>>Mm. >>Welcome back to the Cube. Special presentation. Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Brought to You by Cisco We're here with Vegas Rattana, who's the director of product management for you? CSS Cisco and James Leach, who was director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you again. >>Hey, thanks for having us. >>Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers and as organisations that they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, one of the most common challenges that they face. What are they telling you? How is Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >>Well, you know, first, I think that's a That's a great question. And, you know, the customer centric view is is the way that we've taken. Um, it's kind of the approach we've taken from Day one, right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for their customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the That's where the rubber meets your proverbial road. Um, with the customer. And I would say that you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications. For example, um, those require that we are able to move, um, and process large datasets really in real time. Um, and the other aspect of application, I think, to give our customers kind of some pose some challenges would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application. That application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can't keep up with today. So, um, that creates some some challenges around. How do I build the infrastructure? How do I write? Size it without over provisioning, for example. But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planting those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements and within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges. We see customers who are being forced to move away from the like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits. And they have to move to something like, um, Iraq server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have. And that creates a lot of opportunity for silo going. The infrastructure and those silos, in turn, create multiple operating models within the A data centre environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the the enemy here. Um, and then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratisation of of processing, if you will, right, so it's no longer just CPU focus. We have GPU. We have F p g A. We have things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can can manage this these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management at its core is really right size for for our customers and give them the most value when it when it meets the mark around scale and scope. Um, back in 2000 and nine, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put at the top of the rack, and that works great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, Right? So we're talking about hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centres across clouds. And, um, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those those operational pieces that that touched the application that touched the infrastructure. But they're not the same tool. They tend to be, um, disparate tools that have to be put together. So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of building their own tools. So, um, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >>Right? You know, Jim, I said in my my Open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS. But the X Series is the next generation, the generation of the next decade, which is really important cause you touched on a lot of things. These data intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So how's it going with the X Series? You made a big splash last year. What's the reception been in the field? >>Actually, it's been great. Um, you know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our UCS X series story. Um, I think that the main reason they relate to it as they helped create it, right, it was their feedback and their partnership that they gave us Really, those problem areas, those, uh, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add significant value. So, you know, since we brought you see s to market back in 2000 and nine, we had this unique architectural, um uh, paradigm that we created. And I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history. Um, in terms of growth, Um, what we're seeing now is X series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing, uh, both in terms of the number of customers. But also, more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using and the types of workloads are growing. Right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists not just, um, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, But we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. Um, I think the other piece, you know that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry and I think right now is a You know, a great example. Our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, um, at a kind of a new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any any of our competitors have seen. When they announced something, um, that was new to this space. So I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. Um, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game, Um, as it may have been in the past, Um, X series is out in front today, and we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched that series to the world. And, uh, you know, as we as we continue to do that, um, we're seeing, you know, again tremendous uptake from our customers. >>So thank you for that, Jim. So viscous. I was just on Twitter just today, actually talking about the gravitational pull. You've got the public clouds pulling C x o is one way. And you know I'm Prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud So organisations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away, and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that with that confusion with the X series. Right? So how so? Can you explain that? >>Sure. And and and that's the right, Uh, the context that you built up right there, Dave, if you walk into Enterprise Data Centre, you see platform of computer systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs. And hence you find Dr Note Driving system memory system, computing system, coordinate system and a variety of farm factors. When you do, you, for you and every one of them typically come with a variety of adapters and cables and so forth Just create silence of resources. Fabric is broad. The actress brought the power and cooling implications the rack, you