And we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mash Manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So couple of things to close on. First of all. Um, inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing, the second thing I close with is, um we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with Public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale is everything they're doing to innovate superfast. All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world including Cisco. How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you. Dave. >>Thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube, the leader in tech event >>coverage. >>Mm mm.

>> From around the globe. It's theCube. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay we're here with Kaustubh Das, Who is the senior vice president and general manager of cloud and compute at Cisco and Vijay Venugopal who is the senior director of product management for cloud compute at Cisco KD, Vijay, Good to see you guys. Welcome. >> Great to see you Dave. >> Good to be here. >> KD, let's talk about cloud. You- you and I last time we were face-to-face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud. And I always say to people, look Cisco is not a hyperscaler but the big public cloud players they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost- actually over a hundred billion dollars last year on CapEx, the big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about Hybrid Cloud. So help us understand the strategy there and maybe how you can leverage that build out and importantly, what a customer is telling you they want out of Hybrid Cloud. >> Yeah, no, that's, that's that's a perfect question to start with Dave. So yes, so the hyperscalers have invested heavily building out their assets. That's a great, a lot of innovation coming from that space um there is also great innovation- sort of innovation coming from open source. And, and that's another source of a of a gift in fact to the IT community. But when I look at my customers, they're saying, well how do I, in the context of my business, implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage in terms of my contemporary workloads, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DevOps and really harness that innovation that's built in the public cloud that is built an open source that is built internally to me, and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Cisco's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest, most powerful platform to deliver Hybrid Cloud. And that platform is Intersight. We've been investing in Intersight, it's a it's a SaaS service. Intersight delivers to them that bridge between the states of today, their workload of today the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility that's needed for the future, the embracing of cloud native of new paradigms of DevOps models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an opensource and bridging those two is what Intersight has been doing. That's kind of, that's kind of, the crux of our strategy of course we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any- any version of that whether that is on prem in the Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Multi-Cloud and so forth. >> But, but, but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today the Intersight is really a linchpin of that strategy. Is it not? >> It really is. And may take a second to, to to really familiarize those who don't know Intersight with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we, we built it ground up to be an immensely scalable SAS super simple hybrid cloud platform. And it's a platform that provides a slew of services inherently And then on top of that, there's suites of services there's suites of services that are tied to infrastructure automation, Cisco as well as Cisco partners, the suites of services that have nothing to do with Cisco products from a hardware perspective. And it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and Intersight and its suite of services continue to kind of increase in, in pace and velocity of delivery. Well just, over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things. We'll go a little bit deeper into some of those but they span everything from infrastructure automation to Kubernetes, and delivering Kubernetes that service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate how much it's costing into your on prem state into your workloads and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling, with both Cisco as well as non-Cisco assets. And then, and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day the job of IT is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient. And that includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this then do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation like infrastructures code and so forth. So it includes a self service that, so that spanned that but Intersight, the world's simplest Hybrid Cloud platform rapidly evolving, rapidly delivering new services. And we will talk about some more of those today. >> Great. Thank you, KD Vijay let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with HashiCorp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre-COVID, I ma- in my predictions post, I said Hashi was a name to watch, our data partners ETR You look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream. You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi-cloud discussion and as well they're attractive to customers they have open source offerings, You can very easily experiment smaller organizations can take advantage, but if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever you can plug right in not a big complicated migration. So very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? >> Absolutely Dave And spot on every single thing that you said. Let me just start by paraphrasing what our mission statement is in the cloud and compute group, right? Our mission statement is to enable a cloud operating model for Hybrid Cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation, orchestration, and observability across your Hybrid Cloud IT operations. Now we- so developers and applications teams get a great amount of agility in public clouds. And we are on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers. And Intersight is a key key platform and linchpin to enable that kind of operations cloud- like operations in the private clouds. And a key- as you rightly said- HashiCorp is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of Infrastructure as Code and in telephone, they have the world's number one Infrastructure as Code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with HasiCorp to integrate Intersight with HashiCorp's Terraform to bring the benefits of Infrastructure as Code to the two hybrid cloud operations. And we entered into a very tight integration and a partnership where we allow in our developers DevOps teams and infrastructure administrators to allow the use of Infrastructure as Code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private cloud. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed IAC to be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we're very, very happy and proud to be partnering with HasiCorp on that iniative >> Yeah, Terraform gets very high marks from customers. The- a lot of value there the Intersight integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native. KD was sort of mentioning before you got the- the core apps. You want to protect those make sure they're enterprise grade but they got to be cool as well for developers you're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this cloud native trend? What are the moves you are making in this regard? >> I mean, cloud native is the is one of the paramount IT trends of today. And you're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architectures in all modern applications now cloud native has become synonymous with Kubernetes these days. And Kubernetes has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we've created a brand new SaaS delivered Kubernetes service that is integrated with Intersight. We call it the Intersight Kubernetes service for IKS and this just g'd a little over one month ago. Now what Intersight Kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered Kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure. It could be a third-party infrastructure or it could even be public cloud. But think of it as Kubernetes anywhere Delivered as SaaS managed from Intersight. So very powerful capability that we've just released into Intersight to enable the power of Kubernetes and cloud native to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important announcement Because we have today, announced the brand new Cisco service Mesh Mangager The Cisco service mesh manager which is available as an extension to IKS or to Intersight basically we see service meshes as being the future