>>Hey, welcome to this continuing coverage of the H P E Aruba. Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen by now the announcement from john and Antonio, we're going to get into some technical details. Now I've got two guests joining me. Please welcome Krishna Otopeni, the VP of engineering at Pensando and frank Reich stein, senior Director platform engineering from HP Aruba guys welcome to the program. >>Hi lisa. >>Hi lisa. Thanks for having us. >>Sure. So we're going to, we're going to dig in here. You guys are tasked with bringing these two worlds together, christian. Let's go ahead and start with you talk to me about the announcement why this is so significant and then we'll dig into the technical details. >>Yeah. So as you know, right, Pensando has been in the market for a couple of years right now. Um, and we heard a lot of success with the cloud providers and we're also working with be a million project Montreat. Um, so what we learned in the last couple of years, we're trying to take all the lessons and I was a little bit going to what, what we learned with the crop, your providers. So we took a dsC card, which is a B C, a form factor, the customer takes dsC card inserts into the, into server with various forces and hypervisors. So it's really exciting that the BSE is in production with some of the providers already and some of them were taking to production in this calendar quarter and we also have in connection with that first generation BSC cards a couple of years and some of the biggest banks and storage platform providers. So, so this is kind of a big deal for us because we are starting with what we call a D P U. Uh that Pensando is bailing which is the latest generation of it is called code named Alba which delivers the software in silicon program ability while matching the performance of hardware. So internally the DPU has the tight integration between special purpose processors that consent of what we call mps and a general purpose processor like arm course where we do the management and control software and with tied together with offload engines like encryption and compression. The key takeaway from this platform. Their consent of belt. It's it's programmable at all layers Either by Pensando or our customers whether it's in data plane using P four or control and management plane. All right. So what we learned while developing this platform and taking this production with the public cloud providers, we realize that the platform and architecture is not only very highly scalable with very high performance with respect to, you know, packets per second or stable connections per second or NBA me I ops but it's also adaptable like a very rapid paced. And another key lesson that we learn from our cloud partners is that the new devoPS model operations is as important as functionality. For example, the importance of creating the DPU pipeline the subsequent guarantees or providing Hatch uh first fateful connections so that in some cases the component fails, there is hardware or software customer doesn't have any disruption in his network or storage operations. So we took all the ski lessons that we learned over the last few years. And then we are building a new platform partnering with Aruba team which is very high scale with very high performance at the same time, tied with very good operations um that you know it comes the best of both both platforms from the pew side and from the Aruba side frank they want to add on the Aruba platform side. >>Sure, yeah. So the Aruba networking team has been building network switches for the past 25 years and we've been following all of the trends and evolutions over that time frame. And as we've gone through a few years ago we decided to make an evolution of our operating system to scale it up for the modern needs of the modern world. And this included doing things like designing with a micro services oriented architecture to provide for a high degree of resiliency throughout the product line. And then being able to extend that single network operating system from the core to the edge of the network. As we've been partnering with Pensando, it came very clear that the evolution of the network the next step was this form of a deep, you integrated into that top of rack switch to provide a deeper and richer feature set and what has traditionally been available in your top of rack switch. And so this partnership has enabled us to leapfrog but has been traditional top of rack functionality and add to it. Things that previously were not attainable in that layer of the network >>frank. Continuing on with you. Talk to me about some of the technology requirements and challenges of designing and engineering and delivering the industry's first distributed service switch. What were some of those? >>Sure, sure. So a lot of the challenges around integrating this type of solution come down to how to ensure that you have the highest performance possible and maintaining high speed of performance when you're now introducing an additional pay hop within the network topology inside of the switch, a lot of that came down to integrating the background and skill setting capabilities that come along with osc x that were made it quick for us to enable a new piece of functionality within the architecture and then a lot of credit has to go to the Pensando team for the richness of the feature setting capability set that they have within that DPU product as it stands >>christian, let's go ahead and dig through some of those core features and capabilities that are really going to be benefiting customers. >>Yeah, so basically right, uh taking a little bit of step back, we started with the dsc market from Pensando perspective where we wanted to put gPU in every survey and we obviously have success in enterprise customers and cloud customers that we discussed earlier. But we also learned a few lessons while deploying DSC and enterprise markets in the sense that enterprise markets do not need the performance of every DSC at 200 G full duplex network services for every survey. And also you know what makes historic key is that you know, there are a lot of brownfield service in current enterprise data centers where customers do not want to open up a server to put the DSC in. So we wanted to give a product with the form factor that frank is talking about and technology that's very familiar to every IT department given the Aruba Lois uh in a deployment in data centers. And also as I said earlier, what we lessons that we learned, we came up with this taking this production very deep you software and hardware which is deployed in public clouds. And combined with those features that that have been rapidly evolving uh through multiple Aruba releases into enterprise data centers in a switch form factors. So what we think is by doing this taking the best of both worlds. We're creating a new product category that is not that is for the features and capabilities are not available in the market from any vendor specifically providing state full services at every tour without the complexity of the service redirection because today's data centers if you want to install services. It's a it's a lot of effort operator to bring in those services. This obviously also has a great operational model, great TCO and the functionality that customers that you never see in tar before. For example, in the first release we are providing state full firewall with the visibility at every floor level that goes through the tower which never existed in the market before. >>New product category. That's a big deal christian. Talk to me a little bit about how long you guys have been at this, you were in stealth mode crack that open for us. >>I mean it has been a less than a year but of development that both teams have been doing and we work very closely together and we meet I mean for sure at least more than a week uh you know, more than once the once a week between uh frank's team and you know, and send it to them and there's a coordination between the sales team and the marketing team and the go to market team and then how we sell it and the manufacturing team, there's a lot goes on in building this product. I mean we believe this is the fastest uh tard new generational product that we built because because we could do that because the experience of both the teams trying they want anything more to this one. >>Yeah, I think that that really goes to the point here. The capabilities and maturity of the deep you solution that Pensando was bringing into the solution really allowed for a very fast and seamless integration on top of that Aruba, OsC X and the platform that we built there with automated Api generation and integration with our Aruba fabric composer orchestration layer really created the capability to make things go as fast as possible for this development effort And so to really take a new product and define a new product space within a 12 month time frame has been a really exciting and impressive feat by both teams. >>Very impressive considering the challenges and the dynamics in the market and the global market that we've had frank. How big of a lead do you think you have on incumbents here? >>I think we have a substantial lead on the incumbents here. I think what we're doing is a fundamentally different take on how you do a top of rack switch and the capabilities that we're bringing to bear at the top of rack are fundamentally new and differentiated from what the competition has been thinking about. So I believe we have a substantial lead on the competition. >>Excellent chris to talk to me about what's next? What's the future? I have some secret sources that tell me that john and Antonio are meeting regularly pushing you guys, what does the future hold. >>Yeah. So I mean obviously this is the start of an exciting journey. There's a first platform you're bringing to the market jointly and obviously we like a bunch of form factors without upcoming road map. So additionally I mean the software in silicon performance that with all the services that we deliver a software means that scope and scale of the state will services that we can deliver and evolve over time whether you talk about security or encryption or state flat or load balancing or d does all of the services and then you know hybrid connectivity. So obviously you know there's a lot that we can do with this platform that will be driven by with the partnership with our customers. We also see that you know the market of all where you know all the customers we'll have some customers will have deep us in the service and some customers will use the new platform that we're bringing together. So we won't have all the management start to make sure all of them can be managed uniformly and any time you know you this is a major step for a new category of platform and architecture we're developing jointly with the rubber and I believe this will be a huge opportunity for both the companies and our customers and this is exciting times ahead for us >>and talk to me both of your opinions here where can customers go to find more information, how can they get started frank will go ahead and start with you. >>Yeah you can jump straight to Aruba networks dot com and dig into the feature sets and packages that we have available with the Aruba 10-K product line direct from there. >>Fantastic christian anything to add >>that is correct actually. So we are treating it as one product coming from both the companies. All the documentation is where you know, frank pointed out in Aruba website, we put all the documentation at the same place and we're supporting it as one unified product from both the companies. >>Are you seeing any? We've seen so much change in the last year and a half. Last question. I'm just wondering if if either of the HPV riverside or the pence underside is seeing any industries that might be really prime to take advantage of knowing how many industries all have been affected by the events of the last year and a half christian any thoughts there? >>Yeah, I mean if you look at it right and obviously all of us are working from home and now everything happens, you know, mostly at the edge, right? You know, and we are in that this platform will help us get there where we get security to the edge and we get more visibility and more services to the edge. Right? So I mean that's what you know Pensando is all about and hoping that you know, this is uh this journey that we started with the D. P us, we go with this platform and it will ever all and it will help customers, our customers and our partners leverage all the functionality that, you know, Pensando and the rubber can bring together. >>Well guys, congratulations on an enormous feat accomplished in not just a 12 month time period, but a very challenging 12 month time period. We appreciate you guys breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement and more technical detail. Those can go to learn more information and again, congratulations. >>Thank you. >>Thank you very much lisa >>for my guests. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement. Thanks for watching. >>Mhm >>mm.

>>mm we are back and with us now is Alan welcome from the 65 oh Group 650 is a market research company and their specialty focus areas are cloud and IOT. They look at growth markets, They also look at the broader communications and information technology industries. Alan has been a leading data center researcher for over a decade and an enterprise class switch designer. So he's got the chops in that in that sense. Alan, welcome to the cubes. Great to see you. >>Great. No thanks so much for having me looking forward to discussing this with you. >>Okay, so let's get right into it. I mean what is your initial reaction to this announcement? The news? What do we need to know about it? >>I think this is an amazing product. We're heading into a whole new class of product here. Something that can address future designs. So if we look at kind of data center switching in the market, we've been looking at market where we created a new class of category about 15 years ago in data center switching. And we're at a point where we need to start looking forward in the market to address new use cases and sort of customer pain points out there. >>So how should we think about this new category? What's your take on why this is necessary. Why now? >>Well, I think again, if we go back in time, about 15 years ago we created data center switching as a category and the reason for that was we had purpose built products to address a unique use case. When we look at now we have a new use case forming whether it's sort of multi cloud Or how we're deploying applications and security things are different and we need a new class of product in order to address that. And if we look at kind of the opportunity here, we're talking about a market and a class of product that's going to do north of $10 billion dollars in just a couple years. So we have a magnitude and sort of a market category that makes sense to kind of be differentiated and unique from the way we've been looking at the markets in the past. How >>should we think about sort of a follow up on this? If I may, how should we think about, you know, the history of whether it's F P G A or a C X. You're seeing a lot of more program ability built into the system on chip these days. How do you see that trend fitting in and is that an important trend that you would note? >>Yeah, absolutely. So if we look at kind of the way the servers evolved, we have F P G A S a six smart nick now we call them Gpus and it's really been to address these pain points via hardware and software out there and to a certain extent the server has been a little bit ahead with that smart nick and now DPU category and this creates a great opportunity for the network to embrace the same sort of technology and accelerate how we're deploying workloads and really sort of solve those customer pain points, right. The human just can't scale relative to what we've been doing in the past. Got >>it. So how do you think customers are gonna react to this used to be a designer of this type of equipment? How and why might a customer adopt this type of solution and maybe what are some of the barriers that they'll need to consider when, when moving to this approach? >>Yeah, I think customers are going to be excited, right? If you look at it again, they can't scale, they have application Creep, they have security creep, they have data creep out there and this class of product allows them to kind of look at the network a little bit differently and maybe build the network kind of on a go forward 10 year basis than sort of in the past out there. And that's why they're going to look at it in terms of deployments hurdles, I'd say not so much out there. Right. The hybrid cloud and enterprise is moving so fast these days, whether it's because we're working from home or just sort of the agility factor that I think they'll be quick to embrace this because it will enable them to move faster and be more agile or just say more cloud like >>so is that really the use case here? It's kind of cloud slash hybrid cloud on prem cloud and then ultimately connecting to the edge. >>It is, yeah, absolutely. So everyone uses a different term for hybrid cloud or co location or things like that. But ultimately this is the part of the market that's growing very rapidly for enterprises as they try to move their applications, their workflows and their data to more hybrid environment out there. And some of that is as simple as just moving the data. And some of that is kind of going into security and sort of questioning how you move that data around and secure it on a forward basis. A lot >>a lot of customers we talked to tell us, look, the security in the cloud is fine. It's just may be somewhat different and we want to have greater flexibility. So we either want to do this on prem or the other big trend that we see. And I wonder if you could talk about this is we see people putting infrastructure into a Coehlo uh to offer to allow themselves to maybe not get locked into a single cloud provider, expand their optionality building their own sort of infrastructure layer, their own sort of internal cloud, if you will. Can you comment on that? >>Yeah. Co location is a very big trend out there. As you said. It enables you to not be locked into your particular cloud provider. It also gives you proximity to all cloud providers, all staffs providers out there. Uh so deploying and polo makes a lot of sense out there and that creates another pool of data or pool of information that the IT managers need to think about in terms of managing out there. >>So what's the sweet spot for this? And thinking in terms of a business cases that consolidating sort of legacy infrastructure simplification, enabling people to transfer skills up up the stack if you will to support their digital transformation. How do you see the business case evolving here? Alan, >>yeah, it really is simplification and that digitization journey that all enterprises are on the human just simply can't scale with the number of applications or the complexity of those applications and as you get more complex, your costs go up. So this is really about simplification, reducing costs and again, kind of building and taking that journey Forward for the next 10 years vs doing things the same way you've been doing it there, which allows you to move up stack. How do you >>see this partnership, HP Ruba Pensando. Do you see it as unique in the business or the ahead of the game in your opinion? How do you sort of handicap that? >>Yeah, it is unique and it is ahead of the game. So there is a first mover advantage going on here, but I think this partnership shows how the data center is going to be different 5, 10 years in the future and we're starting to create purpose built products to address that change. We simply can't build the way we've been building in the past. Again, whether it's the device not scaling or the human not scaling, we need to look at this differently for many, many reasons. >>Awesome. Okay, alan, we got to leave it there really. Thanks for bringing the analyst perspective. We'll give you the last word. If there's any kind of research you've got, that's worth noting or any last thoughts, please bring it home. >>Yeah, we've been tracking this space for over, You know, 15 years personally. Uh, and there's a lot of new research we have in this area, whether it's this class of product data center switching, uh, location types out there, verticals. So we're really excited to kind of be at the forefront. Well, thanks vision on the future. >>Well, thanks for that, appreciate it. Look, we've been covering this announcement and the initiatives around disrupting the traditional space and uh we thank everybody for watching. Remember all this content is available on demand. If you want more information. Just hit up your HP Aruba rep, you know, I'm sure they'll be eager to help you out. So, again on demand, we will be available immediately. Appreciate you watching the cubes, coverage of the HP, Aruba Pensando announcements, appreciate it. >>Mm

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to "The Power of And," theCUBE's coverage of the HPE Aruba Pensando announcement. Antonio Neri is here and John Chambers to help us set up the day. Guys, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us today. >> Dave, it's going to be fun. >> It sure is. So two years ago, you guys might recall, we were in the Goldman Sachs offices, overlooking Manhattan, and that's when you announced the investment in Pensando, the relationship. Two years, it goes by fast. How's it going? >> Yeah, definitely two years have gone by fast, and a lot has happened, right? A lot has happened since then. What I will say first and foremost, the partnership has grown stronger, much stronger, because as John and I and the team worked together, we validated the vision, the vision that ultimately the world would be way more distributed, that Edge to Cloud architectures would be required, and the original idea that John had with the Pensando team partnered with us to bring that Cloud experience to the Edge. It got stronger and stronger and stronger. At the same time, we also introduced new joint offers with the Pensando Silicon Software with our HP ProLiant servers. And since then we have learned quite a bit, right? So, which inform us what the next steps should be. And that's why we're here today, to talk about not just the work we have done around the distributive services cards, as we talk about it in the past, but now the distributed services switching, which we believe is another market in transition opportunity for us to disrupt as we go forward. >> So, John speaking of transitions, you've seen a number of industry transitions, dating back to my East Coast days. >> Yes. >> But so what was the wave, or the waves that you saw, that sort of led you to this new venture, to the partnership with HPE? >> Well, the exciting part is Antonio and I can almost finish each other's sentences. You compete against market transitions enabled by new technology. The biggest transition of all is the clouds moving to the Edge, the computes move into the edge, your storage security, your software applications, et cetera. And we saw this wave together, and when you talk about what's changed in the last two years, I think it exceeded both of our expectations. How our teams worked together? We outlined audacious goals of a hundred million in terms of orders within the first two years. And we hit and exceeded that. We said, we're going to be in a billion; after three years after we had a hundred million, we're on track for that. And if you watch our dream of democratizing the cloud, giving the capability for any major hyper scaler to compete with an Amazon web services or generally with them, and now bringing it down to any enterprise or any government agency be able to do it and the ability to do this as a team is what's unheard of. Innovation is hard to move with speed. Two companies to move together with innovation and more focused on the outcome than anything else. Our teams work even better than I thought we could. And I think you're seeing today, the next major phase that we make, where we take these concepts and we're going to revolutionize the switching industry. In every 10 to 12 years is a chance for a major change. And you either get through that and often the incumbents don't change. We're going to get through this, we think very, very well and we're again setting a tremendous challenge to the market with, literally software and Silicon and programmability throughout the whole architecture, and results that I think even surprised our engineers; a hundred times the scale of the nearest competitor in the market today at 10 times the performance at one third the total cost of ownership. Antonio and I can't even sell that with that type of capability. Our teams are functioning well. It's that ability to see markets and say, how does your partner win, that culture is so important to us in terms of the direction. >> So to chime in on this because you for years have been talking about the basically redefining cloud, not just a remote set of services, somewhere out there in the cloud, but connecting to on-prem and hybrid, multi-cloud out to the Edge. Is that the big wave that, that you see here? Is that what you're riding? >> Definitely one component of the wave. I think the other part is, remember what I said in 2018, when I became CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, that the enterprise of the future will be a centric cloud enabled and data driven. And through the unfortunate events of the global pandemic, right? That has been validated, right? We live now in a much more distributed and enterprise than ever before. The original architectures that John obviously pioneered for, for the case, you know, you have the data center and you have the campus and the branch, now you have these extension called the micro branch. The micro branch is our homes, our home offices, right? But now what happens is that the cloud obviously scared to stay because it's all about speed and agility, but it's also important that we define cloud correctly, which is an experience that we should bring to, for all the applications and data. And what we see that the vast majority of the data is created at the Edge, where we live and work. Here we are, you and I, and John having a conversation. There is cameras everywhere taping this, there's a lot of bits being created. And those bits, I hope have value when people watch this. But, but to me, that's the, the big opportunity to really disrupt the cloud as we know it and bring that set of capabilities closer to where the action is. The second part of this, which I think is important is that what we saw with the consumption of IT, and this is where, you know, we have a, a vision to become the Edge supply platform that you can consume as a service. And that's our HPE Green Lake offer. But the- as a service offerings taken off to a level we have not imagined. And it's not just the fact that the public cloud is there, it's everything, whether it's in your own premises or at the Edge. And that's why I'm so excited about the partnership with Pensando to disrupt this age to cloud architectures, with the know how that we have, our go to market in the, as a service model to accelerate those markets in transition. >> You take the excitement of a company that's reinventing itself. And you think about HPE, they alerted the original Silicon Valley garage startup. So much of what is great about the Valley, they brought Lou Platt, who was the CEO at HP. When I came to Silicon Valley, nobody knew what Cisco was, much less the internet. They thought we were a food company. I called up Lou and I said, Lou I need help. I don't know the Valley, teach me about how you've been successful. He not only met with me once, he met with me for three years. At the end of the three years, he said, I said to him, now we're really cooking this time! We were growing out of control, becoming the most valuable company in the world for a while. And I said, Lou, what can I do to pay the HPE back? And he said, very simply, "John, give back to the next generation." That stuck with me forever. The values of a company, the leaders, whether it was Lou, whether it's original leaders of the company, or Antonio, their cultures and values are so much aligned. So we have a chance to change a market together. I was all in and, you know, while we competed a little bit, in, in the past, it was very little, and now we have a chance to change a whole market and take on the giants, and perhaps really disrupt a whole industry. That gets exciting. We've got a team that has built a $8 billion products per year, eight different times. Now we're going to do it a ninth and maybe a 10th together. And to share that is truly exciting with a world-class team at HPE. >> So let's talk a little bit about HPE, Aruba, and Pensando, where you guys are going. You started sort of at the core two years ago. And I think I, you know, I think Aruba, in some regards, is misunderstood. I mean, you're basically building a major cloud strategy around that. It