>> Live from Seattle, Washington it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, The CloudNative Computing Foundation, and Antico System Partners. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE. Day two live coverage here in Seattle of the CNCF KubeCon and CouldNative. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Stu Miniman here all week for three days as multiple years we've been covering KubeCon. We've been covering this community, all the way back to the OpenStack days to now CloudNative and Kubernetes, rise of Kubernetes, and KubeCon has been great. CloudNative Computing Foundation and the center of it has been an individual CUBE alumni that we've talked to many times, Lew Tucker, VP and CTO of Cloud Computing at Cisco Systems. Great to have Lew on, good to see you. >> Great to be back again. >> We got a great history of conversations and every year we kind of have a pinch me moment where it's like it's so awesome right now, the technology's coming together, now more than ever, the standardization, the maturization of Kubenetes and what's going on around it, is probably one of the most exciting trends. It's not just about Kubernetes, it's about what that's enabling, ecosystems, storage, networking and compute, now the, is working now magically creating a lot of value. So, we've talked about it, what's the update from your perspective, how do you see it evolving now? >> I see it very much the same way, I had a short little keynote today, yesterday, and was talking about I think we've entered this kind of golden age of software where because of the number of projects that are now going into the CNCF for example, and elsewhere, and get up repositories, we just have a major driving force which is the accumulation of the software that's used now to power the cloud, power data centers, totally transforming infrastructure. We're no longer cabling as I sort of say has no become code. >> Yeah. >> And that's all about the software, it's about through the open source communities. >> We've been talking about before we came on camera about the, and we've had other conversations about the historical waves of innovation. AI's been around for a while, you know all these things have kind of been around but now with cloud computing and the resources available in terms of compute power, storage, and networking now programmable, it's creating a lot of innovation right. And this has been a tailwind for some and a headwind for others, companies that have transformed and understood that have been leveraging it. We've seen conversations from Net App, Cisco, you guys are transform, you turned it into a tailwind, for Cisco, because now all that magic can come in for the programmability on the networking side. >> Exactly right, yeah. We see AI as having a big impact across the board on all of these, we're big contributors also into Cube Clove, for example, because on top of Kubernetes, the biggest issue we're going to have in AI going forward is we don't have enough AI engineers. We don't have enough people who are trained in that. So we need to create these tools and the services that we see coming out in the cloud now for AI are designed to make it easy to consume AI. You don't have to be an AI expert in order to use it and that sort of thing is really exciting. >> How is the CloudNative environment changing IT investments 'cause again, the old days I'd have to throw a machine at something, I got to buy this and siloed, you got now horizontal capabilities, you got the vertical specialization with machine learning and AI as you just referenced. How is it changing investments, people now are looking at re-imagining their infrastructure, they're re-imagining how apps are built. How is Kubernetes, CloudNative impacting IT investments? >> So we've found for example when we talk to our customers and everything else, they're all using multiple clouds. So I think internally we're getting to see a rise here now is this multi-cloud environment that we have. And so Cisco with what we've been doing with our hybrid solutions for AWS and hybrid solutions that we're having with Google is making it so that you can have the same environment within your data center as you have in the cloud, and then we connect the two so that now the IT infrastructure really is looking like a cloud and there's many clouds, multiple clouds in your own data center, in multiple service providers. That makes it easier for IT to really consume CloudNative technology. >> I wonder if you can chill us down a level from what we're talking- you talk about cube flow and machine learning remember back to big data, was like okay, well what do we have to do with the network? Well, I need some more buffering but you know, how are we what is just the base infrastructure layer and where Kubernetes and this ecosystem just becomes the platform for all of the modern applications, and what has to be done differently, I wonder if you could help- >> Yeah so one of the big challenges I think is this how do we connect the different clouds together with your own data center. And that's why we, the hybrid solutions, where Cisco's driving now are designed specifically to make that easy because it's scary for IT organizations to say they're going to open up some part of their firewall to have connections coming in, and so we provide a solution that makes it easy for people. And that means that things such as cube flow, and things like that, they can be running, perhaps they might do some of their research in a hybrid- in a public cloud provider, such as AWS or Google. And then they want to run it now in production within their own data center, and they don't want to change a thing. And at the same time, we're seeing other capabilities. You want to access some service in the cloud as a part of your enterprise app. >> Yeah one of the things people have a hard time understanding is what is just kind of standardized, okay I've got compliant Kubernetes it can run all these places and then there's areas where Cisco has done deep integration work with both Google Cloud and with AWS, maybe help understand what are the standard pieces and what's the extra engineering work needed to be done to support some of these? >> Well I think what has helped us all is the fact that Kubernetes has really taken off. So we really are seeing if you have a Kubernetes platform and you adhere to the public APIs of Kubernetes and everything else like that, you then can have the portability of applications back in the java days we were going after that, and now we're seeing it with Kubernetes. And so by what we've developed has been with the Cisco container platform is an on premise manage Kubernetes environment that looks identical to what you find in the Kubernetes environment at AWS or at Google. So the same interfaces are there, the IT doesn't have to relearn things, they can actually get the advantage of that standardization. >> And that's key for operations and IT because that is the promise of cloud operations. Similar on both platforms on premises and in the cloud. And the next question is okay from a networking perspective, we've had many conversations with Suzie Wee at Cisco around network programmability or net dev options as you guys call it, which is kind of a play on dev ops. This is the future because with multi-cloud the apps don't need to know about where to provision workloads, which cloud