>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana it's the Cube, covering Dot Next Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here at the Cube in New Orleans, the Nutanix Dot Next Conference. Joining me is Keith Townsend, going wall-to-wall with interviews for two days. And going to dig into some really geeky techy stuff, Micro segmentation and the like. Happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests, Harjot Gill, who is the Senior Director of product and engineering at Nutanix and Rajiv Mirani, who's the CTO of Cloud Platform. Thank you both for joining us. >> Both: Thanks, thanks for having us. >> Alright, so Rajiv you've been with Nutanix for a bit, so we're going to get Harjot first. So we beat four acquisitions that Nutanix has made in the software space in the last year or so. One of them was Netsil. >> Harjot: Yes. >> So bring us back. You were and are the CEO of the Netsil Group. Tell us, kind of, a why of the company, size of the team, things like that. >> That's good yeah, so previously, as I was co-founder and CEO of Netsil, which I don't know whether you noticed, is listen spelled backwards. And, essentially, it was like microservices analytics platform and the core technology of Nexus was, where designers at University of Pennsylvania in the research group. That's where most of my team came from. It's a really small team, like just 10 engineers, who took on this like very interesting challenge in the industry as micro services were taking off, applications were, like, ported to modern platforms, like kubernetes. We saw an opportunity to take, like, a network centric approach in doing performance analysis and liability analysis. And the product that we built is very interesting. It can be thought of as, like, Google Maps for your cloud applications just like Splunk, in the past, was Google search for data center. So we came up with this concept where you can, like, visualize different abstractions and different virtualization layers of your application delivery. And that was our product. >> Alright, Rajiv, we've been talking about the, really, expansion of services that you're offering. You know, security and networking, obviously a big space. So first of all, not not a Stanford team that you brought in but University of Pennsylvania. Explain a little bit for us justification, how Netsil fits in with the Nutanix portfolio. >> Yeah, the Netsil Technology is unique in many different ways and we actually see a lot of different applications for it. The core product that they have today, the way they do performance monitoring by staying just on the network, not installing any host agents. It's pretty unusual. It's something that we really liked about the technology. The fact that they can do this at layer seven can actually look at application data to deep packet inspection at line speed. It's even more impressive. And they really build at the scale out architecture based on Harjot's research work. We looked at that and we said, "hey look, this can be used for performance monitoring, it can be used for application discovery, it can be used for security operations." There's just so many different directions we can take this in. And it's a great team that's built it with a relatively small number of people. We want these guys to be working with us not not as a separate company. And it moved very quickly. The acquisition happened quite quickly. We talked a little bit this morning about how they're going to use it for micro segmentation but there's many other use cases we see coming down the pike. >> So let's talk a little bit about the enterprise of applicability. You know, when you guys looked at it, you mainly looked at containers and the challenges of a micro, i'm sorry, of multi services and basically twelve fact applications. >> Harjot: Yeah. >> How is that applicable to the typical enterprise, which 90% of their applications are modern lifts. Same capability? What what capabilities are you bringing to Bear for traditional application? >> It's pretty applicable everywhere because network is a very stable source of truth, like what remains constant in the legacy as well as in the new world is your TCP/IP stack. And it's a very stable source of truth to tap into. So one of the value proposition that Netsil had with an offer very, like, the early enterprise customers that we signed up, was helping them migrate from this monolithic architectures to micro services. And their existing tools on the market, if you look at APM tools or even the logging tools, were inadequate when taking them on this journey. And you can think of Netsil as a very pervasive solution. I mean, the analogy that I usually give people is, like drones versus troops on the ground. Where Netsil can quickly set up, like a breadth of coverage in any environment, whether it's like Legacy or micro services, you are covered. And and then once you find issues in your environment with security issues or performance issues, you can systematically drill in. Either add more instrumentation creating or add policies with micro segmentation. That was the whole idea. So there was a gap in the market for this kind of a tool. >> So let's talk about integration of Nutanix. One of the, what I'm calling, first principles for Nutanix is, push button one click easy. >> [Harjot And Rajiv] Yes. >> What does the Netsil application look like in a Nutanix environment to the Nutanix administrator? >> So let's take the micro segmentation example again, right. So today, if you were to micro segment an existing application, it's pretty hard to know where to begin. So Netsil described it as a hairy problem but we know he likes hair. But what Netsil does is it takes all the