>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual experience brought to you by HP. >>Hi. And welcome back to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. I'm stew Minimum and happy to welcome back to the program. One of our cube alumni, Partha Narasimha He is the chief technology officer of Aruba. Which, of course, Aruba is an H p e company. Partha. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Alright, so HP Discover is a big event. But, you know, for the networking people, of course, Aruba has its own event atmosphere, which happened, you know, just ahead of Discover you gave a keynote there some news there that we'll talk about. But, you know, just, you know, we bring our audience up to speed a little bit about, you know, the role of the networking inside of HP with Aruba. >>And so you know, when everybody's primary focus is networking and security. Uh, we really have expanded in the past few years and scope of the problems that we work on, what we call the intelligent edge and we define the edge is where people are, where the action is And how do you think about the kinds of experiences that end users care about? In addition to just connecting security into their absence of data on the upside, but also about the experiences in the physical world? And then there are these stakeholders that care about in an efficiency, productivity and so on. So the intelligent edge is it includes networking and security, but it really focuses on people and businesses. Hooks. >>Yeah, that's great. You know, Often we talk. It's, you know, the business outcomes that matter and experiences. It's you know so much about people. The current global pandemic absolutely has put a real focus on people. Um, you know, from a networking standpoint, of course, everybody's working from home a lot more. Um, you know, VPN services need to be considered. And you know what? I'm curious the impact from your business and your customers as to what's happening. >>I think this is where you know the focus on on the intelligent edge on people's experiences and business outcomes. Uh, is actually it was being having now, with the presence of endemic, if you're defining and go back to the definition of the edge as where people are and where the action is in the last 2 to 3 months. A lot of that exists in people's hearts in all of our homes. That's where that's where I am right now. And that's where we all of being, Um, so what does that mean for where the edges? And so we kind of see at least three phases in here, where right now we're focused on business continuity, Which is how do you know enable employees to continue to stay productive and connect securely to be enterprise data? Perhaps, but also, when you know some of the subsides, how do you bring people back safely? Go into physical spaces? And that's what we call business recovery. And then, as I talk to customers, you know, there's there's a spectrum of opinions about what is going to stake. And, you know, if you call that the new normal Andi, when an image goes out of our in our lives, it doesn't look like they're all going back to everywhere in January of Apple Siri. And so what is the new normal? And how do you how does a painful that's that's really what we're focused. >>Yeah, it's so important right now. Parts you know, when you look at enterprise is rapidly adjusting to to ah, situations is not necessarily what we think of. Of course, in the last few months, we've had to move very fast to be able to enable the workforce. Uh, I would love to hear what you're hearing from CEOs that there and customers and, you know, how are you helping them react to things you know much faster than they might have. >>So a lot of the business part unity. Actually, the focus is on 19 right? Because you know, how do you deploy technologies are actually leverage the technologies that have already been deployed in order to allow employees to stay productive from their homes? And there's been a spike in demand from for work from home solutions. Believe it or not, Aruba had we have built a solution for the remote access point way back in 2005 or 2006 when there was a different endemic, a time as a business continuity solution. But given the intensity of how this pandemic is affected all of our lives there was a strike and demand for work from home solutions not just from a connectivity and security perspective, but also every employee is home eyes very different, right? Based on the speed of your Internet connection. How many other people are home? How many other devices are connecting to the home network and what else is happening in the three Netflix streams running in parallel? And in this case, in that kind of environment, how do we now provide some visibility for key help employees getting there? So while we built a remote access point as a security solution, we ended up realizing that would be really solved. For the end user was a better user experience where they just see the same network that they see in the office. They see that home but more again, helping I t get some visibility and maybe troubleshoot some issues employees might have. So all three of these have been integral components of that solution and, you know, it became even more front and center well, when the wind and make it in terms of the site. >>Yeah, you know, when I think about security, has really, you know, in the last five years or so escalated only to the C suite. But the board level for constant consideration, has Has the current situation really raise the visibility of networking, you know, to the C suite. >>It has essentially, you know, the focus Until now. Could be in that. Okay, I my all of my employees get into the office and also and create an environment within the office building that allows for collaboration that allows for seamless connectivity and security. Um, but the pace at which we all have to go to this work from home situation, what's the time? And I was so shocked. I have to respond quickly on day after this phone, quickly where, you know, they could have done with a few dozen office buildings to now thousands of employees homes, and so >>be bigger. >>The all of the effort that we put in to create that solution earlier now pick off because we were already but this for for this situation. Even though, you know, we all live in interesting times, and I never want to see this again in my lifetime. But the fact that you know we had a focus on it for the last 15 years or so made it ready for us. But more importantly, as we look at, you know, as the business community face was about I p the business recovery, which is which is probably very a starting point right now. How do we now bring people back safely into lying to physical spaces? Now the stakeholders are you know, that set is expanding, right? Whether it's, you know, maybe we have the steam called the crisis management that is looking at Okay, how do I now manage Not just the crisis, but bringing people back in facilities is important, because if things space has to get rearranged in order to make certain density or spacing objectives, so they know they have some interest in there marketing. If you're a retailer, you know, hospitality and so on, they get interested in it. So there's a lot of other stakeholders now the lie on the infrastructure that I be has deployed primarily for security and security. Now that same infrastructure, it's gonna go benefit other stakeholders so that you get a competitive advantage in the business recovery face. Like if I'm able to safely brain a lot of my key employees that are required to be in physical spaces back in while addressing all of their concerns about the health and the safety associated with the recovery. That definitely gives me a competitive. And I believe that the solutions and Aruba has provided to I t. Until now are now. There's a There's a spark like Chinese on it because a lot of people, a lot of other stakeholders, could benefit from that infrastructure. That is already, >>Yeah, there's a lot of conversation going on in the industry about what things look like post endemic. And, you know, while there is still obviously a lot of