stretches to the edge. So what is it that you are trying to disrupt here? Maybe give us a little insight as to the industry transitions that you're seeing. >> Antonio: Yeah. So first of all, Aruba is doing incredibly well, I mean, if you see the latest results grow in between 25 and 30% on a year over year basis. We have improved profitability, but what I'm really excited about is that our value proposition, our mobile first cloud first approach, is resonated with customers when it comes down to connectivity and analytics. So to me, that's an incredible value. And in order to become a cloud company, we leverage the Aruba infrastructure that was developed over the years to build a subscription based model to connectivity and extended all the way to what we call the cloud, which for us is the core business there. Now, with John and his team, we are changing the architectures around those, those components of there, there's the solution. So, Aruba has been incredible foundational, not only to grow the company, but also to give us the foundation technology to become that Edge to cloud company. So what we're doing with John, we have taken now this new architecture to the next level of the entire solution. So we started with the server business. We integrated these distributed service cards, and now we are taking it to their rack level architecture and eventually to the, you know, data center architecture in a true Edge to the cloud environment. And that means we are introducing the distributed service switching technology, which is, again, this is a joint innovation between the Aruba IP and the Pensando IP, which we think, which are, will change, again every 10 to 12 years, that switching market opportunity. >> And it's fun to take on the big competitors and bring them down, which I love doing. And it's also unique to see how fast our teams are moving together. Our cultures are very similar, and we set audacious goals for our team, and so far, they've been exceeding them. >> So you know a little bit about this networking market. Is this a, is this a new category of switch? Is this, how unique is this? >> John: Well, I think it's all the above. It's, Antonio used the word "platform and architectures" and distributed service platform that now is going into switching as well. It's ability to redefine everything with software in Silicon. And that's a lot different than what the industry seen before, and to move with speed in terms of software defined programmability everywhere, everything automated and simple, which makes it so easy to start- how simple? All you do is plug a server into the switch, and you look at what we're doing together already with the HPE servers and how you literally add value on top of it with the distributed services card and platform. So you see it all coming together. How big could it be? I think it will be the next generation, and truly not just the cloud moving to the Edge, but internet working security, how load balancing all comes together. That really is going to change an industry group. So I think it's going to be the next big product for the whole segment of the industry. >> Antonio: Yeah, and I think it will bring tremendous value from the company. Obviously we love the technology and this markets, but ultimately think about from the customer's perspective is less CapEx because they don't need to add log balancing, all these things that add costs, and actually friction points and point of failure, but also OPEX, because to the point that John said, right, it's all about simplicity and automation and awareness around the, the application. And also the, the infrastructure that ultimately we want this to be autonomous and intelligent, therefore is an OPEX reduction on the run time too. Go ahead, John. >> It's in many ways, future proof. It's an architecture for the future, not for the past. When you get your peers that talk about scale in low single digit thousands, and we talk about scale in millions, you talk about performance that literally is 10 fold, in order of magnitude better. And you build an architecture that allows the market to go where they want with ease of use for your customers. That's about innovation with speed. They can leave no small company or no large company probably could do by themselves. I think very few people in industry would have had the courage to do it, but probably not the culture to really make it work well. >> Dave: Talk About HPE, Pensando. I mean, you've got small company, big company, and you guys have been at this now for a couple of years. It seems to be gaining momentum. That, that is in an, in and of itself unique. Why HPE and Pensando? >> Antonio: Well, I think, again, it start with a thesis that John and I share about the future. As John said, it takes courage to do these things, and ultimately culture is everything. Well, we jointly realize that the way we think, the way we work is very similar. These are two companies that are very engineering driven in everything they do, but they put the customer at the center of how we think about the future. And it has been amazing to me. In fact, I, we connect every handful of weeks to check where we are and I keep, you know, in many ways the larger company, in many ways is pushing the smaller company to go further and faster. And to me, it's all about speed. >> So when you think about what makes a strategic partnership work, it has to be really material, both sides. In other words, it has to change an industry. HPE has done an amazing job. You've doubled your profits in the last four years, and you're reinventing yourself again and again, but it's a common vision of where the market's going to go, as Antonio articulated very well when it goes to the Edge, and Green Lake is going to be your delivery vehicle for it. It's about bringing together all these technologies into one, not individual appliances or approaches. You do load balance and you do security. You do scale and you do networking. And it's about the best of each company saying, how do you help the other company be successful? When our teams come together, other than their accents, you usually can't tell who's from HPE and who's from Pensando. >> Dave: How should we be evaluating the progress over the next several quarters, months, years? What are the, sort of, benchmarks we should be looking for? >> Well, I think the most important metric is customer relevance, in my mind. The financials generally tend to follow that because if you are relevant, is, is, you know, we were talking to all the teams, you know, are you important or are you strategic, right? Generally we are very important. What we do matters, but we want to be strategic. And I think this joint innovation will catapult us to be way more strategic in everything we do. So it's customer relevancy. Obviously from the financial perspective, we both have an idea to create multi-billion dollar businesses, otherwise, why do it, right? So, and the market is huge, is huge. I mean, you know that obviously we, we, we are living in an amazing time where data is exploding everywhere, right? And I think this is just a starting point, right? So we obviously start with an idea and a thought and a specific focus. But if you think about the next generation is create data fabrics that are secure, and then you can run these models with AI and machine learning at scale. The network fabric becomes the core of everything you do, right? >> So think about it the way you asked the question. It's been two years as of the announcement that we're making jointly. Since we made the announcement two years ago, we've over exceeded every expectation. It starts with the customers, as you said, Antonio, how many of the large customers do we have two years from now? Are we in the same leadership position like we are with the first-generation of the distributed services platform? And have we got a number of the very largest accounts in the world committed to us? And are we still one to two generations ahead of our nearest competitor two years from now like we are today with our current card capability and platform capabilities. >> Dave: Pretty cool partnership. Thanks so much guys, for helping us kick off the Power of And. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you, Dave. >> All right. Keep it right there. We've got a ton of content. You're going to hear from technologists, how they're trying to change the world, what it means for customers. You're watching theCUBE.

>>mm we are back and we're continuing the coverage on H P E. Aruba's news today around the D S X six S C X 10-K with Pensando. Now we want to get the perspective of a system Integrator because they're in the front lines, they understand how to put the pieces together where you're happy to bring john Galatea of Dasher technologies dashes and in the end I. T solutions provider, they gotta focus a lot of expertise on infrastructure, jOHn welcome. Good to see you. >>Thank you for having me. Good to be here. >>That's our pleasure. So I wonder if you could give us a little bit more color on Dasher where you focus what your core companies competencies are, what industries you focus on etcetera. >>Yeah, absolutely. So a dasher, we assess architect implement and manage I. T. Solutions that digitally transform businesses. Our practice areas include cybersecurity, networking, cloud data center and we also offer pro professional services around those practice areas. We partner with all the major tech companies in the space. Some of the examples are HP, Cisco, Aruba Palo Alto eight Ws and many others that fill out the, you know that practice area. >>Well that's great. So you have a very wide observation space, that's why we like talking to SA as you have an independent mindset and you can kind of tell it like it is. But so what are you seeing with customers? It's exactly, we hear a lot about digital transformation, you mentioned security, you're obviously doing cloud that's it's almost like john these pieces are all coming together to power Digital and digital transformation and we were forced into it over the past 18 months. And now people are stepping back saying hey okay we have all these resources, how do we put them together and really transform our business? What do you see? >>Yeah, seeing similar things. So you know, our customers are telling us that they're looking for more speed, more agility, um you know, limited complexity because they're trying to do more every single day with less staffing and a sophistication of integrating functionality that breaks down I. T. Silos. Um there also evaluating security span versus effectiveness And they're moving towards zero trust. >>Yeah. So I want to, I'm gonna come back and ask you about that. So I've written a lot about this is that you look at how much we spend versus as you say the effectiveness and there's sort of an imbalance there, it's like we can't spend enough, it budgets they're not infinite. And even though security is top of top priority for ceos, they've got other things that they have to fund and then zero trust, you know, before the pandemic john that was a buzzword and now it's become a mandate. Any thoughts on that >>in terms of zero Trust? Absolutely yeah it is a mandate, we've seen more and more of our customers moving toward in this direction and defending themselves against cyber threats and yeah absolutely. It accelerated during the pandemic and is continuing to accelerate today. >>Right? And I think there's some things that were reported now going to be permanent with regard to obviously hybrid and the like, cloud security and so forth. So, okay, let's get into some of the news here. What's the big trend, john can you explain the relevance of the H P E, Aruba and Pensando news? >>Yeah, I mean when I first heard of it, you know, I I looked at it as a whole new category because it's a category that's going to deliver cloud scale distributed services closer to where applications are. It's going to simplify. One of the things we mentioned earlier was limiting complexity. So it simplifies the network um, by putting security provisions and operations in a unified management platform and it helps improve your security posture around moving towards zero trust and limits the appliance and vendor sprawl that you might ordinarily have in a in a existing network today. >>Okay, so that's kind of the business cases, you're consolidating a lot of piece parts and that's, you know, from a system integrator standpoint. You know, it's funny people often say, well, isn't that bad for the s I'm like, no, they don't want to be in the business of plumbing, they want to be in the business of, you know, more strategy if they if they just end up bolting stuff together, they're going to go out of business, They need to extend their value. So as a strategic partner, you got an early preview of this launch? The D S S D S S C X 10,000, what was your initial impression reaction you called it? A new category? What do you mean by that? >>Well, it's a new category of of of a data center switch in the digital infrastructure because it includes or incorporates security. Um And more specifically it includes security around east west traffic, which is it doesn't eliminate your perimeter firewall but it actually incorporates more functionality which leads to better simplicity and easier use of management of a platform. So for us, I'm really excited to go position and talk to our clients about this. >>Yes. So we're seeing the flattening of that network, that's even it's obviously been accelerated by the pandemic, everybody talks about that. But if you think about the traditional headquarter hierarchical network and now all of a sudden everybody's working remotely using more cloud. Using more distributed infrastructure that flattens the network. That creates security challenges because you can't just build a perimeter and say, okay, we're safe. You now have to go to where the adversary is and that's everywhere. So what's your sense as to how customers are going to react to this new category of switch? >>I think really my sense is that I've got a really positive outlook on this product. I mean hardware, firewalls are costly and deploying software agents can be very disruptive and when you're integrating it into the switch layer. So um I think the C X 10,000 provides a great alternative to an embedded accelerated services embedded in accelerate service into the D C fabric. Um, it's great for brownfield migration, um, rack pod and you know, and the standards based leaf, you know, L two, L three um, and it doesn't necessarily replace, as I mentioned earlier the perimeter security, but um, it can cap and grow with DSS and east west firewall traffic. >>Yeah. And I think we've seen when we talked to see so, so like you said, it does, it doesn't replace the traditional perimeter security but you're going to see a shift and spending priorities obviously to a comedy because as I said earlier, there's not infinite budget but john give us the big takeaway, Bring us home. What what, what do you want to leave our audience with? >>Yeah, I think, you know, the number one takeaway is that it's a massive opportunity to reduce complexity, enhanced security and lower costs in the data center by eliminating dedicated devices and embedding services through software capability in the network closer to where workloads are are moving. So that's the big takeaway for me and for, I think for our clients, um, you know, other things are, you know, you're the data center perimeter is no longer confined and open an on prem location but extends out, right. We're seeing customers extend out to the cloud and across uh, you know, disparate locations, co locations. So The traditional architecture isn't going to be well suited for this, and I think the CX- 10,000 and its feature set are going to be really great for addressing the changing market. >>Yeah, that's, that's all. I mean, again, we're seeing the democratization of everything and and networking is, is no exception. The notion of simplify simplification, john really appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having me. >>You're welcome. Okay, keep it right. There were unpacking the changing trends in networking generally, and specifically switch networking with HP, Aruba and Pensando and the cube. Keep it right there.

(fastpaced upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCubes coverage of the power of N and the collaborations between HPE Aruba and Pensando. Where the two companies are setting out to create a new category in network switching. Joining me now is Simon McCormack, who looks after product management at HPE Aruba. Welcome Simon. Good to see you. >> Good morning. Thanks for having me today. >> You're very welcome. So Simon, we've been talking all day about the Aruba switching fabric that you're bringing to market, embedding the Pensando technology. Can you tell us what's the primary value prop that AFC brings to its customers? >> Sure. Aruba Fabric Composer. This is orchestration and management for the Aruba wide switching platform. Primarily for data centers. It does a lot of things. I'll give you three key ones just to get a feel for it. So in data center networking, there's a lot of complex technologies. I'm afraid to say, lease spines, overlays, underlays, EDP and OSPF BGP. I can throw out loads of acronyms for you. Fabric Composer can really simplify through a bunch of intent based workflows, the deployment and management of these fabrics. We can do it either interactively through a UI or fully API driven, if you want to. So it really takes away a lot of the plexity there makes it dead easy to deploy these and that scale. Number two, in a data center, a lot of compute storage hypervisor technologies that you have to interact with the THEO network products. So in Fabric Composer, we built an integration layer into it that interacts with other orchestrators, vCenter, VMware vcenter is a good example of that. So an operator may make changes to vCenter that affect the network. You don't want to call the network team for it. Fabric Composer can automate that network side configuration on the Aruba switch, making your day to operations, insertion of new services, much more simpler. And then finally, number three, because we've got all these capabilities I've just told you about. We actually have a great typology model that we build from it. And we can use that to visualize this virtual to physical network layer that is really powerful for troubleshooting the environment. >> Great? So three things, actually four right. To simplify or integrate and automate. And it's kind of two and two way, I'm going to to call it. and then the visualization piece for troubleshooting. Awesome. What about security policy? How are you thinking about that in this release? >> Yeah, so that's where in this release, we're extending it with the Pensando PSM technologies embedded into the 10K. Now we can use Aruba Fabric Composer to actually orchestrate the policy in addition to the network. So you think about today, Fabric Composer does network primarily. You bring policy into it. You've got one single pane of glass now that does network and policy. It actually provides a really powerful capabilities for operators of different skill sets to be able to manage and orchestrate this environment. >> What about the sort of operational model as it pertains to the network and security, I'm interested in how flexible that is. For instance, if a customer wants to use their own tooling or operational frameworks. What if they want to leverage multi-vendor fabrics like a third-party spine? How do you deal with all of that? >> Yeah, and I think that's, we built that into essentially the DNA of this technology is that we're, we're expecting to often go into brownfield environments. Where they've already got best practices for security and networking. They've already got networking vendors there. The 10K is a very powerful lease switch on its own. We want those lease switches to go in all of these different environments, not just Greenfield. It's really great for Greenfield. And I'm going to explain this a little bit in a few ways. First of all, the technology we have with Aruba fabric Composer and Pensando PSM, you can do a pure operational split between them SecOps, NetOps. A lot of customers that's how they deal with it. They've got the security operations team, network operations team. If they're split, you can use the two tools and make a fantastic product using that. However, if they're not split, and you've got a single policy for it. You can use Aruba Fabric Composer to do both of them. So you've got the options there and we fully embrace that in the architecture of what we built. This extends to multiple layers for the technology build as well. Again, as I said, the 10K's is a lease switch, it can connect to third-party spines. So you could use Fabric Composer to manage this lease Spitch and the policy you could use Fabric Composer just to manage the least switch and connect and interoperate the lease to the spine, or you can do a full Aruba solution, the full Aruba spine and use that operating model. There's one final thing in this area is fabric Composers are a UI based orchestrator, API driven. Some customers love it. Some customers love their CLIs. We fully embrace the operational model where customers still use their own APIs and their own CLIs. So the customer may be using Ansible to automate through API. They can still use that directly to the switch and they can use it to AFC and mix the two. If you talk directly to a switch and change it, Fabric Composer detects it and basically sinks its configuration together. So we can insert all or any part of this solution into existing or new Netflix. >> Yeah, that's nice. Right? Because I mean, so there's the network hard guys, right they, they want that CLI access. So you you're accommodating that. And then as well, being able to bring those SecOps view and the netOps view together is important because let's say, let's face it. A lot of organizations, especially some of the smaller ones, they don't actually have a full blown SecOps team. That's really the netOps responsibility. And so that's nice flexibility, you can handle both worlds. How about segmentation? What a customer is telling you that they want regarding segmentation and how are you guys approaching that? >> Yeah, I mean, it's, it's actually a key feature of what we're doing in this area. Now the iland segmentation generates it's kind of a wide area with many layers to it and we could talk about it for hours. So let me talk briefly about some of the areas we're going into when it comes to the segmentation. But particularly of a compute and virtual type environment. So when you, when you're typically creating policies in today's world, current policies based on addresses, IP addresses, or Mac addresses. You have lots of rules and big lists of addresses. It's really annoying. Customers generally don't talk in addresses. They talk in machines and names of machines. So if you think about what I've already told you with the Fabric Composer, we've already got these hooks in the compute hypervisor layer. So we didn't know about the virtual machines? So it said obviously, a natural extension now for you to be able to create these policies based on the machines. So there's, there's a scale problem in policy distribution at two levels, at the top and the bottom. The top level is your chronic create the policy. You've got this massive distribution addresses. So Fabric Composer can really help you by allowing you to then create these groups, sensible groups, using the names then you can distribute. The 10K solution with the distributed architecture of the bottom layer, now allows us to distribute these policies and rules across your racks within your data center. So it scales really well, but that's one level I've described. You know, you're creating groups of machines with names, so it's easier to define it, but there's auto and automation angle to this as well. You might not want to even create it interactively. Now a lot of customers with VMware vCenter, For example, are tagging the virtual machines. So the tag tells you a group information. Again, Fabric Composer can already get the tag within its database model. So we can use the tag now either to fully automate or use as a hint to creating these groups. So now I've got a really simple way to basically just categorize my machines into the groups so that now I can push rules down onto them. And there's one, one final thing that I just want to tell you before, before we move on. There's, there's often a zero trust model you want to do in the data center for segmentation. Meaning I've got two virtual machines on the same network on the same host. Normally they can talk to each other, nothing's stopping them, but sometimes you want to isolate even those two. You can do it in products like vCenter with PV land technologies. A bit cumbersome to configure on the vSphere side, you got to match it with what you see on the switch side. It's one of those that's a real headache, unless you've got an orchestrator to do it. So Fabric Composer could basically orchestrate this isolated solution. You're now grouping your machines and you're saying they're isolated. We can do the smarts and both of the vCenter side and the switch side, get them in sync, get it all configured. And now the masses can start to do this kind of segmentation at scale. >> Got it. Thank you Simon. Can the Fabric Composer kind of be used as the primary prism for troubleshooting? How do you handle troubleshooting and this art combined architecture? Who, who do I call when there's a problem? How do you approach that? >> Well, definitely start by calling me or actually call my product first, so fabric Composer. If you're using it, use that as the front tool for what you're going to try and figure out what's going on. There is a global health dashboard. It encompasses networking security policy across the solution, across the fabric. So that's your, tells you what's going on immediately. Down to port stats on what's happening within the physical topology of the network. Down to the end-to-end view, we have in terms of policy connectivity between machines. So Fabric Composer is your first port of call, but we built a solution here that we don't want to hide the pieces underneath it. Any networking guy knows when they're deep troubleshooting networking stuff, they're going to end up with the switch. So you started the orchestrator, but sometimes in the deep troubleshooting, not day-to-day, hopefully. You'll go to the switch and you'll troubleshoot that way. We've got the same technology here with the policy, with the firewall rules, with Pensando PSM. We still fully embrace for deep troubleshooting, go to Pensando PSM. They have really advanced tools in their bag of tricks in the product to give you advanced troubleshooting down to the policy layer. They have a really powerful firewall log capability, where you can search and sort, and see exactly what role is allowing or stopping any traffic going through the environment. And the two orchestrated model, we really like it 'cause it scales really well. It allows Fabric Composer to remain lightweight, PSM focused on the policy orchestration bit. But again, if your that customer that wants to do single pane of glass use Fabric Composer for the standard day-to-day stuff. But you've got the tools there to do the advanced troubleshooting between the different elements that we have within the Pensando and the Aruba tools. >> Yeah, really well thought out. You got the simplification angle nailed, the integration automation we talked about that, the visualization and the topology map, zero trust. And then remediation with deep^ened inspection. Simon, thanks so much for taking us through the announcements. Really appreciate your insights and time today. >> Thank you very much. >> You're welcome. Okay. Keep it right there, this is Dave Vellante for theCube. More content from the HPE Aruba Pensando announcements coming right up. (soothing music)

>>Mhm Yes. Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob. Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch, instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch so it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing, if you've got a high availability top of rack up environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start, they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where I don't know, you might have some regulated services, right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up, configure apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right, Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East west traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication you said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these. So, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said, it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP. Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right. But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch, enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical, as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. >>Mhm.

