(light music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here at theCUBE studio in Palo Alto in the center of Silicon Valley. Happy to welcome back first of all a many time guest at theCUBE, Kevin Deierling with Mellanox, and also someone I've known for many years, but the first time we've actually gotten under the lights in front of the cameras, Marty Lans with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Here to talk a lot about networking today and not just networking but storage networking. So, you know, kind of one of the dark corners of the IT world that... There's those of us that have known each other for decades it seems. And, but you know, pretty critical to a lot of what goes on in the environment. Kevin, you know, let's start with you. You know, we've caught up with Mellanox a bunch. Obviously we do a lot of video with HPE. We'll be at the Discover show in Europe coming soon. But why'd you bring Marty along to talk about some of this stuff? >> Yeah, so HPE has been a long-time partner of Mellanox. We're really not necessarily known as a storage networking company, but in fact we're in a ton of storage platforms with our InfiniBand. So, we have super-high quality reliability. We're built into the major storage platforms in the world and Enterprise Appliances, and now with this new work that we're doing with Marty's team and HPE, we're really building what we consider to be the first Ethernet storage fabric that will scale out what we've done in other worlds with dedicated storage platforms. >> Okay, Marty, before we get into some of the things you're doing with Mellanox, tell us a little bit about your role, how you fit inside Hewlett-Packard Enterprise as it's made up today. >> I'm responsible for storage networking, or the connectivity for storage as well as our interoperability. So if you think about it, it's a very broad category from a role perspective. We have a lot of challenges with all the new types of storage technologies today. And that's where Mellanox gets to come in. >> So just elaborate a little bit. What products do you have? NICs and host bus adapters, switches, what falls under your purview? >> Pretty much everything, everything you just mentioned. We carry traditionally, all the traditional storage connectivity products, Fibre Channels, switches, adapters, optics cables, pretty much the whole ecosystem. >> So what we're talking about is the Ethernet storage fabric. So can one of you set it up for us, as to what that term means? And we talked about Fibre Channel. Fibre Channel is a bespoke network designed for storage, a lot of times run by storage people or storage networking people underneath that umbrella. What's happening with the Ethernet side? >> Yeah, I think when you look at the traditional SAN network it was Fibre Channel and the metrics that people evaluate that on are performance, and reliability, and intelligence, storage intelligence. Today when you look at that on all those metrics Ethernet actually wins. So we can get three times the performance for 1/3 the price. Everything is built in in terms of all of the new protocols like NVMe over Fabrics, which is a new one that's coming. Obviously iSCSI. And taking some of the things that we do in terms of intelligence, like RDMA, which is RoCE over Ethernet, that's what really enables NVMe over Fabrics. We have that end-to-end supply of switches, adapters, and cables. And working with HPE, we can bring all of the benefits of the platform that they have and all of the software to that world. Suddenly you've got something that's unmatched with Ethernet. And that's the internet storage fabric. >> So Marty, one of the things I've said a bunch over the last couple of years is nothing ever dies. But Fibre Channel, it's dead, right? Isn't that what this means? Why don't you help us a little bit with the nuance of what you're seeing, what customers are asking, and of course there are certain administrators that are like, I know it, I love it, I'm going to keep buying it for years. >> I guess Fibre Channel's still alive. It's doing very well. I think from a primary storage perspective, I mean that's where Fibre Channel is used, right? Today's storage has a lot of different technologies. And I like to look at this in a couple of ways. One, you look at the evolution of media. You're going from disk, we went from tape to disk, and now we're going from disk to Flash. And Flash to NVMe. And now we have things like performance and latency requirements that weren't there before. And the bottleneck is moved from the storage array to the network. So having a network that creates great latency is really the issue at stake. We have latency road maps. We don't have performance road maps from a storage perspective. So that's the big one. >> Kevin, I'm sure you want to comment on some of the latency piece. That's Mellanox's legacy. >> So with some of the things we're doing now, NVMe over Fabrics, we're adding 10 microseconds of latency. So you've got an NVMe Flash drive. When it was spinning rust, and it took 10 milliseconds, who cared what the network added? Today you really care. We're down to the tens of microseconds to access an NVMe Flash drive. When you move it out of the box, now you need to network it. And that's what we really do, is allow you to access NVMe over Fabrics and iSCSI and iSER and things like that in a remote box and you're adding less than 10 microseconds of latency. It's incredible. >> Yeah, Marty, I think back. Even 10 years ago, there was a lot of times, okay, do I want InfiniBand, do I want Ethernet, do I want Fibre Channel? And there were more political implications than there were technical, architectural implications. I said five years ago, the storage protocol wars are dead. That being said, it doesn't mean that we're still sorting those out. What do you hear from customers? Any more nuance you want to give on that piece? Architecturally, right, Ethernet can do it all today, right? >> Sure, yeah, yeah, it is. So I think those challenges are still there. You still have that... you mentioned political, and I think that's something that's still going to be there for quite some time. The nice thing we did with Mellanox, and what we did in our own technology for storage connectivity, we innovated in an area that I think really hasn't been innovated that was ripe for innovation. So creating an environment that gives the storage network administrator the same capabilities of