uncertainties, we really think there will be some hybrid modes going on. So, you know, work from home might not stay permanent. But many companies, we're talking about being more flexible. So how does that impact? You know what you're offering? Cause, you know, I think about, you know, from the enterprise. You know, I needed a certain density. Now I need to think about Okay. How do I make sure that whether you're in the office or working remotely that I can have you participate and have the same kind of experience wherever you >>are? And, you know, this is again this is where we rely on the network infrastructure, right? Because if you dig ah, connected with the network that enables mobility is secure and is always available, it drives participation. That participation leverages net flow data to provide visibility toe into physical space. Right, And you think about even the recovery face. And we see, actually, three achieves three interesting scenarios and organizations with customers on how the network can help them in the recovery face. And it points to dispensing requirements are how do I reduce density so that I get some level of increased distancing amongst my employees. So that way you can look at naked data and figure out okay where the hearts thoughts are in terms of people density and can go make changes to those to try and lower that meet my internal guidelines or public safety guidelines to shared spaces are also medium of transmission, you know, off this particular virus or disease, and so shakes faces like conference route cafeteria tables and others that we can again use the network to figure out usage of those and potentially provide guidelines to cleaning crews to pay more attention to certain spaces in favor of others necessarily seeing the same level of usage on three. If in the unfortunate situation that some individual becomes a person of interest, we can quickly figure out all of the spaces that they have seen in the past. A certain window, including who else they could have overlap are being close to within that space, right? So at least you're not relying purely on human memory for contact tracing, there's a certain level of additional data that can be used to enhance a refresh human memory. That is really what we see happening in the business recovering. But you made a good point on what is the new normal. Because as we again after customers, I'm trying to gauge what is going to stick beyond the beyond the recovery feet, striking that you fast forward, let's say, a year from now we have a vaccine and the viruses control. We are going to go back to everywhere before the widest entered our lives in and on. The common opinion seems to be that some things are here to stay, and you look at work from home. You made a reference to that. You know, a lot of our customers do believe that there is gonna be an increased amount of work from home that stays with us, even even after the biases off all of our lives. That again, the special things we built for the business continuity continues forward. Even as you know, some of you know we start to get back into physical spaces security again. It's paramount rate the home, essentially as far as I t is concern is an uncontrolled in mind because they just don't have control over many things that happen in brackets homes. And so how do we bring in a layer of visibility and some degree of control in an environment that is inherently not subject to that level through the same way that that an office building can be? And those are the kinds of things that we're looking at. When we talk to higher education customers, for example, they are looking at plans for them. You know this upcoming fall semester, or for the next I can make your off running the classrooms at 30% occupancy. So if you had 100 students sign up for a class physically in the classroom, they only want to have the respondents and the other 70 could be on campus, but they're all dialed in remotely online past. But how do you manage this process or which study people get to be in the classroom learning way? And we believe that a lot of these work, the work flows and interesting use cases that directly address the intelligent edge are gonna become important as we get into that. >>Alright. And I'm glad you talked about the intelligent edge. So your keynote that you gave that atmosphere was accelerating innovation at the edge. And you have the tough task of being right before the Space X Speaker two. So give us a little bit our audience a little bit about you know, the innovation. How should we be thinking about the edge? >>So atmosphere visitor Two weeks ago, we announced the manage services platform on the SP for sharp and it's a little bit of a play because we really believe that we're building solutions that have 1/6 sense in in sensing what end users looking for what stakeholders looking for when problems show up and how do we quickly resolve that right, So that degree of focus on our data driven AI operations was key in us starting to coin the term DSP on it services platform. So it really looks at addressing not just connectivity connect and protect. We're also analyze and act because the telemetry data coming out of the network is really the same data that is that helps with the business recovery. But we won't actually bubble that up and put it into a common daily that helps us deliver a better connection and connectivity and security services, but also enable all of these experiences and outcomes at the edge. And so the CSP or then Ed services platform was the key announcement atmosphere this year. And we see that as the the foundation on which everything that we're gonna do starting now is going to get >>Yeah, I'm curious. You know, we talked about some of the the things that have been accelerated due to the current situation. After that respond work from home in the and the like. When you look at edge environment, is that something that you know? Is that something you see people, you know, accelerating them or they pausing them. Is it just kind of happening at the same pace any data or sense that you have from users right now. >>So edge is going to become even more important that we used to focus on the edge. We had the focus on edge for a while, but uncle, now until the pandemic it us. The assumption is always that people are going to show up in physical spaces and then let's focus on the experiences of the hour. I believe with the pandemic coming in, some of the power of choice has shifted towards the towards the user of the person in choosing whether they want to consume a particular service experience by going to a physical space or by staying at home and doing it on the radio. I look at the past few weeks, we've had a few. Both parties were used to me in person, and now we are doing it over a zoom or other video conferencing policies. So that choice moving over to the person means that we can't just assume that people are going to show up in physical spaces and then focus only on okay once they show up, what can I do about the experience of the outcomes? The focus on edge is now shifting to where we have even before, we have even look at enabling the technologies and experiences that entice people that convince people come into the physical space and consume that service on. But our experience and that means that the scope of what we do at the intelligent edge actually is gonna increase is gonna whiten. And that's the reason why it was timely that we were working on the ed Services platform. Even, you know, it started working on it long before the panoramic ever showed up. But that focus is now putting us in the right place. You know, from a competitive perspective, leverage all of the technologies that people so far, the package it up together to offer our customers something that is far beyond just connectivity and security. >>Great final question I have for you. You're talking about these, you know, not necessarily in person. Experience is here. We have, you know, did the Discover virtual experience give our audience just a little bit as to what they expect from Ruba and what you want people to take away from the Discover virtual