(intro music playing) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to the power of n where HPE Aruba and Pensando are changing the game, the way customers scale with the cloud, and what's next in the evolution in switching. Hey everyone, I'm John furrier with the cube, and I'm here with Shane Corbin, director of technical product management at Pensando, and William show vice president of product management, Aruba HPE. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on and doing a deep dive and, and going into the, the big news. So the first question I want to ask you guys is um, what do you guys see from a market customer perspective that kicked this project off? um, amazing um, results um, over the past year or so? Where did it all come from? >> No, it's a great question, John. So when we were doing our homework, there were actually three very clear customer challenges. First, security threats were largely spawn with on, within the perimeter. In fact, Forrester highlighted 80% of threats originate within the internal network. Secondly, workloads are largely distributed creating a ton of east-west traffic. And then lastly, network services such as firewalls, load balancers, VPN aggregators are expensive, they're centralized, and they ultimately result in service chaining complexity. >> John: So, so, >> John: Go ahead, Shane. >> Yeah. Additionally, when we spoke to our customers after launching initially the distributed services platform, these compliance challenges clearly became apparent to us and while they saw the architecture value of adopting what the largest public cloud providers have done by putting a smart NIC in each compute node to provide these stateful services. Enterprise customers were still, were struggling with the need to upgrade fleets and brown field servers and the associated per node cost of adding a smart NIC to every compute node. Typically the traffic volumes for on a per node basis within an enterprise data center are significantly lower than cloud. Thus, we saw an opportunity here to, in conjunction with Aruba, develop a new category of switching product um, to share the processing capabilities of our unique intellectual property around our DPU across a rack of servers that net net delivers the same set of services through a new category of platform, enabling a distributed services architecture, and ultimately addressing the compliance and TCO generating huge TCO and ROI for customers. >> You know, one of the things that we've been reporting on with you guys, as well as the cloud scale, this is the volume of data and just the performance and scale. I think the timing of the, of this partnership and the product development is right on point. And you've got the edge right around the corner, more, more distributed nature of cloud operations, huge, huge change in the marketplace. So great timing on the origination story there. Great stuff. Tell me more about the platform itself, the details, what's under the hood, the hardware OS, what are the specs? >> Yeah, so we started with a very familiar premise. Rubik customers are already leveraging CX with an edge to cloud common operating model, in deploying leaf and spine networks. Plus we're excited to introduce the industry's first distributed services switch, where the first configuration has 48-25 gig ports with a hundred gig couplings running Aruba CX cloud native operating system, Pensando Asic's software inside, enabling layer four through six, seven stateful services. Shane, do you want to elaborate on. >> Yeah, let me elaborate on that a little bit further, um, you know, as we spoke existing platforms and how customers were seeking to address these challenges were, are inherently limited by the ASIC dye size, and that does limit their scale and performance and ability in traditional switching platforms to deliver truly stateful functions in, in, in a switching platform, this was, you know, architecturally from the ground up, when we developed our DPU, first and second generation, we delivered it, or we, we built it with stateful services in mind from the get-go, we leveraged the clean state design with our P four program with DPU. We evolved to our seven nanometers based pro DPU right now, which is essentially enabling software and Silicon. And this has generated a new level of performance scale, flexibility and capability in terms of services. This serves as the foundation for our 200 gig card, were we taking the largest cloud providers into production for. And the DPU itself is, is designed inherently to process stage, track stateful connections, and stateful flow is at very, very large scale without impacting performance. And in fact, the two of these DPU components server disk, services foundation of the CX 10 K, and this is how we enable stateful functions in a switching platform functions like stateful network fire-walling, stateful segmentation, enhanced programmable telemetry, which we believe will bring a whole lot of value to our customers. And this is a platform that's inherently programmable from the ground up. We can, we can build and leverage this platform to build new use cases around encryption, enabling stateful load balancing, stateful NAT to name a few, but, but the key message here is, this is, this is a platform with the next generation of architecture's in mind, is programmed, but at all, there's the stack, and that's what makes it fundamentally different than anything else. >> I want to just double click on that if you don't mind, before we get to the competitive question, because I think you brought up the state thing. I think this is worth calling out, if you guys don't mind commenting more on this states issue, because this is big. Cloud native developers right now, want speed, they're shifting left at the CICD pipeline with programmability. So going down and having the programmability, and having state is a really big deal. Can you guys just expand on that a little bit more and why it's important and, and how hard it really is to pull off? >> I, I can start, I guess, um, it's very hard to pull off because of the sheer amount of connections you need to track when you're developing something like a stateful firewall or a stateful load balancer, a key component of that is managing the connections at very, very large scale and understanding what's happening with those connections at scale, without impacting application performance. And this is fundamentally different at traditional switching platform, regardless of how it's deployed today in Asics, don't typically process and manage state like this. Um, memory resources within the chip aren't sufficient, um, the policy scale that you can um, implement on a platform aren't sufficient to address and fundamentally enable deployable firewalling, or load balancing, or other stateful services. >> That's exactly right. And so the other kind of key point here is that, if you think about the sophistication of different security threats, it does really require you to be able to look at the entire packet, and, and more so be able to look at the entire flow and be able to log that history, so that you can get much better heuristics around different anomalies, security threats that are emerging today. >> That's a great, great point. Thanks for, for, um, bringing that extra, extra point out. I would just add to this, we're reporting this all the time on Silicon angle in the cube is that, you know, the, you know, the, the automation wave that's coming with around data, you know, it's a center of data, not data centers we heard earlier on with the, in, in, in the presentation. Data drives automation, having that enabled with the state is a real big deal. So, I think that's really worth calling out. Now, I've got to ask the competition question, how is this different? I mean, this is an evolution. I would say, it's a revolution. You guys are being being humble, um, but how is this different from what customers can deploy today? >> Architecturally, if you take a look at it. We've, we've spoken about the technology and fundamentally in the platform what's unique, in the architecture, but, foundationally when customers deploy stateful services they're typically deployed leveraging traditional big box appliances for east-west our workload based agents, which seek to implement stateful security for each east-west. Architecturally what we're enabling is stateful services like firewalling, segmentation, can scale with the fabric and are delivered at the optimal point for east west which is through leaf for access layer of the network. And we do this for any type of workload. Be it deployed on a virtualized compute node, be a deployed on a containerized worker node, be deployed on bare metal, agnostic up typology, it can be in the access layer of a three tier design and a data center. It can be in the leaf layer of a VX VPN based fabric, but the goal is an all centrally managed to a single point of orchestration and control of which William will talk about shortly. The goal of this is to drive down the TCO of your data center as a whole, by allowing you to retire legacy appliances that are deployed in an east-west roll, and not utilize host based agents, and thus save a whole lot of money and we've modeled on the order of 60 to 70% in terms of savings in terms of the traditional data center pod design of a thousand compute nodes which we'll be publishing. And as, as we go forward additional services, as we mentioned, like encryption, this platform has the capability to terminate up to 800 gigs of our line rates encryption, IP sec, VPN per platform, stateful Nat load balancing, and this is all functionality we'll be adding to this existing platform because it's programmable as we've mentioned from the ground up. >> What are some of the use cases lead? And what's the top use cases, what's the low hanging fruit and where does this go? You've got service providers, enterprises. What are the types of customers you guys see implementing? >> Yeah, that's, what's really exciting about the CX 10,000. We actually see customer interest from all types of different markets, whether it be higher education, service providers to financial services, basically all enterprises verticals with private cloud or edge data centers. For example, it could be a hospital, a big box retailer, or a colon such as Iniquinate So it's really the CX 10,000 that creates a new switching category, enabling stateful services in that leaf node right at the workload, unifying network and security automation policy management. Second, the CX 10,000 greatly improves security posture and eliminates the need for hair-pinning east-west traffic all the way back to the centralized deployments. Lastly, As Shane highlighted, there's a 70% TCO savings by eliminating that appliance sprawl and ultimately collapsing the network security operations. >> I love the category creation um, vibe here. Love it. And also the technical and the cloud alignment's great. But how do the customers manage all this? Okay, I got a new category. I just put the box in, throw away some other ones? I mean, how does this all get done? And how does the customers manage all this? >> Yeah, so we're, we're looking to build on top of the river fabric composer. It's another familiar site for our customers, and what's already provides for compute storage and network automation, with a broad ecosystem integrations, such as VMware vSphere Vcenter as with Nutanix prism and so aligned with the CX 10,000 FGA, now you have a fabric composer, unified security and policy orchestration, and management with the ability to find firewall policies efficiently and provide that telemetry to collect your such a Splunk. >> John: So the customer environments right now involve a lot of multi-vendor and new frameworks, obviously, cloud native. How does this fit into the customer's existing environment with the ecosystem? How do they get, get going here? >> Yeah, great question. Um, Our customers can get going as we, we've built a flexible platform that can be deployed in either Greenfield or brownfield. Obviously it's a best of breed architecture for distributed services we're building in conjunction with Aruba. But if customers want to gradually integrate this into their existing environments and they're using other vendors, spines or cores, this can be inserted seamlessly as, as a lead for an access, access tier switch to deliver the exact same set of services within that architecture. So it plugs seamlessly in because it supports all the standard control plan protocols, a VX 90 VPN, and a traditional attitude, three tier designs easily. Now, for any enterprise solution deployment, it's critical that you build a holistic ecosystem around it. It's clear that, this will get customer deployments and the ecosystem being diverse and rich is very, very important. And as part of our integrations with the controller, we're building a broad suite of integrations across threat detection, application dependency mapping, Siemens sooam, dev ops infrastructure as code tools. (inaudible) And it's clear if you look at these categories of integrations, you know, XDR or threat detection requires full telemetric from within the data center, it's been hard to accomplish to date because you typically need agents on, on your compute nodes to give you the visibility into what's going on or firewalls for east west fuels. Now, our platform can natively provide full visibility into all flows east- west in the data center. And this can become the source of telemetry truth that these MLX CR engines require to work. The other aspects of ecosystem around application dependency mapping, this single core challenge with deploying segmentation east west is understanding the rules to put in & Right, first is how do you insert the service, um, service device in such a way that it won't add more complexity? We don't add any complexity because we're in line natively. How you would understand it, would allow you to build the rules that are necessary to do segmentation. We integrate with tools like Guardi core, we provide our flogs as source of data, and they can provide room recommendations and policy recommendations for customers. Around, we're building integrations around Siemen soam with, with tools like Splunk and elastic, elastic search that will allow NetOps and SecOps teams to visualize trend and manage the services delivered by the CX 10 K. And the other aspect of ecosystem, from a security standpoint is clearly how do I get policy for these traditional appliances and enforce them on this next generation architecture that you've built, that can enable stateful services. So we're building integrations with tools like turf and an algo sec third-party sources of policy that we can ingest and enforce on the infrastructure, allowing you to gradually, um, migrate to this new architecture over time. >> John: It's really a cloud native switch. I mean, you solve people's problems, pin- points, but yet positioned for growth. I mean, it sounds that's my takeaway, but I got to ask you guys both, what's the takeaway for the customers because it's not that simple for them, I mean it's, we a have complicated environment. (all giggling) >> Yeah, I think it's, I think it's really simple, um, you know, every 10 years or so, we see major evolutions in the data center and the switching environment, but we do believe we've created a new category with the distributed services, distributed services switch, delivering cloud scale distributed services, where the local, where the workloads reside greatly, simplifying network, security provisioning, and operations with the urban fabric composer while improving security posture and the TCO. But that's not all the folks, it's a journey, right Shane? >> Yeah, it's absolutely a journey. And this is the first step in a long journey with a great partner like Aruba. There's other platforms, hundred or 400 gig hardware platforms where we're looking at and then this additional services that we can enable over time, allowing customers to drive even more TCO value out of the platform of the architecture services like encryption for securing the cloud on-ramp, services like stateful load balancing to deploy east-west in the data center and, you know, holistically that's, that's the goal, deliver value for customers. And we believe we have an architecture and a platform, and this is a first step in a long journey. >> It's a great way of, I just ask one final, final question for both of you as product leaders, you got to be excited having a category creation product here in this market, this big wave, but what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, exactly right, it doesn't happen that often, and so we're, we're all in it's, it's exciting to be able to work with a great team like Pensando and Shane here. Um, so we're really, really excited about this launch. >> Yeah, it's awesome. The team is great. It's a great partnership between Pensando and Aruba. You know, we, we look forward to delivering value for our joint customers. >> John: Thank you both for sharing under the hood and more details on the product. Thanks for coming on. >> [William And Shane] Thank you. >> Okay. The next evolution in switching, I'm John Furrier here with the power of nHPE Aruba and Pensando changing the game, the way customers scale up in the cloud and networking. Thanks for watching. (music playing)

>>I'm john free with the Q we are here. It's exciting news around the next evolution switching, Sony jean Donny, co founder and chief business officer Pensando and David Hughes chief product and technology officer Aruba HP. Welcome back. We just heard from Antonio neary and john Chambers about the HPV Ruba partnership with Pensando and the new switching platform. Tell me more about the exciting news you're announcing? >>Yeah, I'm really excited today to be introducing the CX 10,000 distributed services switch. It's a brand new class of switch way bringing together the best of Aruba switching technology adding to R C X portfolio combining with Pence Sandoz technology that technology embedded in the platform. The problem we're solving is that in a traditional data center, all of those services like fire walling and low balancing provided by centralized appliances. And while that might be okay for north south traffic traffic that's going in and out of the data center. It's not scalable and it's not cost effective to apply to every service in every port to every flow traversing their data center As we all know with microservices more and more of the traffickers east west over 70% today and growing and so what we're doing here with the C X 10,000 is giving enterprises away to take the smart nick technology that's been proven out by hyper scholars and introduce it into their data centers in a very cost effective and easy to deploy way we're embedding that capability in the top of rack switch so that we can apply Fireable services, low balancing services to every port To every flow, delivering 100 times a scale in terms of a CLS 10 times of performance, in terms of encryption at a third of the cost of those traditional network architectures. So it's a super exciting time, >>love the speed, love the energy there. But I gotta ask what makes this a new category of switch. >>Well if you take a look at the journey we have been on as we have evolved our data centers and the applications have evolved for our customers. Uh and the world is now a bold new world of multi cloud. Uh the architecture is in the data center which are leaves spine architectures have become the new norm. Software defined, networking is pervasively deployed by our customers but as this journey began five or seven or even about 10 years ago uh and has culminated into a much more mature set of building blocks. We have taken the problem from one space of automating networks in the data center to then introducing lots and lots of expensive appliances to bring about security for example, or the state full services, whether it's load balancing or whether it's encryption and visibility and telemetry types of services. Now the customers had to try, you know, trombone all the traffic in and out of these appliances driving up the cost uh and the complexity and when time comes to troubleshoot these environments, it's extremely complex because you're trying to rationalize fabrics coming from one place appliances coming from four or five different vendors, maintaining all the software elements that need to be kept track off. Uh and as more and more customers want to aspire towards zero trust security model. Uh we need to start to embrace a lot of the principles that have been implemented by the hyper scholars and the cloud vendors, which is doing away with the appliances doing away with agent technology on servers, but instead to bring that technology for east west uh into play as well as to ensure that if there are bad actors that are landing inside of the data centers that they do not have the ability to, you know, create attack surfaces with complete lateral movement. Today, that is possible. Uh if you look at 70% of all the attacks that have been happening here in the past few years, it's as a result of having a attack surface which is pretty large in the data centers. And that gets further complicated when you move towards a multi cloud environment where the perimeter of the data center is now moving into the edge. Whether that edges, whether fleet resides for our customers or whether that edge happens to be a co location edge where you're building your own rampant off ramps. So I think the compelling event essentially is driven by the whole notion of distribution of services and having them available from a security and from a services point of view and these are state full services as close to the workload as you possibly can get them. >>So you guys really hit on some key points, their cloud, native microservices East west, north south, um no perimeter edge. These are topics that we would talk about kind of individually over the years, it's happening now all at the same time, this is causing a lot of complexities and then the security challenges you just laid out are everywhere. This brings up a big conversation around solving this. How does this new architecture, this solution solve the complexity and the security challenges in the data center. >>If you look at the use cases that our customers are talking about. The first, the initial use case really is to bring about security and state full security for east west traffic right into the fabric of their data centers. So having the ability to deliver that while eliminating the complex appliances only to do the job which they do very well, which is not South protection of services. Uh that also allows us the ability then to start to deliver visibility and telemetry at the same time that we're delivering state full security firewall and micro segmentation services because what I cannot see, I cannot secure. Uh so those two elements are initial use cases out of the box for our customers as we deliver this platform to them and then as more and more use cases that are becoming evident to us through customer interactions come into play. For example, the co location edge that I would like. David to walk you through a bit more in terms of how we help solve for that use case. >>So for the cooler use case, I think we're moving from a world where people talk about data centers to now talking about centers of data and those centers of data. Yes, they can be in a core private data center, they could be in the cloud but more and more they're going to be distributed around the edge in co location environments. And what we need to be able to do is extend those services that were provided in the data center to be provided in those Kahlo's at the edge And again we want to do that without having to deploy a whole rack of appliances that may be cost more than a computer itself and so with the CX- 10,000 we can have that as a top of rack switch for that polo. And from that switch deploy all of the encryption and firewall ng services that that polo requires. And what's important is that we're doing it with the same policy framework under the same management system across the whole enterprise in the data center as well as in these co location environments and out into the cloud. >>So you guys mentioned visibility and a quick follow up on this question because you mentioned visibility can't see it, you can't protect it. But also there's a lot of workloads that people are trying to automate. These are two factors. Can you guys just double down on that? I want to just get that out there because I think this becomes a big thing. >>I think policy having the ability to have an intent based policy that is a foundational technology building block that we are brought together is a very important element. And then when you map it back to tools that Aruba is extending support for including this platform, become very valuable. So David, why don't you walk us >>through? You know, I think one of the advantages that we bring is that this is an extension of the Aruba C X switching portfolio. So yeah, it's a cloud native microservices, very modern switch architecture and we have a comprehensive management platform, the Aruba fabric controller. And so what we are doing is making sure that everything fits together nicely, that we're delivering a complete solution to our customers. But one important thing to mention here is that we are thinking about how customers can do this step by step. So no, we're not requiring them to rebuild their entire data center, They can do this one rack at a time. We can work with their existing spine and deploy one leaf at a time in a very measured way. And so we think it's a great way for enterprises to be able to consume this modern distributed platform. >>That's a great segment. The next question. I mean I totally see this as you guys are talking about the cloud native trend, driving a cloud operational model to every edge. The data center is just another edge. It's a center of data. Love that. I love that line. So I have to kind of ask the operational side of the question, how would an enterprise customers manage all this take us through the nuts and bolts of deploying and managing of his gum? A customer >>That's a very good question. If you take a look at the customer's deployment models and let's let's take the example of they want to now bring in this technology and build a part or highly secure part with it for east west and to make sure that they're protecting 100% of that east west traffic. I think that leveraging all the building blocks that we have innovated