of networking, right? In the past, we had layer two networking and layer three networking. And now with service meshes application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age, very differently how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be very developer friendly and developer centric And so what we've done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the Service Mesh Manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking to the consumers like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud, and we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and delivered the Cisco service mesh manager as an extension to IKS that brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development teams. >> Got it. Thank you, Vijay. And so KD let's-let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >> Absolutely. So a couple of things to close on first of all, Intersight is the simplest most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that- that cloud operating model that that Vijay talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it's SAS, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encourage anybody Who's not familiar with it to try it out. And anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again because there are probably services in there that you didn't notice, or didn't know last time you looked at it because we were moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I'll close with is we- we've been talking about this bridge. This kind of bridging- bridging your- your on prem your open source, your- your cloud estates. And it's so important to- to make that mental leap because in p- in past generation we used to talk about integrating technologies together. And then with public cloud we started talking about move to public cloud. But it's really, how do we integrate? How do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyperscale and everything they're doing to innovate super fast. All of that innovation has come from open source. All of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world, including Cisco how do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud ops team if you're an IT ops team, your job is to deliver an outcome. And our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. So that's the mission we're on. And we're hoping that everybody is as excited as we are about how simple they made that. >> Great. Thank you a lot, a lot in this announcement today. I appreciate you guys coming back on and helping us unpack some of the details. Thanks so much. Great having you. >> Thank you Dave >> Thank you >> And thank you everyone for spending some time with us. This is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCube the leader in tech event coverage. (Closing music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2020, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host for this segment is Dave Volante. John Furrier is also in the house. We're doing a little more than three days wall-to-wall coverage. One of the big themes we're talking about this week is in this complicated world, networking, containerization, applications going through transformation. Future work simplification is something that is very important and helping us to really tease through and understand some of the integration, some of the announcements where Cisco is helping to simplify the environment, happy to welcome back to the program one of our Cube alumni, Kaustubh Das who is a Vice President of Product Management at Cisco. KD, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, I'm delighted to be here, it's great to be here. >> All right. So but up on the main stage, they walk through a number of the announcement. Listen Tony, I was talking about some of the pieces and two of the announcements from the main stage are under your purview. So why don't we start there, walk us through the news. >> Yeah, so there's two two major announcements. The first one's called Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. And what it is, it's a way to have visibility into your data center, all the way from the applications and in fact, the user journeys within those applications, all the way down through the virtualization there, through the app servers, through the container platforms down into the servers, the networks, storage lands. So you have a map of the data center. You have a common data set that the application owner and the infrastructure owner can both look at and you finally have a common vocabulary so that it helps them to troubleshoot faster so on a fast reactor way, they talking the same language not pointing fingers at each other or do things proactively to prevent problems from happening when you see a server running hot, a virtual machine running hot, an application server running hot. You can diagnose it and have that conversation before it happens. >> My understanding is that Intersight and there's also some integrations with AppDynamics there, AppD which of course we know we talk to that team at the Amazon Cloud shows a lot. So that common vocabulary spans between my hybrid and multi cloud environments. Am I getting that right? >> Correct and there's two pieces even within that. So certainly that's integrations with AppD so from AppD we get information about the application performance. We get information about the business metrics associated with the application performance. We get information about the journeys that user take within the application and then we take that data then we stitch it together with infrastructure data to map how many applications are dependent on which application servers, how many VMs are those dependent on, what does those VMs run on? What hosts are they dependent on, what networks do they Traverse, what lands do they run on? And each one of these is an API call into that element in the infrastructure stack. Each API call gives us a little bit of data and then we piece together this data to create this map of the of the entire data center. There's a multi cloud aspect to it obviously and so we also make API calls into AWS and Azure and clouds out there and we get data about utilization of the various instance types. We get data about performance from the cloud as well. >> So two announcements. Insight Workload Optimizer and HyperFlex AppDynamics, is that right or they are separate? >> HyperFlex application platform. >> Okay. >> So if we look at the, let me just put these two in context. Every enterprise is doing two things. It's trying to run application that it already hosts and then it's writing some bespoke new applications. So the first announcement, the Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer and the integration of the AppD, that helps us be more performant for applications we're running, to have troubleshoot faster, to have reduced cost in a multiply cloud environment. The second announcement Dave, the HyperFlex application platform, it's really targeted towards developers who are writing new applications on a container platform. And for those developers, IT needs to give them a simple appliance like easy to use container as a service platform. So what HX AP HyperFlex application platform is is a container as a service platform driven from the cloud so that the developer gets the same experience that they get when they go to an AWS and and request a pod. But they get it on-prem and it's fully 100% upstream Kubernetes compliant. It's curated by us so it's very simple appliance like feel for development environments on container. >> Okay. So Insight Workload Optimizer, it really attacks the problem of sort of the mystery of what goes on inside VMs and the application team, the infrastructure team, they're not talking to each other. You're bringing a common, like you said parlance together. >> Kaustubh: Correct. >> Really so they can solve problems and that that trickles down to cost optimization as well as performance. >> It does, aha. >> And I understand hyper HyperFlex app platform it's really bringing that cloud experience to on-prem for hybrid environments. >> For our new development. So if you're developing on containers, you're probably using Kubernetes but you're probably using this entire kind of ecosystem of open source tools. >> Yeah. >> And we make that simple. >> Okay. >> We make it simple for developers to use that and variety to provide that to developers. >> Okay. since underneath, there's HyperFlex. is there still virtualization involved in there and how does this tie in with the rest of the Kubernete solutions that we were talking about with your cloud partner? >> Great, great. Great question. So yes, there is HyperFlex underneath this. So to develop, you need a platform. The best platform we think is the elastic platform that is hyper-convergence. And with type of flex, we took storage networking and compute, packaged it together, made it super simple. We're doing the same thing with Kubernetes. So it's the same concept that how do you take complex things, package it together and