know, the space challenges and above all, the multiple management plane that they come of it, which makes it very difficult for I t to have one common centre policy and enforce it all across across the firmware and software and so forth and then think about the great challenges of the baroness makes it even more complex as these go through the great references of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers. Uh, you know, really, uh, seeing Anna slowness in that agility and high burden, uh, in the cost of overall ownership, this is where the X rays powered by inter side. We have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more Asyl and drive lower tco and we are delivering it by doing three things. Three aspects of simplification first simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure and infrastructure, which removes the narrowness of fun factor and infrastructure which reduces direct from footprint that is required infrastructure were power and cooling better served in the Lord. Second, we want to simplify it with by delivering a cloud operating model where they can create the policy ones across compute network stories and deployed all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they are going to go through the next 23 years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity lowering down there. >>That's key. Less friction is is always a good thing now, of course, because we heard from the hyper flex guys earlier, they had news. Not to be outdone, you have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X series today? >>Absolutely. So we are following up on the excited, exciting extras announcement that we made in June last year. Day and we are now introducing three innovation on experience with the bowl of three things First, expand the supported World War and extra days. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third dramatically reduced the complex cities in the data centre by driving down the number of adapters and cables. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU note using a cable list and very unique X fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPS to the compute note in the model of form factor thereby, our customers can now power in AML workload on any workload that needs many more number of GPS. Second, we are bringing in GPS right onto the computer note and thereby the our customers can now fire up the accelerated video upload, for example, and turf, which is what you know we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology with the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and density is that we have on the computer note our customers can now fire up the big data workloads the F C I work. Lord, uh, the FDA has worked with all these workloads that have historically not lived in the model of form. Factor can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig and two and single board banned word and the multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco validated design to oversee a franchise. And third, the innovations in, uh, in the in the fifth and public again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, made the Internet adapter made with our general doctors or maybe the other stories adapters. They reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable so very, very excited about these three big announcements that we're making in this part of the great >>A lot There. You guys have been busy. So thank you for that. Because so, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have. Customers are adopting. What problems are they telling you that X series addresses and and how do they align with where where they want to go in the future? >>Um, that's a great question. I think if you go back to um and think about some of the things that we mentioned before. Um, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what the cost mentioned, I think, is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move again to kind of to the next level of, of taking advantage of some of these problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look, you know, I think the cost mentioned accelerated VD. That's a great example. Um, these are where customers you know, they need to have this dense compute. They need video acceleration, they need type policy management, right. And they need to be able to deploy these, um, these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X series right now, we're hitting the mark in every every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs. Um, and a lot of room to grow. Um, we have the the premier cloud based management. You know, hybrid cloud suite. Um uh, in the industry. Right. So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that that the cost just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the through the use of the X fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, uh, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, um, and an intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig and end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data again. You know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere be able to get the bandwidth that they need to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to that fit exactly their needs. This is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can take off right away with the infrastructure. As I mentioned, X fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here. We're talking about GPS today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPS that solve these lifecycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like it does for GPU. We can do that with storage or memory in the future, So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregate Asian that actually delivers right. It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing. This is something that that customers can really get value out of Day one. And then finally, I think the future readiness here. You know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPS going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve the drives, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together. It's critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with C XL with with some of the the PC express changes that are coming in the in the very near future. So we're ready to go X and the X fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers. Our customers are out there saying that you know, they want to buy into something like X Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future. We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt, um, their competition as well. So, um, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X