when, is it better region over here, latency, network factors come in, you still got to move things around, put A to B, edge of the network for IOT. Talk about the importance of network programmability now more than ever with CloudNative why it's so important. >> Well the first and foremost, it has to be driven by APIs. The old days of actually going out and having people configure network switches to make connectivity or open up provisions and firewalls and things like that, that's behind us. Now we have that all being because of programmability of the network through what we've been doing with ACI and other technologies, we can make it so we can connect these clouds and make it, maintain the security. We're also seeing other things such as isteo and edgebased computing and things like that come into play, where again, the ordinary developer doesn't have to learn all of the details of networking and security, but the operations people need it to be secure, need it to be able to be moved around, need to be able to have telemetry so they can tell what's going on. >> One of the things we've been talking about on theCUBE, Stu and I were yesterday riffing on this but for a while, but it's also now trickled into the Silicon Valley conversations around some of the tech elite people around architecture. Cloud architects are in high demand and there's two schools of thought. There's a persona around a systems architect, more of a systems view, operating systems kind of view, that's cloud that's operating, environment, serverless, advanced, these are kind of concepts that is a systems-oriented thinker. And then you have the application developer that looks like an app server kind of world. Those are all paradigms that we've lived through. >> Right. >> Now coming together now in one, horizontally scaled both cloud that's a system, vertical specialization around the apps, and with dev ops layer, having these guys work together. Talk about this dynamic, your thoughts on it, how it shapes employee selection, people who lead projects. 'Cause the CTO and architect role's now more important, but the software side's just as important. >> Yeah so I think one thing that's become very clear is that we need to make it easier for the domain experts in an application area to just take care of their part. And so that's why like one of the previous episodes we talked about here was about istea, where we've actually separated out essentially the data play, the transport of data around with security, encryption, identity, and everything else from the actual application code of the micro service. That makes it much easier because now the engineering teams are too large, you can't have everybody know everything anymore, like you say, we've got specialists in different areas. We need to be able to provide then, underlying systems that connect these things and that underlying system then has to be managed by your operations people. So we've got dev ops where the application people are writing code actually that the operations people use, so that we can actually have this kind of uniform infrastructure that is maintainable. >> And security is super important and all that good stuff. >> Yeah so Lew it's interesting, we've been watching so many of the pieces we've worked on OpenStack, it was really from the bottoms up building the infrastructure, we've seen the dynamic the last two years, Kubernetes some, and server-less even more, coming from the top down. We want to get your thoughts on that, we've been digging in and trying to tease out some of the Knative pieces that are being discussed here, versus some of the functions things that are happening, especially in Amazon and Microsoft, I'd love to get your take. >> I think we're always seeing this progression in platforms for computing, and programming languages, and paths we've talked about years ago. All of these things are designed always to make it easier. So you're right we've got for example Knative now really coming on as saying can we standardize a way specifically helping Kubernetes people move into this area. Like I've mentioned before the Kubeflow again, how can we start to standardize these pieces? The beauty of this is, the standardized pieces are coming out in open source. So everybody gets it, and that means it's deployable in your public clouds, it's deployable in your data center, and then through a lot of the hybrid technology that Cisco's working, you can connect those together. But you're right we're going to continue to see innovation, that's great, because we need that, we need that constantly. What we need to be able to do is make it easier to consume and then integrate into these systems. And that's where I think Kubernetes has a lot do with how we make it easier. >> Final question on Cisco then I want to go on a more personal note with you on your situation which is news breaking here on theCUBE. Cisco has successfully transformed it's direction, it's been always a great leader in networking, always a great business, billions and billions of dollars in revenue. Now with CloudNative and Kubernetes, the relationship I saw with Amazon, you got Google, you guys have taken that systems view in making things programmable. Explain the Cisco strategy from your perspective as a CTO and as a legend in the industry, for the people that know Cisco, know the old Cisco, what is the new Cisco? And how does Kubernetes and how does all this CloudNative fit into the new Cisco? >> I think the new Cisco really is focused now on where customers are taking their computing resources and it is in this multi-cloud world where we're seeing it's not a fight anymore. You can't say I have a reason to keep things here in my data center, I'm never going to go to cloud, and other customers are saying I'm never going to have a data center, now everybody's saying we're probably going to have both. And Cisco as a networking company, this plays right into our strength because what you have to be able to do is now connect those environments in a secure way, in a manageable way. And so this plays right into where Cisco's growth I think is going to be, it'll be in much more of these kinds of services that allow that to happen, and in the relationships and partnerships that we have with the major cloud providers. >> This basically, the decomposition of monolithic applications into sets of microservices is connected by the network. >> Exactly right. >> This is the fundamental beauty of where you guys see that tailwind. >> Exactly. >> Awesome. Well Lew you've been a legend in the industry, I've been following your career from the beginning. You've been- you have product that's in the Computers Museum you've done amazing work at Sun Microsystems, I mean just a great story career, the work you've done at Cisco, you've been on theCUBE so many times, I don't know that number. You've really contributed to the industry and this news now about your situation, share the news about what's happening with you. >> Well I made announcements at our CNCF board and our OpenStack board meetings that I'm leaving Cisco and so I'm having to withdraw from the board positions as well as Cloud Foundry and that's sad in a way because I have relationships with those people, but it many ways after I want to spend some time to really see where the future is again, because as you know in my career I've changed several times. And I'm so looking