what you get in Fibre Channel we can do on an Ethernet network today. >> And Marty, one of the things. When we get a partnership announcement like this, bring us inside. Talk to us about what engineering is being done. How is this more than just sticking a lovely new logo on it? What development, what's HPE been bringing to this offering? >> So we did, first when we started, before we get to the Ethernet side, we built something called Smart SAN. It's automation orchestration for Fibre Channel networks. And that was a big success. What we did after that was we looked at it from the Ethernet perspective. We said why can't we do it there? It's in-band, it's real-time access, and it gives you the ability to do all the nuances of what makes Ethernet hard. Automate and orchestrate all the Ethernet capabilities to behave much like a Fibre Channel network. So this is a four- to five-year development cycle that we're in, in terms of developing these products. And sitting down with Mellanox, this is not just a marketing relationship. There is a lot of engineering development work that we've done with Mellanox to storage optimize their products. To make them specifically designed to handle storage traffic. >> Kevin, it's interesting. I think back to, let's say the big other Ethernet company. When they got into Fibre Channel, they learned a lot from the storage side that they drove into some of their Ethernet products. So you kind of see learning going back and forth. It's a small industry we have here. What did HPE bring to the table, and more importantly, what's the latest as to what makes the Ethernet storage fabrics... What's going to move the needle on some of that storage adoption? >> I think the key thing is, as Marty said, if you look at it you've got to be able to be familiar with all of the same things. You need to provide the same level of protection. So whether you're using data center bridging to have a lossless network. We have zero packet loss switches, which means that our switches don't drop packets under the cases where you've actually over-subscribed a network. We can actually push back, we can use PFC, we can use ECN. All of that, and on top of that, what's happened is the look and feel to be able to manage things just like it's Fibre Channel. So all that intelligence that HPE has invested in so much over the years is now being brought to bear on Ethernet. One of the big things we see is in the cloud, people have already moved to a converged network where you're seeing compute and networking and storage all on the same fabric. And really that's Ethernet. And so what we're doing now is bringing all of those capabilities to the enterprise. So we think that 15 or 20 years ago there was really no choice. Fibre Channel was absolutely the right choice. Now we're really trying to make it as easy as possible to make that enterprise transformation to be cloud-like. >> It's funny. Marty, you and I worked for EMC back when that storage network was being designed. Architecturally, those of us who have been in networking since before Fibre Channel, we would have loved to do it with Ethernet, but there were limitations with CPU, the network itself. It would have been nice. But fast forward, it was like, Flash had been around for a long time before, oh wait, now it's ready for enterprise. Now it feels like Ethernet has gone through a lot of that journey. You're welcome to comment on that. But the question I want to have from the storage side, we're going through so many changes. HPE has a very large portfolio, a number of acquisitions as well as many things HPE's doing. We talked about NVMe, NVMe over Fabric, we talked about hyper-converge, we talked about scale-out NAS. Networking is not trivial when it comes to building out distributed architectures. And of course storage has very particular requirements when it comes to network. So what are you hearing from your customers from the storage side of the business? How does HPE pull those pieces together and how does this Ethernet storage fabric fit into it? >> I mentioned it earlier. We talked about the primary array being Fibre Channel. If you take a look at where storage has gone, you talk about the cloud, you talk about all these big data, now you've got secondary storage, you've got hyper-converged storage, you've got NAS scale-out, you've got object. I mean, you go on and on. And all these different storage technologies are representing almost 80% of all the data that's out there. Most of that data, or all that data, now that I think about it, is connected by Ethernet. Now what's interesting is, from our perspective, is that we have a purview of all that capability. I see that challenge that customers are having. And the problem that these customers are finding is they go through the first layer of the challenges which is the storage capabilities they need in these storage technologies. And then they get to the next layer that says oh, by the way, the network isn't that great. And so this is where we saw an opportunity to create something that created the same category of capabilities as you got in your primary to the rest of the storage technologies. They're already using Ethernet. It's a great opportunity to provide another dedicated network that does connectivity for all those other types of storage devices, including primary. >> Is there anything along the management of these type of environments? How similar, how much retraining do you need to do? If your customers are probably going to manage both for a while. >> From a usability perspective, it's quite easy. I think what customers are going to find. We use Fibre Channel as the lowest common denominator in terms of everything has to meet, the Ethernet network has to meet those kind of requirements. So what we did was we replicated that capability throughout the rest. With our automation orchestration capabilities it gives us the feature. From a customer perspective it's really a hands-off kind of solution. It's really nice. >> The other piece is... Kevin, how's the application portfolio changing? You mentioned a little bit, some of those really specific latencies that we have. What are you seeing from customers from the application portfolio? David Floyer from Wikibon has been talking for a long time. HPC is going to become mainstream in the enterprise which seems to pull all of these pieces together. >> That's Mellanox's heritage. We came from the InfiniBand world with