make it almost appliance like. We said we're doing the same thing with Kubernetes. Now Stu, the point about virtualization is a good one. A lot of container deployments today are run in virtual machines. And they run in virtual machines for good reason, for isolation, for multi-tenancy, for all these kinds of ignition. However, the promise of containers was to sort of get rid of the tax that you pay when you deploy a virtualization environment. And what we're giving out right now is no tax, no virtualization tax virtualization environment. So we have a layer over transition in there. It's designed for this use case so it does give the isolation, it does give the multi-tenancy benefits but you don't need to need to pay additionally for it if you're deploying on containers-- >> Job wise it is some KB and base type solution >> Kaustubh: Correct. >> Underneath, it makes a lot of sense if you look at the large virtualization player out there. It's been talking about how do I enable the infrastructure that's all virtualized and everything and bring them along to that journey >> Correct. >> For that bridge if you will to the environment? Sure containerization sometimes I want to be able to spin it up super fast. It leaves, it dies, but if I'm putting something in my data center, probably the characteristics I'm looking at are a little bit different. >> Correct, correct. The other thing it does and you touched on it a little bit was we have a homogeneous environment with the major clouds out there. So one of the things developers want to do is they want to develop in one place and they want to deploy in another place so develop on Amazon and deploy on-prem or Azure. We've got an environment with very native integrations so that it's natively integrated into EKS and AKS. And we facilitate that develop anywhere, deploy anywhere motion for developers who are trying to build on this. >> So okay. What does the customer have to do to consume these solutions? >> So our customer right now for this one is IT operations. It maybe helps to bit back a little bit on why we did this. I had a lot of customers come to me and they said listen, I'm IT, I'm in the business of taking shrink-wrap software, taking enterprise-grade resilient infrastructure, putting that together. I'm not in the business of getting open source drops, every week, every day, every month, putting them together by making sure all the versions line up and doing that again and again and again. So the putting together an Ikea piece part of open source software has not been traditionally the IT operator's business. So our customer is that IT operator. What they need to do is they buy a, if they may have a HyperFlex system already, or they buy a HyperFlex effect system. They add on a license for the HyperFlex application platform. They have an Intersight license. This is delivered from the cloud so Intersight manages that deployment, manages the lifecycle, manages the upgrades and so forth. If they have a state that spreads across multiple sites, Intersight is cloud-based so it can actually reach all those sites and so they're in business. >> Okay, so very low prerequisite. You just got to have the product and you can add on to it. >> Yeah, I have the HyperFlex system, add on to the license, you're done. >> So I'm curious. How unique do you see this in the marketplace? I think the keynotes this morning is that there's no other company that can actually do this. I wonder if you can sort of add some color to that and just help our viewers understand the uniqueness of Cisco's offer. >> Sure. So I think it's unique on a number of different dimensions. The first dimension is HyperFlex itself. We've had an appliance mentality to this for a long time and we really co-designed the software and the hardware to build the most performance hyper-converged system out there. We took the same approach when we went down the path of Kubernetes and building this container platform. And so it's called design software and infrastructure together. The second thing is we said we're going to be 100% upstream Kubernetes compliant right, so if you look at the major offerings out there in this space, they're often several months actually behind where the open source is, where the upstream of the sources and developers don't want that. They want the latest and greatest, they want they want to be current, right. So we are far ahead of most of the other offerings out there in terms of how close they are to their upstream commodities. The final piece is Intersight. Intersight gives us immense ability to have scale where especially if you're developing on containers and micro services, you're talking tens of thousands, many tens of thousands of N nodes, maybe more. And being in the cloud, we have the scale and we have reached so a lot of our customers have distributed assets and branches and you know, hotel chains with hotels and so forth. Intersight allows us the ability to actually deploy across a distributed asset class with with the centralized kind of provisioning. >> You see a huge uptake right now and containers generally Kubernetes, specifically. It's sort of across the board but I wonder if you could comment on how much of that demand and activity is coming from sort of the traditional IT roles versus with other hoody developers? >> Yeah, that's that's a great question. So yes, there is a on a hype cycle it's at the top of the hype cycle. Everybody's in actual adoption. I think it's pretty good as well right. So that is every company I talk to is doing something in containers, every company. But usually, it starts at the developers. It starts with like you described with the folks in the hoodies and that's great. I mean they're experimenting, they're getting this thing. What hasn't happened is it hasn't gotten mainstream. And things can mainstream is when IT picks it up. It certifies hey this is resilient, this is enterprise-grade, I can stand behind it, I can manage the lifecycle of it. That's what we're enabling here. I'm giving IT a path to mainstream containers, to mainstream Kubernetes so that the adoption kind of takes it from that pipe cycle to mainstream adoption. >> Do you see K.D. new sort of data protection approaches or thinking as containers come into play? I mean they're ephemeral, you know microservices sometimes aren't so micro. Like you say, they're running often times inside a VM. So how are people thinking about protecting containers? >> Yeah, yeah, that's a big topic in itself. I mean one of the things that we found is even though they were supposed to be ephemeral, they require persistent storage so we've implemented within hyperflex a CSI plugin that provides that persistent storage layer to containers. Then once you do that, all of the data protection mechanism of HyperFlex come into play. So within the cluster, the resiliency, the triple replication, the backups, the partnerships we have with their other data protection pairs, all of those mechanisms become available instantly and those are enterprise-grade. Those are ones that IT knows and can stand behind. Those become available to containers right away >> Great. >> But it's great, great question. >> Awesome. >> Just want to go back to when you were talking about Intersight and the reach and the scale of the solution reminds me that Cisco has a strong legacy in global environment. What I'm curious about, we've talked a little bit about Edge computing in the past. >> Kaustubh: Yes. >> Where are you seeing Edge today? Where is that going? What should we be looking at in that space when it comes to Edge? >> Yeah, no, it's a big part of our customer demand. In fact, we haven't seen I think all flash was the other technology that took place so fast but Edge has been really phenomenal in its growth rate. Over the last year, we've seen I think probably up to 15% to 20% of my engagements are in this space on at least the hyper convert side. So we see that as a big growth area. More and more deployments are happening. They're being centrally managed, deployed at the edges and so the only solution that scales to something like that is something that's based on the cloud. But it's not just enough to be based in the cloud. You've got to maintain that entire lifecycle right? You've got to make sure you can do installs, upgrades, you know OS installs, health monitoring and so as we built that Intersight platform, we've added all those capabilities to it over time So we started with hey this is a SAS-based management platform and then we added telemetry and then we said if we can actually match signatures, now machines can manage machines. So a good amount of my support calls are now machines calling each other and then fixing themselves. So that's just path-breaking from an informant Edge environment. You don't have an IT person, add an Edge location. You want to drop, ship an appliance there, and you want to be able to see it remotely. So I think it's a completely new operating model. >> I know we got to go but I want to run your scenario by K.D.'s. Do share with me from