forward to actually, now going into sort of a new direction which may be much more moving up the stack. I think there's very exciting things going on in AI, there's exciting things going on in genomics. There's a lot of activity going on so we've been building this technology for a purpose to allow us to have those kinds of things. Now I want to start focusing much more directly. >> And you're leaving Cisco on what date? >> Leaving Cisco beginning of January. >> Well congratulations, great work and I think one of the trends I think this speaks to is I see a lot of computer scientists, a lot of people who have some DNA from the old ways like you do, and been there, and contributed at a seminal level, just some great contributions. Seeing computer science as an opportunity to solve problems. This is kind of a renaissance from seasoned pioneers and young people coming together. This is a great opportunity, is that kind of what you're thinking, you're just going to attack the problem? >> There's 8000 people here, this show's sold out and this is all developers so people who have background in computer science or are getting online and learning it themselves, this is an opportunity and the time to get in. >> You've been a great mentor to many, you've been a great contributor in the open source community, again, your contributions at the systems level and you understand certainly what's going on with CloudNative, looking forward to following up and congratulations. >> Yep, well I hope to be back again. >> Of course, you're VIP CUBE alumni. Lew Tucker, exciting news, Cisco's transformed. He's moving on to- taking on some big new challenges, thanks for coming on theCUBE really appreciate it. Lew Tucker, Vice President CTO systems, Cisco systems, moving on to some new endeavors. Here in theCUBE we're covering the live coverage here at KubeCon CloudNative I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, back with more day two interviews after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube, covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Net App and The Cube's ecosystem partnership. >> Welcome back, we're here live at The Cube here in Orlando, Florida, for Cisco Live 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman have been co-hosts all week here for three days live coverage. Day one and I'm winding down. Great keynotes, CEO of Cisco laying out the next generation network and it's not just the old networking, it's a whole nother thing. Our next guest is Salman Asadullah, who is the CTO and VP in Engineering at Netnology.io. Like technology, Netnology.io, former Cisco fellow been twenty- >> Distinguished engineer. >> Distinguished engineer, sorry, fellow engineer, well you look distinguished today. So how many years have you been at Cisco? >> 22 years. >> 22 years, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for the invitation. >> So I got to ask you, before I get into the company, which we were talking before we came on camera, you doing really, I think you're on the front end of a big wave we see, certainly in The Cube, but you've been at Cisco 20 years and I've been working with Cisco since the beginning of time, 1993, in some capacity or another in the industry and I've had friends that have sold companies to Cisco. There's always been a debate within Cisco's engineering organization as to how to move up the stack. One team, yes no. So there's been but now it's time. Can you add some color and reaction to that because I think that's kind of where it is now. So all those conversations, even go back 15 years ago, where in the stack should we go? What's the right time? How about some of the history of Cisco and now they're moving up the stack. >> Yeah so I think first of all just to start with, our company name is Netnology.io but our tagline is full stack system integrator because we call ourselves a full stack system integrator because we know end networking, we know Cisco but we know how to move up in the stack as well. With the APIs and the STKs and what not. So the thing what is happened when you kind of look into this from Cisco's perspective, and I was there for 22 years, I am what I am because of Cisco, like when people say in Cisco when they work in Cisco I am Cisco but I still say I am Cisco because all of our business, 70% of our business is around Cisco. But the thing is when people are in Cisco, from Cisco's perspective when they say okay we are a software company and all of that good stuff, they look at the software from a networking perspective but the world, the industry when they say software, they are kind of talking about up in the stack from the application perspective. This is what you see even in Cisco they are sort of trying to pivot and all of the requisitions which are happening is around that. That they are acquiring companies which are basically up in the stack. There are more application based companies and also they are building organically some stuff in there as well. >> What's interesting is that the trend is their friend right now because they are getting to have their cake and eat it too. They are going to have best of both worlds. The networking is becoming more and more important with something to find and then you've got Kubernetes which Google Cloud is out there on the stage today. You've got Kubernetes and containers and Service Mesh is coming on that all look like networking. It's got words like policy, QOS, I mean this is networking world moving it up the stack. What does that mean for a customer? Is that the path in your mind? >> Yeah and I'm a big believer of that. I'm a big believer of that even before leaving Cisco for last five years of Cisco, I was basically working around all of these SDN, NFE, APIs and making sure in organizations I was leading or I was part of that how do I enable our engineering force to do some of that, to gain those capabilities. This is what we are trying to mimic on a much smaller scale in our company. That the way we sort of call it we are a bunch of hybrid engineers. The people who are CCIs but they can also code as well. This is our sort of a focus because just like what you said John, five years ago or three years ago when people talked about this stuff it was only about if you are a data center, cloud these things matter. But now, if you really see all Cisco's solutions are around APIs, around STKs, around SDN and NFE concepts. So let's say if you look into Cisco enterprise solution like SDA or SDVAN it's all around that. If you look into collaboration, Spark, Intropo it's all around that. So the point is that for any network, for any engineer or any organization to get to the next level they have to go through this evolution. >> And that's scaling too then. The network's got to scale and the new software environment. >> You bet. >> So there has been a big debate in the networking world, Salman, for many years, okay I ran networks, wait I have to be a coder. Maybe there's not that skillset. Will my solution providers and my software providers and the platforms I build on take care of some of that or is the traditional role of the network dead? You're saying your company's got a hybrid role but what percentage of people that are the CCIEs and the network admins today, how many of them need to be coding, developing, working with APIs and everything in the future? >> Yeah I think the way I sort of look at it that there's