between us and Aruba. We want to make sure that the ecosystem that the customer has built, they want whether they have built it with companies like Splunk and service now or Guardianco, they want integration points will be made available to them. If you take a look at, take a step back and say for these environments as you aspire to go toward zero trade security. The issues of inserting security appliances into network flows and having the ability to map it to the knowledge of applications and their dependencies for policy becomes an important function to tackle. So once you accept that, Okay, I have state full security functions built into this top of rack device available for my applications and all workloads, whether they're container workloads, bare metal workload, virtualized workloads uh and I have complete visibility into those workloads without compromising on connectivity and I can control through enforcement of policy where I need it because now security is part of the fabric, it's not a bolt on. Then comes the job of integration with an ecosystem. So whether you're looking at seem and sold companies where we are delivering in close collaboration with Splunk, A Pensando app for Splunk there's also going to be the availability of an elastic module, A plug in module. Uh then turn attention to what's more automation and devops and civil playbooks for the C X 10-K will be made available day one so that where you do not have the ability to deploy the A. F. C. You can use your existing answerable toolkit and they're making those playbooks available to our customers. Uh They want integration with application discovery mapping companies like Guardianco, allowing them to discover who's talking to whom and push and enforce that policy through the C X 10-K will allow for more automated deployments of those policies and finally, compliance integration with vendors like too thin for continuous security compliance monitoring becomes extremely important as the screen depicts a lot of lot of visualization capabilities with companies like Elk which are in beta today and answerable and Splunk and Elk will all be targeted at first customer shipment. So again, telemetry visibility with the integration of the ecosystem. Uh, it becomes a very powerful combination for the customers as they look to operationalize this for day to day three and they, you know, day one, day two, day three automation. >>That's awesome. David, I'd like to let you weigh in on this whole question of operations because you're hitting all the marks here that are relevant cloud, native microservices, apps, explosion and data volume and velocity, hyper scale operational cloud operations, performance, price point security all in this one solution. This is big. Um, it's not like you mentioned earlier, it's not a rip and replace but you can roll it out how how do you see a customer best operational izing this new, >>You know, I think the answer is a little bit different for each customer but you are very careful at the beginning, we introduced this. It's an evolution of switching. It's not a revolution where we have to replace everything and I think that's really exciting is that it builds on the foundational architecture of leaf and spine. And what we're able to do is let that customer introduced these new capabilities one leaf at a time. So maybe when they're upgrading from 10 gigs to 25 gigs, it's a great time for them to introduce this capability into their data center um and then depending on their application, you know, it may be, as Sony said that they've got one particular application, a crown jewel application and so they want to build out that in one rack and provide, you know, very, very robust East west as well as north south um security around that application, but there's so many different ways that customers can deploy this technology and what's really exciting is now is we're beginning to work with our customers, learning about these new use cases and then feeding that back into our roadmap and we all >>know, as you get down lower in the network layer, security is distributed architecture. So everything is paramount like security, super relevant, great conversation, I gotta ask what's next with this technology. Yeah, >>well, you know the teams, the two engineering teams are working together and this is step one on, on a really exciting new path, I don't know, Sony, what would you say? >>I think there's a lot more to come here. This is just a starting point. We have an incredibly strong partnership and go to market partnership here with Uber team with this platform. It is just the beginning uh and it will lead our customers onto the multi cloud journey. Uh and last but not least, I would like to say that you know, in closing uh that are seldom opportunities where you look at disrupting the way things are happening while fitting into customers existing models. So this is, as I said with everything being software defined, you will continue to see as delivering at great velocity more and more software defined services, whether it's encryption, Lord balancing and other state full services over time. Making this technology easier to deploy by fitting into the existing ecosystem and continuing to provide them with the 100 extra scale, 10 X. The performance as well as the ability to do it at a third of the same, you know, at the third of the cost of what they would need to if they had to build this uh today with disparate devices, >>exciting news in the industry. You guys are the pros you've seen all the waves of innovation over the years. I guess my final final question would be, how would you summarize this point in time right now? This is pretty um exciting all this is all happening At the same time, customers are having opportunity to innovate the pandemic has shown a lot of scale and and the need for stability and security. This is a special moment. How would you guys weigh in on that? >>Yeah, I think about it every decade, there's a change in how data centers a belt. And so this is the change that's happening this decade. Moving to a distributed services, switch. The other big mega trend that I see is this move, as I said from data centers to stand as a data and the opportunity for customers to use this technology as they move out to the edge. Have distributed compute and tell us, what do you think Sony? >>I think I couldn't agree more. I think there are so many various technology transitions occurring now. The cloud being the biggest one. Uh the explosion of data and uh, you know, the customers making decisions of having a distributed model And if indeed two thirds, if not 75% of all data will be processed at the edge over the next few years. This architecture is prime for the enterprise to go leverage their best practices of today while they can gradually move that architecture is for the future, which is a multi cloud future >>centers of data, large scale cloud operations automation. The speed of innovation has never seen this before. Uh It's exciting time. Sunny, thank you for coming on. And David, thanks for chatting about this exciting new announcement. Thank you very much. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>This is the power of and hp. Ruba and Pensando partnership. I'm john forward the cube. Thanks for watching. Mhm

>>Thank you. >>Hi and welcome to the Aruba Pensando announcement. I'm lisa martin. Hopefully you've seen the announcement from Antonio and john but if you haven't, we're going to dig into it from an analyst perspective joining me is bob La Liberty, senior analyst at Enterprise strategy Group to unpack the announcement, bob Welcome to the program. >>Thank you very much. Great to be here. >>So in this case anybody hasn't seen the announcement go ahead and give me an overview, what are these two companies announcing? >>Yeah, absolutely. So essentially what you've seen is is that Pensando, who's been developing this distributed services platform to be deployed as an intelligent card, basically has taken their technology and incorporate it into an Aruba switch. So now you can get distributed services, all the great capabilities that Pensando has been working on combined with an Aruba top of rack switch, all managed under the Aruba fabric controller. Um so you've got a really simplistic way to be able to provision, configure and update and assigned policies to all those great Pensando state full services in the top of rack switch for an existing data center environment >>and what's your overall synopsis? Is this a disruptive technology? What do you think? >>Yeah, I really like this. I mean the whole goal of developing this technology was to be somewhat disruptive. It was to enable data center organizations to basically recreate what hyper scale hours are doing and the whole concept is around how do I improve, how do I distribute the services that are needed to help my application to protect my applications closer to the applications themselves. Um so I really find that this is something that's that's really needed. You know, we've seen the pendulum swinging towards distributed. But the interesting part about this announcement is that the majority of applications still reside in existing data centers. And the other the other kind of interesting pieces that, you know, cloud native, everyone talks about cloud native applications, but cloud native doesn't always mean public cloud only and that organizations are actually gonna run them in a hybrid. So organizations need to figure out how they're going to run these cloud native applications and their existing data center environments. And what the combination of the technologies enable organizations to do is to basically retrofit if you will that top of rack switch and be able to deploy, excuse me, deploy those distributed services at a top of rack switch. Instead of having to either rely on existing hardware appliances that are pulled off to the side of the network or to have to deploy agents onto the server which could impact the application performance. So they've kind of hit that goldilocks spot of being able to provide distributed services without impacting the application performance. In fact, when you look at it from that perspective of its not having to go to that appliance pool any longer, it's actually going to increase the performance, right? Your latency is going to be a lot lower because instead of hair pinning through the core of your network. Now you're just going to your top of rack switch. So it's going to improve the performance. >>Everybody wants improved performance. Especially in this the fact that things are continuing to stay distributed and we probably will have some part of that be permanent. So bob how do customers upgrade or integrate this into their existing environments? Talk to me a little bit more about that and the simplicity, it sounds like what you're saying with which they can do that. >>Yeah, this should be a fairly minimally minimally disruptive uh type of integration, essentially what you're doing if you've got a high availability top of rack it environment, you're going to be swapping out one top of rack switch at the time. And organizations do this quite often when they're upgrading for capacity and things of that nature. So in this case it's simply going to be replacing the top of rack switch and organizations can look at different ways of how they want to do this. You know, to start they might want to look at where they're critical applications are and deploy them. They're so they've got the services, it might be based on looking at where, I don't know you might have some regulated services. Right. Pc I things like that that need to make sure that they've got higher levels of security. So essentially it's all about just simply deploying those top of rack switches going on to Aruba's fabric controller being able to spend that up configure, apply the policies and the security policies that you want to employ for those applications and and let it run, >>Talk to me about this in certain context that we know some of the industry's every industry obviously has been affected by the events of the last 1819 months. What we think of manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, give me uh your perspective into some of the customers in those industries and how they'll be able to take advantage of this technology as their environments continue to distribute. >>Yeah, I mean, I think that the interesting piece of this is that, you know what it's really about for any industry, it's about as they modernize their data center, as they modernize their applications. Right? So we've seen the transition from um monolithic too. So a based apps to microservices based applications and and that's really what's driving this. Because what's happening in all those organizations now, there's a lot of of communication within those applications themselves. Right? Because instead of having one monolithic application or two or three pieces of an application, you could now have dozens or hundreds of pieces of an application that need to talk to each other. And so the key for all of these industries, right. Regardless of the industry, when you're deploying this is how do you secure that communication, how do you make sure that East West traffic is being fully protected um because as organizations, you know, the legacy approach was castle and moat protect the perimeter, which was great. But if you got inside that perimeter right then the malware could really put periphery slow, deliberate, sorry, can't talk today. Um, but the idea is now, how can I deploy services that are able to protect that east west traffic as well? And so by deploying those services at the top of rack, you can do that more easily without having any kind of an impact. Right? So I think that you know the zero trust is what it's the mantra is never trust, always verify. And so that's what organizations are looking to do. So even if there is a malware attack and they do get inside the data center that it's not able to spread throughout that organization. >>Got it. And that's absolutely critical. We have seen the security landscape change dramatically in the last year and a half, we've seen this massive spike in ransom where it's companies in every industry. I now know that it is not a matter of if we get attacked, it's when we've seen a massive increase in detail. So let's kind of dig into, You mentioned some of the benefits in terms of low latency performance, let's unpack the security level there. What are some of the things that you've seen in the security landscape where zero trust is absolutely critical for every industry? >>Yeah. Well, like I said, it's really all about how do you make sure you're protecting there's a lot more communication going on within your application itself and how do you protect it? And so as that landscape has changed, it's critically important for organizations to adapt to that and to be able to, you know, make this change happen. So I mean we've seen this in the hyper scale is right. They've deployed the technology, they have it running at the right and those, those intelligent cards at the server level as close as they can. But for an existing data center, it doesn't make sense, right, unless you're replacing your whole data center, which is obviously incredibly disruptive. It's this is really about how do you insert those services in a minimally minimally disruptive way. And that's what that's what's really key here. The other interesting pieces because of the location, because they can track that east west traffic and apply the security policies to it and they can see all that and they've got visibility into it. They can then take that information and they can export it to existing other security tools. So you're not going to get rid of your perimeter security, you still need that. So this is more about a defense and depth about securing or augmenting your security posture and creating much more, much more, much tighter security around those modern application environments as well. So, so having this capability, like I said, it really starts to democratize that, that capability and the functions that the hyper scholars have and it brings it into existing enterprise data center environments and I think that's really what's important. And then, like I said, as organizations progress, they can take the data that they're collecting and they can leverage that with XDR solutions, right? Feed it into other, you know, sense or things like that. That can really help organizations um, you know, enhance their machine learning algorithms and things like that. The more data you can collect, the better you can, you can nail down the the policies that need to be provided there. >>Well, that's important too. As every company these days either needs to become a data company or if they don't, they're probably not going to be around much longer. Talk to me about the overall security kind of like implication. You said this is going to help organizations in any industry augment their overall security posture. That's so critically important these days. >>Yeah. And it's like I said, it's really about having that that full visibility into the east west flows for these so, and their ability, the distributed services switch is able to stream all of that telemetry of those flows right? And that can be complemented by the existing north south firewall telemetry as well. So you've got all this data for the XDR engines and things like that so that you can really determine whether there's an insider attack where there's any movement of malware, things like that, whether there's an external actor that's gotten into the data center, so it really provides you with a lot more visibility and that visibility provides that data that you talked about. So that's really what's key here and again, it's the ability here is that you're not needing to deploy XDR agents on every workload so there's no impact to the application performance when you're doing it in this this matter. So that's what makes it a really kind of an elegant solution to being able to modernize and deliver these capabilities into an existing data center environment. >>What do you think the timeframe is for an organization to be able to take advantage of this technology? >>Yeah, that's a good question. I mean really it's it's up to the, you know, it's up to the organization themselves. Clearly, once the technology is released by Aruba they've got the ability to start deploying it um you know, obviously one of the easiest ways to deploy it might be if they were adding a new rack, adding some new capabilities then certainly that's completely non disruptive and they can get going there, but like I said it, excuse me, it's also quite easy for organisations to be able to to just simply if they've got a high availability top of rack environment to start augmenting it into their existing their existing infrastructure as well, fairly non destructively >>excellent. That non disruption augmentation is critical. I I do want to ask you a question in terms of the partnership with HP Aruban Pensando, what does this signify on the HP side in your opinion? >>Mhm Well from from the HP side, like I said, I think this is a HP has been involved with Pensando for a long time now. They've obviously recognized the value of the technology and wanted to partner with them from an early stage and so um what it really helps is you're thinking about moving forward. It creates a unique opportunity for organizations to take advantage of the Pensando technology within the HP server environments as well as those top of rack switches and create some really unique opportunities to drive even greater visibility and protection. >>Let's do one more thing bob. Let's just summarize your key takeaways if somebody has 30-60 seconds to watch this and see what the three things are that Bob says we need to be taking away from this announcement. What are those three things? >>Yeah, I think the key thing is first to recognize that modern application environments are gaining ground and that organizations need to accommodate these new application architecture. Right? But to do that, they need a solution. They need some technology to help them. So the key takeaway is that this now this H P E. Aruba and Pensando distributed services switch enables you to deploy distributed services into your existing environment in a minimally disruptive way and it provides you with the benefits of improving security of improving performance and user experiences. Um all while making sure that you can scale and do it simply through a single interface through the Aruba fabric controller. >>Got it. And being able to deliver those outstanding customer and user experiences is critical as we are in this day and age where our business lives blend with our consumer lives that we expect things to be able to work like that bob. Thank you for joining me on the program, breaking down the HP Aruba Pensando announcement, telling us what it is, what the benefits are in it for customers and how they can take advantage of that. We appreciate your analysis. >>Very welcome. It's great to be here. >>Probably Liberty. I'm lisa martin. You're watching this HP Aruba Pensando announcement video. Yeah. Mhm.

>>Hello and welcome to the power of and where H P E Aruba and Pensando are changing the game the way customers scale at the cloud and what's next in the evolution in switching everyone. I'm john ferrier with the Cuban. I'm here with Shane Corbyn, Director of Technical Product management. Pensando Williams show vice president Product management, Aruba HP Gentlemen, thank you for coming on and doing a deep dive and and going into the big news. So the first question I want to ask you guys is um, what do you guys see from a market customer perspective that kicked this project off? Amazing results over the past year or so. Where did it all come from? >>It's a great question, John So when we were doing our homework, there were actually three very clear customer challenges. First, security threats were largely spawned with from within the perimeter. In fact, four star highlights that 80% of threats originate within the internal network. Secondly, workloads are largely distributed, creating a ton of east west traffic and then lastly, network services such as firewalls load balancers. VPN aggregators are expensive. They're centralized and then ultimately result in service changing complexity. So everyone, >>so go ahead. Change. >>Yeah. Additionally, when we spoke to our customers after launching initially the distributed services platform, these compliance challenges clearly became apparent to us and while they saw the architectural value of adopting what the largest public cloud providers have done by putting a smart making each compute note to provide these state full services. Enterprise customers were still were struggling with the need to upgrade fleets and Brownfield servers and the associated per node cost of adding a spark nick to every compute node. Typically the traffic volumes for on a personal basis within an enterprise data center are significantly lower than cloud. Thus we saw an opportunity here to in conjunction with Aruba developed a new category of switching product um, to share the crossing capabilities of our unique intellectual property around our DPU across a rack of servers that Net Net delivers the same set of services through a new category of platform, enabling a distributed services architecture and ultimately addressing the compliance and uh, TCO generating huge TCO and ri for customers. >>You know, one of the things that we've been reporting on with you guys as well as the cloud scale, this is the volume of data and just the performance and scale I think the timing of the, of this partnership and the product development is right on point. You got the edge right around the corner more, more distributed nature of cloud operations, huge, huge change in the marketplace. So great timing on the origination story there. Great stuff. Tell me more about the platform itself. The details what's under the hood, the hardware. Os, what are the specs? >>Yeah, so we started with a very familiar premise, Ruba customers are already leveraging C X with an edge to cloud, common operating model and deploying Leaf and spy networks. Plus we're excited to introduce the industry's first distributed services switch where the first configuration has 48 25 gig ports with 100 gig uplinks running Aruba C X cloud native operating system. Pensando A six and software inside enabling layer four through seven staple services you want to elaborate on. >>Let me elaborate on that a little further. Um, you know, as we spoke, existing platforms and how customers were seeking to address these challenges were inherently limited by the diocese and that thus limited their scale and performance and ability in traditional switching platforms to deliver truly stable functions in in a switching platform. This was, you know, architecturally from the ground up. When we developed our DPU 1st and 2nd generation, we delivered it or we we we built it with staples services in in mind from the Gecko. We we leverage to clean state designed with RP four program with GPU, we evolved to our seven nanometer based DPU right now, which is essentially enabling software and silicon and this has generated a new level of performance scale flexibility and capability in terms of services this serves as the foundation for or 200 gig card where we're taking the largest cloud providers into production for. And the DPU itself is designed inherently to process state track state connections and state will flow is a very, very large scale without impacting performance. And in fact, the two of these deep you component service, their services foundation of the C X 10-K And this is how we enable states of functions in a switching platform. Functions like stable network network fire walling, stable segmentation, enhance programmable telemetry. Which we believe will bring a whole lot of value to our customers. And this is a, a platform that's inherently programmable from the ground up. We can we can build and and leverages platform to build new use cases around encryption, enabling state for load balancing, stable nash to name a few. But the key message here is this is this is a platform with the next generation of architecture is in mind is programmed but at all levels of the stack and that's what makes it fundamentally different than anything else. >>I want to just double click on that if you don't mind before we get to the competitive question because I think you brought up the state thing, I think this is worth