one of my breaking analysis. Look Dave, you mentioned Flash, that's what triggered me. (laughing) So think of containers and Kubernetes, think of like Flash. Remember Flash used to be the separate thing which we used to think it was a separate market and now it's just everywhere, it's embedded in everything. >> Kaustubh: Yes. >> So the same thing is going to happen with Kubernetes. It's going to be embedded in solutions. This is exactly what it is. By 2023, we're probably not going to be talking about it as a separate thing, maybe that's sooner. It's really just going to be ubiquitous, yeah. >> No, I totally agree. I think the underpinnings that you need for that future, you need a common infrastructure platform and a common management platform. So you don't want to have a new Silo creator and this has been our philosophy even for hyperconvergence. We said hey, there's going to be converging infrastructure that will be hyper converted. But they need to be the same management system, they need to be the same fabric. And so if it's Silo is not going to work. Same thing for containers you know. It's got to be the same platform in this case, it's HyperFlex. Hyperflex runs virtualization, it runs containers with HXAP. You get all of those benefits that I've talked about. It's all management insights, it's a common management platform across both of those. At some point, these are all tools in somebody's tool kit and you pick the right one for the job. >> Kaustubh, it is wonderful to hear the company that has been dominant in one of the silos for so long of course helping to bring the silos together work across the domains. Congratulations on that good news, always great to have you. >> Yeah, always great to be here, thank you. >> Dave: Thank you. >> For Dave Folante, I'm Stu Miniman back from lunch where we hear more from Cisco live in Barcelona 2020. Thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo Live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem barkers. >> Welcome back. It's the Cube here at Cisco Live, San Diego 2019 times. Two minute My co host is Day Volante. First, I want to welcome back custom dos Katie, who is the vice president. Product management with Cisco Compute. We talked with him a lot about Piper Flex anywhere in Barcelona. Wanna welcome to the program of first time guests Laura Crone, who's the vice president of sales and marketing group in NSG sales and marketing at Intel. Laura, thanks so much for joining us, All right, So since Katie has been our program, let let's start with you. You know, we know, you know. We've watched, you know, Cisco UCS and that compute, you know, since it rolled out for about a decade ago. Now on DH, you know Intel always up on stage with Cisco talking about the latest enhancements everywhere I go this year, people are talking about obtained and how technologies like envy me are baking in tow. The environment storage class memories, you know, coming there. So you know, let's start with kind of intel. What's happening in your world and you know your activities. Francisco live >> great. So I'm glad to hear you've heard a lot about octane because I have some marketing of my organization. So obtain is the first new memory architecture er in over 25 years. And it is different than Nanda, right? It is you, Khun, right? Data to the silicon that is programs faster and has greater endurance. So when you think of obtain its fast like D ram But it's persistent, like nay on three D now. And it has some industry leading combinations of capabilities such a cz high throughput, high endurance, high quality of service and low latent see. And for a storage device, what could be better than having fast performance and hi consistency. Oh, >> Laura's you say? Yeah, but 25 years since this move. You know, I remember when I when I started working with Dave, it was, you know, how do we get out of you know, the horrible, scuzzy stack is what we had lived on for decades there. And finally, Now it feels like we're coming through the clearing and there is just going to be wave after wave of new technologies that air free to get us high performance low latent c on the like. >> Yeah, And I think the other big part of that which is part of Cisco's hyper flex all in Vienna, is the envy me standards. So, you know, we've lived in a world of legacy satya controllers, which created a lot of bottlenecks and the performance Now that the industry is moving toe envy me, that even opens up it. Mohr And so, as we were developing, obtain, we knew we had Teo go move the industry to a new protocol. Otherwise, that pairing was not going to be very successful. >> Alright, so Katie all envy me, tell more. >> So we come here and we talk about all the cool innovations we do within the company. And then sometimes you come here and we talk about all the cool innovation we do with our partners, our technology partner, that intel being a fantastic technology partner, obviously being the server business, you've got a partner with intel on. We've really going away that across the walls ofthe two organizations to bring, uh, just do to life, right? So Cisco 80 I hyper flex is one of the products >> we >> talked about in the past. Hyper Flex, all in Miami that uses Intel's obtain technology is, well, it's Intel's three demand all envy me devices to power really the fastest workloads that customers want to put on this device. So you talked about free envy me. Pricing is getting to a point where it becomes that much more accessible to youth, ese for powering databases for par like those those work clothes required that leyton see characteristics and acquire those I ops on DH. That's what we've enabled with Cisco Hyper Flex collaborating with Intel of Envy Me portfolio. >> Remember when I started in the business, somebody was sharing with me to educate me on the head? A pyramid? Think of the period is a storage hierarchy. And at the top of it, was it actually an Intel solid state device, which back then was not It was volatile, right? So you had to put, you know, backup power supplies on it. Uh, so but any rate and then with all this memory architecture coming and flash towards people have been saying, well, it's going to flatten that pyramid. But now, with obtain. You're seeing the reemergence of that periods of that pyramid. So help us understand, sort of where it fits from a supplier standpoint and a no yam and ultimate customer. Because if I understand it, so obtain is faster than NAND, but it's going to be more expensive, but it's slower than D Ram, but it's cheaper, right? So where does it fit? What, the use cases? Where does it fit in that hierarchy? Maybe. >> Yeah. So if you think about the hierarchy at the very top is D RAM, which is going to be your fastest lowest Leighton see product. But right below that is obtained. Persistent memory, the dims and you get greater density because that's one of the challenges with the Ram is they're not dense enough, nor are they affordable enough, right? And so you get that creates a new tear in the store tire curry. Go below that and you have obtain assist ease, which bring even mohr density. So we go up to a 1.5 terabyte in a obtain sst, uh, and you that now get performance for your storage and memory expansion. Then you have three Dean and and then even below that, you have three thing and Q l c, which gives you cost effective, high density capacity. And then below that is the old fashioned hard disk drive. And then magnet. Yeah, you start inserting all these tears that give architects and both hardware and software an opportunity. Teo rethink how they wantto do storage. >> So the demand for this granularity obviously coming from your your buyers, your direct bars and your customers. So what does it do for you and specifically your customers? >> Yeah. So the name of the game is performance and the ability to have in a land where things are not very predictable, the ability to support any thing that the your end customers may throw at you if you're a 90 department. That may mean a bur internal of, uh, data scientist team are traditional architect off a traditional application. Now, what Intel and Cisco can do together is truly unique because we control all parts of the stack, everything from the sober itself to the to the storage devices to the distributed file system that sits on top ofit. So, for example, in Etienne, hyper flecks were using obtain as a cashing here on because we write the distributed file system. We can speak in a balance between what we put in the cash in care how it moved out data to the non cashing 3 90 year, as as Intel came out with their latest processors that support memory class torched last memory. We support that now we can engineer this whole system and to end so that we can deliver to customers the innovation that Intel is bringing to the table in a way that's consumable by their, uh, one more thing I'll throw out there. So technology is great, but it needs to be resilient because I D departments will occasionally yank out the wrong wire. They are barely yank out the wrong