some push back. There is some push back but mainly more in the younger generation. They get it, they get it because if I give you an example of our company, we have 15 to 20 people company, the last two hires we had these were fresh grads, computer science grads and what I asked them to do, first six months go get your CCNA so then they start to understand some of the basics of the networking so they can work with our senior CCI engineers who know how to write 50 lines of five tone script but they can work with the coders to get bigger things developed. >> That's the new strategy from millennials. Throw them in CIE training, get them up to speed. Okay I got to ask you the question, because I want Netnology, the company that you're the co-founder of, is small but you're doing a unique thing. You're taking and SIE approach, obviously Cisco DNA is in your blood, you in the Cisco family if you will, but you still got to work with other platforms like Amazon and what not, as you guys go out there is a trend towards automation and we're seeing that professional services, whether they are from global SIs, the trend is towards accelerating down the cycle of deployment, faster, faster, faster, it's almost like the old days was eight months to roll out an SAP deployment, now that's eight weeks, now is it going to be eight minutes. This is the trend, it requires automation, what is your vision on how this is going to pan out going forward because this is the beginning of a new kind of Cloud scale at a service level. What's your vision? >> So if you really see from the compute world guys they were already doing that stuff for the longest time and they always asked us, the networking people, how come if my CAPEX is 30% but my OPPEX is 70% when it comes to the networking because we were lacking all of those capabilities. And the reason was that all the vendors they had these closed systems but now with this whole trend of SDN, NFE, people want to have more control. Cisco, and a lot of the vendors, they have all opened up their APIs and given the SD case so now you have the capability to go and take this talk to the compute guys. Say you are ahead of the game but we are catching up as well. By using all of these different tools what we are using in our deployments day in and day out. So if I give you an example, recently we did a project for a customer which was a multi-vendor fabric, VXLAN fabric, for data center, and we automated that whole deployment using Ansible Tower. So the thing is that if you would have done that manually, my God it would have taken a long time but now you can do it in minutes. >> Sal, talk about the Devnet explosion, because obviously we've reported all day today it came out in the keynote, over half a million developers are on Devnet, Susie Wee who's heading up Devnet and now Devnet Create which is the Cloud version of Devnet. Those two worlds are coming together and you're seeing network guys, even old school folks, adopting Cloud Navis. A natural migration and the younger guys are going and get networking as you pointed out. Devnet's been popular, you're seeing some great demos here. You can get a free Meraki Switch if you can code a little bit, take it home with you and play with it. A lot of tools, a lot of APIs as you're talking about, this is the new software development environment. What are you guys doing with Devnet? Can you share some insight into some of the things that you're doing that's relevant? Things that you're kicking the tires on? What's up? >> So first of all, to start with, we do a lot of work with Cisco Devnet and we are so humbled and honored by that because we get to learn while we are working on a lot of cool stuff. Then we can go sell that to our customers. Just to kind of tell you tomorrow, Susie Wee is announcing Devnet's cord exchange you might have heard about. So we are among those few partners who have contributed to that cord exchange. So we have put our code for everybody go get it, play with it, like we couple of use cases we have shared on that cord exchange, free for everybody. Think about you have Cisco VNFs running on AWFs how would you use cisco Cloud Center to model and deploy that service on AWFs? Using the APIs and then in the back end we have done scripting using Python and Shell and Ansible. These sort of things. And also we have a booth over here at the Devnet zone partner village and we are demonstrating some of these demos over there as well. >> That's really the standard now, people are getting the scale up in multiple clouds then deploying. That seems to be the big trend, automation there. >> Oh yeah, because as I said, the way we are partnered with Cisco we are also partnering with AWS and GCP so we have close to 35 certifications in our team including 13 CCIs. >> You're a veteran at Cisco, obviously to work at Cisco that long it's very entrepreneurial inside so it's always kind of been there. It's still a big company even when you were there but not you're an entrepreneur. What's it like on the other side? >> Oh my god, I'm living someone's dream. I'm blessed to be afford to do this. It's an awesome time for us. Of course it's a little stressful. >> Heavy lift there huh? It's not easy right? >> Me being in the silicon valley and I wanted to kind of do this but I tell you I recently Cisco included me in the Cisco designated VIP, which is a very selected group of people and worldwide, so I'm one of those people and I wrote a blog about that and I said something in there that although I have left Cisco but I don't feel like I've left Cisco because I'm still you know- >> Extended family. >> Yeah extended family. >> So what's up for the company, what's next? What's you're mission? Are you hiring? What are you working on? Share some insight into what's next for you guys? What's on your road map? >> So it's the growing pains. It's the growing pains, we are growing, our work is expanding. We are basically hiring some good talent. But more exciting something that we are also building a platform. So hopefully in the next six months we are going to be releasing something around that as well. Because again, think about we are recently named as a top 10 SDN providers by Enterprise Networking Magazine, so we are focusing on three Cisco SDN solutions. SDI in data center, SDA in branch and campus, and SDVAN on the VAN side. Now think about that you have segmentation in all of these solutions. How you can simplify this whole thing. How you can map these different perimeters between these three different solutions. So we are working on some cool ideas and some product as well so that's something really exciting for us. >> Are you guys self funded? >> Until now we are all privately funded. >> Sal, I'll put the hard question to you. As a startup, congratulations by the way, we know all about startups, we started a startup ourselves, it's growing pains but it's fun. It's hard work but it's a whole different joy. What problem are you solving? When you look at hiring an engineer what's the tough problem that you guys are trying to tackle? If you could boil it down into, the full stack great mission, what's the hard problem that you guys are trying to solve? >> So we just want to further simplify the Cisco story. As a matter of fact, in some of these SDN NFE based environments, that's our goal. How we can further simplify it. We are small enough that we can tackle some of these things. >> So tackle the complexity, that's where your mission is? >> Yes. >> Salman, thanks for coming on The Cube. Great to meet you, great to have you here. Thanks for sharing your insight here on The Cube with us live here- >> Very good, I appreciate the opportunity. >> Yeah let's follow up, love what you do. I think the future is going to be changing the game on how professional services are built, deployed and leveraged. Certainly code sharing. Collaboration is the new competitive behavior. You don't have to beat the other guy to win, you can work together. This is the new normal. This is what's going on at Cisco Live. Here in The Cube we're bringing you all the content. Stay with us, we'll see you tomorrow for day two of coverage. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose it's The Cube presenting Big Data, Silicon Valley brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Good morning. Welcome to The Cube. We are on day two of our coverage our event Big Data SV. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're down the street from the Strata Data Conference. This is The Cube's tenth big data event and we had a great day yesterday learning a lot from myriad guests on very different nuances of big data journey where things are going. We're excited to welcome back to The Cube an alumni, Octavian Tanase, the Senior Vice President of Data ONTAP fron Net App. Octavian, welcome back to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> So you've been at the Strata Data Conference for the last couple of days. From a big data perspective, what are some of the things that you're hearing, in terms of from a customer's perspective on what's working, what challenges, opportunities? I'm very excited to be here and learn about the innovation of our partners in the industry and share with our partners and our customers what we're doing to enable them to drive more value out of that data. The reality is that data has become the 21st Century gold or oil that powers the business and everybody's looking to apply new techniques, a lot of times machine learning, deep learning, to draw more value of the data, make better decisions and compete in the marketplace. Octavian, you've been at NetApp now eight years and I've been watching NetApp, as we were talking about offline, for decades and I've seen the ebb and flow and this company has transformed many, many times. The latest, obviously cloud came in, flash came into play and then you're also going through a major transition in the customer based to clustered ONTAP. You seemed to negotiate that. NetApp is back, thriving, stock's up. What's happening at NetApp? What's the culture like these days? Give us the update. >> I think we've been very fortunate to have a CEO like George Kurian, who has been really focused on helping us do basically fewer things better, really focus on our core business, simplify our operations and continue to innovate and this is probably the area that I'm most excited about. It's always good to make sure that you accelerate the business, make it simpler for your customers and your partners to do business with you, but what you have to do is innovate. We are a product company. We are passionate about innovation. I believe that we are innovating with more pace than many of the startups in the space so that's probably the most exciting thing that has been part of our transformation. >> So let's talk about big data. Back in the day if you had a big data problem you would buy a big Unix box, maybe buy some Oracle licenses, try to put all your data into that box and that became your data warehouse. The brilliance of Hadoop was hey we can leave the data where it is. There's too much data to put into the box so we're going to bring five megabytes to code to a petabyte of data. And the other piece of it is CFOs loved it, because we're going to reduce the cost of our expensive data warehouse and we're going to buy off the shelf components: white box, servers and off the shelf disk drives. We're going to put that together and life will be good. Well as things matured, the old client-server days, it got very expensive, you needed enterprise grade. So where does NetApp fit into that equation, because originally big storage companies like NetApp, they weren't part of the equation? Has that changed? >> Absolutely. One of the things that has enabled that transformation, that change is we made a deliberate decision to focus on software defined and making sure that the ONTAP operating system is available wherever data is being created: on the edge in an IoT device, in the traditional data center or in the cloud. So we are in the unique position to enable analytics, big data, wherever those applications reside. One of the things that we've recently done is we've partnered with IDC and what the study, what the analysis has shown is that deploying in analytics, a Hadoop or NoSQL type of solution on top of NetApp is half the cost of DAS. So when you consider the cost of servers, the licenses that you're going to have to pay for, these commercial implementations of Hadoop as well as the storage and the data infrastructure, you are much better off choosing NetApp than a white box type of solution. >> Let's unpack that a little bit, because if I infer correctly from what you said normally you would say the operational costs are going to be dramatically lower, it's easier to manage a professional system like a NetApp ONTAP, it's integrated, great software, but am I hearing you correctly, you're saying the acquisition costs are actually less than if I'm buying white box? A lot of people are going to be skeptical about that, say Octavian no way, it's cheaper to buy white box stuff. Defend that statement. >> Absolutely. If you're looking at the whole solution that includes the server and the storage, what NetApp enables you to do if you're running the solution on top of ONTAP you reduce the need for so many servers. If you reduce that number you also reduce the licensing cost. Moreover, if you actually look at the core value proposition of the storage layer there, DAS typically makes three copies of the data. We don't. We are very greedy and we're making sure that you're using shared storage and we are applying a bunch of storage efficiency techniques to further compress, compact that data for world class storage efficiency. >> So cost efficiency is obviously a great benefit for any company when they're especially evolving, from a digital perspective. What are some of the business level benefits? You mentioned speed a minute ago. What is Data ONTAP and even ONTAP in the cloud enabling your enterprise customers to achieve at the business level, maybe from faster time to market, identifying with machine learning and AI new products? Give me an example of maybe a customer that you think really articulates the value that ONTAP in the cloud can deliver. >> One of the things that's really important is to have your data management capability, whatever the data is being produced so ONTAP being consumed either as a VM or a service ... I don't know if you've seen some of the partnerships that we have with AWS and Azure. We're able to offer the same rich data management capabilities, not only the traditional data center, but in the cloud. What that really enables customers to do is to simplify and have the same operating system, the same data management platform for the both