calling out if you guys don't mind commenting more on this state issue because this is big cloud. Native developers right now want speed, they're shifting left at the Ci cd pipeline with program ability. So going down and having the program ability and having state is a really big deal. Can you guys just expand on that a little bit more and why it's important and how hard it really is to pull off. >>I I can start I guess. Well um it's very hard to pull off because of the sheer amount of connections you need to track when you're developing something like a state, full firewall or state from load balancer. A key component of that is managing the connections at very, very large scale and understanding what's happening with those connections at scale without impacting application performance. And this is fundamentally different. A traditional switching platform regardless of how it's deployed today in a six don't typically process and manage state like this. Memory resources within the shape aren't sufficient. Um the policy scale that you can implement on a platform aren't sufficient to address and fundamentally enable deployable fire walling or load balancing or other state services. >>That's exactly right. So the other kind of key point here is that if you think about the sophistication of different security threats, it does really require you to be able to look at the entire packet and more so be able to look at the entire flow and be able to log that history so that you can get much better heuristics around different anomalies. Security threats that are emerging today. >>That's a great great point. Thanks for bringing that extra extra point out, I would just add to this, we're reporting this all the time when silicon angle in the cube is that you know, the you know, the the automation wave that's coming with around data, you know, it's the center of data now, not date as soon as we heard earlier on with the presentation data drives automation having that enabled with state is a real big deal. So I think that's really worth calling out now. I got to ask the competition question, how is this different? I mean this is an evolution, I would say it's a revolution you guys are being humble um but how is this different from what customers can deploy today >>architecturally, if you take a look at it? So we've, we've spoken about the technology and fundamentally in the platform, what's unique in the architecture but foundational e when customers deploy stable services, they're typically deployed leveraging traditional big box appliances for east west or workload based agents which seek to implement stable security for each East west architectural, what we're enabling is staples services like fire walling, segmentation can scale with the fabric and are delivered at the optimal point for east west which is through the Leaf for access their of the network and we do this for any type of workload. Being deployed on a virtualized compute node being deployed on a containerized, our worker node being deployed on bare metal agnostic of topology. It can be in the access layer of a three tier design and a data center. It can be in the leaf layer of the excellent VPN based fabric. But the goal is an all centrally managed to a single point of orchestration control which William we'll talk about shortly. The goal of this is to to drive down the TCO of your data center as a whole by allowing you to retire legacy appliances that are deployed in in east west role, not utilized host based agents and thus save a whole lot of money. And we've modeled on the order of 60 to 70% in terms of savings in terms of the traditional data center pod design of 1000 compute nodes which will be publishing and as as we go forward, additional services as we mentioned like encryption, this platform has the capability to terminate up to 800 gigs of line, right encryption, I P sec VPN per platform state will not load balancing and this is all functionality will be adding to this existing platform because it's programmable as we mentioned from the ground up. >>What are some of the use cases lead and one of the top use case. What's the low hanging fruit? And where does this go? Service providers enterprise, what are the types of customers you guys see implementing? >>Yeah, that's what's really exciting about the C X 10,000 we actually see customer interest from all types of different markets, whether it be higher education service providers to financial services, basically all enterprises verticals with private cloud or edge data centers for example, could be a hospital, a big box retailer or Coehlo. Such as an equity. It's so it's really the 6 10,000 that creates a new switching category enabling staple services in that leaf node, right at the workload, unifying network and security automation policy management. Second, the C X 10,000 greatly improved security posture and eliminates the need for hair pinning east west traffic all the way back to the centralized plants. Lastly, a Shane highlighted there's a 70% Tco savings by eliminating that appliance brawl and ultimately collapsing the network security operations. >>I love the category creation vibe here. Love it. And obviously the technical and the cloud line is great. But how do the customers manage all this? Okay. You got a new category. I just put the box in, throw away some other one. I mean how does this all get down? How does the customers manage all this? >>Yeah. So we're looking to build on top of the ribbon fabric composer. It's another familiar sight for our customers which already provides for compute storage and network automation with a broad ecosystem integrations such as being where the sphere be center as with Nutanix prison And so aligned with the c. x. 10,000 at G. A. now the aruba fabric composer unifies security and policy orchestration and management with the ability to find firewall policies efficiently and provide that telemetry to collectors such a slump. >>So the customer environments right now involve a lot of multi vendor and new frameworks cloud native. How does this fit into the customer's existing environment? The ecosystem. How do they get that get going here? >>Yeah, great question. Um our customers can get going is we we built a flexible platform that can be deployed in either Greenfield or brownfield. Obviously it's a best of breed architecture for distributed services were building in conjunction with the ruble but if customers want to gradually integrate this into their existing environments and they're using other vendors, spines or course this can be inserted seamlessly as a leaf or an access access to your switch to deliver the exact same set of services within that architecture. So it plugs seamlessly in because it supports all the standard control playing protocols, VX, Lenny, VPN and traditional attitude three tier designs easily. Now for any enterprise solution deployment, it's critical that you build a holistic ecosystem around it. It's clear that this will get customer deployments and the ecosystem being diverse and rich is very, very important and as part of our integrations with the controller, we're building a broad suite of integrations across threat detection application dependency mapping, Semen sore develops infrastructure as code tools like ants, Poland to answer the entire form. Um, it's clear if you look at these categories of integrations, you know XDR or threat detection requires full telemetry from within the data center. It's been hard to accomplish to date because you typically need agents on, on your compute nodes to give you the visibility into what's going on or firewalls for east west flaws. Now our platform can natively provide full visibility in dolphins, East west in the data center and this can become the source of telemetry truth that these Ml XT or engines required to work. The other aspects of ecosystem are around application dependency mapping the single core challenge with deploying segmentation. East West is understanding the rules to put in place right first, is how do you insert the service uh service device in such a way that it won't add more complexity. We don't add any complexity because we're in line natively. How do we understand that allow you to build the rules are necessary to do segmentation. We integrate with tools like guard corps, we provide our flow logs a source of data and they can provide rural recommendations and policy recommendations for customers around. We're building integrations around steve and soar with tools like Splunk and elastic elastic search that will allow net hops and sec ops teams to visualize, train and manage the services delivered by the C X 10-K. And the other aspect of ecosystem from a security standpoint is clearly how do I get policy from these traditional appliances and enforce them on this next generation architecture that you've built that can enable state health services. So we're building integrations with tools like toughen analgesic third party sources of policy that we can ingest and enforcing the infrastructure allowing you to gradually migrate to this new architecture over time >>it's really a cloud native switch, you solve people's problems pain points but yet positioned for growth. I mean it sounds that's my takeaway. But I gotta ask you guys both what's the takeaway for the customers because it's not that simple for that. We have a complicated >>Environment. I think, I think it's really simple every 10 years or so. We see major evolutions in the data center in the switching environment. We do believe we've created a new category with the distributed services, distributed services, switch, delivering cloud scale distribute services where the local where the workloads were side greatly simplifying network security provisions and operations with the Yoruba fabric composer while improving security posture and the TCO. But that's not all folks. It's a journey. Right. >>Yeah, it's absolutely a journey. And this is the first step in in a long journey with a great partner like Aruba, there's other platforms, 100 or four gig hardware platforms we're looking at and then there's additional services that we can enable over time allowing customers to drive even more Tco value out of the platform and the architectural services like encryption for securing the cloud on ramp services like state for load balancing to deploy east west in the data center and you know, holistically that's that's the goal, deliver value for customers and we believe we have an architecture and a platform and this is the first step in a long journey. It's >>a great way. I just ask one final final question for both of you. As product leaders, you've got to be excited having a category creation product here in this market, this big wave. What's what's your thoughts? >>Yeah, exactly. Right. It doesn't happen that often. And so we're all in, it's it's exciting to be able to work with a great team like Sandu and chain here. And so we're really excited about this launch. >>Yeah, it's awesome. The team is great. It's a great partnership between and santo and Aruba and you know, we we look forward to delivering value for john customers. >>Thank you both for sharing under the hood and more details on the product. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Okay, >>the next evolution of switching, I'm john furrier here with the power of An HP, Aruba and Pensando, changing the game the way customers scale up in the cloud and networking. Thanks for watching. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. We're digging in with Pensando. Talking about the technologies that they're using. And happy to welcome to the program, two of Pensando's technical leaders. We have Krishna Doddapaneni, he's the Vice President of Software. And we have here Pirabhu Raman, he's a Principal Engineer, both with Pensando. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right. >> Thank you for having us here >> Krishna, you run the Software Team. So let's start there and talk about really the mission and shortly obviously, bring us through a little bit of architecturally what Pensando was doing. >> To get started, Pensando we are building a platform, which can automate and manage the network storage and security services. So when we talk about software here, it's like the better software as you start from all the way from bootloader, to all the way it goes to microservices controller. So the fundamentally the company is building a domain specific processor called a DSP, that goes on the card called DSC. And that card goes into a server in a PCIe slot. Since we go into a server and we act as a NIC, we have to do drivers for Windows, all the OS' Windows, Linux, ESX and FreeBSD. And on the card itself, the chip itself, there are two fundamental pieces of the chip. One is the P4 pipelines, where we run all our applications, if you can think like in the firewalls, in the virtualization, all security applications. And then there's Arm SoC, which we have to bring up the platform and where we run the control plane and data and management plane so that's one piece of the software. The other big piece of software is called PSM. Which kind of, if you think about it in data center, you don't want to manage, one DSC at a time or one server at a time. We want to manage all thousands of servers, using a single management and control point. And that's where the test for the PSM comes from. >> Yeah, excellent. You talked about a pretty complex solution there. One of the big discussion points in the networking world and I think in general has been really the role of software. I think we all know, it got a little overblown. The discussion of software, does not mean that hardware goes away. I wrote a piece, many years ago, if you look at how hyperscalars do things, how they hyper optimize. They don't just buy the cheapest, most generic thing. they tend to configure things and they just roll it out in massive scale. So your team is well known for, really from a chip standpoint, I think about the three Cisco spin-ins. If you dug underneath the covers, yes there was software, but there was an Async there. So, when I look at what you're doing in Pensando, you've got software and there is a chip, at the end of the day. It looks, the first form factor of this looks like, a network card, the NIC that fits in there. So give us in there some of the some of the challenges of software and there's so much diversity in hardware these days. Everything getting ready for AI and GPUs. And you listed off a bunch of pieces when you were talking about the architecture. So give us that software/hardware dynamic, if you would. >> I mean, if you look at where the industry has been going towards, right, I mean, the Moore's law has been ending and Dennard scale is a big on Dennard scaling. So if you want to set all the network in certain security services on x86, you will be wasting a bunch of x86 cycles. The customer, why does he buy x86? He buys x86 to run his application. Not to run IO or do security for IO or policies for IO. So where we come in is basically, we do this domain specific processor, which will take away all the IO part of it, and the computer, just the compute of the application is left for x86. The rest is all offloaded to what we call Pensando. So NIC is kind of one part of what we do. NIC is how we connect to the server. But what we do inside the card is, firewalls, all the networking functions: SDNs, load balancing in all the storage functions, NVMe virtualization, and encryption of all the packets, data of data at rest and data of data in motion. All these services is what we do in this part. And you know, yes, it's an Async. But if you look at what we do inside, it's not a fixed Async. We did work on the previous spin-ins as you said, with Async, but there's a fundamental difference between that Async can this Async. In those Asyncs for example, there's a hard coded routing table or there's a hard coded ACL table. This Async is a completely programmable. It's more like it's a programmable software that we have domain specific language called P4. We use that P4 to program the Async. So the way I look at it, it's an Async, but it's mostly software driven completely. And from all the way from controllers, to what programs you run on the chip, is completely software driven. >> Excellent. Pirabhu of course, the big announcement here, HPE. You've now got the product. It's becoming generally available this month. We'd watch from the launch of Pensando, obviously, having HPE as not only an investor, but they're an OEM of the product. They've got a huge customer base. Maybe help explain, from the enterprise standpoint, if I'm buying ProLion, where now does, am I going to be thinking about Pensando? What specific use cases? How does this translate to the general and enterprise IP buyer? >> We cover of whole breadth of use cases, at the very basic level, if your use cases or if your company is not ready for all the different features, you could buy it as a basic NIC and start provisioning it, and you will get all the basic network functions. But at the same time in addition to the standard network functions, you will get always on telemetry. Like you will get rich set of metrics, you will get packet capture capabilities, which will help you very much in troubleshooting issues, when they happen, or you can leave them always on as well. So, you can do some of these tap kind of functionalities, which financial services do. And all these things you will get without any impact on the workload performance. Like the customers' application don't see any performance impact when any of these capabilities are turned on. So once this is as a standard network function, but beyond this when you are ready for enforcing policies at the edge or you're ready for enforcing stateful firewalls, distributed firewalling capabilities, connection tracking, some of the other things, like Krishna touched upon NVMe virtualization, there are all sorts of other features you can add on top of. >> Okay, so it sounds like what we're really democratizing some of those cloud services or cloud like services for the network, down to the end device, if I have this right. >> Exactly. >> Maybe if you could, networking, we know, our friends in network. We tend to get very acronym driven, to overlays and underlays and various layers of the stack there. When we talk about innovation, I'd love to hear from both of you, what are some of those kind of key innovations, if you were to highlight just one or two? Pirabhu, maybe you can go first and then Krishna would would love your follow up from that. >> Sure, there are many innovations, but just to highlight a few of them, right. Krishna touched upon P4, but even on the P4, P4 is very much focused on manipulating the packets, packets in and packets out, but we enhanced it so that we can address it in such a way that from memory in-packet out, packet in-memory out. Those kind of capabilities so that we can interface it with the host memory. So those innovations we are taking it to the standard and they are in the process of getting standardized as well. In addition to this, our software stack, we touched upon the always on telemetry capabilities. You could do flow based packet captures, NetFlow, you could get a lot of visibility and troubleshooting information. The management plane in itself, has some of the state of the art capabilities. Like it's distributed, highly available, and it makes it very easy for you to manage thousands of these servers. Krishna, do you want to add something more? >> Yes, the biggest thing of the platform is that when we did underlays and overlays, as you said there, everything was like fixed. So tomorrow, you wake up and come with a new protocol, or you may come up with a new way to do storage, right? Normally, in the hardware world, what happens is, Oh, you have to I have to sell you this new chip. That is not what we are doing. I mean, here, whatever we ship on this Async, you can continue to evolve and continue to innovate, irrespective of changing standards. If NVMe goes from one dot two to one dot three, or you come up with a new encapsulation of VXLAN, you do whatever encapsulations, whatever TLVs you would want to, you don't need to change the hardware. It's more about downloading new firmware, and upgrading the new firmware and you get the new feature. That is that's one of the key innovation. That's why most of the cloud providers like us, that we are not tied to hardware. It's more of software programmable processor that we can keep on adding features in the future. >> So one way to look at it, is like, you get the best of both worlds kind of a thing. You get power and performance of Async, but at the same time you get the flexibility of closer to that of a general purpose processor. >> Yeah, so Krishna, since you own the software piece of thing, help us understand architecturally, how you can deploy something today but be ready for whatever comes in the future. That's always been the challenge is, Gee, maybe if I wait another six months, there'll be another generation something, where I don't want to make sure that I miss some window of opportunity. >> Yeah, so it's a very good question. I mean, basically you can keep enhancing your features with the same performance and power and latency and throughput. But the other important thing is how you upgrade the software. I mean today whenever you have Async. When you have changed the Async, obviously, you have to pull the card out and you put the new card in. Here, when you're talking upgrading software, we can upgrade software while traffic is going through. With very minimal disruption, in the order of sub second. Right, so you can change your protocol, for example, tomorrow, we change from VXLAN to your own innovative protocol, you can upgrade that without disrupting any existing network or storage IO. I mean, that's where the power of the platform is very useful. And if you look at it today, where cloud providers are going right, and the cloud providers, you don't want to, because there are customers who are using that server, and they're deploying their application, they don't want to disturb that application, just because you decided to do some new innovative feature. The platform capability is that you could upgrade it, and you can change your mind sometime in the future. But whatever existing traffic is there, the traffic will continue to flow and not disrupt your app. >> All right, great. Well, you're talking about clouds one of the things we look at is multi cloud and multi vendor. Pirabhu, we've got the announcement with HPE now, ProLion and some of their other platforms. Tell us how much work will it be for you to support things like Dell servers or I think your team's quite familiar with the Cisco UCS platform. Two pieces on that number one: how easy or hard is it to do that integration? And from an architectural design? Does a customer need to be homogeneous from their environment or is whatever cloud or server platform they're on independent, and we should be able to work across those? >> Yeah, first off, I should start with thanking HPE. They have been a great partner and they have been quick to recognize the synergy and the potential of the synergy. And they have been very helpful towards this integration journey. And the way we see it, a lot of the work has already been done in terms of finding out the integration issues with HPE. And we will build upon this integration work that has been done so that we can quickly integrate with other manufacturers like Dell and Cisco. We definitely want to integrate with other server manufacturers as well, because that is in the interest of our customers, who want to consume Pensando in a heterogenous fashion, not just from one server manufacturer. >> Just want to add one thing to what Pirabhu's saying. Basically, the way we think about it is that, there's x86 and then the all the IO, the infrastructure services, right. So for us, as long as you get power from the server, and you can get packets and IO across the PCIe bus, we are kind of, we want to make it a uniform layer. So the Pensando, if you think about it, is a layer that can work across servers, and could work inside the public cloud and when we have, one of our customers using this in hybrid cloud. So we want to be the base where we can do all the storage network and security services, irrespective of the server and where the server is placed. Whether it's placed in the call log, it's placed in the enterprise data center, or it's placed in the public cloud. >> All right, so I guess Krishna, you said first x86. Down the road, is there opportunity to go beyond Intel processors? >> Yes. I mean, we already support AMD, which is another form of x86. But other architecture doesn't prevent us from any servers. As long as you follow the PCIe standard, we should, it's more of a testing matrix issue. It's not about support of any other OS, we should be able to support it. And initially, we also tested once on PowerPC. So any kind of CPU architecture, we should be able to support. >> Okay, so walk me up the application stack a little bit though. Things like virtualization, containerization. There's the question of does it work but does it optimize? Any of us live through those waves of, Oh, okay, well it kind of worked, but then there was a lot of time to make things like the origin networking work well in virtualization and then in containerization. So how about your solution? >> I mean you should look at, a good example is AWS, like what AWS does with Nitro. So on Nitro, you do EBS, you do security, and you do VPC. In all the services is effectively, we think about it, all of those can be encapsulated in one DSC card. And obviously, when it comes to this kind of implementation on one card, right, the first question you would ask what happens to the noisy neighbor? So we have the right QOS mechanisms to make sure all the services go through the same card, at the same time giving guarantees to the customer that (mumbles) especially in the multi-tenant environment, whatever you're doing on one VPC will not affect the other VPC. And the advantage of the platform that what we have is very highly scalable and highly performing. Scale will not be the issue. I mean, if you look at existing platforms, even if you look at the cloud, because when you're doing this product, obviously, we'll do benchmarking with the cloud and enterprises. With respect to scale, performance and latency, we did the measurements and we are order of magnitude compared to (sneezes) given the existing clouds and currently whatever enterprise customers have. >> Excellent, so Pirabhu, I'm curious, from the enterprise standpoint, are there certain applications, I think about like, from an analytic standpoint, Splunk is so heavily involved in data that might be a natural fit or other things where it might not be fully tested out with anything kind of that ISV world that we need to think about. >> So if we're talking in terms of partner ecosystems, our enterprise customers do use many of the other products as well. And we are trying to integrate with other products so that we can get the maximum value. So if you look at it, you could get rich metrics and visualization capabilities from our product, which can be very helpful for the partner products because they don't have to install an agent and they can get the same capability across bare metal virtual stack as well as containers. So we are integrating with various partners including some CMDB configuration management database products, as well as data analytics or network traffic analytics products. Krishna, do you want to add anything? >> Yeah, so I think it's just not the the analytics products. We're also integrating with VMware. Because right now VMware is a computer orchestrated and we want to be the network policy orchestrator. In the future, we want to integrate with Kubernetes and OpenShift. So we want to add integration so that our platform capability can be easily consumable irrespective of what kind of workload you use or what kind of traffic analytics tool you use or what kind of data link that you use in your enterprise data center. >> Excellent, I think that's a good view forward as to where some of the work is going on the future integration. Krishna and Pirabhu, thank you so much for joining us. Great to catch up. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