drive. One of the things that we work together with Intel What? How do we court rise into this? How to be with reliability, availability, serviceability? How do we prevent against accidental removal or accidental insertion on DH? Some of those go innovations have let Teo asked, getting out in the market a hyper flecked system that uses these technologies in a way that's really usable by teens in our customs. I'd >> love to double click on that in the context of envy. Envy? What you guys were talking about, You mentioned horrible storage deck. I think he called it the horrible, scuzzy stack. And Laura, you were talking about the You know, the cheap and deep now is a spinning disk. So my understanding is that you've got a lot of overhead in the traditional scuzzy protocol, but nobody ever noticed because you had this mechanical device. Now, with flash storage, it all becomes exposed. And VM e allows just a like a bat phone. Right? Okay, so correct me where I got that wrong, But maybe you could give us the perspective. You know what? Why Envy Emmy is important from your standpoint. And how are you guys using it? >> Yeah, I think envy and me is just a much faster protocol. And you're absolutely right. We have a graph that we show of the old world and how much overhead there is all the way down to when you have obtained in a dim solution with no overhead octane assist. E still has a tiny bit, but there's a graph that shows all of that Leyton C is removed when you deploy, obtain so envy me gives you much greater band with right. The CPU is not bottlenecked, and you get greater CPU efficiency when you have a faster interface like and >> and like hyper flexes taking advantage of this house. Oh, >> yeah? Let me give you a couple of examples. So anything performance, the first thing that comes to mind is databases. So for those kinds of workloads, this system gets about 25% better performance. Next thing that comes to mind is people really don't know what they're gonna put on the system. So sometimes they put databases, sometimes put mixed workloads. So when we look at mixed workloads way get about 65% or so better I ops, we get 37% better lately sees. So even in a mixed I opened Wyman wherever have databases you may have a Web theory may have other things. This thing is definite resilient to handle the workload. So it's it just opens up the splatter abuse cases. >> So any other questions I had was specific to obtain. D ram has consumer applications, as does Flash Anand was obtained. Have similar consumer applications can achieve that volume so that the prices, you can come down, not free, but continue to sort of drive the curves. >> Eso When we look at the overall tam, we see the tam growing out over time. I don't know exactly when it crosses. Over the volume are the bits of the ram, but we absolutely see it growing over time. And as a technology ramps, it'll have a you know, it costs ramping curves. Well, >> it'll follow that curve. Okay, good. >> Yeah, Just Katie. Give us a little bit. Broad view of hyper flex here. Att? The show, people, you know, play any labs with the brand new obtained pieces or what? What other highlights that you and the team have this week? >> Yeah, absolutely. So in in Barcelona, we talked about high, perfect for all that is live today. So in the show floor, people can look at the hyper flex at the edge combined with S t one. How do you control How did deploy thousands of edge locations from a centralized location to the part of the inner side which cloud based management too? So that whole experience is unable. Now, at the other end of the spectrum is how do we drive even more performance. So we were always, always the performance leader. Now we're comparing ourselves to ourselves to behavior 35% better than our previous all flash. With the innovation Intel is bringing to the table, some of the other pieces are actually use cases. So there's a big hospital chain where my kids go toe goto, get treated and look and see the doctor. There are lots of medical use cases which require epic the medical software company to power it, whether it is the end terminals or it is the back and database. So that epic hyperspace and happy cachet those have been out be invalidated on hyper flex, using the technology that we just talked about around update on doll in via me that can get me there is that much more power. That means that when my my doctor and the nurse pulls off, the records don't show up fast. But all the medical records, all of those other high performance seeking applications also run that much more streamlined, so I would encourage people little water solution. We've got a tremendous set off demos out there to go up there and check us out >> and there's a great white paper out on this, right? That e g s >> e g is made one of the a company that I've seen benchmarking Ah, a hyper flex. >> So whatever Elaborate where they do a lab report or >> it's what they do is they bench around different hyper converge infrastructure vendors. So they did this first time around and they and they said, Well, we could pack that much more We EMS on a on a hyper flex with rotating drives. And then they did it again And I said, Well, now that you got all flash Well, deacon, you got now the performance and the ladies see leadership and then they did it again and they said, Well, hang on, you you've kind of left the competition that does that. That's not going to make a pretty chart to show when we compare your all in Miami against your hyper so many. When you get that good, you compare against yourselves. We've been the performance theater on the estate has been doing the >> data obtained. The next generation added up, >> and this is what a database workload. OK, nowyou bringing obtain a little toast to the latest report >> has that measures >> measures obtain against are all flash report and then also ship or measure across vendors. So >> where can I get this? Is at some party or website or >> it's off all of this. All of this is off off the Cisco Hyper Flex website on artist go dot com. But F is the companies that want to go directly to their about getting a more >> I guess final final question for you is you know, I think back the early is ucs. It was the memory enhancements that they had that allowed the dentist virtual ization in the industry back when it started. It sounds like we're just taking that to the next level with this next generation of solutions. What what else would you out about? The relationship with Cisco and Intel? >> Eso, Intel and Cisco worked together for years right innovation around the CPU and the platform, and it's super exciting to be expanding our relationship to storage. And I'm even more excited that the Cisco hyper flex solution is endorsing Intel obtain and three thing and and we're seeing great examples of really use workloads where are in customers can benefit from this technology. >> Katie Laura. Thanks so much for the update. Congratulations on the progress that you've made so far for David Dante on Student, and we'll be back with more coverage here. It's just go live 2019 in San Diego. Thanks for watching the cue >> theme.

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live! Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona everybody, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-hosts. Stu Miniman, John Furrier has been here all week. Day three coverage of Cisco Live!, Barcelona. Cisco Live EMEA, and R. We learned the other day, add R for Russia. Kaustubh Das is back. KD is the vice president of product management for data center at Cisco and he's joined by Kevin Egan who is the director of the computer systems group for data center. Also from Cisco, gents, good to see you, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> KD, Data center was a real focus of the announcements this week. The data center is exploding to a lot of different places. What's going on in the group? >> It's been a terrific weekend, you're right. Data center was a core of a lot of the announcements this week, and as we kicked off the key note with this concept that the data center is no longer centered. It's really, the data moves to the edges, the data center is moving to the edges. We had a lot of announcements around Hyperflex, Hyperflex anywhere, this product that we've been innovating on like monsters. Within a very short time, gone from a brand-new product on the market to a magic quarter liter with Gartner, and really kind of doing a lot of industry firsts with that. That's been a big focus. We had a lot of announcements with our technology partners, because we not only innovate within Cisco, but we work with Pure and NetApp and Citrix and Intel Optane and Nvidia to bring products to the market that get the richness of their innovation and our innovation together. The other big focus has been all about programmability. As the world becomes much more programmable, focus devops automation, it's been around Intersight and programmability and taking that to the next level. >> Interesting. So of course we always talk about