experience when it comes to Aruba and networking at hp, >>right? And you know, the common way we kind of when we talked to some customers is always an association off of the Aruba brand todo a wireless lan. And you know what time in the past five years is being part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise? We've kind of expanded that into other networking and some some of the security functions that we also. But more importantly, I encourage everybody to go look at some of the technologies that we packaged together as orderly it services platform and how they can help. Our customers are not just like we are also all of the other stakeholders within their organizations, but to create that compelling experiences and outcomes at the edge. >>Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate all the updates. >>Thanks. Thanks for having me. >>Alright. Stay tuned for more coverage. HP discover virtual experience. I'm Stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation >> universe. And welcome to another cube conversation from our wonderful Palo Alta Studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. As we do with every cute conversation, we're gonna talk about an important topic with smart people that can provide some good clues and guidance as to how the industry's gonna be forward. We're gonna do that today, too. Specifically, what we're gonna talk about is that there has been an enormous amount of interest in kubernetes is a technology for making possible the whole micro service's approached application development. But one of the challenges that kubernetes has been specifically built to be stateless, which means that it's not necessarily aware of its underlying data. Now that is okay for certain classes of application. But the typical enterprise does want to ensure that its data can remain state full. That does have a level of protection required, et cetera, which creates a new need within the industry for how do we marry state full capabilities, staple storage capabilities with kubernetes and have that conversation? We've got great guests here. Part of Ayatollah is a co founder and C t o of robin dot io and radish men on is the CMO Robin. I owe partner Radish. Welcome to the Cube. >> Great to be here. >> All right, so, reddish one, we start with you. Why don't you give us a quick update on Robin Donna? >> Sure. Robin. Daughter, You, as you were alluding to, is addressing super important problem that is in front of us, which is that you've got cloud. Native technologies, especially containers. And community is becoming the default way in which enterprises are choosing to innovate. But at the same time, there's a >> whole swath >> of applications which were architected just five years ago, which all need to get the same benefits off agility, portability and efficiency of cloud native technologies. Robin helps bridge that, and I hope to talk more about that. >> Excellent. So part of let's start with you and talk about this problem this impedance mismatch between applications that require some state full assurance about the data and kubernetes, which tends to be stateless. How does that How does that impact the way applications get built and deployed? >> Sure. So if you look at me as you mentioned that communities is a platform that has started our originated for stateless workloads, and people have adopted the fastest growing open source project. We know about that, but when you look at a stateless work lord, it actually depends on state from somewhere. It's basically computing something right. It's computing state that's coming either, for the network ordered. Is computing on state that store brother inside, big data data, data leak or inside a database? Now, if you look at the problem itself, developers have gotten used to the agility benefits that communities has to offer the mostly infrastructure as a court kind of construct centered offers, however, the agility is not complete if you do not bring the state full workload workloads also into the communities for so as an example, think about somebody who's trying to build on entire pipeline right across the in. Just process so visualized by plane. If you're saying that you know what, in order to put this entire stock together, our entire pipeline together are to still do something that is non agile by going out sorry communities and then marry that with something inside communities. That's not true, actually. So more and more we're seeing developers and the develops teams basically saying that. Okay, I want to have the entire stock developed on deployed on a child platform, like open these. And of course, that comes with a bunch of challenges that need to be addressed and hoping you talk about that today. >> Well, if we have a zoo said the state has to be maintained somewhere, state may be maintained somewhere up in the cloud, But there are gonna be circumstances where because of data locality issues on, you know you want local control. You have ah, Leighton. See, considerations a number of other issues that you want to be ableto locate state in the closer close to the kubernetes. Is that really what we're talking about here? >> That's one aspect of it which is essentially around the performance and maybe you in governance reasons why you want to call a Kate State and stateless, Right? But the other reason I was saying is, if you want to deploy a stack, stack is comprised of many too many competent, stateless as well estate full. And you're talking about the birth of an entire application that the developer is gonna push under this platform right, so there. It's not about just the data locality and all that. It's also that just enabling the entire stock to be deployed in one shot. >> So you just you just you want a simpler, more manageable stats at all, right? So what's the solution? What people, what people have to do to get access to both those performance more more performance state Full application. Cubans clusters that record, have some degree of day locality concerns or to sustain that dream of increasingly simple stacks. What has to happen differently? >> Sure, and there are two aspects to this. The 1st 1 I would say, is that a the platform that is going to offer this on top of communities has to guarantee the persistency needs, whether it is in terms of reliability, dumps of performances. Selous, it has to guarantee does so you have to get those onto the platform first. But beyond that, if you look at other issues talking about many, there are many, many data platforms or data applications of workloads that predict board docker and communities. Now, if you don't really bring them into the Ford, you really are not solving the real business challenges that people have today, right? So beyond just providing persistency layer to communities pods, you need to have a way in which you can take complex platforms such as Mongol, Cassandra Elastic, such article rack. Cloudera these kind of workload and bring them onto a platform that has architected for Microsoft. Just communities, right? Because these platforms are not. These workers are not designed for micro service's workloads. So how do you marry them onto a platform such as communities that is designed as a micro service's platform? So you go to solve that, and that is exactly what Robin has done. So we have taken this approach where you can take complex workloads, rear platforms and then make them run on on a Microsoft this platform like abilities, starting with the storage subsystem, which is where one of our course fences. >> So I could conceivably imagine an Oracle database being rendered as a container with inside a cougar and he's cluster and position as a service have been orchestrated by by that kubernetes instance. What >> if I could jump in? You don't have to imagine we have customers in production there. They have Oracle Rack as a service offered on robin right now. One thing I want to contextualize is that our roots are in problem solving this hard problem off applications that I haven't been designed for containers contain arising them and being able to manage that gracefully in carbonated right. It