the second platform traditional applications as well as for the third platform applications. I've seen a company like Adobe be very successful in deploying their infrastructure, their services not only on prem in their traditional data center, but using ONTAP Cloud. So we have more than about 1,500 customers right now that have adopted ONTAP in the AWS cloud. >> What are you seeing in terms of the adoption of flash and I'm particularly interested in the intersection of flash adoption and the developer angle, because we've seen, in certain instances, certain organizations are able to share data off of flash much more efficiently that you would be, for instance, of a spinning disk? Have you seen a developer impact in your customer base? >> Absolutely I think most of customers initially have adopted flash, because of high throughput and low latency. I think over time customers really understood and identified with the overall value proposition in cost of ownership in flash that it enables them to consolidate multiple workloads in a smaller footprint. So that enables you to then reduce the cost to operate that infrastructure and it really gives you a range of applications that you can deploy that you were never able to do that. Everybody's looking to do in place, in line analytics that now are possible, because of this fast media. Folks are looking to accelerate old applications in which they cannot invest anymore, but they just want to run faster. Flash also tends to be more reliable than traditional storage, so customers definitely appreciate that fewer things could go wrong so overall the value proposition of flash, it's all encompassing and we believe that in the near future flash will be the defacto standard in everybody's data center, whether it's on prem or in the cloud. >> How about backup and recovery in big data? We obviously, in the enterprise, very concerned about data protection. What's similar in big data? What's different and what's NetApp's angle on that? >> I think data protection and data security will never stop being important to our customers. Security's top of mind for everybody in the industry and it's a source of resume changing events, if you would, and they're typically not promotions. So we have invested a tremendous deal in certifications for HIPAA, for FIPS, we are enabling encryption, both at rest and in flight. We've done a lot of work to make sure that the encryption can happen in software layer, to make sure that we give the customers best storage class efficiency and what we're also leveraging is the innovation that ONTAP has done over many years to protect the data, replicate its snapshots, peering the data to the cloud. These are techniques that we're commonly using to reduce the cost of ownership, also protect the data the customers deploy. >> So security's still a hot topic and, like you said, it probably always will be, but it's a shared responsibility, right? So customers leveraging NetApps safe or on prem hybrid also using Azure or AWS, who's your target audience? If you're talking to the guys and gals that are still managing storage are you also having the CSO or the security guys come in, the gals, to understand we've got this appointment in Azure or AWS so we're going to bring in ONTAP to facilitate this? There's a shared responsibility of security. Who's at the table, from your perspective, in your customers that you need to help understand how they facilitate true security? >> It's definitely been a transformative event where more and more people in IQ organizations are involved in the decisions that are required to deploy the applications. There was a time when we would talk only to the storage admin. After a while we started talking to the application admin, the virtualization admin and now you're talking to the line of business who has that vested interest to make sure that they can harness the power of the data in their environment. So you have the CSO, you have the traditional infrastructure people, you have the app administration and you have the app owner, the business owner that are all at the table that are coming and looking to choose the best of breed solution for their data management. >> What are the conversations like with your CXO, executives? Everybody talks about digital transformation. It's kind of an overused term, but there's real substance when you actually peel the onion. What are you seeing as NetApp's role in effecting digital transformations within your customer base? >> I think we have a vision of how we can help enterprises take advantage of the digital transformation and adopt it. I think we have three tenants of that vision. Number one is we're helping customers harness the power of the cloud. Number two, we're looking to enable them to future proof their investments and build the next generation data center. And number three, nobody starts with a fresh slate so we're looking to help customers modernize their current infrastructure through storage. We have a lot of expertise in storage. We've helped, over time, customers time and again adopt disruptive technologies in nondisruptive ways. We're looking to adopt these technologies and trends on behalf of our customers and then help them use them in a seamless safe way. >> And continue their evolution to identify new revenue streams, new products, new opportunities and even probably give other lines of business access to this data that they need to understand is there value here, how can we harness it faster than our competitors, right? >> Absolutely. It's all about deriving value out of the data. I think earlier I called it the gold of the 21st Century. This is a trend that will continue. I believe there will be no enterprise or center that won't focus on using machine learning, deep learning, analytics to derive more value out of the data to find more customer touch points, to optimize their business to really compete in the marketplace. >> Data plus AI plus cloud economics are the new innovation drivers of the next 10, 20 years. >> Completely agree. >> Well Octavian thanks so much for spending time with us this morning sharing what's new at NetApp, some of the visions that you guys have and also some of the impact that you're making with customers. We look forward to having you back on the program in the near future. >> Thank you. Appreciate having the time. >> And for my cohost Dave Vellante I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube live on day two of coverage of our event, Big Data SV. We're at this really cool venue, Forager Tasting Room. Come down here, join us, get to hear all these great conversations. Stick around and we'll be right back with our next guest after a short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Midtown Manhattan. It's the CUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and its ecosystem sponsor. (electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live here in New York. This is the CUBE here in Manhattan for Big Data NYC's three days of coverage. We're one day three, things are starting to settle in, starting to see the patterns out there. I'll say it's Big Data week here, in conjunction with Hadoop World, formerly known as Strata Conference, Strata-Hadoop, Strata-Data, soon to be Strata-AI, soon to be Strata-IOT. Big Data, Mike Maccaux who's the Global Big Data Practice Lead at Dell EMC. We've been in this world now for multiple years