(soothing music) >> Commentator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stuart Miniman, and welcome to this Pensando event. We're talking about how Pensando is helping the future proof for enterprise. Really happy to welcome back to the program. Prem Jain he is the CEO of Pensando. Prem, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> All right, So we had the opportunity, Jeff Frick was at the launch when Pensando came out of stealth. Of course, we were all together there, New York City, beautiful views at the Goldman Sachs office in New York City. We had John Chambers there, Antonio Neary and really explaining to the world what your team is doing. And giving that out to the world. We're a little bit more than six months later. So, first just give us the update is how's your team doing? Obviously, when people come out of stealth or have any major things going on. You can't necessarily predict when things like a pandemic or global financial situations are happening, but how's the team doing and give us the updates since last year? >> Yeah sure, thank you. It was a great launch actually we had and that was in October. Since then, the company had made tremendous progress in all different areas of the company. So let me start with a number of people. We have grown to 250 plus people in the company, we filled up all our key positions in the company, and we are really making very good progress with the whole overall team. Product-wise, we continuously delivering since October last year. We have made multiple releases for the enterprise customers, we have made multiple releases for the cloud customers. And we also have done work with some other service provider customers. And the product is really doing very well in these environments. We have partners like you mentioned in the Discover show, HP is going to launch our cards into their server. This is the official launch, we are already shipping to some customers. And this particular thing is with all their servers as well as the GreenLake product. We continue to work with our cloud partners and they are also, we have done multiple releases to them and they will all go in production in next six months time frame. We also have a lot of interest, we are seeing it from the service product customers and we are working with a few of them. I cannot mention the name at this particular point but we will share with you, once that information becomes available. And they are very excited about the technologies which we have. And they think this innovation which we bringing into the market is really great for the edge market, in the cloud as well as edge of the service provider. >> Congratulations Prem on the progress there, of course, HPE was an investor and you know and expected to be an OEM. So, getting that, you know less than a year from when you've come out of stealth, to being generally available this month, great milestone there. And as you said, you've already got some early customers using it. >> Yes. >> Help us understand, when the company first launched, your team has a very storied pedigree. Everyone in the network knows what you've done before. when I was waiting to watch, when you were in stealth, it's like, okay, well, I know there's going to be a chip and, we'll see how all the software that happening in the world is going to change that. So very Much edge is one of the, key use cases that you talk about, that you're enabling but, help our audience understand a little bit. If I'm an HPE customer, and I'm looking at GreenLake, I'm looking at ProLiant. What are those things that I'm doing that says, Oh, hey, HPE is now going to offer this to me. >> Yeah, so I think what the customer is going to get in the very beginning is HPE is going to ship our DSC card into the server. And that makes the server a future proof. And the reason for that is because, initially they are just using the networking capabilities. But then going forward, they can enable security capabilities. We can do like distributed firewall. We can do distributed load balancing, we can provide the encryptions, we can provide the capability of making sure the system is highly secure. We have created a air gap between the host and the network itself. They can also making it sure that they can get the visibility on the networking side, as well, as the application is very close to the application edge. Security is the right place to be close to where the application is running on the server. And then we provide the capability with the policy and service manager, so that they can manage lifecycle of this particular products into all the servers which is installed, as well as making sure they can enable all the features and capabilities based upon the object model. >> Yeah, excellent. Absolutely security needs to be everywhere. So when we think about edge models, how do I get into those devices? So therefore, form factor of a card, that fits in seems to be well. We talked about it at the launch. Goldman Sachs was, a customer of yours. They're very well known in the enterprise space, Financial Services, needs to make sure securities there needs to understand that, maybe speak to that enterprise customer. And if there's anything specifically with how Goldman sees this rolling, that can help illustrate a little bit more what you're doing. >> Sure, so we start shipping to Goldman right after the launch, as we talked about in the launch itself. They have since then, they are now expanding it and rolling it out more servers and capabilities into their environment, particularly using distributed firewall, and other capabilities, which is, they wanted to make sure that it get deployed into their environment. And one of the things which is we are looking at it also, is that we want it to be for every future servers they buy, we want to be part of it and then they can enable all the services related to like I talked about before. Firewall, load balancing, micro-segmentation other capabilities, containers down the road. To make sure that we can provide storage also as a part of it. So we can enable them to deploy those services and that makes it also in their case of future proof once they deployed, roll out this particular capabilities. At the same time, we have more than 10 to 12 customers, which is we are doing a POC and these are all very large enterprise customers. And the POC so far has done... is going very well. And these customers again will deploy different capabilities of the product. Starting in Q3, Q4 this year. The POC is going very well and we are very excited about working with these customers and these are named brand customers. Once you will see it, once we will announce it, you will see it, this is really making a difference in their environment. >> You talk about the capabilities that customers are using today and then, the roadmap of services that they will be able to add on top of that. >> Obviously, you're talking about future proof, I shouldn't change the hardware. But, how do I think about it from a customer standpoint? Is it similar to kind of a SaaS model as to how things updated? Do do I purchase it? More as a subscription than as a feature card? How should I be thinking that from a consumption model or, the finance team, when you say, oh, there's all these wonderful things? What will that do to my cost over time? >> No absolutely, I think it's a very good point, the way the customer should think about it is that they're getting, one is a piece of the hardware which provides this capabilities. And then on top of it, the subscription model, which allows them to pay in three years, or if they want to buy it all in once, they can also do that. It's a very cost effective way of deploying these services. This is a new paradigm. This is a world of distributed services paradigm, and I think this will allow them to scale up, scale down whatever is needed because by the time you are discarding to a server, you're basically adding these capabilities in every server. And more servers you're going to add, you don't need to worry about, do I need to add this particular capabilities on the servers, you can enable whatever is necessary to enable in that server. And it's a very cost effective model. Once you enable these services, encryptions, compressions, firewall, load balancing, all the networking services and storage services, once you enable all those, it's very cost justifiable in terms of deploying these services. >> So Prem, when I think about HPE and their history, in the compute market very much they offer flexibility, they want things to be really simple when they go out the door. You've both partnered with them as well as created competing products with HP in the past so, give us a little bit more as to what Pensando plus HPE will deliver to the market place. >> Yeah, exciting, is a very good partnership so far, I think can we assume that this is going to continuously get better and better. The reason I think is very important, because instead of just selling a classic server, HPEs now have the ability to provide the security solutions, networking solutions, as well as storage solutions to their customers. And this one is really providing all the services, simplifying the design of the network, and also making sure that the customers can enable all these capabilities wherever they want. It's a model which is unprecedented in the sense of it's a totally distributed and the customers should be able to enable whatever the service they need there, even if they didn't plan it in the past. >> Yeah, excellent, we very much these days talk about, how important data is, and I need to be able to deliver services where the data is. So, very much a discussion of the cloud as well as the edge. So, it sounds like this is extending, the importance of that data and being able to bring those services, very much where the data is being created and service in real time. >> Correct. >> Okay, so, from the HPE relationship obviously gives you, a good chunk of the enterprise business, but down the road, should we be thinking about other partnerships and potentially even other OEM relationships? >> Yes, I think, like I said, we are working with the two or three major cloud vendors. And they will be rolling it out by the end of this year. And they see themselves like we said, we are going to democratize the Cloud based upon the fact that the only solution which is Amazon has based upon the Nitro, we are now providing the capabilities, to all the cloud vendors. And they can take this particular technologies and integrate in their environment, which is what we are providing the software stack. And they are integrating, and they will be going into the production and providing more capabilities, more features, and stuff like that. Then what the competition will provide. So this is a really excellent opportunity, both for us as well as for our cloud vendor partners. >> Yeah, one of the key things when you hear talk of what AWS is doing with Nitro, and the Outpost solution is they talk about, from a hardware standpoint and a software standpoint, they pull certain things off of the software layer to be able to have them be more performing, but also it's both in the cloud and in your location, whether that be an edge data center with Outpost, it's the same on both ends. So, it should I be thinking of this in a similar model that you need to... I guess, where is it that it would be an enterprise only play? And what considerations is it between enterprise and cloud when you'd be buying it from multiple vendors, if they're enabled by your solution? >> Absolutely, and I think for the enterprise, the people who wants to build their own cloud, I think this is provide a really excellent solution. Because all the capabilities which we have will provide all the features which you can get from the cloud vendors, in that particular sense. And if you are in the cloud, you can provide scale and capabilities to the cloud vendors. Now the combination is a very powerful solutions between, you can get the same services, whether you're in premise, or providing or leveraging the cloud. And that can give also hybrid opportunities. You can run, same capabilities, same features in the hybrid cloud model where you're running some on your premises and some running in the cloud itself. >> Excellent, all right. So, Prem you've got the solution coming out with HPE, you talked a little bit about some of the other, partnerships in the cloud. Partners there, give us a little bit of priorities for the second half of 2020. >> Yeah, so I think the first half we have done very well financially also, we are running almost close to 50% ahead of our forecast where we were at this particular point. Going forward, I think we need to make sure that we execute based upon, the current roadmap which we have, and making sure that we meet the customers expectations and our partners expectations. And also, I want to also give you another thing is that which is our plan is basically our second generation innovation. Also is going to come in very soon, and we will be able to take that into the production also on the first half of next year. So I think all for the second half, we have a pretty good opportunity to really capture with our solutions, as well as looking forward to win some more design wins, both with our current solutions as well as the new solutions, which we're going to take it today. >> All right, well Prem Jain let me just give you the final word as to how customers should be thinking about Pensando as they look the future proof their enterprise. >> Absolutely, I think based on the history, we are known as a innovation machine in the industry, and we continuously do better and better. So I think the people should think about us is providing really looking at this transition, which is happening in the enterprise cloud as well as in the service provider space. And we will provide the solution, which is really will meet their expectations, and the solution is consistent whether it's for VMs whether resources containers, whether it's for bare-metal services, and providing all these services in a very consistent manner. >> And well thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the continued steps along with HPE and definitely look forward to catching up with you and the team in the future. >> Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity. And definitely we will talk six months from now and and again see how much progress we have made and what I told you and I will compare the notes and say, this is what we have done better. >> Alright, stay tuned. We have a lot of interviews with some of the Pensando teams as well as that partnership with HPE. I'm Stuart Miniman and check out theCUBE.net for all of the background on this. And thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

>>from the Cube Studios in >>Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi. I'm stupid, man. And welcome to a cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program. First time guest on the program. Francis Mattis. He is the vice president of engineering at Pensando. Francis. Thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Good to be here. All >>right. So, Frances, you and I actually overlapped. Ah, you know, some of the companies who work with, you know, if anybody familiar with Pensando, you have worked with some of the mpls team over the years through some of those spin ins, but for our audience, give us a little bit about your background. You know, what brought you to help and be part of the team that you started pensando? >>Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So I started my career with Advanced Micro Devices in the mid nineties, got out of school, really wanted to build micro processors. And so, Andy, being in Austin, Texas, and be going to ls you for undergrad was perfect sort of alignment. And so I got to say M. D and Austin built K five worked on that team or kind of team with K seven. And, uh, when I came out to California to help with K, and that brought me to California. And then we got into the dot com era and and being a A and B fighting intel, so to speak, seemed like a hard battle. And so, with the dot com era coming, I just saw this perfect opportunity to jump into the Internet. And so that's how we got into building Internet and data communications equipment, went to the show on systems. We talked a little bit about that earlier, and that got me into storage. From there, I got into a company called on GMO, which was building fibre channel sand equipment. So built chips there, and I got to know the Mpls team there. I always say they hired me off the street. And from that point on, while we've been together since Jews 1001 So 19 years, yeah. Yeah, and I've been building silicon with them and systems for almost 20 years now. So we had quite a journey. Yeah, it's been fun. Great >>stuff. Yeah, you know it's going back, you know, niche on talking about ice scuzzy. You know, in the networking world, you know, it's a little bit of a dark arts in general for most people, you know, understanding the networking protocols and all the various pieces and three and four letter acronyms aren't something that most people are familiar with. Pensando, I'm curious. You know what? You know, networking In general, you're like, I work on Internet stuff and we're the tubes that, you know, Things go around. So when when you describe pensando, you know how to explain that to the people that maybe aren't deep into East, west, south, over on under underlay protocols? >>Yeah, absolutely. So for me, pensando was kind of the sort of the culmination of all the things I've done in my career processing, you know, being able to build compute engines that have programmable, starting with microprocessors, being able to do storage and storage networking with Andy on no, we build a computer with druva and the virtualization layers around the Ethernet interfaces in the adapter with what was really our first smart nick, Um, in 6 4007 timeframe and then with STN in CNI, all of these elements kind of came together. These multiple different layers in the infrastructure stack, if you will, and so pensando for me. What was interesting was the explosion of scale in both space and time with the advent of, let's say, 25 gig 50 gig 100 gig to the server, the notion of very dense computing on in each rack and the need for very high scale After doing all of these technologies and seeing where silicon kind of started to fall in place, I was 16 centimeter. It seemed that bringing this kind of technology to the edge very low power with sort of an end to end security architecture and to end policy engine architecture, distributed services as we're doing all seem to naturally fit into place. And the cloud was already proving this morning when I say the cloud, I mean, the hyper scaler is like Amazon and Microsoft. We are already building these platforms. And so yeah, it dawned on me that, uh I didn't think this was possible unless you built the entire platform. We built the entire system. If you build any one piece, the market transition would take a lot longer. And I think this is true. In technology, history tends to repeat itself, starting with mainframes. When IBM built an entire computer and that built the entire computer, HP built these people. So these kinds of things, um, are important if you want to really push a market transition. And so pensando became this opportunity to take all of these things that I've done in my past life and bring them together in a way that would give a complete stack for the purposes of what I call the new computer, which is basically the data center. And so, um, you know, when my mom asks me, you know, what is it that you're doing? I said, Well, it's just imagine the computer you have right now and multiplying by thousands and thousands stacking in Iraq, and anyone can use it at any one time. And we provide the infrastructure and the mechanisms to be able to Teoh, orchestrate and control that very, very high speed layers. So I don't know if that was a long answer. >>No, no, no. It's fascinating stuff, and you know, when I look at the industry, you know cloud. Of course. Is that just make a wave? That changed the way a lot of people look at this. The way we architect things, there was this belief for a number of years. Well, you know, I'm going to go from this complicated mess that I had in my own data centers and cloud was going to be, you know, inexpensive and easy. And I don't think anybody thinks about inexpensive and easy when they look at cloud computing these days, then add edge into these environments. So I guess what I'm asking is, you know, today's environment, you know, we know I t always is additive. So I have various pieces that I need to put together. You talked about building platforms, and how can it be a complete stack? So companies like Oracle, you know, for many years said we can do everything from the silicon all the way up through your application. Amazon in many ways does the same thing they can. You can build everything on Amazon, but they built out their ecosystem. So how does Pensando fit into this? You know, multi cloud, multi dimensional multi vendor. >>So yeah, so that's a good question. so So one of the things we wanted to do is to be able to bring a systematic management layer two header Genius, beauty. And what I mean by that is in any enterprise data center, modern data center, you're gonna have multiple types of computing. You're gonna have virtual machines, you're gonna have their metal, and you're gonna have containers, or at least in the last, say, three or four years. Chances are you'll have some containers and moving there. And so what we wanted to do was be able to Brighton Infrastructure a management mechanism where all of these head Virginia's types of computing could be managed the same way with respect to policy. What I mean by policy is sort of this declarative or intent based model of I have declared what I'd like to see, whether that the network policy or and and security with data in motion and be able to plot apply it in a distributed manner. Across these different types of hetero genius elements, the cloud has the advantage that it's homogenous for the most part. I mean, they own the entire infrastructure and they can control everything on their now our systems will obviously manage the marginal systems as well, and in many ways that's easier. But bringing together these this notion of heterogeneity these types of computing with one management plane one type of interface for the operator, specifically the networking services operator, was fundamental. That and then the second thing is being able to bring the scale and speed to the edge. So a top of rack switch or something in the in the middle of the network is obviously very dense in terms of this Iot capability. So the silicon area that you spend building a high speed switch is really spent for the most part on the Iot, unless typically, 30 to 40% of the area will be Iot and the rest will be very much hardwired control protocols. We know that as we go to STN services and we want, uh, let's say software defined mechanisms in terms of what the policy looks like, what the protocols look like. The ability to change over time in the lifespan of the computer, which is 3 to 5 years, are you want that to be programmable, very difficult to apply a very dense scale in the core of the network. And so it was an obvious move to bring that to the edge where we could plug it into the server effectively, just like we did. Really? In the UCS system. Uh, no system. >>Yeah, some some really tough engineering challenges. You know, for the longest time, it was very predictable in the networking world, You know, you go from one gig to 10 gig. You know, there was a little discussion how we went the next step, whether, you know, 25 50 40 and 100 gig now. But you talk about containerized architectures. You talk about distributed systems with edge. Things change at a much smaller granular level and change much more frequently. So what are some of the design principles and challenges that you make sure that you're ready for what's happening today but also knowing that, you know, technology changes there always coming, and you need to be able to handle, You know, that next thing. Yeah, >>that's right. Yes. So, uh, I think part of the biggest challenges we have are around power with respect to design power. And then what is the usefulness of each transistor? So, um, when you you have sort of a scale of flexibility. See, views are the most flexible, obviously, but have probably the least performance in them. PG A's are pretty useful in terms of its flexibility, but not very dense in terms of its logic capability. And then you have hardwired a six, which are extremely dense, very much purpose built logic, but completely inflexible. And