Series brings And, um, again, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >>A lot of headroom, uh, for scale and the management piece is key. There just have time for one more question because talk to give us some nuggets on the road map. What's next for? For X X series that we can look forward to? >>Absolutely Dave, as as we talked about. And James also hinted this is the future radio architecture, a lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up no infantry place. And there we are, looking into enabling the customer journey as the transition from PCH in less than 4 to 5 to six without rip and replace as they embraced the Excel without rip and replace as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the desegregated memory desegregated P. C, A, r N B and dance drives and so forth. We're also looking forward to extract Brick Next Generation, which will and now that dynamic assignment of GPS anywhere within the chassis and much more. Um, so this this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the Enterprise Data Centre operations a lot more simpler and drive down the PCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on there. >>Okay, Thank you guys. We'll leave it there in a moment. I'll have some closing thoughts. >>Mhm

>> live from London, England. It's the queue covering a ws summat. London twenty nineteen, brought to you by Amazon Web services. >> Welcome back to London, Everybody. This is David Lamont and you watch the Cube. The leader and live tech coverage has been a incredible week for the Cube. Three events this week in London that we had six events worldwide. We started out yesterday with a public sector session. Special mini session We did for Teresa Carlson at eight of US headquarters. And we did it impact investor event last night, Of course. All day here at the eight of US Summit in London at Excel Centre. Twelve thousand people. We're going to wrap up now. My good friend Kim Myers here is the managing director of M. C. I experience Kim. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure. First time on the Cube You got to give you a sticker. >> Thank you. Make you know, great to see you is also great to be here >> to have you. So you are branding expert. We've had a lot of conversations about this. You and I go way back. Do you brand Is everything every touch point? I mean, you would tell me a story last night and I let you pick it up from here of Apple. You see the apple logo, but so why is Brandon so important? What's M. C I experience and how are you helping brands? >> Yeah, Well, Dave, I think it's really amazing, like this event today. You know, we have a lot of technology out there today. We're really digitally enabled, and that's great. I mean, it's amazing what we can do now with technology, but, you know, it also is a little distracting. And and some in fact, there was a recent study that said that kids air haven't developed social skills because there is, they feel more comfortable communicating online, you know? So I think the technology is really great and it's important. But that human human connection is really the thing that makes the difference. And I think brands are starting to recognize that that actually live experiences do cut through the clutter, the digital clutter and getting people together with common interests, getting them engaged. Letting them participate really makes a difference in terms of their affinity and loyalty and even advocacy for your brand. >> So M. C. I experience does that. >> Yeah, that's were essentially work with companies across a lot of industries, but certainly the tech industry. But helping companies, um, developed ways of engaging with their audiences and more meaningful ways. And actually, it's a very human centric approach. So basically the way we look at it is it's not so much about logistics. That's important. Of course, right. You gotta register people. You're gonna have so many breakout rooms got over that gotta, gotta thank you guys. But it's really more about understanding your audience on DH, where they drive benefit and making sure that you're meeting that need. And that's really where your band, your brand, starts to benefit. So we use a design thinking methodology. We're really very focused on the audience using empathy and ideation and you know, just really, really getting to know who those guys are like this crowd and making sure that every touch point of the experience, how it smells the temperature, the lighting, everything smells house. No, seventy percent of your memory is from smell, you know, and yet we never even think about >> it. It's weird when you run a defense, >> you don't even think about it. really. It's just like Exactly. So it's, uh, that sort of multi sensory, engaging aspect of what we do is what m. C. A Experienced specializes in and working with clients to help them sort of look at new ways of creating experiences that really engaged their audiences and really create community around those audiences in terms of loyal fans and customers. >> So we hear it at Amazon. You see this audience? Obviously a developer crowd? Yeah. Um what, do your thoughts here just walking around? >> Well, as I was saying, I think you know, we were talking about this earlier. You know, developer crowd doesn't like flashy marketing because they're suspicious of it, right? You think I like you? David Tyree? Exactly. Uh, Mrs Perfect Tone. I think the tone created here is great. It's a little rough and ready, and that's great. And that's how it should be because that's ah, developers and warranted in the content than the show. And I think it's got the audience bang on. >> So how do you use data to inform this brand experience? >> Yeah, so date is becoming obviously really important, and event technology is you know, it's amazing today the kinds of things we can do. I mean, we can track people and monitor them and take their temperature. I mean, if we want to, you know, you could do an amazing number of things, see >> how they smell >> exactly. And the thing about it is, that date is important. Of course it is. But insights even more important. And that means using data in the right way the right analytics asking the right questions, not just relying on demographics, but really getting to know people on building personas and understanding who your audience is. And I think it's the two things need to fit hand in hand in hand. >> Data is plentiful, actionable insights, you're saying are not necessary, >> not necessarily, not necessarily, and that that that, I think, is really, really important. You know, we call an empathy planning, but it's kind of like walking in the shoes of your audience like, would you like this? Would you be happy with