just gave the example off Oracle Rack as a service. Or we also have customers with, let's say, multiple petabytes of data with her new bastard service, um, covering big large enterprises as well. Now from that lineage. Now, what've you also offering is that there is a set of customers who, already picked, Committed is already right might be open shift. It might be P K, as it might be g k to do its customers. We also have an offering called Robbins Storage, which brings powerful data management capabilities right. So to offering the platform offering, which is communities plus storage plus networking. Bless application bundles for some of the demanding workloads. But we just talked about, and then Robin Storage is a new offering which can add the magic of data management and advanced data management capabilities to any community. Is that you? >> Well, let's talk about that just for one second the uh, when I think of data management capabilities, I'm thinking not just a Iot being written back and forth between some media and some application. I'm thinking in terms of, oh, data protection and security. So are there Give us a sense of the scope of the service? Is that our part off this solution that you're talking? >> Yeah, I'll start in part like and chime in as well. So the first context you need to have is that all these data management capabilities are in the context of a hybrid being the normed implementation, right? Nine or 10 customers are looking at implementing on Prem with Public Cloud, right? So in that context, any of the cable release that we're talking about being being able to take snapshots or being able to take, you know, move that snap short to be offer as a back up in the cloud or ability, the clone and rehydrate applications, these air own capabilities that need to operate in a hybrid cloud context, that's number one. The second thing is, rather than just solve the storage level problem off taking snapshots, being able to bring application and data together is a big game changer in partner. Can you add a little bit more on the apple is data? >> Absolutely. Because, I mean, if you look at the the dinner service is the radish doctor board snapshots and clones and things living backups. Those constructs have existed in the storage industries for almost three decades. So there's nothing new about dark, right? But if you look at applying them for work Lord that are running in communities, you gotta uplevel that, because when you look at a story little snapshot, it is still a volume orelon level snapshot. But what a developer develops team needs is the ability to take an entire workload. That's a Mongo TB cluster and the only snap, short and dark cluster. I want to keep different states, even if the topology of the application is changing. Correct. And that is something that Robin has innovated on because we recognized. And I come from a storage bag when I was a distinguishing. Jenna very does have Bean fortunate to be building many data platforms there on be recognized that just leaving that storage does not deliver the promise of agility that communities offers. They were uplevel it into applications and for the very first time. In fact, we're introducing concepts such as you go to a Mongo classroom. You say I want to go snapshot this cluster. We understand the apology that this cluster has. How many shards depositor for offering these things. The service is under Langston the volumes and we dark forms a snapshot. That's an application. Little snapshot of the benefit of application will snap Shirt is that if another developer wants to go clone and run queries on that, you don't have to go Dr Storage Admin inside. Just give me clones of these large volumes. They'll say, Just clone this Mongol Devi cluster on. Then within minutes, you have an up and running long body be cluster fully functional. You can start readies life. Exactly. Other thing would be draw the stock double portability. So you have this snapshot taken periodic snapshots. So let's say that you run out of capacity nor deer center, and you would like to go bust into a different cloud. That's your on premises, and you want to go and run a clone in geeky because that's where the capacities, our snapshots and the baby, a implemented and architect of this allow you to port an entire application along with topology? Medea on data so that he can go and stand up Fully functional, ready to use. That's among Would he be cluster and geeky in the club? >> Now you talk about UK a Google kubernetes engine on G C P Google Cloud Platform. Obviously, that's when you think about kubernetes. That's kind of the mother ship. When you come right down to it. How does your platform and G K E G. C P work together? >> So the first thing is >> that we have, ah, partnership, which is led by engineering to engineering engagement, that >> part eyes front, ending around a standard set of AP eyes whereby the advanced data management capabilities that we're talking about can be brought into communities world itself and, of course, geeky as the implementation footprint. Right? So that's one area that we've been collaborating on. The second is from, ah, Google perspective. The preferred storage for running enterprise workloads or state full workloads or the data intensive work clothes that be talking about is Robin Storage and that's ah that we definitely are pretty excited by the fact that through rigorous technical evaluation, after rigorous technical evaluation, Google is chosen Robyn stories as the preferred storage for these demanding workloads. So from both these standpoints off moving the state of the art of what does it mean to provide data management capabilities to communities, to providing a solution that works today for customers who are embracing G K both on Prem in in the cloud to be able to bring state full workloads? We're working with Google and pretty excited about that part. Anyone add further color on the engineering partnership? >> He absolutely, I think, as a radish mentioned. So Google perform. We are the purport storage solution for that. Now can we just rewind back a little bit there? About 25 30 different stories? When does providing stories for communities? Right. So what is this? I think that this move is something special that let us tow this thing at this point, right. We took a very fundamentally different approach when we when we saw this problem for G k r for communities you could have started with several open source story solutions, are there and build on top of that. When their companies that take barter effects, for example, pity orifice and build on that. The companies that takes seven belong there, right? Be formally said that. Listen, if you want to elevate the experience from storage onto applications, that the example that I took earlier off taking a snatcher, a mongo migrating and if your story, it's stackers underwear off the application, which means that the stories track is unaware of the topology of the application. Can you really do application consistent snapshots? You can't. All he can do is begin to snapshot individual Williams. Correct. Now, if the stories stock is not a rare off the application to polish, can you actually the application level quality? Also, this. If you can't do that, can you really guarantee noisy neighbor elimination? You had to >> do all >> those things right? If you really wanna run data platforms, those are the core things that you need to do right and Soviet took an approach is that it doesn't know it will not cut it if you build a story. Stack on top of border defense, for example, are on set, so we do a ground up approach and he said, Look, if you wanna build a story, started this cloud native communities native. How would that look like? And how would the perimeters exposed so that it can deliver the entire experienced applications? So architectural leave yard very superior compared to the other players out there, it's proof is that we've got picked. Now that's one aspect. The other aspect is the approach that were taken to expose these primitives, their own snapshots and backup on a portability and all that was very clean. Right