>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. >> And we're back. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer, getting to the end of day two of three days of coverage here at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. Happy to welcome the program Sujal Das, who is the chief marketing and strategy officer at Netronome. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so we're getting through it, you know, really John and I have been digging into, you know, really where OpenStack is, talking to real people, deploying real clouds, where it fits into the multi cloud world. You know, networking is one of those things that took a little while to kind of bake out. Seems like every year we talk about Neutron and all the pieces that are there. But talk to us, Netronome, we know you guys make SmartNICs. You've got obviously some hardware involved when I hear a NIC, and you've got software. What's your involvement in OpenStack and what sort of things are you doing here at the show? >> Absolutely, thanks, Stu. So, we do SmartNIC platforms, so that includes both hardware and software that can be used in commercial office house servers. So with respect to OpenStack, I think the whole idea of STN with OpenStack is centered around the data plane that runs on the server, things such as the Open vSwitch, or Virtual Router, and they're evolving new data planes coming into the market. So we offload and accelerate the data plane in our SmartNICs, because the SmartNICs are programmable, we can evolve the feature set very quickly. So in fact, we have software releases that come out every six months that keep up to speed with OpenStack releases and Open vSwitches. So that's what we do in terms of providing a higher performance OpenStack environment so to say. >> Yeah, so I spent a good part of my career working on that part of the stack, if you will, and the balance is always like, right, what do you build into the hardware? Do I have accelerators? Is this the software that does, you know, usually in the short term hardware can take it care of it, but in the long term you follow the, you know, just development cycles, software tends to win in terms, so, you know. Where are we with where functionality is, what differentiates what you offer compared to others in the market? >> Absolutely. So we see a significant trend in terms of the role of a coprocessor to the x86 or evolving ARM-based servers, right, and the workloads are shifting rapidly. You know, with the need for higher performance, more efficiency in the server, you need coprocessors. So we make, essentially, coprocessors that accelerate networking. And that sits next to an x86 on a SmartNIC. The important differentiation we have is that we are able to pack a lot of cores on a very small form factor hardware device. As many as 120 cores that are optimized for networking. And by able to do that, we're able to deliver very high performance at the lowest cost and power. >> Can you speak to us, just, you know, what's the use case for that? You know, we talk about scale and performance. Who are your primary customers for this? Is this kind of broad spectrum, or, you know, certain industries or use cases that pop out. >> Sure, so we have three core market segments that we go after, right? One is the innovene construction market, where we see a lot of OpenStack use, for example. We also have the traditional cloud data center providers who are looking at accelerating even SmartNICs. And lastly the security market, that's kind of been our legacy market that we have grown up with. With security kind of moving away from appliances to more distributed security, those are our key three market segments that we go after. >> The irony is, in this world of cloud, hardware still matters, right? Not only does hardware, like, you're packing a huger number of cores into a NIC, so that hardware matters. But, one of the reasons that it matters now is because of the rise of this latest generation of solid-state storage, right? People are driving more and more IO. Do you see, what are the trends that you're seeing in terms of storage IO and IO in general in the data center? >> Absolutely. So I think the large data centers of the world, they showed the way in terms of how to do storage, especially with SSDs, what they call disaggregated storage, essentially being able to use the storage on each server and being able to aggregate those together into a pool of storage resources and its being called hyperconverged. I think companies like Nutanix have found a lot of success in that market. What I believe is going to happen in the next phase is hyperconvergence 2.0 where we're going to go beyond security, which essentially addressed TCO and being able to do more with less, but the next level would be hyperconvergence around security where you'd have distributed security in all servers and also telemetry. So basically your storage appliance is going away with hyperconvergence 1.0, but with the next generation of hyperconvergence we'd see the secured appliances and the monitoring appliances sort of going away and becoming all integrated in the server infrastructure to allow for better service levels and scalability. >> So what's the relationship between distributed security and then the need for more bandwidth at the back plane? >> Absolutely. So when you move security into the server, the processing requirements in the server goes up. And typically with all security processing, it's a lot of what's called flow processing or match-action processing. And those are typically not suitable for a general purpose server like the ARM or the x86, but that's where you need specialized coprocessors, kind of like the world of GPUs doing well in the artificial intelligence applications. I think the same example here. When you have security, telemetry, et cetera being done in each server, you need special purpose processing to do that at the lowest cost and power. >> Sujal, you mentioned that you've got solutioned into the public cloud. Are those the big hyperscale guys? Is it service providers? I'm curious if you could give a little color there. >> Yes, so these are both tier one and tier two service providers in the cloud market as well as the telco service providers, more in the NFV side. But we see a common theme here in terms of wanting to do security and things like telemetry. Telemetry is becoming a hot topic. Something called in-band telemetry that we are actually demonstrating at our booth and also speaking about with some our partners at the show, such as with Mirantis, Red Hat, and Juniper. Where doing all of these on each server is becoming a requirement. >> When I hear you talk, I think about here at OpenStack, we're talking about the hybrid or multi cloud world and especially something like security and telemetry I need to handle my data center, I need to handle the public cloud, and even when I start to get into that IoT edge environment, we know that the service area for attack just gets orders of magnitude larger, therefore we need security that can span across those. Are you touching all of those pieces, maybe give us a little bit of, dive into it. >> Absolutely, I think a great example is DDoS, right, distributed denial of service attacks. And today you know you have these kind of attacks happening from computers, right. Look at the environment where you have IoTs, right, you have tons and tons of small devices that can be hacked and could flood attacks into