data it's gathering from the network and it gives you all this visibility into how every part of your application is interacting with each other. You can group it in different ways, so it's not just about VMs talking to Vms. If you have a micro services based application, that's actually very little value. You really want, which services are talking to each service or even more, which service tiers are talking to which service tiers. But gathering all that data, we can actually fully automate the creation of micro segmentation policies for existing applications. So today what we saw was more of a manual thing. We've set it up previously. It's just that we haven't enough time to do integration yet. You expect that to become completely automated. Similarly with the remediation stuff, the troubleshooting stuff. We have it integrated with the Netsil technology, with the machine learning things that we have been working on. Once we do that, we can explain a lot more automated insights into your applications, integrated alert system, integrated with our metrics and stat systems. So a lot of work to do but a lot of potential for this technology, I think. >> So yeah, so it actually does solve this chicken and an egg problem, as Rajiv said, with actually making micro segmentation operational by first discovering these ground field apps and then suggesting policies, right? And all the goodness of Netsil will be brought on to, like, products like Prism, where out-of-the-box, Netsil can provide visibility and metrics for workloads such as VDI and all the packaged applications and all the Mongo Db and all of the stuff that is hosted on top of Nutanix platform and selling it to the same ID ops. >> Harjot, the space you're playing in is really changing so so fast. >> Harjot: Yes it is. >> Talk about micro segmentation and containers and serverless and the like. What, at its core, will allow your product to be able to stay up with the pace of change? >> So the code of the product, as I mentioned, I mean, it's network based, so one of the things, like, you get with that is, like, it's a very stable source of truth. So your languages keep evolving. So in if you look at the, I mean, this mind-boggling introduction of, like, open source technologies into enterprise environments, which you don't control what languages they are written in. And your developers are like picking up the latest and greatest tools. So in that world the core of the technology, which is like network based, still works the same and that allows us to be ,like, really future-proof this thing here. >> Languages of frameworks change. The network protocols are much more stable. >> Yet, to some people's chagrin, the protocols don't change. So let's talk a little bit about products and overlap of products. One of the, I think, confusing points, or can be confusing, is where Netsil fits in when it comes to Comm and overall to Zai. Where, where's the interaction and overlap or what's the relative? >> Yeah, so you can think of every workload in the cloud as a coup de loop, observe, orient, decide, and act. Now what Comm helps the customer is to like act faster, right. Whereas Netsil comes in and provides the observe and the orient piece. So it's all part of the same workload workflow. If you are an IT ops person, you need tools to observe and help orient, so you can decide faster. And tools like Comm and kubernetes, in the future, with one click, just a few clicks, you can make massive changes to your cloud infrastructure. But without observability you are just flying blind. That's where Netsil comes in. So that's why, as you've said, as Rajiv said, like it's going to enhance a lot of areas within Nutanix and, possibly like, even continue selling as a multi cloud monitoring solution. >> Just as we do brownfield input for micro segmentation, you can imagine that it would be a great great product for Comm as well. Being able to do brownfield import of applications and making them into Comm blueprints. >> Yeah, Rajiv, you've had some pent up demand from customers for the micro segmentation piece but give us a little bit.. You said there's other applications, what should we be expecting to see from the Netsil product line? >> So as CTU I can talk future, so let me tell you some stuff on the kubernete timelines. One great area for us to explore is around security operations. Since since Netsil is already in the net world looking at all traffic, it can easily establish a baseline, of which Vms, which containers normally talk to each other. What kind of requests to make. And it's registered at layer seven, so it can even go and look into what kind of API endpoints are normally called. And once it's base-lined this, detecting variation, selecting violations is going to be relatively simple. So we can alert on security violations, unusual behavior, services making calls to services that shouldn't be making calls to. All that kind of stuff. So that's one area for us to explore. We talked about Comm, so Comm can benefit greatly by being able to import brownfield applications into the Comm umbrella, making blueprints out of them. There's integrations with Prism Pro, which will enable the kind of metrics that Netsil is collecting and integrating it to what Prism Pro already does, putting into one single framework, adding it to capacity planning, adding in all the Prism Pro features that we have. So there's a lot of stuff we can do. >> So that's an awful lot of data. Where's this stored and what's the engine behind it? >> That's a great question. Actually, Netsil not only innovated in this unique way of collecting, we also invented a lot in-time series databases. So the back end of Netsil is powered by a database called