on. Very pragmatic how it works with both the born in the cloud as well as the the prior boatloads right on. Because of that, we're also collaborating with the Google engineers is to come up with a set off a P eyes that were planning to standardize right around community so that you could have a very standard set off a p I through which you can trigger these data management calls. Right? So that's that's other like no other stock Borden engineering to engineering collaboration. So that's the other thing that we're collaborating on to create the stana riser of FBI's based on the knowledge that we have had, because we have have we have feel deployments off like rubbish. Talked about right article rack. We have field the Prime Minster. People are deploying multiple petabytes off starting in the single communities. Robin, cluster. Right? So all that learning all the experience that we have had its contributed towards this joint Engineering to engineering. Afford that you're going to create the standardized data management. >> So we've got Robin. I owe has delivered a piece of technology for handling state full kubernetes clusters that has been validated by Google I o. Today or you know, so that can be used now. And is the basis for further engineering work to move this Maur into the mainstream for the future? That's good. Very exciting stuff, Partha. Right, Dash. Thanks very much for being here in the Cube. Thank you. Thank you. And once again, I want to thank part uh Chautala, Who is the co founder and CEO of Robin I owe and radish men on Who's the CMO Robin don I owe once again. I'm Peter Bursts. Thanks very much for watching this cube conversation until next time

>> Live from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering DataWorks Summit 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back everyone, you are watching day two of theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks here in San Jose, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm coming at you with my cohost Jame Kobielus. We're joined by Partha Seetala, he is the Chief Technology Officer at Robin Systems, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> You're a first timer, so we promise we don't bite. >> Actually I'm not, I was on theCUBE- >> Oh! >> At DockerCon in 2016. >> Oh well excellent, okay, so now you're a veteran, right. >> Yes, ma'am. >> So Robin Systems, as before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about it, it's about four years old, based here in San Jose, venture backed company. Tell us a little bit more about the company and what you do. >> Absolutely. First of all, thanks for hosting me here. Like you said, Robin is a Silicon Valley based company. Our focus is in allowing applications, such as big data, databases, no sequel and AI ML, to run within the Kubernetes platform. What we have built is a product that converges storage, complex storage, networking, application workflow management, along with Kubernetes to create a one click experience where users can get managed services kind of feel when they're deploying these applications. They can also do one click life cycle management on these apps. Our thesis has initially been to, instead of looking at this problem from an infrastructure up into application, to actually look at it from the applications down and then say, "Let the applications drive the underlying infrastructure to meet the user's requirements." >> Is that your differentiating factor, would you say? >> Yeah, I think it is because most of the folks out there today are looking at is as if it's a competent based play, it's like they want to bring storage to Kubernetes or networking to Kubernetes but the challenges are not really around storage and networking. If you talk to the operations folk they say that, "You know what? Those are underlying problems but my challenge is more along the lines of, okay, my CIO says the initiative is to make my applications mobile. They want go across to different Clouds. That's my challenge." The line of business user says, "I want to get a managed source experience." Yes, storage is the thing that you want to manage underneath, but I want to go and click and create my, let's say, an Oracle database or distributions log. >> In terms of the developer experience here, from the application down, give us a sense for how Robin Systems tooling your product enables that degree of specification of the application logic that will then get containerized within? >> Absolutely, like I said, we want applications to drive the infrastructure. What it means is that we, Robin is a software platform. We later ourselves on top of the machines that we sit on whether it is bare metal machines on premises, our VMs, or even an Azure, Google Cloud as well as AWs. Then we make the underlying compute, storage, network resources almost invisible. We treat it as a pool of resources. Now once you have this pool of resources, they can be attached to the applications that are being deployed as can inside containers. I mean, it's a software place, install on machines. Once it's installed, the experience now moves away from infrastructure into applications. You log in, you can see a portal, you have a lot of applications in that portal. We ship support for about 25 applications of some such. >> So these are templates? >> Yes. >> That the developer can then customize to their specific requirements? Or no? >> Absolutely, we ship reference templates for pretty much a wide variety of the most popular big data, no sequel, database, AI ML applications today. But again, as I said, it's a reference implementation. Typically customers take the reference recommendation and they enhance it or they use that to onboard their custom apps, for example, or the apps that we don't ship out of the box. So it's a very open, extensible platform but the goal being that whatever the application might be, in fact we keep saying that, if it runs somewhere else, it's runs on Robin, right? So the idea here is that you can bring anything, and we just, the flip of switch, you can make it a one click deploy, one click manage, one click mobile across Clouds. >> You keep mentioning this one click and this idea of it being so easy, so convenient, so seamless, is that what you say is the biggest concern of your customers? Is this ease and speed? Or what are some other things that are on their minds that you want to deliver? >> Right, so one click of course is a user experience part but what is the real challenge? The real challenges, there are a wide variety of tools being used by enterprises today. Even the data analytic pipeline, there's a lot across the data store, processor pipeline. Users don't want to deal with setting it up and keeping it up and running. They don't want that, they want to get the job done, right? Now when you only get the job done, you really want to hide the underlying details of those platforms and the best way to convey that, the best way to give that experience is to make it a single click experience from the UI. So I keep calling it all one click because that is the experience that you get to hide the underlying complexity for these apps. >> Does your environment actually compile executable code based on that one click experience? Or where does the compilation and containerization actually happen in your distributed architecture? >> Alright, so, I think the simplest- >> You're a prem based offering, right? You're not in the Cloud yourself? >> No, we are. We work on all the three big public clouds. >> Oh, okay. >> Whether it is Azure, AWS or Google. >> So your entire application is containerized itself for deployment into these Clouds? >> Yes, it is. >> Okay. >> So the idea here is let's simplify it significantly, right? You have Kubernetes today, it can run anywhere, on premises, in the public Cloud and so on. Kubernetes is a great platform for orchestrating containers but it is largely inaccessible to a certain class of data centric applications. >> Yeah. >> We make that possible. But our take is, just onboarding those applications on Kubernetes does not solve your CXO or you line of business user's problems. You