shipping five megabytes of code as opposed to shipping petabytes through a straw into the god box. But so Kevin, programmability's a key theme here, of course we're in the devnet zone. We had Susie Wee on yesterday and she was just talking about the evolution of Cisco infrastructure and how early on you guys made the decision. Let's make all this stuff programmable. And that was sort of a game changer, your thoughts. >> Yeah, no it's been amazing. The growth of just Cisco devnet right? We've got half a million developers now developing against our SDKs, our devops, our opportunities all across our Cisco platforms. We've got thousands of Cisco resources doing work on that, producing those libraries, producing that, those sample sets of code and contributing to the communities. And today our customers are using it in a way that they've never really done. Previously it was a sort of a fix because vendor tools weren't getting it done. And now they're using these automation tools to really do every day tasks out to the mass, to reduce the complexity for their teams and reduce the burden. And then of course to have that repeatability and that security and that compliance aspect and it's been amazing the explosion. >> Yeah. The simplicity reminds me back you know the earliest days of UCS, you know UCS was built for that wave of virtualization and as KD has talked with us this week already about some of the partnerships that you've built. The wave of converged infrastructure, UCS really dominated in that marketplace, but here now we talk about AI with some of your partners, you talk about programmability, it's like that's not the Cisco UCS that I remember launching. So maybe give us the updates specifically that was announced this week. Where the platform has gone in more recent days. >> So I can start maybe, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> UCS came up with this concept of everything needs to be programmable, everything needs to be an API. And maybe we were a little ahead of our time, we conceived of this in 2007, got the product out in 09 and really from the very genesis of the program, of the UCS program, it's been a programmable platform, it's been everything's an API. The UI makes calls to the API, our SDKs make calls to the APIs. So that's been the core platform and in some ways it feels like the industry is coming to where we thought it would come to a little bit earlier. So they, this whole concept of infrastructure's code, softly defined what do we want to call it, this was core and germane to the product itself. What we've done lately is, it's taken that policy that we're encapsulated and taken out all of the silver into the fabric for scalability, we've taken that now into the cloud. And what that does is it leads to that velocity of innovation becoming even higher, the ability to create new and unique use cases becomes higher, the ability to conceive it becomes higher. And all of that coupled with where IT is going, which is becoming much more devops, much more around automation. I think those forces are coupling together to create some really unique use cases. >> You said, you gestured take it into the cloud, which is interesting, pointing. What does that mean? Taking it into the cloud? >> So let's speed back a little bit. So what we start off with was listen, a silver's a box, we need to abstract the silver, the personality of the silver out of that box into policy, put it in the fabric. And that allows us to really scale that and give the box different personalities depending upon the workload. What we've done is, we've launched a product called Intersight. Intersight takes that policy and makes it a SAS service, management of the service we want to call it. So now as data moves everywhere, as data centers move everywhere, as our applications no longer become monolithic but become these combinations of little applications communicating across data centers, it allows us to have a centralized dashboard for our infrastructure that we can access, because it's in the cloud, from anywhere. And because it's in the cloud it can kind of get, get that innovation wheel turning much faster. It's just been game changing, and obviously there's other things that can happen once you do that. You can have proactive guidance coming down from the cloud, you can have golden images come down from the cloud, you can do workload specific settings. So there's a lot of new areas that it opens up once you, >> Analytics, right? >> Analytics. >> Machine intelligence. >> So we've got the takeover happening in the devnet zone right now, so focus on the data center, everybody's got t shirts and I think it says Hyperflex on them, big announcement this week about Hyperflex anywhere. Kevin you know I think that when people heard HCI, they often picture a box, or it's a group of boxes it's in a rack, it's all that and everything, and the thing is as an analyst I was poking at it, it's like "well we virtualized a lot of the stuff "and we put it in a new form factor." That's great to modernize the platform but how do we make it cloud native, how does it fit into a hybrid and multi cloud world, and it feels like we're reaching that point now. So help us connect the dots as to how, what HCI was fits into this hybrid and multi cloud world today. >> Absolutely. I mean, HCI when it came out was an alternative to SAN, I mean it was an alternative and it was touting simplicity, touting you know grow with your applications. But really now, with the multi cloud instances that our customers are looking at, they have to have a way to deploy those, a way to connect to those remotely, manage those, monitor those, actually connect that back to the core so that you can take advantage of the analytics that are running at the core and make real time recommendations, make real time adjustments for services and those type of, you know that connectivity is really what we mean by Hyperflex anywhere. It's the evolution of how you deploy, how you manage, and then of course that day two, day five, day one hundred where you're actually making that experience simple for the customers. >> Help us understand exactly, is this, do I just have the backup image in a public cloud, do I actually have similar software stacks, what's the expanse? >> Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think it's three different vectors that we're doing. So we want as we modernize, and as our customers modernize, they're looking for a much more cloud-like limber, elastic platform. That's the first vector, that's what HCI has done, that's what we've done. And we've actually done it on steroids because we've taken that code-designed hardware and software much like the public cloud guys are doing, but we control that and we can give that to our enterprise customers and our enterprise grade resilient infrastructure. The first thing is that, the second piece of it is what our customers and really our developers and the customers are wanting to do, is to create in one place and deploy in another. So create on the private cloud, deploy in the public cloud, or create in the public cloud, deploy in the private cloud, or actually have an application that bridges the two. So having a homogenous development environment whether it's, and a lot of this is around the container frameworks, whether it's on the public cloud, private cloud. That's key, and what we've done with Hyperflex, and the integrations we've got with our container platform, with open shift, with cloud center, which was again a big announcement this week. That's that second vector, is being able to port applications, develop one place, deploy any place. And the third piece is what we've been talking about all through this segment, which is the ability to now have the cloud drive your infrastructure. Everything's connected, everything's analyzed in the cloud, there's telemetry, there's proactive guidance, there's a common dashboard there's centralized monitoring, there's the ability to deploy, like we did in the key note demonstrating in the key note, multiple different sides spread out across the world, from a cental location. I think that's game changing. >> I'd like to get your take on differentiation. Obviously you guys are biased. Cisco's different, it's better. But I want to hear why. So relative to other infrastructure players, are you, in your words, however you want to describe it more cloud like more programmable, where's the differentiation? >> Go ahead and I'll later on. >> Yeah sure. So basically we started with a foundation of UCS and that foundation, virtualize compute bare metal compute, and of course now hyper-converge, and the reason that it allows us to do things, allows us to Hyperflex anywhere, allows us to have that cloud-based model is because we built that infrastructure around the API from day one. When we started this, that programmatic infrastructure, we were talking to customers, it was stateless it was desired state config, they didn't know what we were talking about. I mean, they had no idea when this came out. But that's