so the design challenge it was put in front of us is how do we find that sweet spot of extremely programmable, extremely flexible, but still having a cost profile that didn't look like an F PGA And God knows the benefits of the CPU. And and that's where this sort of this notion of domain specific processing came in, which is okay, well, if we're going to solve a few problems, we're going to solve them well. And those few problems are going to be we're gonna bring PC services. We're going to bring networking services. We're going to bring stories, services. We're gonna bring security services around the edge of the computer so that we can offload or let's say, partition correctly the computing problem in a data center. And to do that, we knew a core of sea views wasn't going to do a job that's basically borrowing from this guy to pay this other guy. Right? So what we wanted to do was bring this notion of domain specific processing, and that's where our design challenges came in, which is okay, So now we build around this language called P four, What is the most optimal way to pack? The most amount of threads are processing elements into the silicon while managing the memory bandwidth, which is obviously, you know, packet processing is it has been said to be embarrassingly parallel, which is true. However, the memory bandwidth is insane. And so how do we build a system that insurance that memory is not the bottleneck? Obviously, we're producing a lot of data or, uh, computing a lot of data. And so So these were some of our design challenges. All of that within a power envelope where this part of this device could sit at the edge inside of a computer within a typical power profiling by PC, a attached card in a modern computer. So that was a huge design challenge for us. >>Yeah, I'd love to hear, you know, it was a multi year journey toe solution. And I think of the old World. It was very much a hardware centric 18 to 24 months for design and all the tape out you need to do on this. Sounds like obviously there is still hardware, but it is more software driven. Then it would have been, you know, 10 years ago. So give us some of the ups and downs in that journey. Love to hear any. Any stories that you can share their Well, yeah, I >>think you know, good question. It's always there's always ups and downs in anything you do, especially in the start up. And I think one of the biggest challenges we we've faced is, uh, the exact hardware software boundary. So what is it that you want in hardware? What is it that you want in software And, uh, you know, one of the greatest assets and our company depends on who are the people. We have amazing software and hardware architects who work extremely well together because most of us have been together for so long. So, um, so that always helps when you start to partition the problem. We spent the first year of Pensando, which was basically 2017. The company was founded really thinking through this problem, would it for for all the problems, we wanted to solve the goals that were given to us and and security. Okay, so I want to be able to terminate TCP and initiate TLS connections. What's the right architecture for that? I want to be able to do storage off load and be able to provide encryption of data at rest data in motion. I want to be able to do compression these kinds of things. What's the right part of our software boundary for that? What do we what do we hardwire in silicon versus what we make it programmable and silicon, obviously, but still through a computing engine. And so we spent the first year of the company really thinking through those different partitioning problems, and that was definitely a challenge. And we spent a lot of time and and, uh, you helped me conference rooms and white boards figuring that out. And then 2018. The challenge there was now taking this architecture, this sort of technology substrate, if you will that we built and then executing on it, making sure that it was actually going to yield what we hope that would that we would be able to provide the services. When we talk about El four firewall at line rate, that's completely programmable. Uh, we achieved that. Can we do load balancing? And we do all of it with this before processing engine and the innovations we brought before satisfy all of these requirements we put for us. And so 2018 was really about execution. And there you always have. The challenge is in execution. In terms of, you know, things are going to go wrong. It's not. It's not. If it's when and then how do you deal with it? And so again, um, I would say the biggest challenge and execution is, uh, containing the changes. You know, it's so easy for things to change, especially when you're trying to really build a software platform right, because it's always easy to sort of kick the can and say we'll deal with that later and software. But we know that given what we're trying to do, which is build a system that is highly performance, um, you can't get that. Can you have to deal with it when it comes in. So we spend a lot of time doing performance analysis, making sure that all these applications we were building we're going t yield the right performance. And so that was quite a challenge. And then 2019 was kind of the year of shaping the product. Really lots of product design. Okay, now that we have this technology and it does these, he says that we wanted to do these pieces meaning services. What are all the different ways we can shake this product after talking to customers for, you know, months and months and months. You know, Sony is very much custom, customer driven customer centric. So we we were fortunate enough that we got to spend a lot of time with customers and then that brings us out of challenges, right? Because every customer has a unique problems and so I don't know how to reform this product around a solution that solves quite a bit of problems that really brings value. And so that was the those are the challenges in 2019 which we overcame. Now, obviously we have several releases that we've come out with already. We've got a six and the chips and the It's all there now. So now, 2020. Unfortunately, covitz here, But this is this is a year of growth. This is the year that we really bring it out into the world with our partners and our customers and show how this technology has been developed and benefit will benefit customers over over the next years. Two years. >>Frances really appreciate the insight there. Yeah, that that discussion of the hardware versus software brings back memories for May. Lots of heated debates. A CIO What? One of lines you know we've used on the Cube many times is you know, you know, software will eventually work. Hardware will eventually break. So those trade rto >>taught me something over time ago. He said that uh huh, hardware is hard to change. Software is hard to stop changing. So >>that that's a great one to All right, So you gave us through the last three years journey. Give us a little bit. Look, you know, on the next three years and where you expect pensando to be going >>Sure. Where I see pensando in the next three years as we go through this market transition is uh, both a market leader in a thought leader in terms of the next wave of data center edge computing, whether the, uh in the service provider space, whether it be in the enterprise space or whether it be in the cloud space, the hyper hyper scale of space. As I was mentioning in the beginning, we had when we were talking about, uh, the journey. Market transitions of this major really require understanding the entire stack. If you provide a piece and someone else provides a piece, you will eventually get there. But it's a matter of when, and by the time you get there, there's probably something new. So, you know, uh, time in and of itself is an innovation in this area, especially when you're dealing with the market transition like this. And so we've been fortunate enough that we're building the entire system when we go from the transistors to the rest of the FBI's way, have the entire staff. And so where I see us in three years is not only being a market leader in this space, but also being a thought leader in terms of what does domain specific processing look like at the edge. Um, you know, what are the tools? What are the techniques for? Really a z save? Democratizing the cloud bringing, bringing this technology to everyone. >>Excellent. Well, hey, Frances, That has been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the journey so far and I can't wait to see you. How? Thanks for going >>forward. Yeah, we're excited, and I appreciate it. Thank you for your time to. All >>right, check out the cube dot net. We've got lots of back catalogue with pensando. Also, I'm stew minimum. And thank you for watching the Q. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hi, welcome back. I'm Stu middleman. And this is a cube conversation digging in with, talking about what they're doing to help people. Yeah. Really bringing some of the networking ideals to cloud native environment, both know in the cloud, in the data centers program, Krishna penny. He is the vice president of software. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for talking to me. Alright, so, so Krishna the pin Sandow team, uh, you know, very well known in the industry three, uh, you innovation. Yeah. Especially in the networking world. Give us a little bit about your background specifically, uh, how long you've been part of this team and, uh, you know, but, uh, you know, you and the team, you know? Yeah. >>And Sando. Yup. Um, so, uh, I'm VP of software in Sandow, um, before Penn Sarno, before founding concern, though, I worked in a few startups in CME networks, uh, newer systems and Greenfield networks, all those three startups have been acquired by Cisco. Um, um, my recent role before this, uh, uh, this, this company was a, it was VP of engineering and Cisco, uh, I was responsible for a product called ACA, which is course flagship SDN tonic. Mmm. So I mean, when, why did we find a phone, uh, Ben Sandoz? So when we were looking at the industry, uh, the last, uh, a few years, right? The few trends that are becoming clear. So obviously we have a lot of enterprise background. We were watching, you know, ECA being deployed in the enterprise data centers. One sore point for customers from operational point of view was installing service devices, network appliances, or storage appliances. >>So not only the operational complexity that this device is bringing, it's also, they don't give you the performance and bandwidth, uh, and PPS that you expect, but traffic, especially from East West. So that was one that was one major issue. And also, if you look at where the intelligence is going, has been, this has been the trend it's been going to the edge. The reason for that is the motors or switches or the devices in the middle. They cannot handle the scale. Yeah. I mean, the bandwidths are growing. The scale is growing. The stateful stuff is going in the network and the switches and the appliances not able to handle it. So you need something at the edge close to the application that can handle, uh, uh, this kind of, uh, services and bandwidth. And the third thing is obviously, you know, x86, okay. Even a few years back, you know, every two years, you know, you're getting more transistors. >>I mean, obviously the most lined it. And, uh, we know we know how that, that part is going. So the it's cycles are more valuable and we don't want to use them for this network services Mmm. Including SDN or firewalls or load balancer. So NBME, mutualization so looking at all these trends in the industry, you know, we thought there is a good, uh, good opportunity to do a domain specific processor for IO and build products around it. I mean, that's how we started Ben signed off. Yeah. So, so Krishna, it's always fascinating to watch. If you look at startups, they are often yeah. Okay. The time that they're in and the technologies that are available, you know, sometimes their ideas that, you know, cakes a few times and, you know, maturation of the technology and other times, you know, I'll hear teams and they're like, Oh, well we did this. >>And then, Oh, wow. There was this new innovation came out that I wish I had add that when I did this last time. So we do, a generation. Oh, wow. Talking about, you know, distributed architectures or, you know, well, over a decade spent a long time now, uh, in many ways I feel edge computing is just, you know, the latest discussion of this, but when it comes to, and you know, you've got software, uh, under, under your purview, um, what are some of the things that are available for that might not have been, you know, in your toolkit, you know, five years ago. Yeah. So the growth of open source software has been very helpful for us because we baked scale-out microservices. This controller, like the last time I don't, when we were building that, you know, we had to build our own consensus algorithm. >>We had to build our own dishwasher database for metrics and humans and logs. So right now, uh, we, I mean, we have, because of open source thing, we leverage CD elastic influx in all this open source technologies that you hear, uh, uh, since we want to leverage the Kubernetes ecosystem. No, that helped us a lot at the same time, if you think about it. Right. But even the software, which is not open source, close source thing, I'm maturing. Um, I mean, if you talk about SDN, you know, seven APS bank, it was like, you know, the end versions of doing off SDN, but now the industry standard is an ADPN, um, which is one of the core pieces of what we do we do as Dean solution with DVA. Um, so, you know, it's more of, you know, the industry's coming to a place where, you know, these are the standards and this is open source software that you could leverage and quickly innovate compared to building all of this from scratch, which will be a big effort for us stocked up, uh, to succeed and build it in time for your customer success. >>Yeah. And Krishna, I, you know, you talk about open forum, not only in the software, the hardware standards. Okay. Think about things, the open compute or the proliferation of, you know, GPS and, uh, everything along that, how was that impact? I did. So, I mean, it's a good thing you're talking about. For example, we were, we are looking in the future and OCP card, but I do know it's a good thing that SEP card goes into a HP server. It goes into a Dell software. Um, so pretty much, you know, we, we want to, I mean, see our goal is to enable this platform, uh, that what we built in, you know, all the use cases that customer could think of. Right. So in that way, hardware, standardization is a good thing for the industry. Um, and then same thing, if you go in how we program the AC, you know, we at about standards of this people, programming, it's an industry consortium led by a few people. >>Um, we want to make sure that, you know, we follow the standards for the customer who's coming in, uh, who wants to program it., it's good to have a standards based thing rather than doing something completely proprietary at the same time you're enabling innovations. And then those innovations here to push it back to the open source. That's what we trying to do with before. Yeah. Excellent. I've had some, some real good conversations about before. Um, and, and the way, uh, and Tondo is, is leveraging that, that may be a little bit differently. You know, you talk about standards and open source, oftentimes it's like, well, is there a differentiator there, there are certain parts of the ecosystem that you say, well, kind of been commodified. Mmm. Obviously you're taking a lot of different technologies, putting them together, uh, help, help share the uniqueness. Okay. And Tondo what differentiates, what you're doing from what was available in the market or that I couldn't just cobbled together, uh, you know, a bunch of open source hardware and software together. >>Yeah. I mean, if you look at a technologist, I think the networking that both of us are very familiar with that. If you want to build an SDN solution, or you can take a, well yes. Or you can use exhibit six and, you know, take some much in Silicon and cobble it together. But the problem is you will not get the performance and bandwidth that you're looking for. Okay. So let's say, you know, uh, if you want a high PPS solution or you want a high CPS solution, because the number of connections are going for your IOT use case or Fiji use case, right. If you, uh, to get that with an open source thing, without any assist, uh, from a domain specific processor, your performance will be low. So that is the, I mean, that's once an enterprise in the cloud use case state, as you know, you're trying to pack as many BMCs containers in one set of word, because, you know, you get charged. >>I mean, the customer, uh, the other customers make money based on that. Right? So you want to offload all of those things into a domain specific processor that what we've built, which we call the TSC, which will, um, which we'll, you know, do all the services at pretty much no cost to accept a six. I mean, it's to six, you'll be using zero cycles, a photo doing, you know, features like security groups or VPCs, or VPN, uh, or encryption or storage virtualization. Right. That's where that value comes in. I mean, if you count the TCO model using bunch of x86 codes or in a bunch of arm or AMD codes compared to what we do. Mmm. A TCO model works out great for our customers. I mean, that's why, you know, there's so much interest in a product. Excellent. I'm proud of you. Glad you brought up customers, Christina. >>One of the challenges I have seen over the years with networking is it tends to be, you know, a completely separate language that we speak there, you know, a lot of acronyms and protocols and, uh, you know, not necessarily passable to people outside of the silo of networking. I think back then, you know, SDN, uh, you know, people on the outside would be like, that stands for still does nothing, right? Like networking, uh, you know, mumbo jumbo there for people outside of networking. You know what I think about, you know, if I was going to the C suite of an enterprise customer, um, they don't necessarily care about those networking protocols. They care about the, you know, the business results and the product Liberty. How, how do you help explain what pen Sandow does to those that aren't, you know, steeped in the network, because the way I look at it, right? >>What is customer looking? But yeah, you're writing who doesn't need, what in cap you use customer is looking for is operational simplicity. And then he wants looking for security. They, it, you know, and if you look at it sometimes, you know, both like in orthogonal, if you make it very highly secure, but you make it like and does an operational procedure before you deploy a workload that doesn't work for the customer because in operational complexity increases tremendously. Right? So it, we are coming in, um, is that we want to simplify this for the customer. You know, this is a very simple way to deploy policies. There's a simple way to deploy your networking infrastructure. And in the way we do it is we don't care what your physical network is, uh, in some sense, right? So because we are close to the server, that's a very good advantage. >>We have, we have played the policies before, even the packet leaves the center, right? So in that way, he knows his fully secure environment and we, and you don't want to manage each one individually, we have this, okay, Rockwell PSM, which manages, you know, all this service from a central place. And it's easy to operationalize a fabric, whether you talk about upgrades or you talk about, you know, uh, deploying new services, it's all driven with rest API, and you can have a GUI, so you can do it a single place. And that's where, you know, a customer's value is rather than talking about, as you're talking about end caps or, you know, exactly the route to port. That is not the main thing that, I mean, they wake up every day, they wake up. Have you been thinking about it or do I have a security risk? >>And then how easy for me is to deploy new, uh, in a new services or bring up new data center. Right. Okay. Krishna, you're also spanning with your product, a few different worlds out. Yeah. You know, traditionally yeah. About, you know, an enterprise data center versus a hyperscale public cloud and ed sites, hi comes to mind very different skillset for management, you know, different types of okay. Appointments there. Mmm. You know, I understand right. You were going to, you know, play in all of those environments. So talk a little bit about that, please. How you do that and, you know, you know, where you sit in, in that overall discussion. Yes. So, I mean, a number one rule inside a company is we are driven by customers and obviously not customer success is our success. So, but given said that, right. What we try to do is that we try to build a platform that is kind of, you know, programmable obviously starting from, you know, before that we talked about earlier, but it's also from a software point of view, it's kind of plugable right. >>So when we build a software, for example, at cloud customers, and they use BSC, they use the same set of age KPI's or GSP CRS, TPS that DSC provides their controller. But when we ship the same, uh, platform, what enterprise customers, we built our own controller and we use the same DC APS. So the way we are trying to do is things is fully leverage yeah. In what we do for enterprise customers and cloud customers. Mmm. We don't try to reinvent the wheel. Uh, obviously at the same time, if you look at the highest level constructs from a network perspective, right. Uh, audience, for his perspective, what are you trying to do? You're trying to provide connectivity, but you're trying to avoid isolation and you're trying to provide security. Uh, so all these constructs we encapsulated in APA is a, which, you know, uh, in some, I, some, some mostly like cloud, like APS and those APIs are, are used, but cloud customers and enterprise customers, and the software is built in a way of it. >>Any layer is, can be removed on any layer. It can be hard, right? Because it's not interested. We don't want to be multiple different offers for different customers. Right. Then we will not scale. So the idea when we started the software architecture, is that how we make it pluggable and how will you make the program will that customer says, I don't want this piece of it. You can put them third party piece on it and still integrate, uh, at a, at a common layer with using. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, Krishna, you know, I have a little bit of appreciation where some of the hard work, what your team has been doing, you know, a couple of years in stealth, but, you know, really accelerating from, uh, you know, the announcement coming out of stealth, uh, at the end of 2019. Yeah. Just about half a year, your GA with a major OEM of HPE, definitely a lot of work that needs to be done. >>It brings us to, you know, what, what are you most proud about from the work that your team's doing? Uh, you know, we don't need to hear any, you know, major horror stories, but, you know, there always are some of them, you know, not holes or challenges that, uh, you know, often get hidden yeah. Behind the curtain. Okay. I mean, personally, I'm most proud of the team that we've made. Um, so, uh, you know, obviously, you know, uh, our executors have it good track record of disrupting the market multiple times, but I'm most proud of the team because the team is not just worried about that., uh, that, uh, even delegate is senior technologist and they're great leaders, but they're also worried about the customer problem, right? So it's always about, you know, getting the right mix, awfully not execution combined with technology is when you succeed, that is what I'm most proud of. >>You know, we have a team with, and Cletus running all these projects independently, um, and then releasing almost we have at least every week, if you look at all our customers, right. And then, you know, being a small company doing that is a, Hmm, it's pretty challenging in a way. But we did, we came up with methodologists where we fully believe in automation, everything is automated. And whenever we release software, we run through the full set of automation. So then we are confident that customer is getting good quality code. Uh, it's not like, you know, we cooked up something and that they should be ready and they need to upgrade to the software. That's I think that's the key part. If you want to succeed in this day and age, uh, developing the features at the velocity that you would want to develop and still support all these customers at the same time. >>Okay. Well, congratulations on that, Christian. All right. Final question. I have for you give us a little bit of guidance going forward, you know, often when we see a company out and we, you know, to try to say, Oh, well, this is what company does. You've got a very flexible architecture, lot of different types of solutions, what kind of markets or services might we be looking at a firm, uh, you know, download down the road a little ways. So I think we have a long journey. So we have a platform right now. We already, uh, I mean, we have a very baby, we are shipping. Mmm Mmm. The platforms are really shipping in a storage provider. Uh, we are integrating with the premier clouds, public clouds and, you know, enterprise market, you know, we already deployed a distributed firewall. Some of the customers divert is weird firewall. >>So, you know, uh, so if you take this platform, it can be extendable to add in all the services that you see in data centers on clubs, right. But primarily we are driven from a customer perspective and customer priority point of view. Mmm. So BMW will go is even try to add more ed services. We'll try to add more storage features. Mmm. And then we, we are also this initial interest in service provider market. What we can do for Fiji and IOT, uh, because we have the flexible platform. We have the, see, you know, how to apply this platform, this new application, that's where it probably will go into church. All right. Well, Krishna not a penny vice president of software with Ben Tondo. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, sir. It was great talking to you. All right. Be sure to check out the cube.net. You can find lots of interviews from Penn Sundo I'm Stu Miniman and thank you. We're watching the cute.