ought to make the management, from an application point of view, not from a container management point of view, from an application point of view, a lot easier and that is where we kind of create this experience that I'm talking about, one click experience. >> Give us a sense for how, we're here at DataWorks and it's the Hortonworks show. Discuss with us your partnership with Hortonworks and you know, we've heard the announcement of HDP 3.0 and containerization support, just give us a rough sense for how you align or partner with Hortonworks in this area. >> Absolutely. It's kind of interesting because Hortonworks is a data management platform, if you think about it from that point of view and when we engaged with them first- So some of our customers have been using the product, Hortonworks, on top of Robin, so orchestrating Hortonworks, making it a lot easier to use. >> Right. >> One of the requirements was, "Are you certified with Hortonworks?" And the challenge that Hortonworks also had is they had never certified a container based deployment of Hortonworks before. They actually were very skeptical, you know, "You guys are saying all these things. Can you actually containerize and run Hortonworks?" So we worked with Hortonworks and we are, I mean if you go to the Hortonworks website, you'll see that we are the first in the entire industry who have been certified as a container based play that can actually deploy and manage Hortonworks. They have certified us by running a wide variety of tests, which they call the Q80 Test Suite, and when we got certified the only other players in the market that got that stamp of approval was Microsoft in Azure and EMC with Isilon. >> So you're in good company? >> I think we are in great company. >> You're certified to work with HTP 3.0 or the prior version or both? >> When we got certified we were still in the 2.X version of Hortonworks, HTP 3.0 is a more relatively newer version. But our plan is that we want to continue working with Hortonworks to get certified as they release the program and also help them because HTP 3.0 also has some container based orchestration and deployment so you want to help them provide the underlying infrastructure so that it becomes easier for beyond to spin up more containers. >> The higher level security and governance and all these things you're describing, they have to be over the Kubernetes layer. Hortonworks supports it in their data plane services portfolio. Does Robin Systems solutions portfolio tap in to any of that, or do you provide your own layer of sort of security and metadata management so forth? >> Yeah, so we don't want- >> In context of what you offer? >> Right, so we don't want to take away the security model that the application itself provides because might have step it up so that they are doing governance, it's not just logging in and auto control and things like this. Some governance is built into. We don't want to change that. We want to keep the same experience and the same workflow hat customers have so we just integrate with whatever security that the application has. We, of course, provide security in terms of isolating these different apps that are running on the Robin platform where the security or the access into the application itself is left to the apps themselves. When I say apps, I'm talking about Hortonworks. >> Yeah, sure. >> Or any other databases. >> Moving forward, as you think about ways you're going to augment and enhance and alter the Robin platform, what are some of the biggest trends that are driving your decision making around that in the sense of, as we know that companies are living with this deluge of data, how are you helping them manage it better? >> Sure. I think there are a few trends that we are closely watching. One is around Cloud mobility. CIOs want their applications along with their data to be available where their end users are. It's almost like follow the sun model, where you might have generated the data in one Cloud and at a different time, different time zone, you'll basically want to keep the app as well as data, moving. So we are following that very closely. How we can enable the mobility of data and apps a lot easier in that world. The other one is around the general AI ML workflow. One of the challenges there, of course, you have great apps like TensorFlow or Theano or Caffe, these are very good AI ML toolkits but one of the challenges that people face, is they are buying this very expensive, let's say NVIDIA DGX Box, this box costs about $150,000 each, how do you keep these boxes busy so that you're getting a good return on investment? It will require you to better manage the resources offered with these boxes. We are also monitoring that space and we're seeing that how can we take the Robin platform and how do you enable the better utilization of GPUs or the sharing of GPUs for running your AI ML kind of workload. >> Great. >> Those are, I think, two key trends that we are closely watching. >> We'll be discussing those at the next DataWorks Summit, I'm sure, at some other time in the future. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Partha. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, my pleasure. Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for James Kobielus, We will have more from DataWorks coming up in just a little bit. (techno beat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. (electronic music) >> Welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. Coverage of HPE Discover 2017. That's Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE. My co-host for the next three days, Dave Vellante, Chief analyst at Wikibon and co-founder with me of theCUBE. Our next guest is Partha Narasimhan, who's the CTO of Aruba, now part of HP for multiple years. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >> So chief technology officer of Aruba, we get to go under the hood a little bit, but it's really important the we kind of have that context because the wireless is beyond just wifi. I mean, wifi is joked on the internet as the lower level of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I mean, it's the biggest complaint people have. 'Where's the wifi? Is it secure?' So wifi obviously in wireless, certainly brings that digital life. Now you take wireless in an enterprise environment, unlimited possibilities with Internet of Things, campus, intelligent edge was the key part of this theme. Welcome to theCUBE and thanks for joining us. >> Narasimhan: Thank you. >> So your thoughts on the intelligent edge, what is Aruba's real innovation happening now? Where's the fruit coming off the trees, beyond just the access to wireless, because we all know is like, freedom. >> Right, and so think of it. People tend to think of wireless as just okay, getting rid of the cables. And yes, it does that, but it does a lot more than getting rid of the cables. And if you think about what it allows you to do, wireless enables mobility, right? So as people walk around and stay connected to all the things that they need connectivity to, we allow that to happen. But wireless enabling mobility also means that we have now the ability to observe things in the physical world that people reside in, right? Kinds of things that they interact with, whether it's in the workplace as part of their work, or whether it's as a customer when you enter a retail store, or when you enter a stadium or a venue for an event. How do we now gather our understanding of context from purely from a digital domain? Combine that with what we are learning about context, the other side of context from the physical domain. Blend that together, one, to either create new experiences for enthusers. Or to enhance existing ones that they're already used to, how can we make it work better? Right, and we have these used cases in- >> Is it true enabling technology and these new scenarios are new? I want to get into the used case, but I first want to get the hard news out of the way. You guys have some announcements here at HPE Discover that are notable. One is an extension to the course, which is 8400 line, real focus on the intelligent