this, or would you find this long queue to register annoying? You know, you have to sort of, you know, actually get in there, get in their shoes and and feel it just like you're going to feel it. >> Well, it's sometimes it's hard to predict it. It is. This is a pretty large venue. But it was packed today, but I don't think they could hold many more people. So I guess you have to say sorry. We've got to cut it off of this because of the experience. I mean, making hard decisions like that. Is that what you recommend? Yeah, >> I think of you. Well, the other thing, too, is, you know, our our attention span time. Someone told me recently that our attention spans like less than a gold fish. I don't know, I don't know anymore, but, you know, it's ah, you know what I want. One thing about the audience now is that they don't need to be polite, and they don't need to pay attention to boring content. And they don't need to do any of that because they're in power, right? Exactly. You know how many bent So I've been to where the entire audience is like looking at their phones with their ipads or the computers on DH checking out on the content, you know. So if you really want to engage people, you need to make sure that the experience really resonates with them. And having said that, you need to use technology because we live in this kind of on live world and people say to me like What's on line like you ever drive was sat Now you know you're driving, but you're being instructed by an application and a lot of what we do today, whether you're finding the bank on your phone, your dentist or your phone or you're doing this or that, we're connected in both ways. And so I think that's really important that we recognize that you can't tell people to turn their phones off. You can't necessarily, you know, use technology and interruptive way. It needs to be part of how people live their lives around this. >> So I have observed that we do a lot of these events and that's it becomes like rock concerts, and sometimes you say, Wow, this is a little over the top Now that's not from inferring right. That's not necessarily a bad thing. If your audience is into it, if your audience is, you know, some guy who provisions lungs, you know every day and gets out to Las Vegas once a year. Maybe that's an OK thing. I think it is. It's really understanding the audience. >> It is understanding the audience. And I think it is a good okay thing. And, you know, you want to have your audience entertained, engaged and, you know, have fun. And I want to tell people about it. Like I'm in Las Vegas. You're not, You know, they're like, you want people to get really fired up about what you're doing. And and and by the way, they're going to give your brand credit for that. They're going to say, you know, bam. I was at this event. Was it rocked? It was amazing. There was great entertainment. There is also a great content. There was great networking, you know, And the beer wasn't all that cheap. So, you know, you get all that stuff together and you have a really great time. >> So you're built your now building out a team? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about tell me about the team and your vision. >> Okay, So, m c. I is a big company. We're in sixty three countries around the world, so we're not small fry. But the truth is, you know, the A big part of our business had been P. C. A. Is PCO professional. Congress organizes a lot of association events, and that's something and meetings, planning. And that's one thing. And of course, today experiences. They're changing. And it's not about just the logistics. It's really about again. Understand your audience, using strategy and creative to create compelling experiences. And that's what I'm CIA experience is doing. And we're doing it here in the UK we're getting set up, and it's going really, really well, and we're going to roll it out, you know, it's going to It's going to go around the world. So, um, we're working with some Fantastic brand's doing some fantastic project so we're all really excited. >> So what? Follow up question. But other than that, you're awesome. You are. You really have been an expert at this. You've You've worked. You know, I'd G worked G p j worked at Freeman, and I'm not on. Yeah, yeah. You've seen it around too much. You've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. And now you've taken that experience and you're bringing it to M. C. I experience no pun intended and you're trying to build out a sort of a next generation experience from Butt. But other than the fact that you're awesome, why should I work with you? >> Well, I tell you, you know, I think that the most of the clients that we work with come to us saying, You know, we don't know. We don't know And I think that's really, really important. I always tell this story. It's called the It's called the Drunkards Paradox, where a drunk man is underneath the lamppost pounding the ground and another man walks by. And so So what do you doing? And he says, I'm looking for my keys. And so the other guy gets down on his hands and knees. He's padding around. And then he said, Did you drop your keys right here under the lamppost? Because no, I dropped them across the street in the dark. Well, then why are you looking here? Because the light is much better here. And I have I tell you that I have a lot of experience in this business and events professionals on DH. Even some experience agencies tend to look where the light is better not where the breakthrough ideas are, and I think we are committed to making sure that we were really closely replying to really understand their brand, really understand who they're trying to build relationships with and and beg, borrow and steal from other disciplines, you know, in an intersectional way to create new kinds of opportunities for engagement. >> One of the things that mantra inside one of the many monsters inside of Amazon has raised the bar. I was at their UK headquarters yesterday, and she raised the bar signs all over the place. It's not a rinse and repeat culture. That's really what you're saying here that is easy to rinse and repeat. It's easy to look for the keys where the light the light is better, right? But that's not transformational. That's not transformation. It's really awesome. Having I'LL give you the last word the conference >> are Well, I think the conference was It was a great day here, and I think, you know, just just testimony to that is how long people stayed and stayed till the very end. You know, they were they were engaged and lots of great conversations were going on, you know, so fantastic. Well done. A WS and Amazon Web services and, um, yeah. More to come. >> Pleasure having you. Thanks for coming. All right. Thank you for watching everybody. That's a wrap here from London. Check out silicon angle dot com for all the news. The cube dot net is where all you find all these videos. Wicked bond dot com for the research Is David Dante signing out from London? Thanks for watching.