the foundation that really allows us to drive the API integrations to our app layers, which is what KD was talking about, and then of course from there to our multi cloud integrations and that's really the foundation that laid, that we laid early on. And that's why all of our UCS platform really enables this cloud integration. >> Yeah, I mean the way I look at it is nobody else has a fully API driven infrastructure. Everything's an API for us, we don't expose APIs after the fact, it is built around, it's an API first infrastructure. And everything is built around them. Whether it's our STKs, our integrations with you know Pop and then Ansible, and those kind of tool sets, our integration with other tool sets that people use. It's all driven through that. The second thing that is different is, we have an emulator, so we can allow our customers to really time travel through the whole process of deployment. I mean, our customers can deploy the infrastructure before the infrastructure hits the loading dock because they can download the UCS emulator. They can actually configure, deploy, build the whole policy on our management platform, test it out, do the what ifs on the emulator. When the equipment shows up, we're ready to go, we are in business, nobody else can do that. And the final thing which is, aside from all of the cloud connected pieces I've talked about, the breadth of Cisco's portfolio spanning from all of our networking assets, our SD WAN assets, our security assets, our collaboration assets, our cloud assets, that breadth gets us to implement use cases for our customers that are just, it's just impossible for anybody else to do. >> We've heard lots of proof points here in the devnote zone specifically from programmability and the automation. I've talked to some service providers here at the show, we've also heard about the journey that enterprise customers are going through to kind of understand that space and learn places here like this. Kevin, I'm sure you're talking to a lot of customers here, maybe if you have examples as to you know the exemplars of who're doing this well, and what people can learn from customers like that. >> Yeah, I mean it's amazing right. In just devnet alone we've got sessions on UCS with Python, STKs, UCS with Powertool, how to integrate with Ansible, these are just becoming common terms, common household terms for our customers. As you go up to enterprise customers, service provider customers, they're using these tools in a day to day manner to do the automation on top of, to really deploy and manage their apps, right, and the way that, I mean, it's exciting, we have customers from all segments of all industry, and they really they use these programmatic, KD's simple example of platform emulator, you don't realize how powerful that is, where you can set that same exact state machine that's in your UCS, you can put it on your laptop, set up all your policies, and then when that gear hits the dock, you are up in hours. Literally we have very large e-commerce sites, they do this, thousands of servers hit it, and in a matter of hours, they've applied those policies and they're up and running. Python, we've got Python, Ruby, Powertool, software developer kits, we've got devops that sit on those, and Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and these are just the automation so if you want to do it yourself, we've got the world class API, nobody else gives you that programmatic API. That's how we built our foundation. If you want Cisco to call those APIs, we have Intersight and we'll make those calls for you. If you just want to do some simple scripting, Powertool. You can automate certain processes, it doesn't have to be the whole end to end. You know you can use all these, it's basically choice to really, what your applications are demanding and what your customers are demanding. >> That's a strong story, one of breadth and depth. We're out of time, but KD I wonder if you could sort of put a bow on Cisco Live! Europe this year, big takeaways from your point of view. >> Listen, we've been innovating like monsters and it's such a terrific week for us to come here, to really touch and feel and listen to our customers and see the delight on their faces as we show them what we've been doing. And this part of the show, day three the devnet takeover, this is where it gets really really real, because now we get to go down to the depths of looking at those APIs, looking at those use cases, getting people to play around with them. So it's just been terrific, I love it. >> I love it too, we're the interview monsters this week. So guys thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from Cicso Live! In Barcelona. Be right back. (upbeat electronic outro)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live Europe. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Barcelona, everybody. You're watching The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day one of Cisco Live Barcelona. Katie Colbert is here. She's the vice president of alliances at Pure Storage, and she's joined by Kaustubh Das, otherwise known as KD, who's the vice president of computing systems at Cisco. Katie and KD, welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so let's start off, KD2, if you could just tell us about the partnership. Where did it start, how did it evolve? We'll get into it. >> We just had a terrific partnership, and the reason it's so great is it's really based on some foundational things that are super compatible. Pure Storage, Cisco, both super technology-driven companies, innovating. They're both also super programmatic companies. They'll do everything via API. It's very modern in that sense, the frameworks that we work on. And then from a business perspective, it's very compatible. We're chasing common markets, very few conflicts. So it's been rooted in solid foundations. And then, we've actually invested over the years to build more and more solutions for our customers jointly. So it's been terrific. >> So, Katie, I hate to admit how long we talk about partnering with Cisco >> It's going to age us. >> So you and I won't admit how many decades it's been partnering with Cisco, but here we are, 2019, Cisco's a very different company than it was a decade or two ago. >> Absolutely. >> Tell me what it's like working with them, especially as a company that's primarily in storage and data at Pure, what it means to partner with them. >> Absolutely, you're right. So, worked with Cisco as a partner for many years at the beginning of my career, then went away for, I'd say, a good 10 years, and joined Pure in June, and I will tell you one of the most exciting reasons why I joined Pure was the Pure and Cisco relationship. When I worked with them at the beginning of my career, it was great and I would tell you it's even better now. I will say that the momentum that these two companies have in the market is very phenomenal. A lot of differentiation from our products separately, but both together, I think that it's absolutely been very successful, and to KD's point, the investment that both companies are making really is just astronomical, and I see that our customers are the beneficiaries of that. It makes it so much easier for them to deploy and use the technologies together, which is exciting. >> So we always joke about Barney deals, I love you, you love me, I mean, it's clear you guys go much much deeper than that. So I want to probe at that a little bit. Particularly from an engineering standpoint, whether it's validated designs or other innovations that you guys are working on together, can we peel the onion on that one a little bit? Talk about what you guys are doing below that line. >> I'll start there then I'll hand it over to the engineering leader from Cisco. But if you think about the pace of this, the partnership, I think, is roughly 3 or so years old. We've 16 Cisco-validated designs for our FlashStack infrastructure. So that is just unbelievable. So, huge amount of investment from engineers, product managers, on both sides of the fence. >> Yeah, totally second that. We start out with the... Cisco-validated designs are like blueprints, so we start out with the blueprints for the standard workloads: Oracle, SAP. And we keep those fresh as new versions come out. But then I think we've taken it further into new spaces of late. ACI, we saw in the keynote this morning, it's going everywhere, it's going multi-site. We've done some work on marrying that with the clustering service of Pure Storage. On top of that, we're doing some work in AI and ML, which is super exciting, so we got some CBDs around that that's just coming out. We're doing some work on automation, coupling Intersight, which is Cisco's cloud-based automation suite, with Pure Storage and Pure Storage's ability to integrate into the Intersight APIs. We talked about it, in fact, I talked about it in my session at the Cisco Live in the summer last year, and now we've got that out as a product. So tremendous amount of work, both in traditional areas as well