edge. And the other one is really comprehensive asset tracking. Assets could be anything, it could be people, it could be machines, devices and whatnot. This really kind of highlights the things that are possible. Obviously asset tracking is entering a change, and it's also big data, it's Internet of Things. Talk about this intelligent edge, talk about the switches and the asset tracking. What is the notable things about those two announcements? >> So let's start with the 8400, right it's a big core of new classes, Abdication switch. We don't have many of those built over the years in the industry, right? There have been very small number of instances of switches like this built in here. But the big difference with the 8400 is it's actually the first one that was completely built in an era that is defined increasingly by mobility in IoT, right? Think of mobility. With mobility, topology is never a constant. Right, I can never assume that the network topology is set and it never changes. Or changes can be controlled in some perspectives. So if you start with the given that topology is not a constant, how do we now create a switch that enables network administrators to deploy networks without having to worry about, you know, old methods of configuring and monitoring the switches, right? So, this was built ground up with the notion that it has to support today's use cases, not overlay today's use cases onto, you know a switch that might have worked many years ago. So programmability was important, modernality was important. It is built on a basic premise that you know, the entire state of the network, the switch, is stored in a database that is accessible through modern interfaces. It allows you to take that switch, plug it into existing workflows that are more modern than to try and force feed these modern workflows be constrained by technologies that were invented fifteen, twenty years ago. So that is the one that's important, right? And in addition to all of the connectivity options, the speeds and feeds that we have to go build, it's extremely interesting and there are advances and innovation on that side. The one that excites me the most is the software layer in the switch, right, that allows for the programmability, it allows for visibility, right, I'm able to get access to all of the state of the switch, and any trouble, problems that I see, I can quickly get to the bottom of, and go back and fix it. But more importantly, the biggest innovation that I think we have, is this thing that we call the Network Analytics Engine. This is what gives you the extensibility property for the switch. Where your ability to go extend the capabilities of the switch in the field, right? Not have to for our engineers to tell what features, but people in the field, either customers or our own field engineers, can extend the capabilities of the switch to go do things that we didn't think of, but exist in the field. >> So before we get to asset tracking, I love the way this press release was worded. You kind of hit on it, John. 'Setting it apart from other core aggregation switches in the market, the 8400's most unique innovation is the Aruba OSCX, a modern software foundation that is a departure from today's static, inflexible operating systems.' I'm not sure exactly who you're talking about there, but nonetheless, so when you talk about this network analytics engine, Are you suggesting that makers of static inflexible operating system designs would have to bolt something like that on? And it would just not be as effective? Or would it not be possible? >> Well you have to go deeper into the operating system, and do major surgery for that to happen. And that is very hard to do. So if you already built it for a certain static use case, and you're trying to now introduce support on certain things in there, you will always be limited by what lies underneath, compared to if you look at the operating system Aruba OSCX, it was built from the ground up with the modalality and extensibility in mind including the programmability for configuring the switches. This is not something that you can bolt on later and go fix it, because you have to go very deep into the operating system, and there's a lot of major surgery work that is for a switch of this magnitude and size, the effort is as good as starting from scratch, throwing everything away and starting from scratch and building it new. That is very hard to do. >> And tell us about the asset tracking. Let's not, I didn't want to lose that either. >> Well the asset tracking, before we get that point. Operating systems are generally about connecting things, subsystems. You mentioned the wireless as an unpredictable. Which is true, I agree with that. Now Internet of Things is even more unpredictable, and the rate of devices connecting: a watch on someone's wrist, a wearable, a phone. We saw the new Apple announcements yesterday, we covered that on SiliconANGLE.com, again more and more consumer devices, and yet, industrial equipment. This is important, I mean, it's not just machinery, it's like, it could be the air conditioning, it could be anything. Thoughts on this asset tracking concept? >> Narasimhan: I'll start the IoT's side, and how it applies to the network, and get to the asset tracking. Let me start with an example. One of our university customers, in adding to the story, right, they said one day the facilities people called and said hey, we just went out and swapped out about 400 door locks in a residence hall with wifi enabled door locks, and then they turn on the 400 of them and they don't work, and the network people are saying sure it doesn't work, we're not surprised, because the network's not built to have arbitrary things come in and start working. But if you look at it from the people that are deploying this equipment, they just think hey, it's wifi, it should just connect and work, right? Versus people running the network have certain ways in which they have configured the network either for quality of service, or security, that, you have to understand. But the network admins are also in a state where they just say that battle is probably lost. People are going to add things to my environment and my job is to go make sure that I gracefully accept them in and fit the into a profile. In the security profile that I already have. So this is why the programmability is key, right? As door locks come in, chances are those door locks don't need to communicate with everything on the network. Maybe only to a very specific server that pushes policy on which keys should open a particular door, and which one's shouldn't, but if you look at network's specifically designed with a certain notion of trust, saying okay, I have a security perimeter. Whether it's a physical perimeter that allows me entry into the building, or a digital perimeter that, you know, I have a dmz in a firewall, but once you're on the inside, you're in a safe zone. That safe zone is being challenged by IoT, right? Because these devices are not capable to begin with. Think of an electronic door lock, and compare it with many other servers, and the compute capabilities and the servers on the showfloor, versus what is available in the door lock. By itself, it's starting out at a very huge disadvantage on that front. But more importantly, the compute capabilities of a door lock are frozen in time. And they tend to stay on the door for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. Versus the compute capabilities that are available to an attacker keeps pace with technology. So over time, the ability for the door lock to protect itself diminishes, right? And this is not just true of door locks, it's true of any of these IoT type of things that are getting added to the systems. So our goal is as we gracefully accept them and get them connected to the network and provide the network guys with the tools to kind of segment them into appropriate boundaries, we also have a need to go monitor their activity all the time. Because they become juicy targets for hackers. To get into and from there, propagate out to the rest of the network. So how do we know they're not