and, well, what a riot it's been. >> Yeah, it has. It's been really interesting as the organizations have gone from their legacy systems, they have been modernizing. And we've sort of seen Big Data 1.0 a couple years ago. Big Data 2.0 and now we're moving on sort of the what's next? >> Yeah. >> And it's interesting because the Big Data space has really lagged the application space. You talk about microservices-based applications, and deploying in the cloud and stateless things. The data technologies and the data space has not quite caught up. The technology's there, but the thinking around it, and the deployment of those, it seems to be a slower, more methodical process. And so what we're seeing in a lot of enterprises is that the ones that got in early, have built out capabilities, are now looking for that, how do we get to the next level? How do we provide self-service? How do we enable our data scientists to be more productive within the enterprise, right? If you're a startup, it's easy, right? You're somewhere in the public cloud, you're using cloud based API, it's all fine. But if you're an enterprise, with the inertia of those legacy systems and governance and controls, it's a different problem to solve for. >> Let's just face it. We'll just call a spade a spade. Total cost of ownership was out of control. Hadoop was great, but it was built for something that tried to be something else as it evolved. And that's good also, because we need to decentralize and democratize the incumbent big data warehouse stuff. But let's face it, Hadoop is not the game anymore, it's everything else. >> Right, yep. >> Around it so, we've seen that, that's a couple years old. It's about business value right now. That seems to be the big thing. The separation between the players that can deliver value for the customers. >> Matt: Yep. >> And show a little bit of headroom for future AI things, they've seen that. And have the cloud on premise play. >> Yep. >> Right now, to me, that's the call here. What do you, do you agree? >> I absolutely see it. It's funny, you talk to organizations and they say, "We're going cloud, we're doing cloud." Well what does that mean? Can you even put your data in the cloud? Are you allowed to? How are you going to manage that? How are you going to govern that? How are you going to secure that? So many organizations, once they've asked those questions, they've realized, maybe we should start with the model of cloud on premise. And figure out what works and what doesn't. How do users actually want to self serve? What do we templatize for them? And what do we give them the freedom to do themselves? >> Yeah. >> And they sort of get their sea legs with that, and then we look at sort of a hybrid cloud model. How do we be able to span on premise, off premise, whatever your public cloud is, in a seamless way? Because we don't want to end up with the same thing that we had with mainframes decades ago, where it was, IBM had the best, it was the fastest, it was the most efficient, it was the new paradigm. And then 10 years later, organizations realized they were locked in, there was different technology. The same thing's true if you go cloud native. You're sort of locked in. So how do you be cloud agnostic? >> How do you get locked in a cloud native? You mean with Amazon? >> Or any of them, right? >> Okay. >> So they all have their own APIs that are really good for doing certain things. So Google's TensorFlow happens to be very good. >> Yeah. Amazon EMR. >> But you build applications that are using those native APIS, you're sort of locked. And maybe you want to switch to something else. How do you do that? So the idea is to-- >> That's why Kubernetes is so important, right now. That's a very key workload and orchestration container-based system. >> That's right, so we believe that containerization of workloads that you can define in one place, and deploy anywhere is the path forward, right? Deploy 'em on prem, deploy 'em in a private cloud, public cloud, it doesn't matter the infrastructure. Infrastructure's irrelevant. Just like Hadoop is sort of not that important anymore. >> So let me get your reaction on this. >> Yeah. So Dell EMC, so you guys have actually been a supplier. They've been the leading supplier, and now with Dell EMC across the portfolio of everything. From Dell computers, servers and what not, to storage, EMC's run the table on that for many generations. Yeah, there's people nippin' at your heels like Pure, okay that's fine. >> Sure. It's still storage is storage. You got to store the data somewhere, so storage will always be around. Here's what I heard from a CXO. This is the pattern I hear, but I'll just summarize it in one conversation. And then you can give a reaction to it. John, my life is hell. I have application development investment plan, it's just boot up all these new developers. New dev ops guys. We're going to do open source, I got to build that out. I got that, trying to get dev ops going on. >> Yep. >> That's a huge initiative. I got the security team. I'm unbundling from my IT department, into a new, difference in a reporting to the board. And then I got all this data governance crap underneath here, and then I got IOT over the top, and I still don't know where my security holes are. >> Yep. And you want to sell me what? (Matt laughs) So that's the fear. >> That's right. >> Their plates are full. How do you guys help that scenario? You walk in, actually security's pretty much, important obviously you can see that. But how do you walk into that conversation? >> Yeah, it's sort of stop the madness, right? >> (laughs) That's right. >> And all of that matters-- >> No, but this is all critical. Every room in the house is on fire. >> It is. >> And I got to get my house in order, so your comment to me better not be hype. TensorFlow, don't give me this TensorFlow stuff. >> That's right. >> I want real deal. >> Right, I need, my guys are-- >> I love TensorFlow but, doesn't put the fire out. >> They just want spark, right? I need to speed up my-- >> John: All right, so how do you help me? >> So, what we'd do is, we want to complement and augment their existing capabilities with better ways of scaling their architecture. So let's help them containerize their big data workload so that they can deploy them anywhere. Let's help them define centralized security policies that can be defined once and enforced everywhere, so that now we have a way to automate the deployment of environments. And users can bring their own tools. They can bring their data from outside, but because we have intelligent centralized policies, we can enforce that. And so with our elastic data platform, we are doing that with partners in the industry, Blue Talent and Blue Data, they provide that capability on top of whatever the customer's infrastructure is. >> How important is it to you guys that Dell EMC are partnering. I know Michael Dell talks about it all the time, so I know it's important. But I want to hear your reaction. Down in the trenches, you're in the front lines, providing the value, pulling things together. Partnerships seem to be really important. Explain how you look at that, how you guys do your partners. You mentioned Blue Talent and Blue Data. >> That's right, well I'm in the consulting organization. So we are on the front lines. We are dealing with customers day in and day out. And they want us to help them