HBC. We're really good at building giant supercomputers. And the cloud looks very much like that. And when you talk about things like big data, and Hadoop, and Spark, all of these activities for analytics, all these workloads. So it's not just the traditional enterprise database workloads that need the performance, but all of these new data intensive. And Marty really talked about the two different elements. One was the faster media, and the second was just the breadth of the offering. So it's not just primary block storage anymore. You're talking about object storage, and file storage, and hyper-converged systems. We're seeing all of that come into play here with the M-series switches that we're introducing with HPE. What's happening now is you've got a virtualized, containerized world that's using massive amounts of data on superfast storage media. And it needs the network to support that. All of the accelerations that we've built into our adapters all of the smarts that we're building into the switches and taking all of this management framework and automation that HPE's delivering, we've got a really nice solution together. >> Excellent. One thing I love when we talk networking here, is the containerized world, we're talking about serverless, some of this stuff is trying to explain it in a way that people can understand. Marty, an M-series is probably boxes. There's actually physical... You can buy the software, and everything critically important. Walk us through the product line and what sets it apart from what you've done before and what makes up the product line there. >> A lot of compliments to Mellanox and the way they've designed their products. We have, first and foremost I'd like to call out they have a smaller product that we're working with from an ASIC perspective. It's the 2100 series. It's nice because it's a half-width box. It allows you to get full redundancy on a single 1U tray if you want to think about it that way. From a real estate perspective it's really nice. And it's extremely powerful. So with that solution, you have the power and the cost savings being able to do what many different networks can do at three times the cost in a very small form factor. That's very nice. And with the software that we do, we talked about what kind of automation we have. It's all the basic stuff that you'd imagine like the discovery, the diagnostics, all the things that are manual in an Ethernet world we provide automated in a storage environment. >> What about some of the speeds and feeds? We've got so many different flavors of Ethernet now. I remember it took a decade for 10-gig to go from standards to most customer doing now. It wasn't just 40 and 100, but we've got 25 and 50 in there. So all of them, are there interoperability concerns? Any things that you want to say, yes this, or not ready for that? >> I'll say that the market has diverged on many different speeds and feeds. So we do support all of them in the technology. Even from a storage perspective, some of our platforms support 25 gig, some will support 40 gig. So with a solution, we can do one, we can do 10, 25, 40, 50, 100. What's nice is it gives you, regardless of what technology you're using you have the capability to use the technology. >> Kevin, I want to give you the opportunity. What are you hearing from the customers these days? What are the pain points? It used to be some of those speeds and feeds. Wait around, when can I do the upgrade? It's something that's a massive thing that we have to undertake from the backbone all the way through. So are we moving faster? I know we all talk, it's agility and speed, but how about the network? Is it keeping up? >> Yeah, I think we are keeping up. The thing we hear from customers is about efficiency of using their platform. So whether it's the server or the storage. And the network they don't want to be in the way. So you don't want to have stranded assets with an NVMe drive stuck inside of a server that's run at 10% and you've got another unit that's at 100% and needs more. And really that's what this disk aggregation and software-defined storage is all about is taking advantage and getting the most out of the infrastructure that you've invested in. One NVMe drive can saturate a 25-gig link. So we have people that are saying give me more bandwidth, give me more bandwidth. So we can saturate with 24 drives, 600-gig links. The bandwidth is incredible, and we're able to deliver that with zero packet loss technologies. So really that's what people are asking for. There's more data being generated and processed and analyzed to do efficient business models, new business models. And they don't want to worry about the network. They want it to configure itself automatically, and just work and not be the bottleneck. And we can do that. >> Marty, can you up-level for us a little bit here? When I think about HPE, it comes pre-configured, I know. That's what I've known HPE for. Of course HP for most of my career. Even back in some of the earliest jobs, it's like well, rack comes fully configured. Everything's in it. When I look at this announcement, HPE, server, storage, network, some of your pieces. What's important about this? How does this fit in to the overall picture? >> Customers are used to having that service level from us. Delivering those kind of solutions. And this is no different. We saw a lot of challenges with all these different types of networks. The network being the challenge with these new types of storage technologies. So having these solutions brought to you in the way that we've done with the primary storage array I think is going to make customers pretty happy about it. >> Kevin, want to give me the final word? What should we look for in this announcement? Any last things that we haven't covered? And what should we look for for the rest of 2017? >> I think as Marty said, this is a beginning. We have a strong relationship with HPE on the adapter side, on the cables, on the switches. Also on the synergy platform that we've done the switch for that as well. So 25, 50, 100-gig is here today. With shipping we're really saying 25 is the new 10. Because this faster storage needs faster networks and we're here to deliver. I think, pay attention, we're going to do some new things. There's lots of innovation coming. >> Kevin Deierling, Marty Lans, thanks so much for bringing us the update. And thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. (light music)