Apache Druid, which is an OLAP time series database. So it can ingest that scale and you can run complex queries in sub-second latency XQ. So it can like summarize billions of data points at sub-second latencies. And the third thing that Netsil innovated is, in the visualizations. We are talking about, like, visualizing this complex data that is coming from these modern transforming environments. That's another area where Netsil innovated with this Maps interface to summarize and build easy-to-understand visualizations on your complex infrastructure. >> Now I'm scared that my head would explode but I would love to get you guys on with Satyam and talk through what additional data and when it comes to IOT machine learning, what additional insights. Quick question, are you guys working with Satyam at all at this point? >> We've started, like, understanding the lay of the land, so we're, like, still getting introduced to a lot of teams. As you guys know, these Nutanix is now growing very rapidly, there's so many areas to, like, learn about. And we are primarily working with a micro segmentation team right now but going forward, you will see Netsil's goodness being brought into other areas at Nutanix. >> Yeah, Rajiv one question I have from a software standpoint in general, where does AI fit into, you know, what you're doing with Zai and Comm? >> Yes, so for all of them, you know, we're using machine learning fairly extensively today to even do basic things like capacity planning, the what-if modeling that we've been doing. But to go beyond machine learning, if we actually invest in building an AI platform, I feel we can do a lot more in terms of root cause analysis and mediation, troubleshooting of applications, finding performance bottlenecks automatically. Essentially, really making that invisible infrastructure dream come true. We're close, we're not quite there yet. >> Yeah, and it's really about, like, getting quality data in without friction. So you have, like, AI is now being commoditized in the industry like all the algorithms are now like mainstream. So the biggest challenge has always been how do you go and capture the data at low friction? That's what Netsil brings onboard. >> Yeah, I'm super excited for the micro segmentation. Let's talk about what if customers... What has been the customer reaction to Netsil and just the new capability? >> We see a lot of excitement. This is micro segmentation barely been out, what, a couple of months at this point? And we already have fairly large customers deploying it out there, and a lot of demand for proof of concepts and so on at this point. It was very clear to us from the beginning that when people were looking at other SDN solutions, the number one use case they were using in the enterprise was for micro segmentation. So we took that, we made it as simple as we could. In true Nutanix fashion we said, "okay, let's make micro segmentation as one-click as we can." And it's been gratifying, I think, to see the initial reaction. In fact, some of the initial feedback we've gotten has been along the lines of, this is almost too simple. >> So one of the challenges that we've had in Enterprise is hybrid cloud. When you look at a EC2 instance and you have an internal database and the two communicate, that EC2 instance is ephemeral, we don't know how to handle that. Does Netsil address that challenge at all? >> It does, in fact, it's been designed for even a faster moving world of containers. I'll give you an example of kubernetes, it is, I mean, a similar example. So next Hill installs as a daemon set on kubernetes experiencing structure insertion. You are, like, independently inserting without developers. And as soon as it is installed, it's not just looking at packets, it's also like tapping into docker socket for metadata. So as soon as containers go up and down, new ones brought up, it actually pulls the metadata, the container IDs, the service IDs, kubernetes, pod names and whatnot. And then measures that to the metrics that we are collecting. So that in the UI, as you saw in the demo today, you're not so much slicing and dicing by IP addresses. You're slicing and dicing by that service tax, so your BMS can come and go, containers can come and go. But we are looking at the behavior of this group of cattle, and you know the cattle versus pets analogy, the whole idea in the new world is, to like, create these services as the new pets and your cattle are ephemeral, and the whole idea that Netsil can discover micro-services, discover the boundary of micro services by looking at layer 7 behavior and by smartly grouping things based on the behavior. So we know exactly what a MySQL database and different installations of MySQL look like based on the behavior and the query behavior, and group them together. >> So enforcement. And is that at the bot level or is that at the container level? >> So on the enforcement side, Netsil is mostly on the visibility. So on the micro segmentation side there is... >> Today micro-segmentation, of which for Vms as we build out our next version of container services, we are looking into building a micro segmentation for kubernetes as well, and that will be at the bot level. >> Alright Kieth, I'm looking forward to this is CTO advisor podcast, digging a little bit more into micro-segmentation. It may be Rajiv and.. >> We'll have them on for sure. >> ...and Harjot can stop by so time. But thank you gentlemen so much for coming. Congratulations on the update. Looking forward to hearing more. Keith and I have a little bit more here left of day one of Nutanix dot next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, Kieth Townsend. Thank you for watching the Cube. (Electronic Music)