solve their problems, not put more of our kit in their data centers, on their desktops. And so partnering is really key, and our job is to find where the problems are with our customers, and find the best tool for the best job. The right thing for the right workload. And you know what? If the customer says, "We're moving to Amazon," then Dell EMC might not sell any more compute infrastructure to that customer. They might, we might not, right? But it's our job to help them get there, and by partnering with organizations, we can help that seamless. And that strengthens the relationship, and they're going to purchase-- >> So you're saying that you will put the customer over Dell EMC? >> Well, the customer is number one to Dell EMC. Net promoter score is one of the most important metrics that we have-- >> Just want to make sure get on the record, and that's important, 'cause Amazon, and you know, we saw it in Net App. I've got to say, give Net App credit. They heard from customers early on that Amazon was important. They started building into Amazon support. So people saying, "Are you crazy?" VMware, everyone's saying, "Hey you capitulated "by going to Amazon." Turns out that that was a damn good move. >> That's right. >> For Kelsinger. >> Yep. >> Look at VM World. They're going to own the cloud service provider market as an arms dealer. >> Yep. >> I mean, you would have thought that a year ago, no way. And then when they did the deal, they said, >> We have really smart leadership in the organization. Obviously Michael is a brilliant man. And it sort of trickles on down. It's customer first, solve the customer's problems, build the relationship with them, and there will be other things that come, right? There will be other needs, other workloads. We do happen to have a private cloud solution with Virtustream. Some of these customers need that intermediary step, before they go full public, with a hosted private solution using a Virtustream. >> All right, so what's the, final question, so what's the number one thing you're working on right now with customers? What's the pattern? You got the stack rank, you're requests, your deliverables, where you spend your time. What's the top things you're working on? >> The top thing right now is scaling architectures. So getting organizations past, they've already got their first 20 use cases. They've already got lakes, they got pedabytes in there. How do we enable self service so that we can actually bring that business value back, as you mentioned. Bring that business value back by making those data scientists productive. That's number one. Number two is aligning that to overall strategy. So organizations want to monetize their data, but they don't really know what that means. And so, within a consulting practice, we help our customers define, and put a road map in place, to align that strategy to their goals, the policies, the security, the GDP, or the regulations. You have to marry the business and the technology together. You can't do either one in isolation. Or ultimately, you're not going to be efficient. >> All right, and just your take on Big Data NYC this year. What's going on in Manhattan this year? What's the big trend from your standpoint? That you could take away from this show besides it becoming a sprawl of you know, everyone just promoting their wares. I mean it's a big, hyped show that O'Reilly does, >> It is. >> But in general, what's the takeaway from the signal? >> It was good hearing from customers this year. Customer segments, I hope to see more of that in the future. Not all just vendors showing their wares. Hearing customers actually talk about the pain and the success that they've had. So the Barclay session where they went up and they talked about their entire journey. It was a packed room, standing room only. They described their journey. And I saw other banks walk up to them and say, "We're feeling the same thing." And this is a highly competitive financial services space. >> Yeah, we had Packsotta's customer on Standard Bank. They came off about their journey, and how they're wrangling automating. Automating's the big thing. Machine learning, automation, no doubt. If people aren't looking at that, they're dead in my mind. I mean, that's what I'm seeing. >> That's right. And you have to get your house in order before you can start doing the fancy gardening. >> John: Yeah. >> And organizations aspire to do the gardening, right? >> I couldn't agree more. You got to be able to drive the car, you got to know how to drive the car if you want to actually play in this game. But it's a good example, the house. Got to get the house in order. Rooms are on fire (laughs) right? Put the fires out, retrench. That's why private cloud's kicking ass right now. I'm telling you right now. Wikibon nailed it in their true private cloud survey. No other firm nailed this. They nailed it, and it went viral. And that is, private cloud is working and growing faster than some areas because the fact of the matter is, there's some bursting through the clouds, and great use cases in the cloud. But, >> Yep. >> People have to get the ops right on premise. >> Matt: That's right, yep. >> I'm not saying on premise is going to be the future. >> Not forever. >> I'm just saying that the stack and rack operational model is going cloud model. >> Yes. >> John: That's absolutely happening, that's growing. You agree? >> Absolutely, we completely, we see that pattern over and over and over again. And it's the Goldilocks problem. There's the organizations that say, "We're never going to go cloud." There's the organizations that say, "We're going to go full cloud." For big data workloads, I think there's an intermediary for the next couple years, while we figure out operating pulse. >> This evolution, what's fun about the market right now, and it's clear to me that, people who try to get a spot too early, there's too many diseconomies of scale. >> Yep. >> Let the evolution, Kubernetes looking good off the tee right now. Docker containers and containerization in general's happened. >> Yep. >> Happening, dev ops is going mainstream. >> Yep. >> So that's going to develop. While that's developing, you get your house in order, and certainly go to the cloud for bursting, and other green field opportunities. >> Sure. >> No doubt. >> But wait until everything's teed up. >> That's right, the right workload in the right place. >> I mean Amazon's got thousands of enterprises using the cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's not like people aren't using the cloud. >> No, they're, yeah. >> It's not 100% yet. (laughs) >> And what's the workload, right? What data can you put there? Do you know what data you're putting there? How do you secure that? And how do you do that in a repeatable way. Yeah, and you think cloud's driving the big data market right now. That's what I was saying earlier. I was saying, I think that the cloud is the unsubtext of this show. >> It's enabling. I don't know if it's driving, but it's the enabling factor. It allows for that scale and speed. >> It accelerates. >> Yeah. >> It accelerates... >> That's a better word, accelerates. >> Accelerates that horizontally scalable. Mike, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate it. More live action we're going to have some partners on with you guys. Next, stay with us. Live in Manhattan, this is the CUBE. (electronic music)