the data center. Look at the autonomous car or self-driving car phenomenon, where each car is equivalent to about 2,500 Internet users. So the number of users is going to scale so rapidly and the amount of attacks that could be proliferated from these kind of devices is going to be so high that people are looking at moving DDoS from the perimeter of the network to each server. And that's a great example that we're working with with a large service provider. >> I'm kind of curious how the systems take advantage of your technology. I can see it, some of it being transparent, like if you just want to jam more bits through the system, then that should be pretty transparent to the app and maybe even to the data plane and the virtual switches. But I'm guessing also there are probably some API or other software driven ways of doing, like to say, hey not only do I want you to jam more bits through there, but I want to do some packet inspection or I want to do some massaging or some QoS or I'm not sure what all these SmartNICs do. So is my model correct? Is that kind of the different ways of interacting with your technology? >> You're hitting a great point. A great question by the way, thank you. So the world has evolved from very custom ways of doing things, so proprietary ways of doing things, to more standard ways of doing things. And one thing that has kind of standardized so to say the data plane that does all of these functions that you mention, things like security or ACL roots or virtualization. Open vSwitch is a great example of a data plane that has kind of standardized how you do things. And there are a lot of new open source projects that are happening in the Linux Foundation, such as VPP for example. So each of these standardize the way you do it and then it becomes easier for vendors like us to implement a standard data plane and then work with the Linux kernel community in getting all of those things upstream, which we are working on. And then having the Red Hats of the world actually incorporate those into their distributions so that way the deployment model becomes much easier, right. And one of the topics of discussion with Red Hat that we presented today was exactly that, as to how do you make these kind of scales, scalability for security and telemetry, be more easily accessible to users through a Red Hat distribution, for example. >> Sujal, can you give us a little bit of just an overview of the sessions that Netronome has here at the show and what are the challenges that people are coming to that they're excited to meet with your company about? >> Absolutely, so we presented one session with Mirantis. Mirantis, as you know, is a huge OpenStack player. With Mirantis, we presented exactly the same, the problem statement that I was talking about. So when you try to do security with OpenStack, whether its stateless or stateful, your performance kind of tanks when you apply a lot of security policies, for example, on a per server basis that you can do with OpenStack. So when you use a SmartNIC, you essentially return a lot of the CPU cores to the revenue generating applications, right, so essentially operators are able to make more per server, make more money per server. That's a sense of what the value is, so that was the topic with Mirantis, who uses actually Open Contrail virtual router data plane in their solution. We also have presented with Juniper, which is also-- >> Stu: Speaking of Open Contrail. >> Yeah, so Juniper is another version of Contrail. So we're presenting a very similar product but that's with the commercial product from Juniper. And then we have yesterday presented with Red Hat. And Red Hat is based on Red Hat's OpenStack and their Open vSwitch based products where of course we are upstreaming a lot of these code bits that I talked about. But the value proposition is uniform across all of these vendors, which is when you do storage, sorry, security and telemetry and virtualization et cetera in a distributed way across all of your servers and get it for all of your appliances, you get better scale. But to achieve the efficiencies in the server, you need a SmartNIC such as ours. >> I'm curious, is the technology usually applied then at the per server level, is there a rack scale component too that needs to be there? >> It's on a per server basis, so it's the use cases like any other traditional NIC that you would use. So it looks and feels like any other NIC except that there is more processing cores in the hardware and there's more software involved. But again all of the software gets tightly integrated into the OS vendor's operating system and then the OpenStack environment. >> Got you. Well I guess you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much bandwidth. >> That's right, yeah. >> Sujal, share with our audience any interesting conversation you had or other takeaways you want people to have from the OpenStack Summit. >> Absolutely, so without naming specific customer names, we had one large data center service provider in Europe come in and their big pain point was latency. Latency going form the VM on one server to another server. And that's a huge pain point and their request was to be able to reduce that by 10x at least. And we're able to do that, so that's one use case that we have seen. The other is again relates to telemetry, you know, how... This is a telco service provider, so as they go into 5G and they have to service many different applications such as what they call network slices. One slice servicing the autonomous car applications. Another slice managing the video distribution, let's say, with something like Netflix, video streaming. Another one servicing the cellphone, something like a phone like this where the data requirements are not as high as some TV sitting in your home. So they need different kinds of SLA for each of these services. How do they slice and dice the network and how are they able to actually assess the rogue VM so to say that might cause performance to go down and affect SLAs, telemetry, or what is called in-band telemetry is a huge requirement for those applications. So I'm giving you like two, one is a data center operator. You know an infrastructure as a service, just want lower latency. And the other one is interest in telemetry. >> So, Sujal, final question I have for you. Look forward a little bit for us. You've got your strategy hat on. Netronome, OpenStack in general, what do you expect to see as we look throughout the year maybe if we're, you know, sitting down with you in Vancouver a year from now, what would you hope that we as an industry and as a company have accomplished? >> Absolutely, I think you know you'd see a lot of these products so to say that enable seamless integration of SmartNICs become available on a broad basis. I think that's one thing I would see happening in the next one year. The other big event is the whole notion of hyperconvergence that I talked about, right. I would see the notion of hyperconvergence move away from one of just storage focus to security and telemetry with OpenStack kind of addressing that from a cloud orchestration perspective. And also with each of those requirements, software defined networking which is being able to evolve your networking data plane rapidly in the run. These are all going to become mainstream. >> Sujal Das, pleasure catching up with you. John and I will be back to do the wrap-up for day two. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno beat)