>> From Sunnyvale California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering, Accelerate Your Journey to AI, Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, welcome to another conversation here from the Data Visionary Center at NetApp's headquarters in beautiful Sunnyvale California. I'm being joined today by Santosh Rao. Santosh is the Senior Technical Director at NetApp, Specifically Santosh we're going to talk about some of the challenges and opportunities associated with AI and how NetApp is making that possible. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you Peter, I'm excited to be here. Thank you for that. >> So, Santosh what is your role at Netapp? Why don't we start there. >> Wonderful, glad to be here, my name is Santosh Rao, I'm a Senior Technical Director at NetApp, part of the Product Operations group, and I've been here 10 years. My role is to drive up new lines of opportunity for NetApp, build up new product businesses. The most recent one has been AI. So I've been focused on bootstrapping and incubating the AI effort at NetApp for the last nine months now. Been excited to be part of this effort now. >> So nine months of talking, both internally, but spending time with customers too. What are customers telling you that are NetApp's opportunities, and what NetApp has to do to respond to those opportunities? >> That's a great question. We are seeing a lot of focus around expanding the digital transformation to really get value out of the data, and start looking at AI, and Deep Learning in particular, as a way to prove the ROI on the opportunities that they've had. AI and deep learning requires a tremendous amount of data. We're actually fascinated to see the amount of data sets that customers are starting to look at. A petabyte of data is sort of the minimum size of data set. So when you think about petabyte-scale data lakes. The first think you want to think about is how do you optimize the TCO for the solution. NetApp is seen as a leader in that, just because of our rich heritage of storage efficiency. A lot of these are video image and audio files, and so you're seeing a lot of unstructured data in general, and we're a leader in NFS as well. So a lot of that starts to come together from a NetApp perspective. And that's where customers see us as the leader in NFS, the leader in files, and the leader in storage efficiency, all coming together. >> And you want to join that together with some leadership, especially in GPU's, so that leads to NVIDIA. So you've announced an interesting partnership between NetApp and NVIDIA. How did that factor into your products, and where do you think that goes? >> It's kind of interesting how that came about, because when you look at the industry it's a small place. Some of the folks driving the NVIDIA leadership have been working with us in the past, when we've bootstrapped converged infrastructures with other vendors. We're known to have been a 10 year metro vendor in the converged infrastructure space. The way this came about was NVIDIA is clearly a leader in the GPU and AI acceleration from a computer perspective. But they're also seen as a long history of GPU virtualization and GPU graphics acceleration. When they look at NetApp, what NetApp brings to NVIDIA is just the converged infrastructure, the maturity of that solution, the depth that we have in the enterprise and the rich partner ecosystem. All of that starts to come together, and some of the players in this particular case, have had aligned in the past working on virtualization based conversion infrastructures in the past. It's an exciting time, we're really looking forward to working closely with NVIDIA. >> So NVIDIA brings these lighting fast machines, optimized for some of the new data types, data forms, data structures associated with AI. But they got to be fed, got to get the data to them. What is NetApp doing from a standpoint of the underlying hardware to improve the overall performance, and insure that these solutions really scream for customers? >> Yeah, it's kind of interesting, because when you look at how customers are designing this. They're thinking about digital transformation as, "What is the flow of that data? "What am I doing to create new sensors "and endpoints that create data? "How do I flow the data in? "How do I forecast how much data I'm going to "create quarter over quarter, year over year? "How many endpoints? what is the resolution of the data?" And then as that starts to come into the data center, they got to think about, where are the bottlenecks. So you start looking at a wide range of bottlenecks. You look at the edge data aggregation, then you start looking at network bandwidth to push data into the core data centers. You got to think smart about some of these things. For example, no matter how much network bandwidth you throw at it, you want to reduce the amount of data you're moving. Smart data movement technologies like SnapMirror, which NetApp brings to the table, are some things that we uniquely enable compared to others. The fact of the matter is when you take a common operating system, like ONTAP, and you can lear it across the Edge, Core and Cloud, that gives us some unnatural advantages. We can do things that you can't do in a silo. You've got a commodities server trying to push data, and having to do raw full copies of data into the data center. So we think smart data movement is a huge opportunity. When you look at the core, obviously it's a workhorse, and you've got the random sampling of data into this hardware. And we think the A800 is a workhorse built for AI. It is a best of a system in terms of performance, it does about 25 gigabytes per second just on a dual controller pair. You'll recall that we spent several number of years building out the foundation of Clustered ONTAP to allow us to scale to gigantic sizes. So 24 node or 12 controller pad A800 gets us to over 300 gigabytes per second, and over 11 million IOPS if you think about that. That's over about four to six times greater than anybody else in the industry. So when you think about NVIDIA investment in DGX and they're performance investment they've made there. We think only NetApp can keep up with that, in terms of performance. >> So 11 million IOPS, phenomenal performance for today. But the future is going to demand ever more. Where do you think these trends go? >> Well nobody really knows for sure. The most exciting part of this journey, is nobody knows where this