as some of these new spaces. >> Maybe we can unpack that Intersight piece a bit, because people might look at it initially and say, "Okay, multi-cloud, on-prem, all these environments, "but is this just a networking tool?" And working we're working with someone with Pure, maybe explain a little bit the scope and how, if I'm a Pure administrator, how I live into this world. >> Absolutely, so let's start with what is Intersight, just for a foundational thing. Intersight is our software management tool driven from the cloud. So everything from the personality of the server, the bios settings, the WLAN settings, the networking and the compute pieces of it, that gets administered from the cloud, but it does more. What it does is it can deliver playbooks from the cloud that give the server a certain kind of personality for the workload that it's supporting. So then the next question that anyone asks is, "Now that we have this partnership, "well can it do the same thing for storage? "Can it actually provision that storage, "get that up and running?" And the answer is yes, it can, but it's better because what it can not only do is, not only can it do that, getting that done is super simple. All Pure Storage needed to do was to write some of those Intersight APIs and deliver that playbook from the cloud, from a remote location potentially, into whatever your infrastructure is, provisioning compute, provisioning networking, provisioning storage, in a truly modern cloud-driven environment, right? So I think that's phenomenal what it does for our customers. >> Yeah, I'd agree with that. And I think it'll even become more important as the companies are partnering around our multi-cloud solutions. So, as you probably saw earlier this year in February, sorry, the end of 2018, Pure announced our first leaning into hybrid cloud, so that's Pure Cloud Data Services. That enables us to have Purity, which is our operating system on our storage, running in AWS to begin with. So you can pretty easily start to think about where this partnership is going to go, especially as it pertains to Intersight integration. >> And just to bounce on that, strategically, you can see the alignment there as well. I mean, Cisco's been talking about multi-cloud for a bit now, we've done work to enable similar development environments, whether we're doing something on-prem or in the cloud, so that you can move workloads from one to the other, or actually you can make workloads on both sides talk to each other, and, again, combined with what Katie just said, it makes it a really really compelling solution. >> Like you said, you've got pretty clear swimming lanes for the two companies. There's very little overlap here. You can't have too many of these types of partnerships, right, I mean, you got 25 thousand engineers almost, but still, you still have limited resources. So what makes this one so special, and why are you able to spend so much time and effort, each of you? >> I could start, so from a Pure perspective, I think the cultures are aligned, you called it out there, there's inherently not a lot of overlap in terms of where core competencies are. Pure is not looking at all to become a networking company. And just a lot of synergies in the market make it one that our engineers want to invest in. We have really picked Cisco as our lean-in partner, truthfully, I run all of the alliances at Pure, and a lion's share of my resources really are focused at that partnership. >> Yeah, and if you look at both these companies, Pure is a relative youngster among the storage companies, a new, modern, in a good way, a new, modern company built on modern software practices and so forth. Cisco, although a pretty veteran company, but Cisco compute is relatively new as well as a compute provider. So we are very similar in how our design philosophies work and how modern our infrastructures are, and that gets us to delivering results, delivering solutions to our customers with relatively less effort from our engineers. And that pace of innovation that we can do with Pure is not something we can do with every other company. >> We had a session earlier today, and we went pretty deep into AI, but it's probably worth touching on that. I guess my question here is, what are the customers asking you guys for in terms of AI infrastructure? What's that infrastructure look like that's powering the machine and intelligence era? >> You want to start? >> You want to go, I'll go first. This is a really exciting space, and not only is it exciting because AI is exciting, it's actually exciting because we've got some unique ingredients across Pure and Cisco to make this happen. What does AI feed on? AI feeds on data. The model requires that volume of data to actually train itself We've got an infrastructure, so we just released the C4ATML, the UCC4ATML, highly powered infrastructure, eight GPUs, interconnected, 180 terabytes on board, high network bandwidth, but it needs something to feed it the data, and what Pure's got with their FlashBlade is that ability to actually feed data to this AI infrastructure so that we can train bigger models or train these models faster. Makes for a fantastic solution because these ingredients are just custom made for each other. >> Anything you can add? >> Absolutely I'd agree with that. Really, if you look at AI and what it needs to be successful, and, first of all, all of our customers, if they're not thinking about it, they should be, and I will tell you most of them are, is, how do you ingest that amount of data? If you can't ingest that quickly, it's not going to be of use. So that's a big piece of it, and that's really what the new Cisco platform, I mean, the folks over at Pure are just thrilled about the new Cisco product, and then you take a look at the FlashBlade and how it's able to really scale out unstructured data, object it and file, really to make that useful, so when you have to scrub that data to be able to use it and correlate it, FlashBlade is the perfect solution. So really, this is two companies coming together with the best of breed technologies. >> And the tooling in that world is exploding, open source innovation, it needs a place to run all the Kafkas and the Caffes and the TensorFlows and the Pythons. It's not just confined to data scientists anymore. It's really starting to seep throughout the organization, are you seeing that? >> Yeah. >> What's happening is you've got the buzzwords going around, and that leads to businesses and the leaders of businesses saying, "We've got to have an AI strategy. "We've got to hire these data scientists." But at the same time, the data scientists can get started on the laptop, they can get started on the cloud. When they want to deploy this, they need an enterprise class, resilient, automated infrastructure that fits into the way they do their work. You've got to have something that's built on these components, so what we provide together is that infrastructure for the ITTs so that the data scientists, when they build their beautiful models, have a place to deploy them, have a place to put that into production, and can actually have that life cycle running in a much more smooth production-grade environment. >> Okay, so you guys are three years in, roughly. Where do you want to take this thing, what's the vision? Give us a little road map for the future as to what this partnership looks like down the road. >> Yeah, so I can start. So I think there's a few different vectors. We're going to continue driving the infrastructure for the traditional workloads. That's it, that's a big piece that we do, we continue doing that. We're going to drive a lot more on the automation side, I think there's such a lot of potential with what we've got on Intersight, with the automation that Pure supports, bring those together and really make it simple for our customers to get this up and running and manage that life cycle. And third vector's going to be imparting those new use cases, whether it be AI or more data analytics type use cases. There's a lot of potential that it unleashes for our customers and there's a lot of potential of bringing these technologies together to partner. So you'll see a lot more of that from us. I don't know, will you add something? >> Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. And I would say more FlashStack, look for more FlashStack CVDs, and AI, I think, is one to watch. We believe Cisco, really, this step that Cisco's made, is going to take AI infrastructure to the next level. So we're going to be investing much more heavily into that. And then cloud, from a hybrid cloud, how do these two companies leverage FlashStack and all the innovation we've done on prem together to really enable the multi-cloud. >> Great, alright, well Katie and KD, thanks so much for coming to The Cube. It was great to have you. >> Great. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome, alright. Keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching The Cube Live from Cisco Live Barcelona. We'll be right back. (techy music)