getting attacked? Their vulnerability is not getting exploited, and the only way to do this is to continuously monitor them. But more importantly, to use a machine learning approach. A behavioral approach, rather than a signature based detection. So if I baseline behaviors of a certain IoT device, whether it's a door lock or a security camera, or any number of those, and whenever I see deviations from that baseline behavior, I want to alert somebody. Because, while it is an anomaly, and not all anomalies are malicious, but it could be potentially. And you need somebody to look at it, so how do we quickly detect that, okay, there's a deviation and is it malicious, and how do we react to it, and how do we shut it down? >> Now talk about the asset tracking announcement, because that's relevant to this show. What's the status, the news? What's the notable thing about the Aruba asset tracking? >> So the asset tracking is interesting on two counts: one is, when you want to track an asset, you need to attach a tag to it, that kind of puts out some notion of identity that I can attach to that asset. But there's also the infrastructure side of it, you need an infrastructure that picks up on these signals, and can locate the asset, and can figure out where all it's been, and who's kind of used it, and how it's getting used. So while we look at asset tags as one improvement, the infrastructure is also another improvement. Aruba we started down the bluetooth low energy as one of the elements for our location based services strategy, look at Meridian team as a central gravity for all location based services. We started out with beacons, and using the beacons as an indication of location, and then providing contextual information and semantic information about that location. But over time we've also recognized that in addition to beacons, we've integrated bluetooth into our access point. So any wireless LAN infrastructure that's based off of the Aruba solution that is getting deployed today is already ready for one half of the asset tracking solution, so the other half is the tags that we're introducing that can be attached to high value assets, and then together these two combine with a back end solution that not only provides you with where the assets are and where they've been, but also uses APIs to integrate with other asset tracking larger solutions that you might have. >> Furrier: So you're feeding data into a bigger picture on the edge? Alright, so let's talk about the fun stuff now. So we can get under the hood there. Getting a little technical, which is great. There's some real sexy deployments out that you guys have been involved in. One is, we've talked about, the folks watching theCUBE know, Levi Stadium in San Francisco, for the San Francisco 49ers is highly instrumented venue next is the provider, great service provider. You guys are the provider there. But it's interesting, this other use case. So talk about how the use cases are driving the value, and how people who are discovering these new value creation opportunities, how do they get there and give us some examples. >> So Levi Stadium, okay. We tend to talk about it a lot, but it also is because we learnt a lot of things as part of being, you know, we were fortunate to be part of that exercise. We learnt a lot of things, so one key learning was the people that built the stadium were very clear from the beginning, their competition was not another sporting venue, right? It's not the Oakland Raiders fans that they wanted to attract over into the stadium. They were very clear their competition was a TV in your living room. How do I convince a fan to not watch the game on the TV in their living room but instead to come into the stadium and watch it? So they said here's a list of experiences that I want to create for the fan that you can only have in the stadium, and that is compelling enough to get a fan into the stadium to watch the game. So once you define those, then it becomes a lot easier. The rest of it underlying here is all technology, and we know how to piece it together. So this was one of the first instances where we saw the whole infrastructure build out being driven top down, right? You define your experiences and then you work your way down on what kind of pieces of technology we need to go in there. Otherwise the networking industry was largely driven by hey, here's the connectivity infrastructure, and we'll figure what hooks are available, and then we'll figure out what you can do with it. >> Furrier: You constrain, naturally, with that. >> Correct, but if you start from the top, lot's of things become easier, right, what we need can be customized to go address the problem, specific problems if we want to go in there. And this is not something new. As you look at, yes it was true for the stadium, but retail stores have a similar problem, right, how do I convince a user to not buy a particular item online, and instead come into the store to do it? And Apple's done a pretty good job of it, the whole store is not a place where you go pick items off of the shelf, put it in your cart, and check it out. It is a place where you go and interact with the item. >> Experience! >> Experience, again. >> What other verticals are hot right now, obviously retail makes sense, sports makes sense, what other verticals- >> Narasimhan: Hospitality is another one where you want to create an experience that customers associate with a brand. If I can somehow make the whole process of you checking into a hotel room, and being in the hotel room and then checking out, if that whole experience can be made significantly better, then I'm going to associate it with that brand. And the next time I'm looking for a hotel- >> So it's an opportunity for brands to extend their brand value, digitally. >> Narasimhan: Correct. It is by creating a better experience in the physical world, you tie it to your brand, and customers associate it with it. And then you go into the workplace. Again, employees and how do I help improve their productivity with what kind of experiences? More and more workplaces are shifting to more open environments, all wireless workplace, because, you know, even if I had wires, there's nothing that I can plug into. I have three devices with me in my bag. Nothing with an Ethernet port in it. And we recently moved into a new facility in Santa Clarita. in January of this year, and the one thing you'll notice is that there are no wires running to where people sit. So when you go into an all wireless workplace, you convince users that it's viable, right, and the way to convince users it's viable is that the network is always there when they need it, when they need to do something on it. But the facilities people are also excited by the possibility, because it gives them a lot of flexibility in how they want to reconfigure space. >> Furrier: It's the future of work and the future of play kind of converging with analog and digital kind of coming together with experiences at the center, and wireless is the fabric for it all. >> Correct, and wireless is what enables mobility but more importantly location is the other fabric that interconnects the two worlds. If I can sense location on the digital side, location is an attribute of the physical world. That's what bridges the two together. >> Context, interest, location. These are all new variables, a whole new way of doing things. In fact, the modern mobility we suggest on SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE is this is going to be the future of work, the future of play, all around modern mobility. >> Narasimhan: Correct. >> Partha, thanks so much for sharing your insights. The CTO here of Aruba Wireless, doing some amazing things, enabling new possibilities here in a new simplified, sounds complex to me, but it sounds like you simplifying, as the new message from HP. Thanks for sharing your insights. Of course, we're bringing that modern day to you here on theCUBE live in Las Vegas, our exclusive coverage for three days. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, we'll be right back with more after this short break. (electronic music)