is going. This is where you need to future proof customers, and you need to enable the technology to have sufficient legs, and the architecture to have sufficient legs. That no matter how it evolves and where customers go, the vendors working with customers can go there with them. And actually when customers look at NetApp and say, "You guys are working with the Cloud partners, "you're now working with NVIDIA. "And in the past you worked with a "variety of data source vendors. "So we think we can work with NetApp because, "you're not affiliated to any one of them, "and yet you're giving us that full range of solutions." So we think that performance is going to be key. Acceleration of compute workloads is going to demand orders of magnitude performance improvement. We think data set efficiencies and storage efficiencies is absolutely key. And we think you got to really look at PCO, because customers want to build these great solutions for the business, but they can't afford it unless vendors give them viable options. So it's really up to partners like NVIDIA and NetApp to work together to give customers the best of breed solutions that reduce the TCO, accelerate compute, accelerate the data pipeline, and yet, bring the cost of the overall solution down, and make it simple to deploy and pre integrated. These are the things customers are looking for and we think we have the best bet at getting there. >> So that leads to... Great summary, but that leads to some interesting observations on what customers should be basing their decisions on. What would you say are the two or three most crucial things that customers need to think about right now as a conceptualized, where to go with their AI application, or AI workloads, their AI projects and initiatives? >> So when customers are designing and building these solutions, they're thinking the entire data lifecycle. "How am I getting this new type of "data for digital transformation? "What is the ingestion architecture? "What are my data aggregation endpoints for ingestion? "How am I going to build out my AI data sources? "What are the types of data? "Am I collecting sensor data? Is it a variety of images? "Am I going to add in audio transcription? "Is there video feeds that come in over time?" So customers are having to think about the entire digital experience, the types of data, because that leads to the selection of data sources. For example, if you're going to be learning sensor data, you want to be looking at maybe graph databases. If you want to be learning log data, you're going to be looking at log analytics over time, as well as AI. You're going to look at video image and audio accordingly. Architecting these solutions requires an understanding of, what is your digital experience? How does that evolve over time? What is the right and optimal data source to learn that data, so that you get the best experience from a search, from an indexing, from a tiering, from analytics and AI? And then, what is the flow of that data? And how do you architect it for a global experience? How do you build out these data centers where you're not having to copy all data maybe, into your global headquarters. If you're a global company with presence across multiple Geo's, how do you architect for regional data centers to be self contained? Because we're looking at exabyte scale opportunities in some of these. I think that's pretty much the two or three things that I'd say, across the entire gamut of space here. >> Excellent, turning that then into some simple observations about the fact that data still is physical. There's latency issues, there's the cost of bandwidth issues. There's other types of issues. This notion of Edge, Core, Cloud. How do you see the ONTAP operating system, the ONTAP product set, facilitating being able to put data where it needs to be, while at the same time creating the options that a customer needs to use data as they need to use it? >> The fact of the matter is, these things cannot be achieved overnight. It takes a certain amount of foundational work, that, frankly, takes several years. The fact that ONTAP can run on small, form factor hardware at the edge is a journey that we started several years ago. The fact that ONTAP can run on commodity white box hardware, has been a journey that we have run over the last three, four years. Same thing in the Cloud, we have virtualized ONTAP to the point that it can run on all hyperscalers and now we are in the process of consuming ONTAP as a service, where you don't even know that it is an infrastructure product, or has been. So the process of building an Edge, Core, and Cloud data pipeline leverages the investments that we've made over time. When you think about the scale of compute, data and performance needed, that's a five to six year journey in Clustered ONTAP, if you look at NetApp's past. These are all elements that are coming together from a product and solution perspective. But the reality is that leveraging years and years of investment that NetApp engineering has made. In a a way that the industry really did not invest in the same areas. So when we compare and contrast what NetApp has done versus the rest of the industry. At a time when people were building monolithic engineered systems, we were building software defined architectures. At a time when they were building tightly cobbled system for traditional enterprise, we were building flexible, scale out systems, that assumed that you would want to scale in modular increments. Now as the world has shifted from enterprise into third platform and Webscale. We're finding all those investments NetApp made over the years is really starting to pay off for us. >> Including some of the investments in how AI can be used to handle how ONTAP operates at each of those different levels of scale. >> Absolutely, yes. >> Sontash Rao, Technical Director at NetApp, talking about AI, some of the new changes in the relationships between AI and storage. Thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit North America 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host John Troyer. Happy to welcome back a company we've spoken to a few times at events, Paddy Power Betfair. First time guest coming to us from across the pond, Dave Buckley who is the automation engineer with Paddy Power Betfair, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright, so first of all, you've been to a couple summits and we've talked to Paddy Power about OpenStack. Before we get into your specific implementation, tell us about your experience here this week and any compare, contrast to previous years. >> Yeah so I'm very lucky, I got to come to the previous two summits in North America. I guess what I've enjoyed this week, it's kind of a