(bright music) >> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a Cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio. And we're going to be digging into P4, which is, the programming protocol independent packet processors. And to help me with that, first time guest on the program, Mario Baldi, he is a distinguished technologist with Pensando. Mario, so nice to see you. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thank you for inviting. >> Alright, so Mario, you have you have a very, you know, robust technical career, lot of patents, you've worked on, you know, many technologies, you know, deep in the networking and developer world, but give our audience a little bit of your background and what brought you to Pensando. >> Yeah, yes, absolutely. So I started my my professional life in academia, actually, I worked for many years in academia, about 15 years exclusively in academia, and I was focusing both my teaching in research on computer networking. And then I also worked in a number of startups and established companies, in the last about eight years almost exclusively in the industry. And before joining Pensando, I worked for a couple of years at Cisco on a P4 programmable switch and that's where I got in touch with P4 actually. For the occasion I wore a T shirt of one of the P4 workshops. Which reminds me a bit of those people when you ask them, whether they do any sports, they tell you they have a membership at the gym. So I don't just have membership, I didn't just show up at the workshop. I've really been involved in the community and so when I learned what pensando was doing, I immediately got very excited that the ASIC that Pensando has developed these is really extremely powerful and flexible because it's fully programmable, partly programmable, with P4 partly programmable differently. And Pensando is starting to deploy these ASIC at the edge and Haas. And I think such a powerful and flexible device, at the edge of the network really opens incredible opportunities to, on the one hand implement what we have been doing in a different way, on the other hand, implement completely different solution. So, you know, I've been working most of my career in innovation, and when when I saw these, I immediately got very excited and I realized that Pensando was really the right place for me to be. >> Excellent. Yeah, interesting, you know, many people in the industry, they talk about innovation coming out of the universities, you know, Stanford often gets mentioned, but the university that you, you know, attended and also were associate professor at in Italy, a lot of the networking team, your MPLS, you know, team at Pensando, many of them came from them. Silvano guy, you know, written many books, they're, you know, very storied career in that environment. P4, maybe step back for a second, you know, you're you're deep in this group, help us understand what that is, how long it's been around, you know, and who participates in it with P4? >> Yeah, yeah. So as you were saying before, one of the few P4 from whom I've heard saying it, because everyone calls it P4 and nobody says what it really means. So programming protocol, independent packet processor. So it's a programming language for packet processors. And it's protocol independent. So it doesn't start from assuming that we want to use certain protocols. So P4 first of all allows you to specify what packets look like. So what the headers look like, and how they can be parsed. And secondly, because P4 is specifically designed for packet processing, and it's based on the idea that you want to look up values in tables. So it allows you to define tables, in keys that are being used to look up those tables and find an entry in the table. And when you find an entry, that entry contains an action and parameters to be used for that action. So the idea is that the package descriptions that you have in the program, define how the package should be processed. Header fields should be parsed, values extracted from them, and those values are being used as keys to look up into tables. And when the appropriate entry in the table is found, an action is executed and that action is going to modify those header fields, and these happens a number of times, the program specifies a sequence of tables that are being looked up, header fields being modified. In the end, those modified header fields are used to construct new packets that are being sent out of the device. So this is the basic idea of a P4 program. You specify a bunch of tables that are being looked up using values extracted from packets. So this is very powerful for a number of reasons. So first of all, its input, which is always good as we know, especially in networking, and then it maps very well on what we need to do, when we do packet processing. So writing a packet processing program, is relatively easy and fast. Could be difficult to write a generic programming in P4, you could not, but the packet processing program, it's easy to write. And last but not least, P4 really maps well on hardware that was designed specifically to process packet. What we call domain specific processes, right. And those processes are, in fact designed to quickly look up tables that might have decamping side, they might have processes that are specialized in performing, in building keys and performing table lookup, and modifying those header fields. So when you have those processors that are usually organized in pipelines to achieve a good throughput, then you can very efficiently take a P4 program and compile it to execute it very high speed on those processors. And this way, you get the same performance of a fixed function ASIC, but it's fully programmable, nothing is fixed. Which means that you can develop your features much faster, you can add features and fix bugs, you know, with a very short cycle, not with a four or five year cycle of baking a new ASIC. And this is extremely powerful. This is the strong value proposition of P4. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think that that resonates Mario, you know, I used to do presentations about the networking industry and you would draw timelines out there in decades. Because from the standard to get deployed for, you know, the the hardware to get baked, the customers to do the adoption, things take a really long time. You brought up, you know, edge computing, obviously, you know, we are, you know, it is really exciting, but it is changing really fast, and there's a lot of different, you know, capabilities out there. So if you could help us, you know, connect the dots between what P4 does and what the customers need. You know, we talked about multi-cloud and edge. What is it that you know, P4 in general, and what Pensando is doing with P4 specifically, enables this next generation architecture? >> Yeah, sure. So, Pensando has developed these card, which we call DSC distribute services card, that is built around an ASIC, that has a very very versatile architecture. It's a fully programmable. And it's fully programmable it's various levers, and one of them is in fact P4. Now this card and has a PCIE interface. So it can be installed in horse. And by the way, this is not the only way this powerful as you can be deployed. It's the first way Pensando has decided to use it. And so we have this card, it can be plugged into a host, it has two network interfaces. So it can be used as a network adapter. But in reality, because the card is fully programmable and it has several processors inside, it can be used to implement very sophisticated services. Things that you wouldn't even dream of doing with the typical network adapter, with a typical NIC. So in particular, this card, this ASIC contains a sizable amount of memory. Right now we have two sizes four, an eight gig but we are going to have versions of the card with even larger memory. Then it has some specialized hardware for specific functions like cryptographic functions, compression, computation of CRCs and if sophisticated queueing system with packet buffer with the queuing system to end the packets that have to go out to the interfaces or coming from the interfaces. Then it is several types of processors. It has generic processors, specifically arms, arm processors that can be programmed with general purpose languages. And then a set of processors that are specific for packet processing that are organized in a pipeline. In those, idea to be programmed with P4. We can very easily map a P4 program, on those pipeline of processor. So that's where Pensando is leveraging P4, is the language for programming those processes that allow us to process packets at the line rate of our 200 gigabit interfaces that we have in the card. >> Great. So Mario, what about from a customer viewpoint? Do they need to understand you know, how to program in P4, is this transparent to them? What's the customer interaction with it? >> Oh yeah, not at all. The Pensando platform, Pensando is offering a platform that is a completely turnkey solution. Basically the platform, first of all, the platform has a controller with which the user interacts, the user can configure policies on this controller. So using an intent based paradigm, the user defines policies that the controller is going to push those policies to the cards. So in your data center in your horse, in your data center, you can deploy thousands of those cards. Those cards implement distributed services. Let's say, just to give a very simple example, a distributed stateful firewall implemented on the all of those cards. The user writes a security policy, says this particular application can talk to these other particular application, and then translate it into configuration for those cards. It's transparently deployed on the cards that start in force the policies. So the user can use this system at this very high level. However, if the user has more specific needs, then the system, the platform offers several interfaces and several API's to program the platform through those interfaces. So the one at the highest level, is a REST API to the controller. So if the customer has an orchestrator, they can use that orchestrator to automatically send policies to the controller. Or if a customer already have their own controller, they can interact directly with the DSCs with the cards on the horse, with another API's that's fully open, is based on GRPC. And in this way, they can control the cards directly. If they need something even more specific, if they need a functionality that Pensando doesn't offer on those card, hasn't already ever written software for the cards, then customers can program the card, and the first level at which they can program it is the ARM processors. We have ARM processors, those are running in version of Linux, so customers can program it by writing C-code or Python. But if they have very specific needs, like when they write a software for the ARM processor, they can leverage the P4 code that we have already written for the card for those specialized packet processors. So they can leverage all of the protocols that our P4 program is already supported. And by the way because that's software, they can pick and choose in a Manga library of many different protocols and features we support, and decide to deploy them and then integrate them in their software running on the ARM processor. However, if they want to add their own proprietary protocols, if they want, if they need to execute some functionalities at very high performance, then they that's when they can write P4 code. And even in that case, we are going to make it very simple for them. Because they don't have to write everything from scratch. They don't have to worry about how to process AP packets, how to terminate TCP, we have to solve the P4 code for them. They can focus just on their own feature. And we are going to give them a development environment that allows them to focus on their own little feature and integrate it with the rest of our P4 program. Which by the way, is something that P4 is not designed for. P4 is not designed for having different programmers, write different pieces of the program and put them together. But we have the means to enable this. >> Okay, interesting. So, you know, maybe bring us inside a little bit, you know the P4 community, you're very active in it, when I look online, there's a large language consortium, many of, you know, all the hardware and software companies that I would expect in the networking space are on that list. So what's Pensando's participation in the community? And you were just teasing through, you know, what does P4 do and then what does Pensando, maybe enable, you know, above and beyond what, you know, P4 just does on its own? >> Yeah, so yes Pensando is very much involved in the community. There has been recently an event, online event that substituted the yearly P4 workshop. It was called the P4 expert round-table series. And Pensando had very strong participation. our CTO, Vipin Jain, had the keynote speech. Talking about how P4 can be extended beyond packet processing. P4, we said, has been designed for packet processing, but today, there are many applications that require message processing, which is more sophisticated then. And he gave a speech on how we can go towards that direction. Then we had a talk that was resulting from a submission that was reviewed and accepted on in fact, the architecture of our ASIC, and how it can be used to implement many interesting use cases. And finally, we participated into a panel in which we discussed how to use P4 in mix-ins Martin at the edge of the network. And there we argued with some use cases and example and code, how before it needs to be extended a little bit because NICs have different needs and open up different opportunities rather than switches. Now P4 was never really meant only for switches. But if we looked at what happened, the community has worked mostly on switches. For example it is defined that what is called the PSA, portable switch architecture. And we see that the NICs have an edge devices, have a little bit different requirements. So, one of the things we are doing within the communities working within one of the working groups, is called the architecture work group. And they are working in there to create the definition of a PNA, Portable NIC Architecture. Now, we didn't start this activity, this activity has started already in 2018. But it did slow down significantly, mostly because there wasn't so much of a push. So now Pensando coming on the market with this new architecture really gave new life to this activity. And we are contributing, actively we have proposed a candidate for a new architecture which has been discussed within the community. And, you know, just to give you an example, why do we need a new architecture? Because if you think of the switch, there are several reasons but one, it's very intuitive. If you think of a switch, you have packets coming in, they've been processed and packets go out. As we said before, there's the PMA then sorry, PSA architecture is meant for these kinds of operation. If you think of a NIC, it's a little bit different because yes, you have packets coming in, and yes, if you have multiple interfaces like our card, you might take those packets and send them out. But most likely what you want to do, you want to process those packets, and then not give the packets to the host. Otherwise the host CPU will have to process them again, to pass them again. You want to give some artifacts to the host, some pre-processed information. So you want to, I don't know take those packets for example, assemble many TCP messages and provide a stream of bytes coming out of this TCP connection. Now, these requires a completely different architecture, packets come in, something else goes out. And goes out, for example, through a PCI bus. So, you need the some different architecture and then you will need in the P4 language, different constructs to deal with the fact that you are modifying memory, you are moving data from the card to the host and vice versa. So again, back to your question, how are we involved in the workgroups? We are involved in the architecture workgroup right now to define the PNA, the Portable NIC Architecture. And also, I believe in the future we will be involved in the language group to propose some extensions to the language. >> Excellent. Well, Mario, thank you so much for giving us a deep dive into P4, where it is and you know some of the potential futures for where it will go in the future. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watching the Cube. (gentle music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. Hi, I'm stupid, man. And welcome to a cube conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston area studio, and we're gonna be talking about the networking giant. So, uh, joining me is the first time on the program some of the members been on and the cover launch of Pensando so vivid Jane, his CTO and co founder of Pensando Bipin thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. It was very nice talking to you. >>All right, so in a big theme we've been talking about for a number of years now is multi cloud. And, you know, I go back and think about you know, that the concept of cloud and even, you know, I've been around long enough You think about the and one of the challenges you look at is well, security is always a challenge. The other things network bandwidth is not infinite. The speed of light has not been solved, though you know, help us understand is you know the first I guess give our audience a little bit of your background. As I said, anybody in the networking world knows less team, though. Tell us, you know, have you been on the journey with them for all of that? Or And you know what brought you and Sandy? >>Yes. Yes. Um, I mean, I've been in the journey with the team since 2000 and six, so it's pretty long, I would say 14 years now, and it's been tremendous. Um uh, at heart, I'm an engineer who takes, you know, Brian brilliant things and taking upon challenges. And I've got multiple startups before this been in a new era, The more startups before that. And of course, you know, they were not experience more independent startups. And, you know, all through the course, I have gained appreciation for, like, you know, starting all the way from silicon to build a distributed systems and a u io all the way up to the fully consumable, you know, system. So I I totally understand the the angle I need to look at this time in a holistic manner. Having contributed to Cisco, UCS of and Nexus products on. Before joining pensando, I was, um I was contributing with my own open source container networking project, which is quite exciting to see How do you evangelize, You know, my own my own core, and that was fun. And that's where I come from, But, uh, but I I'm I'm a software engineer. To start off it started contributing to a six, then started going into the application world with containers trying to pull a container networking with, Ah, we did a server product with Cisco UCS and on and pretty much all over the stack with respect, participation. So that's my background. Um, but it's being exciting to consider what's next for me. And I was largely trying to see >>so, so definitive, actually, if I If I could jump in there, right, you know, I think back the UCS it was, You know, some of those ways I gather virtualization had been around for quite a number of years at that point. But, you know, how do you optimize it you're in. How do you transform infrastructure toe live for those environments, though? You know, UCS, You know, remember, people get back saying, you know, Cisco getting into services like Well, they are. They are because they're changing that compute model really caught that. You know, Cisco led that way. If the urge instructor, so many things you talked about that we'll get to later in the interview open for station. When I look out today, you know infrastructure's paint a lot and cloud obviously, is a huge impact, but also the application. So help us understand kind of the the waves that were writing together And, you know, what was it that you know in Santo decided to build in order to meet what you know, the customers of a require >>Um So I think, you know, going back to the UCS common that you had We started off thinking, for example, what are what were the challenges with respect is scaling out the deployment of servers and we quickly realized that manageability is number one challenge on. And of course, you know when we speak about manageability, it comes down to the underpinnings of what you're building. Are you Are you able to see the entire infrastructure together, or are you still seeing those big pieces? And that's when I think UCS was born to say that Look, we need to bring everything together that could be consumed in a holistic manner. And for that you have to have all those components there are There are somewhat independent to be consumed as a unified thing. And which is why I think it was a unified computing system. UCS. Um and then I think, you know, and Sanders a journey that takes it to probably not just that concept, but in general, the the challenges and the disruptions that we're seeing to the next level. So, I mean, just to summarize, I would say we started off looking at all the disruptions that are happening in the industry. And there are many of those I'm happy to talk about, which means we looked at, uh and then we looked at What are the consumption models that people are largely, you know, finding it very appealing these days because the days in which you're going to write a spirit to do something is still pretty old you want to be able to consume and most this after consumable way, How can we build, you know, how can you build systems that are programmable in the field? Those kind of things? The consumption model reliability software is the friendly factor there, and highly appealing to you guys and all their last one. You know, at least we also we also wanted to be really heard in the game, competitiveness wise. So those were like the the overarching set of things there that we started to think about, like, what descriptions are we going to solve, um, and how the consumption model needs to be for or ah, for the future of infrastructure. And how can we get that key, which is which is far ahead and better than anything that exists out there? So that's where we started to look at. Let's bring something which is bigger B sphere and and something. Even if we have the possibility of feeling it. Let's go ahead and they're doing their anything. >>Yeah, and absolutely. There's been so much discussion over the last decade or so about about software's eating the world and what's going on there yet you know, your your team mates. It's a lot of times it's been the chip set. There have been some huge ripples in the industry, you know, major acquisitions by some of the big, disruptive companies out there. Apple made a silicon acquisition, you know, everybody paid and that will have. You can't talk about disruption today without talking about Amazon. And, of course, when Amazon bought Annapurna Labs, you know, those of us looking at the Enterprise and the clouds base was like, Keep an eye on this. And absolutely, it's been something over the last year or so now, where we've seen Amazon roll things out and, of course, a critical component of what Amazon's doing from outposts. So with that as the stage there, you talked about wanting to be interesting leading, you know Amazon, you know, is really sick, and it's setting the bar that everyone is measured against. And when I look at the solution pensando, the kind of best comparable analogy that we've seen is, you know, look at what Nitro chip can do. This is an alternative for all of the other 1000 for customers that might not want to get them from Amazon. Is that a fair comparison? And how would you line up what founder is doing compared to what Amazon has done there? >>Um, so you know, what you've seen in the Amazon announcement really is possible. Amazon is a great benchmark to beat eso No make mistakes. We are very happy to say that, you know, we are We are doing by comfortably so But then, you know, Amazon is more than more than just the just the chips that are that they are building. I mean, what you consume is what they're building and underneath the engines are really part up by by the nicety off all these things that they're very, um, having said that, you know, And Sandra was consisting off both the you know, it's recognized us as a team which has been in traditionally building chips. But yet I think you know, the the Iot or the the previous venture from Mpls Team was somewhat of an eye opening as to how bringing things together is much more value in op, ex and and simplifying things is a huge, huge value compared to just putting performance and those things. So why this is important? That is another aspect which is important in trying to simplify things and make it consumable like software. And Sandra itself has probably, you know, I would say, Ah, good chunk, like about 60% of people in software team and not the, you know, basic harbor t This is not to say that, you know, we, you know, we are under emphasizing one versus the other. Software is a bigger beast when you start trying to build all those programs on a programmable and doing that here and start to roll out those applications on. So that's why I think the emphasis on software is there. Having said that, you know, it's the software that runs the data path pipeline. There's also a layer of software that we're building that can help manage all you know, all the product in a more cohesive manner and unified. >>Okay, that's Ah, thank you for laying that out. You mentioned you've got some background and open for definitely an area where, for a number of years, you know, Amazon has not exactly, uh, open source. Not exactly been a strength for AWS. They have put a lot of effort. They've done some president IRS over the last couple of years. >>And >>how do you see open source fitting into the space? What is I kind of the philosophy of pensando when it comes to open source. And where do you see it playing in the You know, this network piece of the multi cloud. >>Yeah, no, I think it's It's ah, it's a squared, relevant in a way that you know of the cloud native movement on how applications with very Onda normalization of AP eyes across multiple clouds. Israel, We are all seeing the benefits offered. And I think that that trend will continue and which is all driven through open source Ah, you know, community that exist in, you know, in the heart of the word. So personally for me, I think I learned a whole lot of things in the open source community. You know, the importance off evangelizing whatever you're working on, the reason to have convinced other people about contributing into what you're working on on. Frankly, I also learned how difficult it is to make revenues in an open source based part of that strategy. So I think you know that those were the things that I got away from it when I was doing my own open source project of container networking. Um, but at the same time, pensando, uh, you know, we have to make sure that we are 100% aligned with anything that's happening in open source. Never replicated, Um, anything that might be that might be happening in open source instead tried to make people use those things in the best possible way and in the most efficient way and the easiest possible way to use those. So our strategy largely is that, you know, embrace open source which exists are there from an infrastructure point of view, we are collaborating and communicating with less of the users are Hello. I think we're going to standardize most of things we're looking in before community. So our stands largely is that, you know, if we are building a programmable platform than the community is what is gonna driver and we are very much working towards a step by step, of course, trying to get through, you know, a stable state where we could we could not just empower people who are who are taking up the open source efforts which are going on. But at the same time, we can also contribute our program are programs into the open source community and defining the right abstractions into into the community. Um, because we came out of stealth pretty recently, you'll start seeing that and helping those activity as Well, >>excellent. Well, you know the launch of Pensando you had a phenomenal lineup. Not only you know, John Chambers obviously has the relationship with your theme, but you know, oh, am partners of Hewlett Packard, Enterprise and IBM, as well as the Marquis of Goldman Sachs. Things look a little bit different in the first half of 2020 and then they didn't end of 29 teams. So, you know, curious, You know that the global pandemic, the rippling financial implications, you know, what does that mean? The pensando. How has that impacted conversations that you're having with your >>Well, one thing I know at a broader level, let me cover, um, where things are heading. And in that sense, you know, I see that network and the infrastructure in general cloud infrastructure networking it's going to become. And we have realized it's this during during during recent early 20 twenties that that is going to be very important to have the have a new underpinning infrastructure that is not just working efficiently, securely, but is, you know, highly cost effective and very high performance, you know, ranging from people who are trying to connect from home to people who are trying to use videoconferencing and people who are going to be more and more use cloud based services even to order simple of the data being, you know, going to source for so network will become essential, you know, essential element for four things as we go forward. And we do see that being embraced by our customers and and things where we were trying to communicate that, you know, look, you will need performance and cost benefits are becoming more and more real Now. It's like, oh, things that we were having things in the pipeline for us. We need to work on that now. And the reason is because the things that we anticipated the demand increase, which is gonna happen over the fear of years, is happening literally in a few months. And so that is what we see. We are definitely, you know, very well poised to take advantage of their of their demand for sure. But also the fact that you know it needs to be done super efficiently. And so I think we are. You know, we are right. Well, I would say, you know, situated to be able to take advantage of start. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing you can't control as a company is you know what the global situation is when you come out of stealth and, you know, move through some of those early phases, you know, you've been part of You said a number of startups you've been part of been in give us a little bit of the inside baseball of, you know, being part of Rondo. You know, any stories on a little some of the ups and downs on the multi year journey to get where you are today? >>Definitely. I think. You know, um, minutes aren't good. They are largely an execution play. Relatively independent startup is is going to be about you know, how we cracked the overall market market fit and, ah, on execution, Of course, on deal with maybe in a competition in a different way, of course, like maybe big companies are our great partners. At the same time, you have to navigate that. So the overall the overall landscape in Spain and forces forces not is it's quite different. We can be much more border than we are independent company In trying to disrupt almost anything because we don't have any point of view to define per se. We do exactly, You know, what could be the most disruptive way, too, to potentially benefit the users on day? That's a big, you know, big change. I would say, um, we are being but paranoid as well at the same time, impractical to look at. You know how how we could navigate this situation in a very practical may. And the journey off, often independent startup is, you know, personally, for me, this is this is my fourth in different and start and best off. Off off, all independent. Once, I would stay largely because the kind of tradition that we're getting being an independent company is so huge. I'm just concerned about those things. But what We're really trying to trying to ensure that, you know, we can't get our stuff, but I want you and we started. >>Excellent. Guess what? One of the other things about being a startup is You know what you know adjustments You need to make along the way. So I'm curious. As you know, you've gone to some of your early customers. Any feedback or adjustments in some of the use cases or, you know, things that you've learned along the way that you can share. >>Um, fundamentally, at a base level, we haven't shifted from what we started off. We look at disruptions on on how consumption models are going to be changing, how speeds and feeds are gonna become important because, you know, because most law is going to be almost operating, how we how we deliver things into and containers are going to be a primary, you know, vehicle to deliver and build applications. So we recognize those disruptions, and we haven't changed, But normally from those disruptions that we wanted people after her. Uh, but at the same time, I think, you know, as we went and socialize our ideas and on architecture and designs with customers, we realized that that they are giving us lots more feedback on work all we could do and ah, and starting to become like we could take on different segments of market and not just one. So why stick ourselves to the data center power? Why not work on something on edge, blur wine or wine are real solutions for five G where latency and and performance is super crucial. Why don't take up on, you know, branch that use cases. So there are many things that are opening up. Um, and largely the you know, the shift. Or I would say the the inclination of what we should change versus not is happening with respect to where our customers are driving us. And and it is very important to make sure that you know the users of our lives Articulating all of the shift happens as opposed to, uh, you know, as opposed to anything else. We listen to them like super, super carefully, uh, and at the same time trying to make sure that we not only meet their means for you there their demands. So, um, definitely, you know, from the from the overall landscape of things, we are starting to get a lot more than what we are capture, which is good news For the same time, we're trying to also, uh, take on one part. I'm you know, >>all right, Vivienne, I can't let you off the hook as the cto without talking a little bit about that. You know, I think earlier in my career there was the old discussion and said you know, we should have started it, you know, a year or two ago. But, you know, we didn't. So we should start it today with changing pace of technology. You know, I've always said, you know, if I could I'd rather wait a year because I could take the next generation. I can take advantage of all these other things, but I can't wait, because then I'd never ship any things that I need to start now, Give us a little bit, you know, Look out in the future. How is your architecture designed to be able to take advantage of all the wonders coming with five G and everything there, Um, and anything that we should be looking at, You know, through the next kind of 12 18 months on the roadmap that you could share >>your Ah, yes. So, um, I would first of all say that we didn't build a part of, actually, what we build was a platform on which we can build multiple products. And we started we started off going there because we thought that, you know, the the platform that we're building is capable of capable of doing a lot more things than than one use case that we start off with. And so, to that point, I would say that yes. I mean, he started focusing on one product initially on the possibilities off. Trying to take it to multiple segments is is normally very much there. But we are already, you know, having those conversations to see what is the core set of use cases that we could we could get into for different segments. Besides the data center, you know, public Private Data center, you're looking at edge. We're looking by the looking at, Yeah, you mentioned this is as well as the, you know, storage and conversion infrastructure. So I would say that the food of all those things that we're starting to engage is going to start showing up in next 18 months. I could actually I think we are very well boys to take advantage of what we have. The hardware that we're shipping is going to be 100% compatible with four programs, but I don't those. So that is that is lot more possibilities are interesting. More use cases as people. The software's architecture that we have built is very extensible as well. Eh so we believe that. You know, uh, we believe that we can normally satisfy those use cases, but we're starting to you get into those things now, which will start to show up in and actually useful products of unusable for us with customer testimonials and then maybe 12 to 18 months from now. All >>right, well, thank you so much. It's great to catch up with. You really appreciate you coming on. >>Thank you to Because they're talking to you. And, you know, I appreciate your time. >>All right, I'm stew minimum. And be sure to check out the cube dot net for all the coverage. Go see the launch that we did. So in the second half of 2019. Thank you for watching you. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.