slight tilt towards, it's away from being purely OpenStack, kind of towards this open infrastructure kind of thing, 'cause like I said, especially last year in Boston, Q and NEs was becoming a big thing. Yeah, and kind of, the OpenStack Foundation becoming kind of more, not that it wasn't before, but more community-based and being part of the ecosystem. So, yeah, I think it's been quite interesting seeing that. >> Not to put words in your mouth but, it was even, the last year or two, it's more aware of some of the complimentary things and adding pieces. You know, we had, one of the interviews we did this week was person who's the SIC lead for the Kubernetes stuff, that sits under another Foundation, things like that. Yeah, exactly. It's been quite interesting this week, I guess, sort the Kata Container project, which wasn't something I'd been aware of before Monday morning basically. I remember we were sitting in the keynotes, and they were like, you can have this container-like thing which has all the speed of a container, but it's as secure as a BM. And you're thinking, how, how is that even possible? So I've really enjoyed, I got to go to one of the sessions yesterday, one of the technical introductions on that. >> Yeah, I always love, there's certain things where, okay, this is what I'm going to do with my schedule, and turns into, this got announced, or I didn't know about this, and you knew, blow up my schedule, let me change everything else. Yeah, exactly, I think you always, you can't, you have to be flexible, right? Adaptable, and as the week goes on you just go to what you think is interesting. >> John: So Dave, you and your company have been working with OpenStack for quite a while. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And you obviously run a system that needs to be stable. Right, needs to, you take care of betting and people's money. >> Dave: Exactly. >> So that needs to be solid. But I understand you recently went though an upgrade and have some experiences talking about that? Can you talk a little bit about where you are with your OpenStack implementation and that sort of migration? >> Sure. So, I guess it's about three years ago, it was Betfair at the time, so this was before the merger of the two companies. So Betfair started using OpenStack, and I think it was actually the last time the summit was here, in Vancouver. So a couple of my colleagues who were kind of the technical leads at the time. Steve Armstrong and Steve Perera, they flew out here, to kind of get a feel for OpenStack, what it was, talk to people who'd had experiences with it. I actually think that conference back then was very informative of what the platform today now looks like. So some of the conversations they had there with people like New Age Networks and Arista, which we used for the switching, but conversations they had there kind of ended up being now what we're using in production. I guess over the past couple of years, so the big thing that happened obviously was this merger between Paddy Power and Betfair, following that they had an exercise which they called the single customer platform, which is annoyingly, for a sys-admin guy, kind of like me, they, it's always been abbreviated to SCP, but you have to ignore that. So that was to kind of consolidate and integrate the Paddy Power and Betfair co-bases and put it on a single platform, which was our OpenStack and Nuage platform. So that kind of completed in January this year, so that's live, so basically the Paddy Power sports book has an entirely new website, all running on OpenStack. A lot quicker and more efficient then the previous version. So that's been a real success. And as part of that, I should say that stability is really vital, so kind of in our business. If the site is down we don't make any money, and if it happens during a big sporting event you have a big problem. >> Do you have a metric around that? What a minute or an hour of down time would be? >> So I guess it always depends, so the nature of our traffic is very spikey. So obviously when you have a big, it's on a Saturday in Europe, the football, soccer, maybe I should say, is like a very big deal. >> We have a global audience, football's okay. >> I'll stick with football then. >> We were all watching the royal wedding. >> I don't want to talk about that. The football, if you, we just get peak traffic on that day. And, even within the year, there's a thing called the Grand National, which is a big event in the UK, big horse racing, I guess like the Kentucky Derby. It's kind of when we get our maximum traffic in the year. Yeah, you always need to be prepared for that. So one of the things as you mentioned, we kind of look into upgrade OpenStack from Kilo to Newton. So we've been on Kilo from the start. We're using Red Hat's distribution of OpenStack, so what Red Hat offer is this, they have like every three releases I think it is? They have this long release life-cycle. So that's kind of the reason we're going to Newton, cause we have kind of the, then the support will go to 2021. [Stu] - But if I remember, it's Red Hat the OpenStack Platform 10. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And 13 is going to be queened as their next one that's going to be released. >> Exactly, so I think they just announced that this week, right? So I think at some point in the next year or two we'd be going to queens. >> How do you determine when you make that jump and anything around the upgrade process, you know, good and bad that you could share. >> Dave: Yeah, so I guess going from, we were overdue an upgrade in this case, Kilos, you know, pretty old now. What we're lucky that we can do is because we have Nuage, it's like an external SDM provider, so the entire data plane is controlled by Nuage, and you can kind of plug as many OpenStacks as you like really into Nuage, and you offload all the networking to Nuage. So what's that's allowed us to do is basically we'd have had a lot of trouble if we'd had to do an in place upgrade, so I've actually been to one of the groups this week, quite a lot of people were talking about upgrades and just like all the nightmares it's caused. I know it's getting better as like the releases come out, but what we were able to do is kind of building new, an entirely new OpenStack cloud on the side of, so we've kind of turned it kind of an immutable OpenStack, so your OSB 7 cloud is there, we built this new OSB 10. But they're both circ into the same networking, so the same Nuage SDN. And the way our developers deploy their applications, I guess you want to see this in more detail, we've done presentations at these summits in the past, but kind of in short, every deployment we do immutable deployments as well, so for every deployment we'll create a new subnet within Nuage, and kind of do rolling update of your VMs that are on that new subnet into like a VIP which is kind of where the constant is, so all the traffic's come in to that VIP then you just flip things in and out below it when you do a deployment, so what that basically means is from a developers point of view, when they're migrating from OSB 7 to OSB 10 they'll essentially spin up new networks and new VMs in OSB 10 and that deployment pipeline will kind of just seamlessly, everything else will stay the same because the networking doesn't change. So we don't have to have any downtime on the data plane or the control plane. Which is really beneficial for us 'cause the way, I guess this is I'll just describe the way developers do deployments like we rely heavily on the OpenStack API being available. You pay a cost in that you, so you need extra hardware to do that I guess, but yeah we found it is something that's worked for us. >> John: Anything else with the networking and specifically that you all are running, the load balancing or resiliency that you need to have for your apps? >> Dave: Yeah so one of the things was, so it's kind of another problem there were trying to solve with this whole project, this new OpenStack platform is that historically Betfair, as it was at the time, had always run out of a single data-center. But we had another site, but it was mainly kind of a development environments right in there. So the company thought why don't we just have, we should just have both DCs for resiliency, try and run things in like an active-active configuration. Which is fine for external customer facing applications where we've had an external load balance server that can point traffic between the two DCs. But then the question is what do you do with internal apps? So this is what led us to use Avi Networks, which is kind of a cloud native load balancing technology, so we've been using to provide like GSLB internal laps, so basically we'll load balance traffic between the two data-centers so it gets deployed within your OpenStack environment, has a really neat integration with Nuage, the Nuage SDN layer, and will resolve you to whichever data-center is appropriate at that time. So if you have a full data-center outtage, you should be able to go "Okay, point stuff over there". >> John: So it makes you and the networking team or the IT team into the heroes not the villains, you're usually the people saying "No" or "We can't do that". >> I guess so, I guess so yeah you're probably right. It's cool technology though. I guess that we're very lucky and that we're given the opportunity by the people at the company to experiment with new things, so even though we're about stability but we're also about trying to push things forward in terms of what technology to use. >> Stu: Dave I'm curious how kind of the hybrid or multi-cloud type of environments fit into what you're doing today, give us the update there. >> Dave: Yeah so that's something very in our radar at the moment I guess it's, yeah it's what everybody's doing, looking to how you can have this hybrid cloud model. So I think, going back three years again, at that time, being like an online betting company, it's a highly regulated business and only at that point it was really possible to kind of put some of this stuff into the public cloud, it seems like things have come a long way, so it's something we're looking at at the moment, we're evaluating different solutions, different vendors like the Googles, AWSs, and seeing or even like some OpenStack public clouds and seeing maybe how could we migrate some workloads out into the public cloud, how do we want to that, to give us more resiliency, and also as I was saying about our spiky traffic, it just makes a lot of sense to be able to say burst out into whichever public cloud vendor on a Saturday when the football's on to deal with that peak load. So it's something we're very much looking at at the moment. But yeah no formal decisions as of yet. Unless they've done something while I've been away. >> John: With containers here at the show, lots of different threads right? Containers, Edge, the OpenDev track, things like that. Anything else, we've talked about Kata, anything else that came up that was interesting here that you just watch Kubernetes and container track as well? >> Dave: So I guess in terms of containers it's, sitting in the Keynotes on Monday you would, if you weren't watching if you were just listening, you probably wouldn't know you were at an OpenStack Summit right since there's as much Kubernetes container stuff as there is OpenStack. It's interesting so we've kind of been doing... Again, similar to the public cloud conversation, it's something that's very relevant to us at the moment, we've done kind of a few proof-of-concept ideas, evaluating different solutions, so we have like running a Cube cluster ourself, obviously we have a strong relationship with Red Hat that we've kind of explored to using OpenShift maybe, and then come the networking layer you can integrate with Nuage which would be really cool for us so it'll allow us to do kind of the all the networking, access control mechanisms as we do for our virtual machines. And again this is also something in the whole public cloud conversation is well if wanted to containers in the public cloud as well like you have all the different offerings, would we want to run our own, in like an AWS or something? Or maybe go to someone like Google where you have that supported self-service model I suppose. But yeah at the moment it's kind of at those stages so I think Steve did a presentation on the Kubernetes stuff like a PCO we done at the last Summit. But yeah still at the moment still want to make some firm decisions about which direction we're going to go but a lot of the developers a very keen for this and obviously for guys like us we all know the value of it so I think at the moment because we had that focus on stability we should now have a period of time where we're able to kind of look at all this stuff a bit more, hopefully get some container solutions into production which would be awesome. >> Stu: Dave Buckley we really appreciate you giving us the update, love to be able to do some of those longitudinal case studies as to where you've been where you're going, what you're thinking about. Be sure to check out thecube.net, you can actually search for Patty Power Betfair, see some of those previous interviews from Dave's peers. Loads more interviews there as well as all the shows we're going to be at in the future where hope you come by and say "Hi". For John Troyer I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> (electro-dance music) >> (soft piano)